Dan’s Weeknotes s01e35
The fear
Catch up with the last episode of my #weeknotes (number 34) by listening to it on SoundCloud. Each one has a unique theme tune that I make all by myself.
After a bitty and unsatisfying summer (see episode 33), last week at work felt much more like a week at work. I was noticeably less anxious too. Nevertheless, I still felt wrung out at the end of the week.
My team is generally demoralised, thanks to the destructive power of gossip (see episode 31). And for me, in addition to feeling less than ‘100% work Dan’ (see episode 34) I also finished the week feeling a bit paranoid.
What if I’ve dropped some of the various balls you have to juggle in a job like mine and didn’t notice? What if I had my work destiny in my own hands 18 months ago, and blew it without realising?
Of course, I need to take my own medicine here, get my head down, and do the stuff. I mustn’t slip into living in a bad soap opera.
Week in brief
On Monday I had all day mandatory managing benefits training. I sat next to my fellow Head of X, Jamie.
I definitely got something out of it. It’s certainly a very important topic for my department as a whole. I liked the shout out to cognitive biases and ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman, which is a book that anybody involved in planning anything should read.
I had to leave earlier than expected because it was my son’s first day at a new nursery and he was very upset [1].
Tuesday started with the weekly rally where I told everybody what was happening and that kind of thing. It felt like ages since I’d done one of those.
Thanks to Oli I met Rob, Frank, and my baking brother Henry from the Data Visualisation team at the Office for National Statistics. I won’t go into detail about it, but suffice it to say that it was a great session. There was much impressive work on show from the ONS, and a very good read-across to what the House of Commons Library want to do and how the Digital Service (my department) might help. I especially liked the stuff about achieving reach through syndication, which is consistent with one of our organisational principles of ‘being where the people are’. It was also a relevant follow-on from the data visualisation workshop that Jamie had led earlier in the summer (see episode 29). Jamie himself came in later in the meeting. I said something about ‘organisational prototyping’ too, which was a fairly good explanation of the situation we’re in (in my opinion). Generally speaking I find that the ONS ‘digital’ experience in recent years has a huge amount of relevance for Parliament, with much to learn from.
It was great to see Henry too, and I suggested a new public sector digital baking project.
On the way back to our office I chatted with Jamie like colleagues do.
I had a meeting with Carrie (Head of X), Julie (number one esteemed colleague), and Louise (content legend) about an event we’re going to do that will be absolutely off the chain.
I went to a backlog review with the website teams led by Colin. I thought it was a good session and Colin did especially well holding it all together. There’s further work to do — I think we need to do more to ensure that ‘work to be done’ maps to our users’ needs to everybody’s satisfaction. It struck me that this is hard when you’re working in a brownfield situation, which we are.
I did speaking with people. I suggested to Jeanette that her team do some kind of design show and tell because I’d seen something on Twitter and felt like I was missing out.
I caught up on stuff, including data entry (I am the Head of Data and Search).
Wednesday started with me trying to make progress on the issue from the backlog session the day before. I need to set up a meeting with Colin, Caroline (delivery manager), and Steve (user researcher).
I spoke with Colin.
I sat in on the committees website product team’s retrospective agile ceremony. Then they didn’t do their full sprint planning agile ceremony because not enough people were in the office, but I was impressed with how they work out immediate priorities regardless.
I had a discussion with Ed about ‘messaging’ — how to communicate some of the approaches we’re taking as a wider team to a very broad group of stakeholders without saying the wrong thing. I prefer not to oversimplify after bad experiences in the past, but that definitely takes more effort.
I met with Rupert (king of the architects). We were discussing recruiting a new solutions architect to work on our ‘corporate’ data (which means internal stuff that you’d find in most organisations, like HR and finance). We agreed they would report to Rupert but work closely with my team, ideally situated with the data integration engineers. Rupert and I would interview together too. I remembered that the last time we did this we recruited total legend Trung (who recently left — see episode 31).
