Weeknotes s02e13
Future
I thought and talked about the future – in a data and digital landscape sense – quite a lot this week. This is largely due to a back drop of senior planning and changes of project phase in my own world.
There is an increasing wind of change feeling about the place – in a good, positive and progressive way. Laced with that yin-yang set of people’s emotions and behaviours – drive and excitement for some, uneasiness and denial from others.
Onwards.
This week features a freebie and the gifs are flavours of Wayne – which I think would make a good band name. I was spoilt for choice. There is quite a rich landscape of niche Waynes – apologies to those who missed out.
Monday
London 1/3.
I got the train with Adam – part of our data visualisation community and all round nice person. We had a chat and talked about the learning we’ve been working on – more on that later. We also covered moving the statistics dashboards onto the Churchill platform.
I got to Caxton for a catch up with Kit. This was originally going to be an ideas session – working through our thoughts about future stuff. I find talking to Kit very helpful.
I’d aimed to articulate what I think OneTeamGov might look like in the North East. Kit had some things to talk about too.
However, it ended up being something else, more about now stuff and about my stuff. It was me emptying some of my brain and Kit helping tidy it up. I ended up with some things Ryan needs post its – Kit has really good pens by the way – and we talked about culture change and hypothesis testing amongst other things. We agreed we should speak more regularly as it is valuable.
I called Stuart following an email he’d sent. We spoke about data, support for him, some of the recent requests we’ve had and also logistics for the following week which is another busy travelling week.
I met Sam – Government Digital Service – for an impromptu MacBook exchange. There had been a delay in getting them prepared for our recent data science accelerator cohort (Nujcharee and Sarah) and rather than courier them I’d agreed to collect them while I was down south.
I’ve spoken to Sam many times over the phone but never met him face to face. We had a bit of a catch up about changes at Government Digital Service, changes to his role, plus about data.gov.uk and service design manual.
After lunch with Adam, Keith – from the Client Statistics team in our directorate – joined us and we headed down the road to Ministry of Justice. This was a dual purpose trip.
One was to show Keith the work the Ministry of Justice data science team had been doing on Parliamentary Questions using the UK Parliament API.
The other was to talk about the data visualisation learning. I’ve mentioned this sporadically throughout my #weeknotes. To recap.
Over the last few years I have drawn together and delivered various in-house and conference based data visualisation courses, training, seminars. This has evolved from being aimed at statisticians for publications —where I worked with the Government Statistical Service — to the analytical community for communicating analyses — statisticians, economists, operational researchers and social researcher — to digital folk — to just anyone.
The increased scope and demand lead to Adam and I, supported by our community of data vis enthusiasts, developing an online version. The site consolidates material from the previous iterations and adds information, examples and resources we think are helpful. We cover thought processes and good practice. We’ve shared it with a few friendly faces including a — suggestions welcome for a collective noun for — #weeknote-ers
freebie alert
The learning can be found at https://dataviztraining.dwpdata.info/index.html
Feel free to take a look, share and feedback — it’s an iterative development.
Neither Adam nor I are content designers or web developers — this is a Google time experiment. The aim is to get people – it’s not just for ‘numbers people’ – to think more about the communication side of data and data visualisation. It’s about sharing what we have learned and carrying the torch data literacy and communication.
At Ministry ot Justice, Jonathan R – head of their data science team – asked me a few things about Churchill and explained how it will be helpful to some work his team are doing.
Then while Jon demo’d the Parliamentary Question work I chatted with Eleni – analyst responsible for data presentation – about the vis learning and data literacy in general – I plugged the Government Digital Service work in this area and took a look at the Ministry of Justice training material which was good.
I called Stuart from the train back. I called him lots of times as I dipped in and out of signal. Surely that shouldn’t be a thing.
It was my Mam’s birthday so I called to see her when I got back.
Tuesday
London 2/3.
I got the train with Stuart and Stephen and we caught up about a load of things on the journey.
We were down seeing Paul, Amy, Amanda and Lucy from Cabinet Office office. Plus colleagues from Ministry of Defence and Public Health England. I won’t talk about the details but we were there to share lessons learned about Churchill and experiences with visualising data, user needs, open data, platforms and software. It was a good discussion.
