sprintnotes.people
Sprint 56
Hello, this is Alan, a content designer working on beta.parliament.uk. At the end of each sprint I will provide an update of the work the members team have done and what we learned in the process.
The team’s current focus:
Make written questions and answers easy to find, easy to comprehend and a trusted source for re-use.
Departures
The big news this sprint is that our back-end developer, Bryony, is leaving. While we are happy and excited for her, we are also deeply sad she is going. Bryony is a great developer and brilliant colleague. We will say our goodbye’s next week, but not before lots of karaoke.
What we’ve done
Working iteratively can mean some sprints feel more productive than others. The sprint feels like we have made significant progress on several fronts. It’s been good for morale and our collective sense of achievement.
Written questions and answers
The written questions and answers pages have been iterated based on feedback from our recent rounds of prototype testing
Redesign
This redesign has several aims, but it is primarily intended to assist users in clearly understanding the relationship of MPs and government departments (or other answering bodies) to written questions and answers (the MPs ask, the government departments answer).
We hope to have the pages live next sprint, but here is a preview of the design:
Joshua, our front-end developer, has also worked on getting new responsive tables live.
Measures of success
Naz has ensured measures of success have been implemented for written questions and answers. We’ll be relying on analytics and the user feedback submitted via the beta website to evaluate the success of the new designs and user journeys.
MPs and Lords roles
The MPs and Lords roles sentences are live. This provides a summary of some of the roles a member holds in Parliament.
We have also put our roles pages live. These pages show current and previous roles for MPs and Lords.
Our next task is to make the roles on the page filterable. Victor presented his designs to the team and we will work to put these changes live during our upcoming sprint.
Homepage
The homepage has been redesigned to include sections, to allow people to scan the information to find what they are looking for quickly.
The sections are broad categories that work in the short-term but will be iterated as the homepage continues to change.
The implementation will be carried out by the utilities team.
Contact
Marttiina and Dia have conducted their initial round of meetings. They will continue their interviews during our next sprint and present their findings to the team.
Sprint ceremonies
With the arrival of Simon, our new delivery manager, the team decided it was a good opportunity to review how we conduct our review, retrospective and planning sessions.
The initial changes made were really positive, with the sessions feeling more focused and purposeful.
We were also reminded of the ‘retrospective prime directive’: “Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.” – Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review.
I’m a big believer in keeping these values in mind when interacting with colleagues, so I was pleased to hear them referred to during our retrospective.
Wider team work
Marttiina is currently taking some well-deserved annual leave, but earlier in the sprint she delivered a fantastic presentation on Service Design.
Here’s what our Head of User Research and Design thought of it:
Victor shadowed Hansard during PMQs. He was particularly enthused about their move towards digital note-taking in real time, and the challenges and opportunities this presents.
Victor has also been putting together a talk for the International Design in Government Conference next week.
What we have planned
- implementing new written questions design
- written questions on individual members pages
- view list of written questions by members
- apply filters to the MPs and Lords roles pages
- make decisions for contact product based on pre-discovery research
Interesting things we have read or learned
Jaron Lanier discusses the ideas behind his new book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, with Ezra Klein.
GDS blog post what to expect at the first international design in government conference
Despite their loss to Croatia, the England team have succeeded in strengthening their relationship with their fans: was it due to tweets and memes? Linguists are helping police to catch child predators by teaching them how to communicate like children online.
Other teams
If you’re interested to read about the work of another teams, you can read sprint notes from:
You can also follow regular updates from the people team’s former product manager, Colin Pattinson, in his current role as product manager as the Department of Health and Social Care.