I did email, correspondence, customer support and that kind of stuff for a long time. I was still in the office fairly late.
On Thursday I met with Tori (Director of Transformation). We spoke about the ‘corporate’ data, in particular areas where Tori is trying to make progress on improvement and change in a rather complicated landscape. It was a good session. We touched on corporate management information dashboards too.
I met with Rachel from the New Zealand department of internal affairs to talk about ‘machine readable legislation’. We’d agreed to put our heads together after meeting at Teacamp (see episode 33). This was a great session. I invited Robert, Michael, and Graham along too. Michael describes what we talked about really well in the data and search team #weeknotes. The conversation also made me think about the talk that Rachel Coldicutt gave at our last Newspeak House event the week before (see episode 34) — a general ‘morality in technology’ theme has really stuck with me.
I went to a briefing about values and strategy at every level of our organisation led by Rosie (strategy lead). The aim was to make it personal to staff — what is their place in the delivery of the digital strategy? What is their part in the digital transformation? I was very impressed at Rosie standing up and talking for so long (in the most soul-sucking meeting room we have) about something that people might be sceptical about. Thanks to Rosie’s efforts the energy didn’t dip. The session was best when Rosie was swearing.
We had Emma (my Director)’s website road map delivery meeting featuring Azmina, Jo, Edward (new user engagement person), Ed, Nik, Caroline, Carrie, and Chris (from the business systems team). Jamie was on the phone. I thought it was good, and it’s getting to be a good way to hear about- and track progress.
I did work. Then my roll million Chris McAndrew photos came through and I was distracted.
I had a chat with Samu (tech lead). The collaborative technical thinking on managing content (in the sense of its relationship to the new data service) has evolved and I need to understand it better. It’s interesting, I will have to change my diagrams.
Friday started with me meeting Sarah (new product manager) to tell her about the data and search team as part of her induction.
I had a long talk with Emma. We were working through my work problems (of which there are many). This was / is hard, because there are no ready answers — just a succession of really tough things for me to do.
At the end of our talk I mentioned the ‘big idea’ I’d had (see episode 33). I’m glad I did, because it turned out that it is the same as part of something that Emma has planned to do for a long time. If I’d carried on I might have messed it up. Emma asked me not to progress it any further and that we would work on it as a wider team.
Grand daydreams aside, I hadn’t thought much past the initial idea in any practical sense, but I was planning on exploring it as part of my ‘10% time’ which we get for personal development projects. So, I need to think of something else. It’s probably going to be meetings data [2].
I met Ray (our new CTO). He is very interested in data strategy and data principles, which I hope provides an opportunity for the team and still more high-level impetus for change. I feel a bit sorry for new Directors, it must be extremely tough to get one’s head around things in the early days of a new role in a complicated place.
I got in touch with fellow #weeknotes-er Ryan because I’m planning to visit him in Newcastle to talk about data and search.
I did writing. I published a blog post that is a reflection on the team values I described in 2016 and includes some new thoughts on workplace melodrama. In my annual objectives (see episode 18) I have to write 12 blog posts by the end of March next year excluding #weeknotes. This was my 6th, so I am on the pace. I also have to show evidence that my writing is generally worthwhile in some small way or something like that so that I don’t get fired [3].
#CultureDan
Watching: I saw ‘Colossal’ which I enjoyed, and it had an unexpected story arc. Anne Hathaway’s performance was particularly good.
Listening: This track ‘Milestars’ by Demian is really good.
I didn’t read anything last week. Sad. At least I didn’t pick up the Metro or Evening Standard on the tube though.
#MeetingWatch
I got up to date on my data entry and gathered the data about my meetings as normal. The revolving door that I often get stuck in did something terrifying.
[1] He was fine when I got there, of course
[2] Might actually be great you know
[3] Initially I had written ‘influenced people’ but this is problematic and maybe a bit gross
