Dan’s Weeknotes s01e34
Teenage angst
Catch up with the last episode of my #weeknotes (number 33) by listening to it on SoundCloud. Each one has a unique theme tune that I make all by myself.
Things haven’t been great at work since the beginning of July. I initially put this down to a comedown from my trip to North America (see episodes 24–1 and 24–2), but it’s been a long while now since I got off the plane at Heathrow.
I haven’t managed to build any momentum. I haven’t managed to make any progress in my year-long quest for balance (see episode 8). I haven’t felt very well. I haven’t been happy.
I just want to get a bit closer to my ‘100% work self’.
In my head, 100% work Dan can kick the world’s ass.
I’m feeling about 50% at the moment.
Week in brief
Monday was my 40th birthday. For the past 20 years or so I’d been convinced that I was going to die at 39, thanks to playing a ouija board type game [2] in my late teens. In best agile style I can’t remember the process of the game, just the outcome. That outcome had been irrationally nagging the back of my mind ever since [3]. I’m glad that’s over now.
I had a really good birthday.
On Tuesday I met with Oli to talk about the work he’s leading to start establishing a ‘data science’ function in the House of Commons Library. It’s an exciting prospect, and I really appreciated Oli asking me for my opinions. Hopefully I’ll be able to help. There is a prospective overlap of skills with my data and search team, but the context and the outputs between us and the Library are so different. Outside of my team, I think there’s work we can do to facilitate this ‘data science’ for research, building on work done elsewhere in Government.
I also think that as long as we can laugh about the fact that everybody else in the UK Parliament sees (and will always see) the Digital Service as some kind of villain we’ll be ok.
I did catching up on stuff. I did chatting with people, including Gavin (business partner), and Jeanette (my fellow Head of X).
I met a delegation from the Indian Lok Sabha (lower House of their Parliament) as part of my ongoing speculative efforts to cadge work trips abroad.
This delegation was even tougher work than the last one (see episode 33). Initially I got thrown by the Indian delegates shaking their heads but then my cosmopolitan citizen of the world brain kicked in and I realised everything was going fine.
Mat made me a cake for my birthday and I had some of that. It was delicious and so big that it lasted for 3 days.
I drafted an answer to a Parliamentary Question. That’s not something that happens every day. Here’s the finished answer [4].
Wednesday was data day, my team’s planning day. It was pretty punishing, especially the afternoon where (unusually) we went round and round on a particular problem without any constructive outcomes or resolutions.
The morning was interesting, where we went into more detail than ever before with our colleagues Colin (product manager) and Ed ([5]) on what exactly we were going to deliver in the next two weeks for the website. We also made some collective, tactical decisions so that we can deliver. This was in response to the issues that came up in episode 32. Jamie (Head of X) was with us for much of the day, which was great.
After data day I sat with Stephanie (from the portfolio directorate) working on business cases and justification for corporate management information dashboards, so that I can hopefully get another couple of people in the team, including some desperately needed delivery management.
I did some customer support. I wrote up the data and search team commitments from data day and sent them to lots of people, although next time I should make the circulation wider still.
Thursday started with a meeting with Anya, our most important internal customer. There are troubles, because we’re struggling to make the kind of progress on new internal tools for Anya’s team that would give them confidence in us. I made a mistake here, being too optimistic perhaps 12 months back about how much we could get done with my ‘core headcount’ of people. I’m not sure what to do about this yet.
I sat with the Committees website product team. I thought they were going to do their retrospective and sprint planning agile ceremonies but some of the team weren’t around and they didn’t know why so they decided to do the ceremonies the next day.
I spoke with Ed and Caroline (delivery manager), building on the conversations we’d had at data day and bringing Caroline up to date because she hadn’t been able to make the session on Wednesday.
I met with my colleague Jane from the House of Commons to talk about corporate management information dashboards. There is lots of work to do on corporate management information dashboards.
I had a budget meeting with Emma (my director), Jaie (finance sorcerer), Julie (number one esteemed colleague) and the Heads of X (Carrie, Jamie, Jeanette, and Matt).
In the evening it was our fourth ‘Parliament, Data, and Democracy’ meetup at Newspeak House.
I had to speak, to kick things off and what have you. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, because ever since I was 12 and first realised that I love a stage and an audience because I am vain or whatever, I’d basically turn up anywhere and address any number of people without getting too fussed. I like improvising too. I was always a bit nervous of course, but not to a level that the cost didn’t outweigh the reward.
However, on Thursday I felt really awful. Afterwards it was hard to talk to people as well, because I thought I was going to fall over or something and I couldn’t concentrate properly. I felt awful when I had to speak at the conference in Washington D.C. too. I think this general experience has been creeping up on me in the last 9 months or so.
It bothers me because it’s a new thing. And also fuck it to hell, because I’m 40 years old and I belong on stage.
Me aside, it was a good evening. Maybe the best, because we took previous feedback on board and cut down from 4 speakers to 3. I really enjoyed Anna Scott from the ODI’s talk about open data and democracy. It made me think some more about my ‘big idea’ (see episode 33). I had never seen Rachel Coldicutt (CEO of doteveryone) speak and it was a real treat. It was very thought-provoking, with really important themes for society that I hadn’t considered before. Samu (tech lead) rounded off the evening with a really great technical overview of our new data service.
The main piece of feedback that I took away was from Alyson (who it was really nice to meet in the real life): the gender balance of our audience needs work — it is mostly male. Michael and I take the issue seriously — I wonder what it will be like when we take the show on the road outside of London?
Michael’s excellent data and search team #weeknotes have links to all the slides from the evening.
It was really good to talk to Newspeak House Dean Ed at the end of the night. Hopefully we can meet up before too long for a proper chat.
On Friday I did email and writing.
I sat in on the Members website product team sprint planning agile ceremony, led by Colin. I tried to contribute. It was good to see (or feel) the link from what we’d discussed on Wednesday and how it helped the collaborative work to take shape. Maybe this approach is going to work. I hope we can stick with it long enough to learn lessons.
I did some more correspondence, customer support, and admin.
#CultureDan
Listening: The new album ‘Sleep Well Beast’ by The National. I used to buy everything by The National without fail, and they are a very important band for me and I’ve seen them play live many times, but I don’t think I bought their last record. I had a good chat with the drummer once. The singer recorded a special surprise message for my sister and her husband at their wedding. It’s mean (and it’s easy to be an armchair critic), but I just felt that they didn’t need to make music any more. I read some reviews that said this album was a bit of a departure with a ‘rawer’ sound and weird noises. Of course, it isn’t really a departure at all, but it is very good. The only bits I don’t like are the ‘teenage band in a garage’ hackneyed drum beat on the second track; and there’s a really bad guitar solo on one of the songs [6].
Reading: I’ve been feeling very uncomfortable on the tube and reading makes it worse, so I’m stuck at about 50 pages from the end of the 900 page ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ by Thomas Pynchon.
#MeetingWatch
I’ve fallen behind on updating my open spreadsheet of data about my meetings. I’ll need to do a concerted data entry session.
I didn’t get stuck in any revolving doors last week.
[1] I couldn’t decide between the Phoebe from Friends GIF or this one of Rowdy Roddy Piper
I decided that I’m more like Phoebe
[2] Not actually a ouija board though
[3] Yes I know this is rather silly
[4] Trying to find that Parliamentary Question was an absolute shitshow, and I expect I’d be classified as a user towards the ‘expert’ end of the spectrum. It certainly makes the case for improving search. I discovered a bug on the new search service though, which is something
[5] I can’t remember Ed’s job title, but he’s great
[6] I am allowed to say this because I have played and recorded my fair share of bad guitar solos
