Dog Chow Tastes Great, but what’s it look like?
As you probably saw in Catherine’s introduction to this week’s newsletter, the Exchange Lab is undergoing some changes. After four years of successful experimentation, we are preparing to support more teams on their Agile software development journey, AND we’re looking to broaden our support to help other areas of the business become more agile. Our focus at first will be on places where business areas and teams intersect, but that may evolve, depending on need.
In order to do figure out how we are going to do all of this, we need to eat our own dog food and begin our own journey of adapting to change and growth. For me, that means lots of User Experience research. If our dog food is Agile practices, UX is the gravy that gets made “right in the bowl!”
A few weeks ago, I left the amazing Mines Digital Services team to join the Exchange Lab. My introduction to government began four years ago at the Exchange Lab as a UX Researcher on one of the first teams to go through the Lab. I’ve been happily wolfing down lashings of Agile dog food for years (even before joining government), but I have no idea what other teams’ experiences have been — what’s been served up in their bowls, if you will. This is where UX comes in and I get to do one of the things I love most about this work — being a perpetual beginner. We have a chance to hear from a wide range of teams about their experiences, to understand how they see the service the Exchange Lab has been providing for the last four years. Every person’s perceptions and experiences are unique and tell us something about why a product or service does or doesn’t work and I am excited to begin this learning journey.
We have already begun speaking with teams from all across government, and the conversations will continue for a couple more weeks. We’ll be speaking with teams that are new to this work and teams that have been at it for years. After that, we’ll engage with representatives of the many business areas within ministries that intersect with Agile teams to hear about their experiences learning about and working with these teams. What we learn will help us determine where to focus our energies first so we can to best meet our goals and support everyone participating in organizational change.
If you’re interested in sharing your experience on or working with an Agile team, shoot me an email and I will get back to you as quick as a I can.
Author: Brian Finn
