The Connection and Distraction

Last week was decent, culminating in my first ever UKGovCamp, #ukgc25.

At work I

  • drafted a product brief
  • digested the AI Action Plan (and subsequently wondered what we’d do will all that excess compute)
  • drafted a value stream for our service, including taking secondary legislation through Parliament
  • got distracted by Slack enough to try a new approach
  • published terms & conditions for the service, so that everyone knows where they stand
  • had to write a programme update when I needed to spend time adding more stuff to the service handbook
  • hurriedly wrote our introduction to the weeknote as I was late meeting the deadline
  • prepared a deck on how I run quarterly planning to share with other teams
  • spent 90 minutes with one of our product managers workshopping their professional development objectives
  • went to our team’s show & tell, which was full of progress and exciting stuff!

On a couple of days I had a poor night’s sleep, so I felt pretty groggy. But on Thursday I got the Wordle in two goes, so swings and roundabouts.

AI Action Plan

There have been plenty of good notes on the AI Action Plan. It is kind of shocking that 48 uncosted policies can be released so rapidly. Having said that, we’ve been here before and I expect we’ll be here again now that the hype cycle is spinning ever faster.

It’s also weird to be doing this now when we know that real people mostly fear AI.

Assigning some AI expert to each mission feels like a misstep. It’s a general purpose technology that needs depth of subject-matter expertise and iteration to find a valuable use case. You can’t just slap it on anywhere, and those of us closer to the action will better understand where to apply it. In using AI, let’s think best, not first. Proper innovation, not hype.

The 80/20 approach to Slack

Over the last few weeknotes I’ve talked about getting distracted by Slack, and I’ve got a heck of a lot to do this quarter so I don’t want it eating up my time. We’re also going to look at how we communicate as a team, which reminded me of an experiment on asynchronous communication that we ran on GOV.‌UK Pay.

You see, I need to get my head down on filling out our new service handbook, which should be a reference and resource for the team. One of the things I’m often looking out for on Slack is misunderstanding or misalignment – two problems this very handbook should help resolve.

For a few weeks, I’m going to trial closing Slack for 20% of my working week. Quit the app, don’t open it, change my status to ‘Focus mode’ and ignore it. As long as I’m not unavailable when someone really needs me, it’ll be a success.

Community stuff

As you might expect, Product for the People is coming back for 2025. More details on the website.

On Friday I went to my first Agile in the Ether which was great! There were several good topics, including ‘how to be creative’ and ‘diplomacy versus candour’. I shared how we adopted cycles, not sprints on GOV.‌UK Design System and also had a creative jam week instead of a firebreak.

And then there was UKGovCamp. Had a great time! Caught up with so many people and sat in on several great sessions.

Ben’s session on mission-led government was good. I had assumed on the first week the new government was in that they’d tell us how it was all going to work, but that hasn’t happened yet. The conversation in the room got me thinking about how I’d pitch what I want from a mission delivery board, and how we might offer some plays for making central–local collaboration work well.

Gavin’s session on the ‘National Data Library’ was great, asking the question ‘What do we want from it?’ There were so many different expectations (hilariously all starting with ‘p’) that they really do need to do a discovery. I really liked Ellie’s contribution of ‘pluralism’ which summed up the variety of expectations all existing at once. What do I want from it? To be honest, I just don’t want it getting in our way – we’ve got a good thing going on and we’re making good progress.

Loved PubCamp afterwards too. Caught up with so many people. Stayed until chucking-out time, then got a rather lengthy bus home. Sunday was a slow day. But so worth it!

Running

A successful week! Went out for 3 runs, did my exercises, and feeling OK. The hip is a little tight today but I’m attributing that to wearing a belt too tightly. It’s not painful in any case.

A Real Pain

Saw A Real Pain on Wednesday, it was very good. Well written, it avoids being political; a good essay on life, on suffering, and on appreciating what you’ve got. The setting and a couple of the characters create space for that, without any appropriation.

It felt more like theatre than film.

The showing started just after 6pm and we were home by 8.20pm. Ideal for a weeknight. Home in time for The Traitors!

Brutto

My partner’s cousin stayed with us on Thursday, so we went to Brutto for dinner. We managed to nab three stools at the bar around 6pm, which was ideal. I’ve been meaning to go there for ages and the wait was worth it. Delicious!

Had gnocchi with pauper’s sauce, sausage with braised lentils, Nero D’Avola and a tiramisu. Would go back. Soon. Loved it!

Bookmarks

Not much reading around this week, I’ve been enjoying The Wager too much.

· Weeknotes

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