Weeknotes S03E07
A week of contemplation and restraint. A crappy week healthwise. I’ve felt terrible for most of it, headaches, no energy. A crappy week mental healthwise too as it’s been a personally unsettling week.
Some things I’ve been doing and thinking about this week.
Knowing where you stand
This set of weeknotes has included a lot about what I’m thinking or how I feel. As I said in S03E01 I’m taking the view of writing for future me. A lot of the week was taken up by discussions about aspects of my role.
I mentioned in S02E03 that on a day to day basis I’m responsible for providing direction to a data team in health. I’m also part of a reasonably new service design and strategy team. On top of that, I am the bridge between Health Digital and the central data part of the department. The way the latter of these could/should/might work has been discussed this week. With some uncertainty.
The data core of the department consists of three areas.
- The Data and Analytics directorate: responsible for the delivery of certain data products
- The Chief Data Office: responsible for the strategy, policies and guidance. To help take care of the information held and used across the department.
- The Data Practice. responsible for standards and consistency of expertise across data disciplines.
Much of the discussion and the uncertainty in my mind boils down to operating and funding models. Specifically in circumstances where data product delivery occurs within a business area. I have been seeking clarity over a lot of this for a number of years. Which makes it all the more frustrating.
The discussions also affected Emma and Gemma. They are in similar roles to me but in different business areas. I have a good working relationship with them both. We are all on the same page. That has helped massively. Stu has also been really supportive. Which I’ve very much appreciated.
The crossover in my roles in the Health Data Team and Service design and strategy team also continues to be a little tricky to manage. This is all to do with the role of data in design. All in all a tiring and crappy week on a personal front. I’ve appreciated chats with Stu, Bertie and Rich. Next week will be better.
Consistency, silence, noise and signals
Life is definitely taking its toll on people. More tetchiness, more frustration, more emotion generally. Whether it's the transitional time of year, working from home or just the mad world on our shoulders.
Silence and noise are amplified. Normal human interaction is hard to come by. People are cramming or craving meetings or doom scrolling social media. Brain noise, people’s noise, actual silence, not much brain silence. It's hard to pick out any signals.
This is where I look out for consistency and inconsistency. Silence, noise and patterns of behaviour. What is usual, what is concerning, what to ignore, what to act upon. I’m starting to re-evaluate a few working relationships and also work out where to support others because of signals and patterns.
Working collaboratively, sharing, consulting
Different groups of people need to know what our data team are up to. We are consulting with quite a few different areas and teams. Early on much of this was understanding what foundations exist and what we need to put in place. We’ve had to put a lot in place ourselves. So more recently we’ve been sharing and consulting. This is to ensure consistency, endorsement and possible re-use. It’s important and often missed. We’re making good progress.
This week Jason walked through the first draft of the user discussion guide. We’ll use this to get consistency in our conversations with data users. Ed fine-tuned the measurement framework categories. These are linked and will ultimately support the development of consistent data products. This is all of interest to the wider digital performance analysis community.
Daniel updated me on his work and conversations with the newly formed Data Standards Authority. His and James’ work will enable all new services to get data consistency, compatibility and reusability of data, design and code. I heard really good feedback from Steve’s work designing our CI/CD data engineering pipelines. All of this needs engagement with architects and engineers and their data counterparts.
Aoife talked Chris through her work and plans and how they can support the user research community. I also updated Katharine, who is Head of Data Strategy for the department. This was a good. I mentioned in S03E01 that good strategy connects talk and action. John’s tweet this week resonated.
I am currently putting the infrastructure and capability in place. This is to allow aspects of the Departmental Business Strategy, Data Strategy and Health Digital Strategy to be operationalised. Once the infrastructure and capability are in place — then it's a question of business priority.
Showing the thing
The point of “Show the Thing” is to encourage people to talk about work in progress by actually showing it. It helps make sure that everybody is on the same page.
We’ve found this tricky in the data team. As I mentioned in S03E05 we have been focusing on foundations. The work has been in separate strands that are only now starting to come together. Showing each bit of the thing has made it difficult to make things tangible. Data Standards, Measurement Frameworks, Infrastructure aren’t always obviously relatable to outcomes. We can give examples of the things that are affected and will be improved but it’s challenging to bring it to life.
In a sprint or two’s time, we’ll be in a position to show how it all fits together with something less ambiguous. From service goals, through measures and metrics, journeys, events, features to data items generated by microservices. All linked together through our discussion guide, measurement framework, data models, meta-data standards. Then all that will be needed is for teams to prioritise development to create and extract the data from their services.
We can do better than product by numbers
The GDS Design Principles and the Digital Service Standard are there to help teams to create and run great public services. They are a guide for reasoning. They are not a rule book or a straitjacket. I think they are sometimes interpreted as such.
Service assessments have no specific question sets. Services are assessed as ‘met’ or ‘not met’. I am interested in the incentives this creates. Particularly where data is concerned.
I mentioned in S03E02 that I have a big concern around the focus on data collection. Getting what we can. As opposed to creating what we need. Which is not really mentioned in the rules. Becky’s recent work has highlighted this.
One of the reasons I started DataJam North East with Celine was to drive up these of standards up. To bring the data and design communities together. To show how you can get better outcomes through working together.
The highlights from the DataJam event on inclusivity were a good reminder this week. They show many of the ways we need to do better. They should be part of product manager inductions.
