Firebreak — Healthcare Timeline: Pre-work

Origination of an Idea

Back in August I wanted to start dropping some weight, nothing drastic, just to reverse the effects of unhealthy eating. I’m a manager, and as all managers know, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

My first thought was a slimming world / weight-watchers’ programme as they have the social cohesion approach of ‘guilting’ you into getting measured every week and provide helpful support. However, tenacity has never been my weakness and I could do without the £5 per week spend. So I decided to go it alone with good old MS Excel and a set of scales to track my healthcare metrics over time.

Firebreak Day

I always considered this idea to have potential. When NHS.UK proposed a Firebreak I saw the opportunity to expand and evolve the idea.

I pitched my idea to the team aligned to our strategic goals of integrated personal healthcare and got a warm reception.

From that day though I realised that Development resource would be the pinch point. Each person was allocated 9 x 1 day tokens to spend on their chosen ideas and people wanted to be involved in as many ideas as possible.

This meant that to deliver a prototype we would need to flex scope AND resource — a worrying strategy for delivery.

P*ss Poor Planning Precedes Poor Performance — and how to avoid it

I had already simplified my resource strategy into 4 categories to develop an alpha prototype:

• Facilitator
• Developer
• Data
• User Research / Test

I had the Facilitator role covered but would need people to own the other roles. Not having 3 dedicated people for 9 days meant that I had to rethink the natural greenfield agile development of self-organising teams. However, I wanted people to still have autonomy and have room to try out a different role — which was the philosophy of Firebreak.

The simplest solution was to break the project down into 1 day sprints, making everyday stand alone with a kick off and show and tell. This meant clean handovers to the people available each day.

Trello would be our knowledge repository and Kanban board so that everyone had access to information. We would use an open personal web-ex room as our meeting space to accommodate people working virtually and enable constant collaboration.

I then set about creating story cards to give the project deliverable structure, but being careful to not make acceptance criteria so specific that they defined the solution.

Finally, I created a template script for user researchers. The biggest project risk after resource was new people trying out user research without experienced leadership in that professionalism. Having a template meant that people had some guidance about how to proceed. This and all our documentation was then shared on the Trello board.

We were (just about) ready to start….