OneTeamGov Daynotes
Weeknotes s01e04.4 — Thursday
This was a hotly anticipated event with a massive waiting list. The event was jointly sponsored by the Civil Service digital and policy professions and was run by a cross-disciplinary team of policy and digital professionals from many departments, who were inspired by this blog post by a senior policy advisor on bringing policy and delivery closer together.
The write up below is about the event itself, I cover some of the side conversations and contacts in the main weeknotes.
I thoroughly enjoyed the day. I took something from each of the sessions I attended and as is the case with unconferences a lot of the value was in the spaces in between.
Welcome: from Kit and unusually for an unconference there was a
Keynote: Clare (Permanent Secretary for Defra) spoke about the importance of the day for four c’s
- having conversations
- cross fertilisation of ideas
- celebrating change agents
- making connections
Pitches: Unconferences are loosely structured with attendees invited to put forward topics/titles for sessions (discussions, workshops, conversations, ideas generation etc) in a 30 second pitch. Everyone then indicates if they’re interested in that idea to estimate what size of room will be needed and a schedule is drawn up.
I pitched a session to discuss data -Talk Data to Me- a title shamelessly borrowed from a Tableau webinar series. Below are the sessions I attended.
Lucy — the wonk/geek interface
A good discussion essentially about the relationships between different skill-sets, outlooks, personality types. People talked about their own experiences of being on either side of the fence and the importance of communication and translation between cultures, changing the conversation to outcomes and reading through the language. Lucy talked about the difference security and support can make, giving some examples of different types of managers such as the -its your risk, if it works out I’ll take credit, if it doesn’t its your fault.
The overarching messages were
- make friends
- don’t assume you know everything
- go out and see stuff
Me — Talk Data to Me
A discussion about all things data. I’d pitched this as a ‘what is your dream for data’ but began with some ‘what frustrates you’ questions.
Jim talked about data sharing, there were some good points raised about rising demand for data and the appetite for risk from Senior Information Risk Owners (SIROs). We spoke a bit about the changing the culture of risk around data.
We talked about how some of the above has to start with asking for the right thing which boils down to the ‘why’ of the request and also defining what is fit for purpose — a data share isn’t necessarily always the answer. Daniel gave some examples from the Marine Management Organisation.
Susy pointed out the difficulties of knowing what can be asked/answered without knowing whats out there and available. It was acknowledged that this sometimes came down to networks and relationships.
There was some frustration about the difficulty in answering easy questions and suggestions around automation and self service for some of the simple things.
I gave some examples and talked about the concept of data products — which as Kit pointed out is probably a relatively new concept to many involved in the discussion. We spoke about data in design and delivery.
I talked a lot about the importance context -I always do. There was a discussion about publishing metrics and the potential hesitation due to better/worse comparisons. My view is that if context is included within or alongside any metrics then the publishing becomes a means to understanding, sharing of ideas and best practice and therefore improvement.
I echoed a questions Nick had asked me on Wednesday — whether all policy should be made on open data. Its thought provoking question. There were some meta-questions about what is data and what is analysis.
Ayesha — framing better problems
This was the first session after lunch — I joined slightly late. It was a presentation/discussion combo, I liked the concepts Ayesha raised about widening concepts out slightly to fit into broader services. This is how I try to conduct a lot of our teams data science work, thinking about the overarching generic problem being addressed and delivering an overarching solution.
Zoe spoke about user research and the importance of gathering needs up front (pre-legislation to avoid fitting a service to the legislation), the concept of iterative policy was touched on again -this should be a thing, it feels like its not- someone mentioned the 5 Whys — which I’ve used, its simple but effective.
Raj — prototyping policy
This was very policy based, well attended and whilst I couldn’t really relate to it directly it was an interesting session with lots of debate.
A large part of the discussion was about the distinction between piloting and prototyping. Joshua raised a point which lead to what I thought was the most pertinent point of the discussion — does a policy fail because the policy is poor or because the delivery mechanism is poor. Perhaps prototyping is more suited to addressing the latter.
Paul — a oneteamgov manifesto
My final session of the day was full of energy and really well facilitated by Paul and some of the OneTeamGov team. He had written a pre-unconference blogpost outlining his thoughts which were added to during the session with more reflections and ideas from the day -what have we learned, what have we still got to give, what are we going to do.
There was a feeling that the challenges people were facing had more in more in common than they realised.
Kit rounded off the day with a call to action.