I dipped out early to get the train back as it was parent’s evening at my son’s new school.
Emails on the train.
A call with Charlie about options for the Sunday name for Churchill plus also about hypothesis testing and targeted use cases.
A call with Ash about #HackTheNorth – where our teams are heavily involved – FrontEndNE – who approached us to talk – the Churchill name and some other stuff.
Then another few calls with Charlie and Stuart following an email I won’t talk about. Sufficed to say, it was an unwanted series of communications for almost everyone concerned.
I got back for parents evening though – seems like he’s doing well and has settled in.
Wednesday
Working from home day. However my daughter was off school ill – it subsequently turned out that she was needs medicine ill rather than better in a couple of days ill.
I had a series of back to back phones calls which is becoming a feature of Wednesdays – it means email mountain continues to grow. You’ll sense a theme running through most of the calls.
A call with Charlie: mainly about the thing I’m not going to talk about – but also about business value.
A call with Stephen: primarily about environments, target architecture and articulating business value and a couple of things to do.
A call with Kit: about remaining calm and not overthinking.
A call with Alaine: about splitting a commissioning note to emphasise business value. Also about the Sunday name for Churchill.
A call with Stu: about a few things but primarily hypothesis testing, targeted use cases and business value.
A call with Graham, Jo, Chris – operations analysis – and Billy – Sheffield hub lead about their performance framework. This was a sharing session – I covered relevant bits of our work and put them in touch with the performance analysts.
Another call with Stephen – an update and to talk about something I’ve been expecting someone to ask me for ages but they haven’t yet.
A call with Gayll about Manhattan authentication. This particualr aspect has gone through loads of layers of conversations, Gayll has been brilliantly patient in keeping us right. We also spoke about Manhattan alpha and Greyhound alpha more generally, the challenges of culture change and of course, identifying business value.
I worked late getting through emails.
In amongst the emails, Zoe– product guru at DWP – had asked if Philippa – Government Digital Service better use of data megastar – and I would talk about data stuff at a product owners conference. I juggled my calendar and am really looking forward to collaborating with Philippa.
Thursday
My one day in the office of the week. Next week will also be a one day in the office week.
I had a walking meeting with Stu to start the day.
I met with Penny – data scientist. Penny. also been asked to talk at a product people event and we wanted to compare notes. Penny and I are both in a busy period but agreed to schedule in a joint team show and tell when things settle down a little as there is space for sharing ideas.
Gayll, Pablo, Joana and Daniel then walked me through the material they had prepared for the following day – a wrap up of the discovery phase of Long Island with Pauline – head of labour market policy and employer engagement strategy.
Whilst there have been some wider conversations about governance more recently – at the start of this journey into digital data products I chose – in the absence of a definitive digital service standard for data products – to align as pragmatically as possible to the criteria for public facing transactional services. This has been helpful but not perfect. It is probably least perfect at the transitions between phases. I may expand on this another time.
One aspect of Long Island is a segmentation of geographical areas based on a single rate of change measure over time – this measure comes from Greyhound.
The segmentation pipeline is repeatable – although not yet industrialised – for situations where you can apply Greyhound analytics to ‘time-series by geography’ data in Churchill.
The first Long Island segments produced show some significant (in both senses of the word) differences in characteristics of the geographical areas — even though the segmentation has been conducted on a single varible. It’s really quite powerful stuff and the material the team had put together showed it well.
There were lots of chats around the desk about Long Island in the afternoon.
I joined the call for #HackTheNorth speakers.
I couldn’t access our resource management system AGAIN — aaaaaaarrrrrrgggghhhhhh!
Friday
London 3/3.
The train journey involved a call with Stuart which covered design — I bemoaned not being able to sketch my thoughts to him with a pencil and paper.
Another call I can’t talk about. Lots of slack chatter, blog reading and note taking to get my head around business value stuff.
The reason for the trip to London was the end of discovery meeting with Pauline. Charlie and myself were in the room. Gayll, Pablo, Joana and Daniel Lyncing from Newcastle.
It was a good positive meeting. Pauline is always incredibly insightful. She was excited by the work, the possibilities, full of questions but importantly focused on tangible next steps. So more to come.
That was my week.
