Digital at RNID
RNID is a digital-first charity. That means a few different things.
It means that our products and services are developed in digital ways first and only become physical when digital doesn’t work, so for example our RNID near you service which helps people fix their hearing aids. You can’t do that kind of thing online. But products like the hearing check are entirely online. This is how more than three hundred thousand people have checked their hearing and lots of those who found out they have hearing loss have gone on to get hearing aids. That kind of impact at scale would be really hard to achieve off-line.
It means we all use digital technology in our work. RNID has over two hundred different technology systems. We have more technologies than we have people. I think that shows how digital-first we are as a charity.
And it means we think and work in modern, digital ways. Ewen Stevenson, our chair of trustees, talks about how we can use technology to connect with millions of people. Digital isn’t just about websites, it’s about RNID’s entire business model for how we use digital technology to have impact at scale. If Uber can use digital to change how we travel, and Spotify to change how we listen to music, then RNID can use digital to change society for people who are deaf, have hearing loss or tinnitus.
Who we are
There are eleven of us in the Digital team at the moment. We’re made up of four specialities:
Delivery – Help the whole of RNID figure out better ways of working and how we deliver value to our communities in impactful and agile ways.
Design – Includes service design, interaction design and content design. Use collaborative, user-centred thinking, to design products and services with subject matter experts from across RNID.
IT & data – Do the complicated technical work to make sure our systems and technologies are working.
Product – Develop and manage our suite of products, including things like the website and hearing check.
What we do
Deliver technical projects, like CRM systems, and essential business systems.
Develop new products, like the Hearing Loops Map which lets people update Google Maps about where hearing loops are installed.
Improve existing services, like creating a self-serve option for people looking for information so the Contact Centre can focus on supporting people that really need their help.
Support teams all across RNID with things like analytics and digital skills.
How we do it
Matrix – We work in matrix teams. That means we bring together skills and expertise from across RNID to work on all kinds problems. The hearing check team, for example, has a programme lead with experience of behaviour change, a content designer, web developer, interaction designer and product manager. We all work together, bringing our different perspectives and skills, to make the hearing the best it can be.
User-centred – We do lots of research to figure what the people who will be using the products and services ned from them.
Sprints – We generally work in fixed time-boxes of a week, fortnight or month. This helps us focus on the work that brings the most value for our communities the soonest.
Feedback and continuous improvement – We get lots of feedback on how people are using RNID’s products and services. This includes user interviews, satisfaction surveys and usage analytics. We use all of this to make sure we’re improving the products and services in ways that matter to our communities.
Weeknotes 378
This week I did:
Team priorities
As it’s the last week of the month I’ve been helping the team prioritise their work for November.
Most people had five priorities. The team commits 60% of its time to these planned priorities (this gives us 40% of our time for team meetings, handling unplanned work, etc.). That works out as about 100 hours per month per person. If we’re spreading our time over 5 projects, for example by giving the highest priority project 30 hours, second priority 25 hours, etc., means the fifth priority only gets 10 hours, or less than two days of work in that month. In practice, the team is flexible with their time but this spread shows how much time is available for each project when the team has lots of work in progress.
My hope is that it helps the team know what’s expected of them and push back on unplanned work to allow them to focus and deliver more value sooner. And I hope it’s clearer for all the other teams we work with too. It’s the first time the team has prioritised in this way so I’m interested to know if it makes a difference.
Productivity
I completed 76 tasks this week, an average of 15.2 a day. When I started tracking in August I was averaging 8.5 a day. I had 71 interactions (video meetings, emails or chat messages) with 27 people. I updated how my tracker works so it rolls up into my objectives. It’s interesting to see how my focus has shifted month by month.
I started creating a Google Docs version for other’s to use but have been too busy this week to finish it.
Balancing failure
I wrote a bit about how a manager’s job is to balance opposites. One of those balances I’ve been pondering recently is between ensuring the success of a project and giving people the opportunity to learn from failure.
Reading list
I’m reading Better Value Sooner Safer Happier and Right Kind of Wring. And I bought Lean Enterprise, Coaching Habit, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Business Model Generation and The Fearless Organization. No idea when I’m going to find time to read them but it’s good to have ambition.
