Weeknotes S4, Eps1 New Year, 2021 is up and running… Digital Plans, User Mapping, Gov Systems

Short and sweet, just something to get me back in the saddle from Christmas and then a week of sluggish brain getting back into year. Losing vlogs this month as uploading videos is proving a bandwidth nightmare until my slightly dodgy broadband gets sorted…

With some irony (considering the seemingly tortuous ability of UK digital infrastructure coping with 5x all day zoom calls per router), the next couple of weeks we will really start to ramp up the GCSP Digital work especially the Digital Local Plan work and sharing this through a separate weeknotes so you’ll start to get to meet some of the team.

Also everything else ramping back up so bear with me if I’m intermittent.

Three reflections;

Digital Plan work kicking back off

Was great to get brains together to get start thinking this through in term of next steps for the coming weeks.

After the initial couple of sessions on capturing our initial thoughts on what a digital plan should be and the potential scope of the numerous strands of the likely workstreams (See MIRO frames below), we have settled into two broad areas for development; The discovery phase 1 for delivery which will actually be implemented within our current timescale for the emerging GC local plan; this is mapping out the digital route to get to the next consultation stage of plan making, which is our preferred options stage taking place in summer/autumn.

At a high level this will be; what format the consultation material will take in HTML and how interoperable the process will be between the digital platform and historic consultation databases. Most significantly though we will need to unpack and redesign the policy architecture or frameworks, not necessarily for this stage but so there is a collective understanding of how we begin to develop policies as data (i.e. set of rules that sets of data can be automated against in the future).

The other broad area is phase 1 of the development work. This is where we really get our ‘out of the box hats’ on to really get under the bonnet of the who, what and why we have a local plan in the first place and start understanding what this should look look in 2021, which absolutely means designing this this a users perspective (Marco Picardi made the clear point that not all pour users are the human kind as nature is arguably the most critical user and doesn’t have a clear voice in the consultation process).

This is clearly a significant relook at plan-making as a whole and the aspiration is that will be able to understand the ‘grass roots’ need for policies that come from our citizens and partners and then are embedded in evidence. See a few of our initial thoughts on the user mapping in the MIRO frame below. This was ‘National Government’ as a user and we are/have begun recreating this ‘Journey’ for all potential users which is probably in excess of 30 or 30 groups (even when you break them down) so you can get a feel how much work is needed in these discovery stages to begin to really get to the nitty gritty of purpose and interrelationships

User journey mapping and process for PPAs

This work is starting and really starting to look at a cradle to grave process on how these go through the system, especially mapping out the pain points and the human interactions so we can try and design out waste and design in reflexive learning and iteration.

This is a pilot we are kicking off in our Built and Natural Environment Team to really tighten up how we can improve both process flows as work passes through the various parts of the service, and most importantly the human elements of this and how we communicate each stage to those who need to know both internally and externally. This will be a really important thread in moving to a more user designed approach to service improvements and also allow us to iterate more efficiently as any changes come into play going forward.

Strategic Planning and Systems Mapping

Conversations on the future of strategic planning with Catriona, Caroline, Charlotte, Kevin, Janice and Stuart on Friday focussed my thoughts back towards the systems mapping I started with Tom in October. We are in an exceptionally complex system here in Cambridge but we are not alone in this. I added to this in terms of mapping out some of the relationships and interactions in Central Gov too, and this has been a really helpful go-to in terms of making best use of time when trying to determine responsibility. I will look to make this MIRO open at some point as all the information is public but its just a bit messy at the moment… :-)

I feel it has another key role when looking at strategic planning and what the best version of this could look like and this is definitely a extra curricular bit of research I am going to look at over the next few months whilst making the most of evenings in front of the fire…

Thoughts for the week

Podcasts wise they are backing up a bit as i don't very much deadtime anymore to listen in but i have set myself a task of steam cleaning the whole downstairs so i might be able to catch up on a few then… Only ones i am managing to get through are the new Louis Theroux ‘Grounded’ series. I especially loved the Frankie Boyle episode, which is a massive insight and definitely worth a listen…

Grounded with Louis Theroux — 15. Frankie Boyle — BBC Sounds

Happy New Year to you all…