486 days later

Well, I'm back, but I don't know where I've been.

Well I do know where I've been but it feels like a weird blur, like I was being someone else for a long period of time. Last year, March 20th 2023 at 9am to be exact I started my first major project in a couple of years. I'd put being a practitioner to one side for a while to build and support the team we were building at Paper. I lead a team of designers, things were frantic, chaotic, scary, exciting and then after two years doing nothing but build capability, support colleagues and mentor my team the time came to return back to projects.

That, at the time, was pretty nerve wracking. Have I still got it? Has sitting on the sidelines watching people deliver affected whether I can actually do the job myself? I still don't know the answer to be honest...

I joined a civil service team redesigning how the Turing Scheme service worked. To cut a 486 day story short we needed to lift and shift a service from an large outsourced IT company which shall not be named and plonk it in the middle of the Department for Education. Piece of piss.

What I'm writing today though is not about that project, but about my experience joining, doing, and leaving it. It's my fucking diary right?

Let's start with the first question I was pondering, bearing in mind I just said I have no answers: Have I still got it? Well here are some facts I have from that project which I can use to evaluate the answer:

1. I was the longest serving contractor on that project. Many came and went, some we missed, some we didn't notice had left but I was still there. I can also tell you I did not hold back my opinion or my drive to do things they way I believe things should be done. I've learned by now though how to express an opinion, even a divisive one in a pragmatic and diplomatic way. I'm one of those people who sees a way of doing things early, suggests it, lets it settle and then see it become someone elses idea. Many designers I expect can attest to this.
2. We made some real transformational changes to the way things work, but not as much as I'd like. Now you can see this how you like, either as we didn't achieve enough, or you have to let some things go. I think a little bit of both to be honest.
3. I made pals. It was a tough project to join as I didn't have a single Paper colleague working alongside me. Instead I had like minded practitioners who for all intents and purposes were my colleagues. Now, the true test of whether I actually made fwends, we won't know for a while. Will the WhatsApp groups die?
4. People told me the work I was doing was making a difference. I heard this from colleagues/clients and cough users. You don't often get to hear from the latter but to hear "Thanks for letting us be part of this work, we genuinely feel heard for the first time and feel like what we're saying is actually improving things for us and for students. Thanks for listening, you're amazing". That's paraphrased by the way, except for the last two words, which I made up.
5. I managed to take people out of their comfort zone and design in a truly user centred way by bringing users INTO OUR FUCKING WORK. This was a super tough thing to get done, particularly in a risk averse organisation. We invited actual users into the building, designed a workshop for them to actually participate in, included them in the analysis of workshop outputs and presented the service design recomendations to them to validate the work. They became stakeholders, not just people who use the service. Our industry is too much "take take take, here's a gift card now piss off" and not enough "you're the experts, you LIVE it we're just bloody facilitators!".
6. The support and mentoring skills I've developed came in good use. I won't elaborate on this one but we had some tough times on the project and it took a team effort to get through them.

I could go on, but I'm not sure how much longer I can pat my own back for.

Anyway, Ibtisam B. , Becca S. , Elena Lockyer , Meg, Justin Darley , Amy Thornley

Also, since I'm mentioning those people here are some in jokes, thanks for the "5 minutes with", the "chunky fishermen" and the Jarryl's.