October was a month of two halves. The first half of the month I was finishing up my time with AND Digital. It was a short but felt fulfilling engagement as I laid the foundations of the UX community within Club Spärck. My time with the Department for Education was a chance to gain insight into the workings of another government department. I was ready for my next challenge.
That challenge was leaving the world of freelancing and joining HM Revenue & Customs as their Head of Service Design.
As Head of Profession I will be looking to support the careers of permanent civil servants across HMRC. This will include career pathways and support to progress within the profession. Making the right resources and tools are available for consistency across the various programmes.
I will also be supporting more directly the designers in the various programmes within the Chief Technology & Design Office. An exiting area I am looking to get involved in is the Mindsets work that the team have been looking at.
What did I enjoy
The most enjoyable part of the month, was taking some time off. As a contractor I would see a days lost billing as a financial penalty. With encouragement from my wife I made sure I had an extended break between roles.
We lunched, we explored, we went to the gym, it was a well needed recharge of the batteries ready for the next chapter in my career.
What was hard
Starting a new role is hard, even when going back to an client I have worked with before. HMRC has changed a lot in the years since I was there. A brand new modern building in the centre of Leeds compared to the brutal architecture of the old Shipley location being the biggest change.
When I was last at HMRC the design profession was structured around location based delivery centres. The pandemic and remote working means this model has shifted and are now based around programmes and functions.
Getting my head around the myriad of design structures that exist across a single organisation is hard. Working where I can add value in the profession but not step on the toes of the great work that is already happening in delivery teams. Thankfully there is a strong design leadership team that I can work with. Who have filled the gap due to the absence of someone in my role.
What did I learn?
I learnt that HMRC is complex, I learnt that a lot of good work is happening in the organisation, and to a degree there is some duplication. These is also a misunderstanding of people who think they are doing design, but not in the way they think they are.
One of the key areas of my new role will be to advocate for User Centred Design. To be able to do this well I need to learn the scope of my role more, and how it relates to other people who work in a similar design space.
What did I experiment with?
I need to experiment with the various collaboration tools within HMRC. Unfortunately we are not with a single supplier for unified comms. Certain parts of the business use Microsoft SharePoint and Teams. Where as others use Google Meet and Slack etc.
As one of the key takes aways I have when speaking to people is we need to be better at communicating, and sharing our successes. Having an easier way to share what we are working on, what impacts we have made and where we are looking to work next will be a leap forward in doing this.
From a personal point of view if someone knows how to keep an Office365 and Google Calendar in-sync please let me know!
What do I need to take care of?
I need to realise I am not hands on any more. Where possible I still want to try and achieve the 2 hours research every 6 weeks. I am going to find this will be difficult as already I am busier than I have ever been. I still think there is a lot of people who have not realised I have landed in the role yet!
I also need to realise that life as a Civil Servant is very different from that as a freelance contractor. This is still taking some time to adjust and has been a lot harder than I anticipated.