Dan’s Weeknotes 2022–07–09

Hi there. I hope you’re doing ok. Thanks for stopping by.

I think last week really tired me out. It wasn’t the most productive working week and that was a bit frustrating. Still, there were some highlights.

Outside of work I didn’t quite look after myself enough, I didn’t get outside enough for a start. I didn’t sleep well. I did have band practice, that was good. I read some of a book. I made my first guitar effects pedal that was really satisfying, I’ll be doing more of that. I had some nice sandwiches.

I ran out of coffee and drank the too-old cold brew I’d made that was sitting neglected in the fridge and I think I low-level poisoned myself.

The lesson? Always have some emergency coffee in the cupboard.

No, not instant.

On Monday morning I ran a session with the senior leadership team. This was part of the new ‘start the week with data’ forum. This was the second go at a format I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. It’s a light process for helping decision making, informed by data. The idea is to create a safe space for discussion and to push towards some decisions and actions being taken. We were looking at what we know about the adviser workforce and whether there’s anything we can do to help them improve outcomes for our clients. The last time I did it we had a group of 7, this time it was maybe 25. I split the session into two parts and we’ll do the second part this coming Monday.

How did it go? It was interesting. Worthwhile I think. I’m glad we’d populated the Jamboard that we used in advance with some of the data that we have on the topic. Unlike the previous session the group raised far more questions, rather than adding additional data points. I think this speaks to the fact that we know less about this topic at the moment — both in terms of our collective understanding and also fundamentally how detailed the data we have is.

Still, the aim is to facilitate a constructive discussion, and we got there I think. My take was that, despite there being many things we didn’t know or questions that we’d like to answer, we do know what the main issues are and can start to think about how to address them. That will be the focus for Monday.

I had some positive feedback from colleagues about the session. It’s worth continuing to iterate the format. If it gets a group to a point where there is a greater collective understanding of the topic and one or two big questions have been surfaced then I think it’s serving its purpose.

The advert for our new Associate Data Architect went live. Josh (data architect) is leading on this recruitment and he wrote a blog post about the role. I’m excited about bringing somebody new into the team and providing an opportunity for career progression and growth. We’ve come a really long way with our data architecture work. As an illustration, in early 2020 the question I was being asked was “what is a data architect and why do you need one?”. So yes, I successfully made that case and we’re seeing the benefits.

We’re relaunching our regular data open session. I wrote a blog post about it. I’m also doing an amnesty on the unwieldy invite list, inviting people to opt in to the new series of events. Hopefully we can get several external speakers, and I’d like to make some of the sessions open to people from outside Citizens Advice, once a month maybe.

I launched an informal training and coaching programme to help people who aren’t data specialists to build their skills in talking about our data. I’m working on this with Tom (chief analyst). I wrote up the programme outline in a doc and shared it in a post on Workplace, asking for 9 volunteers from the National organisation from any team and at any level. I got my 9 volunteers within an hour which was nice. I’m looking forward to starting work with this group in a couple of weeks.

Speaking of Tom we met up in real life on Friday at Walthamstow Wetlands. That was great. The weather was lovely although close to being too hot for me and we had a good stroll and a chat. Also we saw some barnacle geese (I’d never seen these before that I remember), and egret, and a couple of herons.

Finally speaking of Tom we had our regular Service Dashboard¹ development meeting along with Pete (principal data manager) and Mankeet (senior data analyst). I mention it because I enjoyed it so much. We had some new features on the dashboard and we all had a really engaging conversation about the data which felt like we were all speaking from a high level of expertise and understanding. From a personal point of view I’m never going to be as capable with our data as the other three on the call and that’s fine. I can make a constructive contribution though, that’s satisfying.

The team do a monthly delivery session where we review all the tickets on our data improvement Trello board. I run the session and I really enjoy it. You could argue it’s the wrong level of work for me to be doing, but I find it particularly valuable. Me running the session is a bit of a pragmatic choice because we don’t have delivery management support at the moment and some of my skills from back in the day are deliver manager-adjacent, unlike the rest of the team. I find getting good visibility of everything that’s happening and how it fits together is helped by my active participation as well — I think it would be a less efficient session if I wasn’t taking the lead. And finally it gives me an opportunity to lead with good vibes — making sure people get the credit for the things that they’ve delivered.

The team have some particularly tricky things going on at the moment and I’m spending a fair amount of time doing coaching and support. This is taking time away from being able to fully participate in some other things — particularly external work. But it’s the right priority for me at the moment.

Hey maybe I did get through quite a lot this week after all. Thanks for reading.

Footnotes

¹ This is our main data product. It brings a wide variety of our operational data together into one place