Notes 2021, episode 5
On new colleagues, admin fights, and the unavoidable realisation that the strategy is delivery
May has been a busy month, during which I spent way too many hours navigating the odd recruitment processes that need to be run in order to get 3 new starters. In absence of my usual admin support, it required much longer than I thought (with a bit of frustration-induced Rottweiling whenever I realised process duplication or lack of clear ownership where the issues). But the negatives, all in all, stop at this. 3 new starters are joining my team between the end of May and the first week of June. This is pretty awesome. The AI Skunkworks team is becoming a data-powered multi-disciplinary team, covering a wide spectrum of expertise between BI and machine learning, alongside the ability to bring people together.
Seeing one of the new starters tweeting about joining us, and the reactions that this tweet triggered in the community, filled me with hope and gave me a massive grin. I can’t wait to welcome Arfah :)
Another piece of work that I’m really happy about was to start a conversation in the directorate about wellbeing at work. I realised two things: first, that in the AI Lab we had no formal connection to the wider NHSX health and wellbeing network; second, that we had no mental health ambassadors/whistleblowing recipients/listening ears. These are really important to the success of any team, I think. Especially the ability to say “if you have any concern, and you don’t want to speak with your line manager/they are about your line manager, speak to this person” is something that I learned in my school governing days to be vital to happiness at work and, in return, to organisational success. So I joined forces with my colleague Sarah, who’s really passionate and experienced about this, in order to make sure we build up a strong support network in the AI Lab. I feel this is especially important now, as new forms of anxiety develop as the world gets out of the pandemic.
With the flurry of activities and new starters coming, this month has also been about getting increasing clarity about the AI Skunkworks programme. I always think about the programme in agile terms, trying to make sure we are lean enough to adapt while keeping delivering towards the programme’s core strategic aim, i.e. to test AI tech, learn about it, share that knowledge to the system. The strategy is delivery, n’est-ce pas?
And to do so we’re increasingly developing our work streams according to 3 big pillars: first, experimentation, through a set of projects that we deliver usually in partnership with one or more suppliers; second, offering AI capability (or, as I keep calling it, AI-capability-as-a-service), through the core team; and third, building a community of AI practitioners in healthcare, while sharing as much as we learn about what works in AI and what doesn’t. Last month we also published a new case study, telling the story of the work we did with NHS Resolution on using AI-driven data analysis to help them better understand their negligence claims. This is one of the two types of projects we tend to run, which are either data analysis powered by AI (like this project), or the building of proof of concepts for a specific problem.
The team received some pretty flattering feedback from the exec team, which was pleasing; but even more flattering— and I hope the exec team doesn’t mind me saying ;-) — is the numbers of people, healthcare organisations, and even private sector suppliers, who want to work with us and who are keen to support our open source ethos. On this note, I’ll be running a session at CogX with Niamh McKenna (NHS Resolution’s CIO) and ian roddis (Kettering General Hospital’s Digital Director) on the work we’ve done together.
Let me finish by waving at Matt — after so much following him on Twitter and Medium, we ended up in the same NHSX training session! I’m loving to find this increasing number of people I’ve known and admired for years working in the same organisation. It is very refreshing and gives me a lot of strength and good vibes.
My newsletter is giving me a lot of satisfaction these days. About a month ago I started a new “Six questions to…” section, with short interviews to a varied audience of people working with data as journalists, techies, policy folks, and visual artists. I’m having fun compiling these, and the feedback has been positive. So here’s a little plug — please subscribe. The next interview is with FiveThirtyEight’s anna wiederkehr.
Finally, on the personal side — some good fun at the allotment…
…and in the print shop!
Have a good month, you all, and see you at the end of June.
