The Federation

Steve Foreshew-Cain: The Federation is open and ‘How do I’ is live

Co-op

(Transcript) Steve Foreshew-Cain: Hello, and welcome to this week’s Co-op Digital update.

This week we officially launched The Federation, as you can see behind me. It’s been amazing to see the transformation of the building into a vibrant, modern space. But what’s been even better is the community of people and organisations, both large and small, public and private that have come together.

Thank you to all the Federation team, Emer, Victoria, Lisa, Beena, Sam and Bex as well as our colleagues across the Group and NOMA that have supported us in not only the launch but the whole refurbishment of this fantastic building.

Also a big thank you to Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester who took the time to join us to mark the launch, as well as our CEO Steve Murrells.

The launch is just the beginning. There’s going to be lots going on in Federation. We’ll share all events on our social channels, and don’t forget there are really great event spaces that are available to hire for anyone as well as desks on our co-working floor.

One of those events is happening next Tuesday. Our Member Voice team are screening the Rochdale Pioneers film in The Federation. The Rochdale Pioneers tells the story of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers who founded the first successful co-operative retail store and whose passion and sense of fairness and justice inspired a worldwide movement with values at its heart.

I also wanted to say a big well done to our team working with colleagues in Funeralcare who received a highly commended award for workplace transformation project of the year at the UK IT Industry Awards last week. Well done.

Yesterday the ‘How do I’ service for our colleagues in Food went live and was launched into stores. 100% of the Retail Support Centre’s policy and procedure content is published on How Do I.

In the few days since we’ve launched we’ve already have over 650 colleagues accessing the new service, giving us lots of positive feedback on the service and plenty of ideas for improvement and iteration of the content.

And to give you some idea of the scale of the work, that’s 411 policies rewritten, 137 copied across from Citrus which was the old system. Absolutely stellar work from the content editor team who have been seconded in from stores and in less than 6 months have learned how to write user-focused content and how to use a content management system.

How Do I wouldn’t exist or be useful without the content, so this team, with our content designers Jo and Hannah’s help, have made it happen. So a huge thank you to Emma Nichols and her team – and to the whole team working together in partnership with our food business. That’s ‘being Co-op’ at its best.

Sadly we say goodbye to Jen Farmer this week. Jen was part of the team that brought our new brand to life, and has done a brilliant job of helping our data team start to engage with members.

Well, that’s it for this week. A big week I think you’ll agree. You’ll find our latest vacancies our blog – we’re looking for engineers, agile delivery managers, QAs and doing lots of recruitment in our data science team.

Don’t forget to subscribe for all our updates and follow us on Twitter.

See you next week.

Steve Foreshew-Cain
Group Digital Director

 

Steve Foreshew-Cain: the Funeralcare service exits beta and Design Manchester has begun

Co-op

(Transcript) Steve Foreshew-Cain: Hello and welcome to this week’s Co-op Digital update.

Well since I last spoke, our Membership app trial with our colleagues has begun and over a thousand people have already signed up to join the trial. They’ve been giving us loads of feedback already and we’re learning quite a lot from it so we’ll be sharing what we learn on our blog.

Some other great news, the service that we’ve been working on with our colleagues in Funeralcare has exited its beta phase. There’s been a lot of hard work since we did the initial inception back in April 2016, but as a team were really proud of the product that it has been built and the amazing job frontline colleagues have done to help us design a service that we have proven works and will give colleagues time back to care more. So big thank yous to all of those involved.

Now you may remember a few weeks ago I told you that The Federation had been nominated for an Inspired Places Award 2017. Voting opens today and we’ll share the link on our blog and our Twitter account so please, please vote and remember if you’d like a tour of The Federation, get in touch with Victoria Howlett who can arrange that.

This week also saw the start of Design Manchester, Manchester’s annual design festival. It runs until the 22nd of October and there’ll be talks exhibitions workshops films and loads more across the city celebrating design in all its various forms. We’ll be running and speaking at several events this year too so we’ll be talking a lot about service design, something that’s really relevant to what we do here in the team. Everyone’s welcome so please once again, the links to register will be on our blog. Please take advantage.

Now, yesterday it was our pleasure to host the first Northern Data Governance Forum. It was great to welcome lots of organisations to share their thoughts and experience on data governance. Thank you to Catherine Brien and Ian Thomas from the team who were amongst the speakers there.

And finally this week Kate Towsey has joined us as a user researcher and she’ll also be helping us build our very own user research lab in The Federation, so welcome Kate, it’s great to have you onboard.

That’s it for this week you’ll find our latest vacancies on our blog and don’t forget to subscribe for all of our updates and follow us on Twitter.

We’ll see you next week.

Steve Foreshew-Cain
Group Digital Director

 

The co-working floor is now open at The Federation

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We’ve blogged before about how the work is progressing at Federation House. The co-working floor at The Federation opened this week. Victoria Howlett the Federation Manager agreed to show us around the space.

(Transcript) Victoria: Hi, I’m Victoria Howlett and I’m the Federation Manager over here at The Federation. We’ve just added a bit more work to the first floor which is open this week, so would you like to come and have a look?

So as you can see, we’ve added some artwork to the walls here which was done by the wonderful artists Nomad Clan. We actually added this artwork after the attack at the MEN, which we thought was an incredible thing to do for our city and the people here.

As you can see all the furniture is now in place, we’ve got the lovely Chesterfield lemon sofas here, we also have green and pink sofas dotted around.

Here we have the main communal kitchen point on the floor and we’ve got these picnic benches here. We’ve asked everyone who’s been involved in this project and all Co-op colleagues to come over and sign the benches, which is actually such a lovely thing. We’ve had some amazingly heartwarming messages on here. We welcome everybody to come and sign these and anybody that visits the floor please grab a sharpie that will be on here and sign.

We’re really excited because the NHS research and development North West team moved in here this week. Kainos moved into the pods here this week too and we’re welcoming the Startup Factory.Tech on this floor soon. We’ve had such a high interest in the pods on this floor that they are more or less all taken now, we’ve only got one left.

Now we come to the second floor, and on this floor we have 9 private suites which roughly range from 200 square foot all the way up to 1,400 square foot.

This is the main kitchen point, the communal kitchen point on the floor and I will walk you through the corridor here. You can see on this hallway we’ve added in the windows here along the sides and this is just to create that community feel still. There are private suites here, but it’s also to ensure that there is that level of community engagement throughout the building and that everybody’s a part of each of the businesses that are based here.

Keep an eye on Twitter and the blog for more updates on The Federation.

Victoria Howlett
Federation Manager