Dan’s Weeknotes s07e16

Weeks ending 2020–10–16 to 2020–11–13

Oh, hi

Hello friend. It’s been a while since I wrote any weeknotes (see episode 15). But hey, here I am on a Friday evening trying to get back into it.

I’m going to go through some highlights from the past month and try and keep it short. Things at work are fine.

What was good?

• I sat in on a content crit with Chelle (content designer) and other content professionals and it was really good. Always fascinating to see something broken down into bits and put back together into something leaner and better.
• The team are doing some great work on a number of different fronts. These including saving people time and money. They’ve also had some opportunities to share with wider forums and raise their profile. I will keep elevating and amplifying them. I don’t want to jinx it but I think our little crew are getting a bit of new momentum.
• On cross organisation collaboration I had a great sharing session with David and the data science team from the Competition and Markets Authority CMA. I had a great sharing and plotting session with Ryan and Stu from Department for Work and Pensions data teams about how we can share practice, experience, and expertise. Both of these are in the ‘slow burn but stick at it’ category.
• We started recording our weekly open invite team discussion of our data dashboard session and posting it on Workplace from Facebook. This costs nothing, and has doubled our audience.
• I had an actual holiday. A few days walking in the Peak District, eating nice food, and being cosy by a fire in a tiny cottage. I don’t know when the last time I went on a holiday on my own terms was. It was great.
• I thought this was fascinating. I remember a few years ago telling people about Valve in the context of new ways of working and flat organisation structures but hey turns out it was all a crock of shite isn’t that just the way man:

The Nightmare of Valve’s self-organizing “utopia”

• Ireti (data architect) unilaterally decided to call his data modelling work ‘project Mimir’ after a Norse god of wisdom and I am so here for it. One of my professional pet hates is systems and projects with amusing names, especially backronyms¹. Why call your thing something that’s slap your thigh bro hilarious when instead you could name it after the decapitated head that whispered knowledge into Odin’s ear?
• Andy’s talk at the ODI lunchtime lecture made me think about the different rhythms and cadences of data:

ODI Fridays: Full Fact on why bad information ruins lives

• Colleagues Mandeep (Head of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) and Shakira led a superb panel session on race inequity featuring Dr Wanda Wyporska and Sanjiv Lingayah.
• I thought this blog post from Emily was excellent:

Principles of coping with isolation

• Tom (chief analyst) ran a session with all the folks responsible for the various ways we find stuff out². This was really promising. The opportunity to work more seamlessly across these disciplines and think about what we know and what we don’t know in a holistic³ way is exciting. Giulia pointed to the Cancer Research UK design principles in this session too:

The Cancer Research UK Design Principles

• My staff survey results were much improved. Solid, and felt like a more accurate reflection of where the team is at than last time. Still work to do, of course.
• I did some recruitment. It was a tough ask for a contract role with specific constraints, skills, and urgency but one of the agencies I’ve been working with really came through for us. I interviewed with Adam (content designer) and enjoyed it.
• Eunjeong (delivery manager) is definitely in my top 5 online workshop facilitators. We had the third workshop with a group of colleagues working on our resourcing processes. With Eunjeong running the show the energy is high, the Trello board is fabulous, and the spirit is so positive.
• I took part in an ODI round table discussion which was fascinating. Particularly everything that Cosmina Dorobantu said. Renate’s facilitation was excellent. Jeni said hello to me on the Zoom chat. I said a few things and they weren’t dumb.
• I did a couple of bits of the kind of coach / let’s solve a problem together thing that I am good at.
• James (my boss) reinvigorated the end of the week checkout for his leadership team, giving one of us responsibility each week for leading something social. I subjected colleagues to a quiz about cake last week. Today Tom did an excellent game about guessing cities.

What could have been better?

• Why is it so hard for me to get any decent focus going? My concentration is shot to ribbons.
• It was 4:30pm on a Zoom workshop and I noticed everybody was sitting in the dark and I tell you I wasn’t prepared for that when we started lockdown in March. It feels different to coming out of an office after the sun’s gone down somehow. That didn’t used to bother me. Suggestions I’ve seen of taking an extended break in the daylight look really solid.
• I didn’t go to the ODI Summit because I was exhausted. Sad about that.
• I have quite a bit on the go and I noticed in the past few weeks that one of the things making it hard to move through things quickly is a high administrative workload that is increasing and is split across multiple separate systems and interfaces. I think it’s the kind of thing that’s exacerbated by being remote as well, harder to ask a colleague for help.

What are you looking forward to next week?

• More recruitment.
• I have a catch up with Jo.
• On Monday I’ve got my third ‘unicorn hour’ to combat the persistent start of the week slump 🦄⏲️

Thanks for reading. Hope you’re doing ok. There is good in the world. Stay safe. Fight racism.

Footnotes

¹ “Barrett’s law”: every organisation above a certain size will have had a system or project called ELVIS.

² Maybe this isn’t the right shorthand. But anyway, I’m talking about user research and service design (Giulia and Eva), the Lab (Kate), and Evaluation and Impact (Natasha). Plus Tom’s kind of data work (analysis), and my kind of data work (infrastructure and design).

³ Sorry.