A very civilised four day week this week so this is going to be a short update for a short week.

This week was very meeting heavy – even compared to previous weeks. Time spent at my desk was a rare and wonderful treat but for the most part the meetings continue to add useful insights to the organisation and are helping me make important connections.

I gave an internal presentation along with our Head of Design on Tuesday to give people a bit of idea of my thinking and proposed direction of travel – plus an opportunity for the team to show off some of the good work already underway. If I’m honest the presentation wasn’t a roaring success – technical difficulties meant starting minus my slide-ware, considerably more people attended than I expected and I clearly pitched the presentation at the wrong level for a lot of people who came. I was trying to keep it quite light without too much geek but clearly I didn’t achieve that. Thankfully the show and tell elements after I sat down were well received.

We had some great news about some taxonomy and IA work that has been going on and that seemed to really lift the team and will kick off a spate of pretty intense user testing over the few weeks. Genuinely exciting stuff.

Its clear that we need to do some more internal comms – I encountered a couple of major misconceptions about the scope of the team this week which will need addressing. Part of it just seems to be people lacking a clear understanding of the amount of work that goes in to doing some of these digital outputs.

Recruitment is hotting up. Three posts have reached the external publicity stage of Civil Service recruitment – these are vital roles for the team so fingers crossed.

Video & Audio production role in sunny Newport bit.ly/14SgvPK – come join new team. Pls RT 🙂

— Matt Jukes (@jukesie) May 23, 2013

2 Producer/Product Manager roles in Newport bit.ly/13JcVoM & bit.ly/14ShhfM > key roles in new digital team at ONS please RT

— Matt Jukes (@jukesie) May 23, 2013

 

I didn’t manage to take the blog any further this week but am going to spend a bit of time on it this weekend and see if I can get it ready for the world. I’ve also been wondering about trying to set up some kind of monthly ‘brown bag lunch’ talk series with external speakers from the digital world.

It is Her Majesty’s birthday next week so Monday and Tuesday off so I’m going to settle in and enjoy this long weekend now 🙂