Purpose: Help us mature the design profession so we have strong, consistent ways of working to help us deliver as efficient and effecively as possible.
Fistly this is an experiement and I'd like to try it out. I'm Jaskiran Kang, Head of Design at DfE and i'm responsible for service design and interaction design profession. I'd like to help faciliate the join up of all our designers and create an environment where we work together on common goals to help us all grow and develop to be the best designers we can. Learning and developing and maturing our design profession means we stand a chance to contribute, have impact so that we help to deliver services which work for end users.
There are 4 design imperatives which contain high level epics. Epics are long term goals we're looking to achieve over a period of 1 to 2 years. We'll set quartly objectives to help us achieve and deliver against our goals. Quartly objectives are shared with the community to lead or contribute. Our small working groups means we can deliver within our delivery teams but also mature our profession in the areas which interest our designers. This gives us added benefits such as connecting and getting to know other professionals who you wouldn't always work with. Designers can work with like minded people within their profession / family or wider during profession time to help their own delivery team and wider. Profession time is deadicated time every Thursday from 1-4pm weekly. Community backlog and objectives can be viewed here: https://github.com/users/JaskiranKang/projects/1
We'll use the template for our community objective which you can use for your 1:1 ABLE chat's with your line manager (If you're a civil servant)
If the objective is priortied, the working group can complete together. [link]
We'll have community planning (start of each quarter) where we review the backlog for each imperative and decide what we focus on per quarter. During the session community members can choose lead, contribute or skip. Each working group can start the community objective with a kick off session during profession time (Thursday's 1-4pm) During the kick-off: Requirements / outputs are agreed to align to the objective and key results. Outputs are open for all members of the community to see / give feedback using GitHub. Working in the open across all our different service areas will bring us all together hopefully! At the end of each quarter, we'll celebrate progress and hopefully all contribute towards maturing the DfE design profession. We'll find a way to scale / embed / share / communicate best practices to help us improve how we deliver.