Had an idea to make some curtains that don’t need to be fastened

But after the first prototype, that’s out the window……………………..

Sprint planning went well this week. The team all agreed on how the next sprint is being time boxed and sorted what we could achieve.

It’s been a bit of a stressful week for me. We have a prototype going out today (Friday) to a cohort of parents in respect of school transport. There has been loads of collaboration on this piece from different departments and I’m feeling the pressure for it to be a success. Whilst this piece has been worked on collaboratively between Services, Developers, Subject Matter Experts and Service Design, I do feel responsible for its success. I want it to work, we all do.

Once replies have been received, I will send out surveys to parents for feedback on the process, analyse the findings and present to stakeholders. Then, a decision can be made as to whether we work on iterating the prototype or to not continue. It will be a business decision based on facts.

Prototyping is really important, it’s a test or the real thing, it can be changed to make the process better and all for minimal budget. It allows you to test your ideas and if they don’t work, no money has been lost and we don’t carry on. Easy right?!

Working in local government, the subject of money and budgets is getting more and more prevalent particularly, in the current climate and this is why prototyping is such an important thing to do — it’s try before you buy.

It sometimes takes time trying to explain the importance of prototyping because it could be seen to the business as being a bit of a waste of resource: “why are we doing this when it might not even work?” well, that’s exactly the reason why we should!

Would you buy a car without test driving it? Unlikely.

The great thing about Prototyping is that the piece can be refined, tailored, and improved based on feedback from users. Fact over assumption and real user centred design.

Until next time……………………