The Iron Cage

A few weeks on from my last note and we’ve made more progress. Last week we started our first round of testing prototypes with users and had some interesting early signals on where to focus after the baselining exercise. One of our partner teams launched their new national service to great acclaim, and the performance metrics look good. This has meant they’re a little more available to chat with us, and we’ve had a couple of meetings. It helped us realise that we don’t have a concise summary of what we’re looking at and why, with just-enough technical detail to explain what we need from them. We fixed that, and we’ve got a pithy set of slides now. We’ve also started work on the technical experiment with them, looking at a proof-of-concept data-matching algorithm which should give teams more control of a test result. Instead of twiddling our thumbs while waiting for people or processes, we’ve spent time gathering a list of assumed needs for service teams, which are helping to shape…