Design #ForTheFans

There is a certain phrase you’ll come to associate with me, I want to introduce it right here, right now. You can even call it a hashtag, here it is #ForTheFans. I’m not claiming to be a celebrity and I’m not talking about a typical fanbase. I do have fans though. Whether it’s Wolverhampton, Northampton, Sheffield, Leeds, Southend or Newcastle, on Linkedin, Snapchat or Instagram, these are my people. Now that you are reading my blog, you’re my fan too ;).

I’m currently contracting to a company called Difrent, providing Agile Business Analysis services to their client NHS BSA on the NHS Jobs platform. Previous to this, I worked on part of the Brexit program at HMRC and a number of agile projects at DWP.

One of the many things I’m passionate about is design. I’ve learnt from talented and well experienced designers and done it very well. However in the past i’ve also done it, ermmm not so well, with the product suffering as a result. Therefore, I understand the value of design and research from both sides of the fence.

At NHS BSA I’ve helped implement a new process across the design space. We have a product roadmap and we research to understand our user needs. In addition to this, we have a backlog of high level user stories. All of our user research can be linked to these, allowing us to stay focused.

We then analyse our user research and use facts and figures to propose recommendations to our Product Owner. We’ll work with the Product Owner to decide on an action, then convert the action into acceptance criteria for us to iterate our prototypes on. The acceptance criteria will be left open to interpretation for us to explore a few different design options. We continually repeat this process until user research suggests that the stories are fit for purpose.

Myself, alongside Scott and Sarah from Difrent presented this to the NHS BSA at our Show and Tell. It was received very well, with further interest from other BSA projects wanting to adopt our way of working.

Fun fact: Paparazzi turned up to our Show and Tell, word must have got out that I was presenting…. Just kidding, they were professional photographers from BSA. Watch this space for updates.