The culmination of our work this week is neatly summarised as:

What this means:

  • we'll be taking cyber standards as a starting point
  • we need to do discovery to answer some fundamentals
  • focussing on cyber standards is the first step to solving our problem

Ask yourself:

  • are there key risks which need to be flagged now?
  • are there key assumptions which we haven't already covered?

Team activity

As a team, we were able to get to this defined focus through a lot of discussion, both within the team and without it, with related project teams and stakeholders. It wasn't straightforward, especially earlier in the week, because there a lot of dependencies and expectations that we both influence and are influenced by.

We have talked with service design, research, and content design colleagues in Plan Tech and Standards teams to get their perspectives on the "landscape" into which our self-serve support needs to fit, and to understand where we can make valuable connections, in order to join up work across the programme.

Research thinking has been collected on a Lucid board. This is going to allow us to zero in on cyber standards in particular, and investigate how self-serve support can remove barriers and enable staff in schools to act on information.

Some of the team also had a really useful call with content design colleagues who work on Apprenticeships. They showed us how they use ZenDesk to collect, manage, tag, and push out content in a knowledge base. ZenDesk also helps them to prioritise content writing/maintenance, and even provides "cues" for likely content needs, based on repeated keywords. This provides us helpful context in understanding some of the "how" of self-serve support: since this is essentially going to mean text, images, and perhaps video content, we need to figure out how best to manage this.

Plans for w/c 19 Dec 2022

We have a short week, w/c 19 Dec 2022, before Xmas, but we plan to review the alpha timeline, taking into account the additional discovery research we need to do around cyber standards. Confirm resource requirements for January and beyond in light of Freddie leaving the team (for shared parental leave).

We've finished the week with everyone back to good health, which is a win!

Share this page