Open Nouse —September 2019 Edition
Open Nouse is a monthly update from the Code for Australia Base Team, and is one of the ways we put our core value of working in the open into practice.
Here’s what’s been good (🌹), bad (📌) and what’s emerging for us (🌱) the past month.
📌 Thorn — Team Time Together
Writing this update has been a little harder than usual this month, partly because I’ve been away for half the month and partly because Matt is now off on a bit of a vacation himself. I’ve joked that we’re like ships in the night this month, but in all seriousness, it’s been tough making sure nothing gets missed while we’ve both been taking time off.
It’s one of the downsides of having a small but mighty team, and yet one of the amazing things about working at Code for Australia — we encourage each other to take the time off we need and absolutely have each other’s backs to make it happen!
🌱 Bud — Shareable Learnings
We’ve wrapped up work on a couple of our recent Digital Maturity Assessments and are working hard to get them into an easily digestible format to share what we’ve learned. Until then, here are a couple of the biggest themes we’ve uncovered so far, which may be common to other government teams across Australia:
- Agile delivery doesn’t work without agile procurement
- We don’t do enough sharing of failure (or success)
- Listening isn’t enough, you need to act on user feedback
- Take learnings from innovation into business as usual
- Plan for engagement from day one
Stay tuned for more details as we dive into the detail of what these mean and what good practices around each can look like. We’d also love to hear from anyone working in government who might have seen these challenges play out for themselves.
🌹 Rose — Pathways Event
Something we’ve been thinking about a lot this year is how can we better support people before and after their Fellowships with us. Being part of a Fellowship is a steep learning curve, making it not suitable for people who don’t have a wealth of work experience to help navigate tricky environments. So we’ve been wondering how we might build a better ecosystem of partnerships to support people before they’re ready. We’re also curious about reaching people who might not know about Fellowship opportunities, to expand the diversity of skills and people coming into this field.
As a starting point into this exploration, Soreti gathered a group of amazing partners (some new, some established for us) for a lunchtime session where we got to know each other a little better and shared some of our challenges and thinking in the space. It was a great session, with incredible food and honest conversations and we’re looking forward to sharing where they might take us!
Curious about something in our work we haven’t mentioned here? Leave us a comment or question in the comments or via Typeform, or reach out to us here, and we’ll be happy to answer all your burning questions!
