Context

We Are Open Co-op (WAO) is kicking off some work this week, collaborating with Jobs for the Future (JFF) to assess the Job Readiness Credential provided by the International Rescue Committee (IRC). WAO is managing the project, developing a user research strategy, preparing necessary materials, and conducting interviews with employers, IRC staff, and, if possible, IRC clients.

Our broad key question relates to how the visual design and metadata contained in a digital badge impact employer perceptions and interactions. We want to help JFF and the IRC have the most impact possible with the Job Readiness Credential because that impact means changing the lives of real people.

How we approach this kind of work

5W’s and an H: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?

At the start of any project, it’s important to know the absolute basics. In fact, it’s a good time to get the Busytown Mysteries theme tune in your head as an earworm! The 5W’s and an H shown above help make sure we know all of the things necessary to set the project up for success. Ideally, we’d know most of this before even signing the contract, but anything missing we can pick up in the client kick-off meeting.

Before the client kick-off meeting, we have an internal project kick-off where we talk about everything from timelines and responsibilities, to setting up the digital environments in which we’ll do the work. If we need to purchase any new equipment or subscriptions, we’ll identify those in this meeting. Our guidelines for this can be found on the WAO wiki.

Communications and cadence

Trello board showing kanban structure, with addition of ‘Feedback needed’ and ‘Undead’
Early days of JFF/IRC Trello board. It’s the usual kanban format with the additional of the self-explanatory ‘Feedback Needed’ along with ‘Undead’. The latter is for cards that would otherwise get stuck somewhere but we don’t want to delete/archive just in case they come back to bite us!

Getting into the right rhythm with clients is an art rather than a science. While it’s easy to put an hour in the calendar each week for a catch-up call, this is a sub-optimal for anything other than the very short term. This is because, in our experience, these kind of calls quick devolve into status update meetings.

Much better is to work as openly as possible. Sometimes that means entirely publicly with etherpads, public Trello boards, and the like. Other times, it’s working transparently with tools that provide either real-time or summary updates. Often this means that the number and frequency of meetings can be reduced. With our recent work with the DCC, for example, we met every other week, aiming for 45 minutes. Between meetings, we sent Loom videos and other sorts of outputs to make sure our collaborators knew how thinking had evolved.

While it’s important that there is a project lead from both sides, it’s also crucial that their inboxes do not become information silos. Larger organisations might use CRM systems, but for us information is best in context. So, for example, a Google Doc for ongoing meta-level important info, and everything else on the relevant Trello card (or equivalent).

Documentation is not putting a message in a Slack channel or mentioning something during a meeting. Documentation is writing something down in an uncontroversial way that makes sense to everybody involved in the project. This is important because humans can only hold so much information in our heads at one time, and our memories can be faulty.

Everything is a work in progress

Skateboarder with words ‘EXPERIMENT’ and ‘DEVELOPMENT’ along with arrows
CC BY-ND Visual Thinkery for WAO

‘Perpetual beta’ is another name for saying that everything is a work in progress. What’s true of software is true of documentation and everything involved in a project. Conclusions are provisional and based on the data and knowledge we had at the time.

To account for this, we usually version our work, starting at v0.1 rather than 1.0. The reason for this is to show the client (and ourselves) that we’re working towards our first fully-formed opinions and outputs. It’s all part of our attempt to work openly and show our work.

With this work that we are starting with JFF and IRC, we’ll be talking to stakeholders in a couple of different places. Our human brains want to take shortcuts and jump to conclusions quickly so that we can take action. However, we’ve learned to “sit in ambiguity” for long enough to allow thoughts and reflections to percolate. This slower kind of thinking allows us to spot things that might have been missed by our ‘System 1’ mode of thought.

Conclusion

We’re greatly looking forward to getting started with this work. We haven’t gone into how we perform user research, which is perhaps the topic for a future post. There’s a lot to cover from that point of view in terms of ethics, data, and different kinds of methodologies.

What we hope that we have shown in this post is our commitment to working openly, holistically, and thoroughly so that the outputs we generate are trusted, interesting, and actionable. We’ll share more on the project as it progresses.