During my student placement with the NHS Business Services Authority I was able to rotate between roles building my skills in a variety of areas, as well as gaining a vast knowledge in a large public sector business. The three main roles I experienced during my placement were Content Designer, User Researcher and Project Manager.
Content Designer
As a content designer I was part of a project working alongside Content Designers and UX Designers creating and improving content for the online application. We worked alongside the user researcher taking on research and testing findings to improve the journey for the users.
As well as this I worked individually on improving a section of the NHSBSA website. I started these improvements collecting customer feedback and Google Analytics data to increase my understanding of flaws in the current product. I then regularly presented my improvements and data it was based on to my line manager for further improvement.
The role gave me an insight into the Content Management System used by the business as well as the Government standards for presenting content to the public.
User Researcher
As User Researcher on the Digital Maternity Exemption project I looked into secondary research available as well undertaking interviews and surveys to understand the problems and solutions users would face with various authorisation and authentication systems. I then compiled this information and presented it to the scrum team to assist in their decision making.
My time in the role allowed me to create and understand complex user journeys and User Needs. By creating User Persona’s we were able to better understand users of the service while also relay this information to the development team.
Project Manager
During my time as a Delivery Manager placement I worked with data provided by Jira to try and help ensure sprint tasks were realistic for the scrum team. I also had the opportunity in a project to facilitate agile ceremonies including sprint planning, sprint reviews and sprint retrospectives.
I also created a plan using the data provided to identify key areas of the country to advertise and recruit healthcare professionals for the digital service. This plan also included various strategies for the recruitment which I carried out in my final 3 months in the business as project administration.
One of the first key tasks I undertook as Delivery Manager was to improve the process for registering users to a service. This included significantly reducing the number of files holding personally identifiable information both increasing the data security and making the process more efficient. I also was able to implement new ways of distributing emails greatly reducing the project administration hours allowing time to be spent on other tasks.
Agile Manchester
Alongside the other two student placements I had the opportunity to present at the Agile Manchester conference. Discussing our journey as student placements we were able to give other businesses an insight into how the NHS BSA conducted placements and how we had learnt and contributed to the business.