And I read:
Autistic leadership
As Helen Jefferies says Pete Wharmby says, autistics don’t so much grow a personality as construct one. We take bits of how other people operate and incorporate them into our own personalities or at least our own public personas. This makes so much sense to me. I have facial expressions and mannerisms that I’ve copied from people I’ve known. More importantly, I’m really interested to see where Helen goes with writing about autistic leadership because there’s so little written about it. Google it, and all the results are about leading autistic people, not autistic people being leaders.
What makes a good pilot project for digital?
Ben Holliday wrote about back in 2017 about some guiding principles for digital pilot projects. It’s an interesting mix of feasibility things and political things, and some feel like they could guide a new project and others assess a pilot. More recently, Alistair Ruff wrote about seven things to think about when prototyping a service.
Both of these made me think about the difference between a pilot and an MVP. Maybe a pilot is complete version of a digital service used by a limited number of users to check the whole thing works, whereas an MVP tests certain assumptions or aspects of a product or service.
From mechanistic-to-systemic-thinking
This is thirty years old. In it Russell Ackoff states that humanity is in the early stage of a transition from the Machine Age to the Systems Age. It’s an important time to be alive and to learn about this new way to understand everything.
I thought about:
Running products like mini-businesses
This idea from Scott Colfer keeps coming up. I’m writing a blog post about a few things that make running a product like running a business.
What makes charity product management different?
Steve Messer’s post, Best, not first about how the public sector needs to approach tech products differently to the private sector made me think about what makes product and tech in the third sector different from the other sectors. I’ve haven’t reached any conclusions yet, but two things come to mind. One is about how the third sector is competitive (like the private sector and unlike the public sector) but success is measured by system change (like the public sector and unlike the private sector). But the say that the third sector is a mix of the other two would be incorrect. The other thought is about the economic theory suggesting that the public sector exists to take care of market failures in the private sector, and so the third sector exists to tackle the market (policy) failures of the public sector. That suggests that one gap for charity products is in tackling those failures.
231024
Woke up at 5.30 so crunched some numbers to help some stakeholders understand the impact of high work in progress limits. The team commits 60% of its time to planned project work. In practice, they probably do more, but this gives them time for team activities and unplanned work. 60% of one month is about 100 working hours. If someone has five projects, and spreads their time so that the most important project gets the most time, it works out at 30 hours for the highest priority, 25 hours for the second priority project, and just 10 hours for the lowest priority project. That’s less than two days of working time.
Today would have been my dad’s birthday. He was the same age as I am now when he died.
How I use my task tracker to know if I’m achieving my objectives
I previous wrote about my system for tracking work and checking where I’m focusing. Like all good systems, it is constantly evolving. Most task management system expect the user to predict when they’ll do a task, but this one tracks what I actually did and gives me the data to figure out if I’m doing the right things.
Connecting daily tasks to long-standing objectives
I have four long-standing objectives, ongoing outcomes that will never be achieved but which guide what I work on. They used to seem a bit vague as I had no way of connecting them to the work I do.
I grouped all the things I work on under each of the four objectives to make it easier to count tasks for each objective. It only one that doesn’t fit is Admin tasks. These are about 10% of the things I do, which means 90% of my work contributes to my objectives.
I set-up a tab for reporting on my four objectives by number of tasks, and, more interestingly, by percentage. This is the most useful part as it helps me ask myself if I’m focusing on the right work, and whether I should do more for an objective.
Finding out who I work with
As an experiment, I’m going to track how many times I interact with different people. This should show me two things; the number of different people I talk to, and how much I talk to each of them. I’m expecting to see that there are some people I spend lots of time with and others I speak to only occasionally. One of my objectives depends on spending time with more people across the organisation, so this should give me some data on how to improve on achieving that.
Monthly priorities
I used to set a few goals for each project at the start of the month, but things would change so much over those weeks that I’d almost never achieve them. Instead, I’m going to switch my monthly planning to be about priorities rather than goals, and about the four objectives rather than each of the sixteen projects. These aren’t trackable yet, but I review them at the end of each month a colour them green, amber or red for how much I actually focused on them.
Weekly goals
I always start the week by thinking about achievable goals. Just like the monthly priorities, these are trackable yet but are reviewed and colour-coded. I’m still pretty poor at choosing goals that are actually achievable but I’m going to keep doing it to see what else I can learn and how I might be able to connect them to the daily tasks.
What next?
Make it open – I could create a Google Docs version in case anyone else wants to try it.
Team sport – It occurred to me that this type of tracker could be used by a team just as easily as by one person. I doubt I’ll put it into practice but I might think a bit more about how it would work.