Weeknotes s01e15
Fever
I had a short work week, and didn’t get much done. However, with the unexpected (to me, at least) news about the general election it was pretty eventful, and also rather thought-provoking.
Thought-provoking because this will be my fifth general election working at the UK Parliament. This realisation made me feel like an old piece of furniture. Maybe a veneered sideboard, with a Toby jug and a dusty bottle of blue curacao on it.
In totally neutral service-provision terms, a general election is a very exciting and busy time where I work, and huge amounts of effort go into providing a good service to MPs of all kinds. It’s challenging because 1) the range of needs, services, and work going on in the background is quite staggering; and 2) it’s condensed into a short period, where the first couple of days after the election are especially intense. Add to this the fact that there’s a far shorter period for preparation than has been the case since I started work and you might get a feel for what the atmosphere is like at the moment.
I thought back to what I did in the previous four elections, and it goes something like
2001 — I had to make the internal telephone directory
2005 — I had to make the internal telephone directory, do something with mobile phones (probably), and maybe did some voicemail training
2010 — I had to coordinate, at a high level, all of the election delivery from the various departments of the House of Commons and the IT Department [1]
2015 — I was Head of [software] Development. My development teams (particularly Matt’s team at the time, who put in most of the effort) did a huge amount of work on data and applications, including an internal telephone directory web app. In terms of hands-on work by me, I was one of many volunteers helping new MPs set up their new IT kit.
This year I’m hoping for some more hands-on volunteering, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some work to do with the internal telephone directory.
Week in brief
Monday was a bank holiday
On Tuesday I took the day off
On Wednesday I met with Rupert the enterprise architect to talk about technical governance. Rupert’s thinking has been informed by the GDS Service Assessment approach. It sounds very sensible.
Stephen (performance analyst in Jeanette’s team) did the corporate management information dashboards show and tell. It was really good, although it would have been nice to have more people along. Stephen is especially good at illustrating good and bad practices in data visualisation, including owning up to when he’s been guilty of bad things himself. His message was to keep away from gimmicks, and focus on the data and what it’s telling us. Stephen also built a dashboard from scratch in the session, which was a nice touch.
I presented to a delegation of lawyers and technical staff from the US House of Representatives about our work on public-facing data services for Parliament. I wasn’t sure about how it went, because I felt there was a bit of a language or culture barrier. At the very least, I was struck by my work situation being quite different to theirs — I have more autonomy by the sounds of things, and not for the first time I felt like I’m in a fortunate position.
Thursday started with a meeting at 8.30 in the morning.
Anybody who knows me in real life will recognise that this is pretty much unheard of, but the meeting was with James and featured breakfast so I made a special superhuman effort to get out of bed like a normal person.
James and I were meeting about meetings, and my project to gather data about my meetings over the course of this year to help me make positive changes in my work. This is all part of my year-long quest for balance outlined in episode 8.
It was really helpful. James is a really great catalyst, and I left full of ideas. I feel like I’m getting to a point where I can set out the project and what I’ve learned so far in a blog post, and also start to make some changes to how I work as well.
There was a meeting of the ‘Heads of Profession’ in my department. Unsurprisingly, the election was the main focus.
I met with Ben who is going to come on a short secondment from the House of Lords to my team. We discussed what his aims for the secondment were, and what we would both get out of it.
Rob Greig (Department Director) told me that the Americans I met on Wednesday liked me, which was nice to hear. Maybe I will get a visit to the United States of America. I could take the Digital Service Learjet [2].
We had the corporate management information dashboards team meeting. It was ok, but the energy isn’t as positive as it was a couple of month ago. I need to do something about this.
Afterwards there was an all staff briefing, and then I went to the ‘Digital Strategy Board’ where Mat and David from my team was presenting on improvements the team have made in the past year to our ‘corporate’ data (internal-facing, often related to HR and finance systems). This is a group of very senior [3] people, so it was great that Mat and David (who did the work) were presenting to them rather than me.
Friday was a short day. I had a meeting led by Jo on election planning for Emma (my Director)’s directorate. Fred (product manager) has been tasked with drawing it all together, which is a big task. Of minor note was the meeting featured a successful low-tech conference call with Carrie and Nik on two mobile phones.
I met with Gavin to talk about a new corporate management information dashboard that we’re going to do for our research and information services. I feel positive about this one. I really think there’s an opportunity to help improve services.
Most of the team sit at the bank of desks opposite me. At the end of the week I was really happy to see lots of collaboration and problem solving by them, it feels like it’s really coming together.
#MeetingWatch
I’m increasingly happy with my data capture form, but I’m going to have to stop iterating soon so that I can be consistent in my measurement and analysis. This is a repeat of my experience when I captured data about cake
…if I were starting on a new product at work, I’d want to make sure that I had time to explore without ending up with an unmanageable mountain of rework. If I had my cake time again, I’d record more detail than I did from the beginning in case it was useful later on.
I failed to learn a lesson there. Nevertheless, I’m really happy with how the sheets are turning out, and I think version 8 (coming next week) will be the last one. All the data I’ve captured so far is here in a spreadsheet open to the public.
[1] I think this is still my favourite job to date. It was all behind the scenes stuff, helping important senior people make decisions and work together, and it taught me a great deal
[2] For the avoidance of doubt, there is not such thing as a Digital Service Learjet (as far as I am aware)
[3] What is a better word? I don’t mean senior as in old, and I like ‘important’ even less. These are the people who have to make the big decisions. Maybe I’ll say ‘bosses’ from now on
