10% time

10% time hall of fame

I wrote a post last year about introducing 10% time in our workplace, and the twitter feedback idea that I started working on.

A few months ago we had our first entry into the 10% time hall of fame. This is a coveted position reserved only for those ideas that have been developed and iterated to the point where they’ve been released into our main live service.

Read more about Michael Cheung’s 10% time project – Optimise Health A-Z for small viewports.

Hopefully this will be the first of many ideas to start out as 10% time projects, and make it all the way into our live service…

Friends & Family Tweet

For my 10% time project I have decided to look at whether Friends and Family Ratings could be submitted via Twitter.

The idea was that if you’re sat in a GP waiting room you might be tweeting, and if you were shown a particular hashtag(s) then you could use these to tweet a view on the service you’re receiving.

This example could be flawed in several ways, as you’re more likely to want to give an opinion after you’ve actually seen the doctor, not while you’re waiting there…

However I’m going to explore the possibilities and see where it takes us – there may be mileage in integrating with Care Connect so that people can submit real-time ratings, comments or complaints via Twitter. It could be extended beyond Twitter itself to other channels. We could make use of geo-location (thanks Russell) or QR codes (thanks Sean) to enhance the experience.

EDIT – there seems to be appetite for this today
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24669382

The technical bit

So far I have a basic Gherkin spec which looks like this –

Feature: Grab Tweets By Hashtag
In order to store tweets for processing
Twit can grab tweets with a specified hashtag from twitter

Scenario: Grab a new tweet with a hashtag
Given there is a new tweet with the hashtag #nhsfft
When you wait 15 seconds
And you run Twit
Then this tweet should be stored

In the background this automatically posts a tweet from a personal dev account I set up, and then runs a console app (called Twit, right now) which searches twitter for tweets with this hashtag and then stores the tweets in a RavenDB store for future processing. The 15 second pause is there as the tweet wasn’t showing up in search results immediately – this sucks a bit as it slows down the automated test…

The next step is to write a separate process, which takes these stored tweets and posts them to Choices via our comment capture API.

I’m trying to practice what I preach (!) and use a BDD and TDD approach to the coding, with lots of refactoring as I go to ensure the code-base stays simple and clean.

It’s also good for learning – I found that you don’t have to store the NuGet packages in source control (thanks Steve), and am learning bits and pieces about RavenDB too.

Interacting with Twitter poses some challenges too. I began writing raw requests, but found dealing with OAuth was eating up time (when I just want to get something working) so am now using a couple of .Net components that wrap around the Twitter API. It’s likely that I’ll have to move from using the REST API to the Streaming API too, in order to ensure we don’t miss any tweets.

I’m also learning more about git – it’s only in a local repository at present, but will hopefully be in github soon!

We just launched a new initiative in our team to encourage more innovation and learning. Our 10% time is a bit of a cross between Google’s 20% time, and Dragons’ Den.

The idea is that any team members in Product Delivery can spend Friday afternoons working on their own project. It can be anything they want, but our panel of Dragons must agree to ‘invest’ a certain number of afternoons in the idea first.

Pitch

To get involved – team members deliver a short pitch explaining

what the idea is
how it will benefit the wider organisation
how long they initially need to work on it

Investment

The Dragons can choose to invest a certain number of afternoons in the idea, or ask for more refinements to the idea. When the end of the invested time comes – we’ll have demos of the different ideas, to see what we’ve come up with.

Ideas

There are some already some interesting ideas being pitched – ranging from a historic twitter analysis and a pregnancy care planner app, to a virtual fridge. Some people have pitched individually, and others have worked in pairs. The methodologies, technologies and tools used to build these ideas are entirely up the individuals building them, so it’s a chance to try out some new stuff.