Happened in the last three weeks:
- Easter vacation - with a focus on the forest. Together with my siblings, I took up the challenge to care for a small patch of forest in the Sauerland region. It’s a hobby and more importantly a check’s and balances mechanism to continuously get reminded that a grand challenge of our time is the climate emergency.
- The time in the highly damaged forest, also broad back some urgency for a working digital administration. Story time:
- As none of us is an expert in biology or forestry, we are consulting with foresters quite frequently. This time about the location of a new fenced of planting plot & the number of samplings we would need for the area in it.
- Some background knowledge, these foresters are employed by the federal state as part of the “Landesforsten” but they charge out their time to us private individuals. So they also rely on the federal state IT infrastructure and applications.
- During the consultation, the forester wanted to use the map based IT system to support him planning it. Which meant:
- rebooting a laptop several times (as the GPS interface to the software fails regularly and can only be fixed by a restart).
- walking around the outer edges of the same area twice, as the software crashed during the mapping.
- and in the end, I used Google Maps to calculate edge lengths and area.
- Outcome:
- A lot of extra time spent for an easy, standart task.
- No automatic documentations in the federal states system.
- A forester that was angry and upset by the tooling that is provided to him.
- Well, this is just a friendly reminder to me, that there is much to improve and do!
- Digitalcheck - we made some slow progress, on the service development. I feel a bit uneasy as we still seem blocked, and not moving as fast and efficiently as I think we should. Raised this in different settings, we are working on solutions.
- Got another newsletter sent to the policy people, felt good as it includes a quote from the NKR and the approval process even under these circumstances was superfast - Yay!
- Finally, the questionnaire of our first “ad-hoc” evaluation about the “how policy people work with the Digitalcheck” made it to the users. 33% of the target group filled out the online survey, that is a typical response rate. Am I satisfied, no not really, but it’s better than nothing.
- Collaboration with the NKR is continuously productive. Our recurring meetings are improving on each iteration.
- Spent some thinking time on the service strategy. With our current struggle to ship faster, I try to balance this important work carefully. Right now we don’t need more noise, still it is essential to continuously reflect about it. Did two things in this realm: 1st, drafted a “Mission Map” inspired by the book “Mission Economy” from Mariana Mazzucato (highly recommend it). This exercise helped me to clarify the interdependence of different projects/experiments happening aside from the Digitalcheck trying to solve the same challenge. The draft is here:
2nd, spent some time thinking on how concrete vs. how abstract our level of details should be when we start exploring and later solving challenges of our domain. This has a lot of parallels with the different levels of fidelity in prototyping (something that we covered as Tech4Germany team in a Twitter Post back in 2020). Have not finalized my thoughts on this yet…
- Miscellaneous stuff:
- Found time to catch up with a dear old co-worker that inspired and taught me much of what I know about facilitation and moderating groups - it was great, inspiring, and time well spend. Need to do more of these.
- With the completion of our company values redrafting, Sonja (co-founder of Tech4Germany fellowship and our chief of staff) came up with two great formats to record and uncover the stories that are the “meat” of our values. This is why she ran a company value story evening and initiated the production of small explain videos composed out of interviews with different people in the company. I was fortunate to participate in both, and it reminded me about how thankful I can be to work with such great people.
- Spent two Saturday mornings with a good friend and colleague, to reflect about what is special about product management in the public sector. Hope that we can share more about it soon!
- Met up with our carbon awareness working group to reflect on how to continue. We mostly struggle with the priority of the topic in our company.
- Participated in a lunch format called “STAATSKANTINE #58: WHY MOST DIGITAL STRATEGIES FAIL - AND HOW TO MAKE SURE YOURS DOESN’T” run by the Swizz Staatslabor (they do similar work to the DigitalService. Kit Collingwood held an amazing presentation that I recommend to watch (it is part of the link) for anyone in the sector.
What’s next?
- Inspired by a Slack post of Magdalena about tech understanding as a product manager, I will set up a bi-weekly 30minute learning slot together with one of our senior engineers. My goal is to figure out my level of technical understanding & to fill in the gaps that we will identify. Super excited about this!
- Thinking about a new system to offload some mental load from my brain. I am looking for a way to “freeze” ideas/assumptions/findings in a way I can quickly pull them out if a window of opportunity opens…
- Digitalcheck related:
- The Digitalcheck roadshow grind continues. As promised last year, we offer an interactive learning format for policy people, the goal is to cover all ministries. This is highly time intensive (the workshop runs for five hours, and we need at least two to three hours of preparation time x2 for each iterations) for the whole team. I still think it is worth it, as we are trying to introduce people to a new mindset, which naturally means a lot of adapting and change management.
- I will speak about my work on two occasions next week. First, I will build on top of an old reflection about my “design thinking journey” with my professional experience of the last three years. The audience are service design thinking students at my Alma Marter, the KIT. The second talk will be together with our service designer Sabrina, we will give the participants of the LMU DigiTax conference in Munich an overview on the Digitalcheck.
- More strategy related work, as our monthly planning and strategy check-in are coming up. Continuing in the direction of an impact logic to help with our prioritization.
- Analysis of the completed evaluation survey - goals: extracting findings for the service development and ranking solutions we implemented so far.
- Continuing our service development focus-work in the field of visualization as part of the drafting activities. Some user research is coming up, yay :)
Interesting links: