The Pass

This is more of a monthnote than a weeknote, given I haven’t written since late March. Just haven’t been feeling it, and that’s fine. (I tend to have a break from weeknoting most years anyway.)

Work has continued to be a slog, but we’ve rightsized our ambitions based on our team size. I also redesigned the teams as sub-services with user-centred KPIs, so they can self-organise around quarterly goals that’ll help us meet both users’ and the platform’s needs. It should help resolve some bottlenecks with handovers, and it puts data quality front and centre. It’s what data consumers care about most.

Our partnership with i.‌AI was in the papers on Saturday, in The Times and The Standard. Working with them has been great. When asked to set them a challenge, I didn’t want to do anything with natural language as I didn’t think it was stretching enough, and these folks are some of the best in the business. Few people in government were doing anything around computer vision or geospatial data, but industry was starting to make advances. So psd and I kicked around a couple of ideas and asked them to look at the possibility of extracting data from planning documents. We should be wrapping it up towards the end of the month, so we’ll regroup to see what comes next.

I’ve had to start looking after two teams (alongside my lead duties), and I’m donning my technical product manager hat again, scaling the platform in readiness for an upcoming hackathon. It’s been nice to be closer to the work again, seeing it first-hand rather than hearing about it in show & tells and one-to-ones.

There was a nice moment on Wednesday when psd (our service owner), our service designer and our tech lead collaborated on how to implement and measure KPIs that I’d drafted for the service. It felt quite validating to come up with the success criteria, have those looked at and approved by the team, then watch them work out how to implement the indicators and present it on a dashboard.

I enjoy coming up with the value architecture and making it real. Stitching that golden thread through vision, mission, strategy, KPIs and OKRs. I’m quite good at it. Oh, did I mention you can hire me to help you with that?

Bucket list

I’m taking some time off in June to tick something off the bucket list: walking the GR11 in the Spanish Pyrenees mountains. It’s going to be hard, there’s a hell of a lot of ascent and descent, but I’m looking forward to disappearing into the hills for a bit. I’m having to get a few bits of new kit – a bigger tent and a bag, mainly – so I’ll need to break that in before going off alone.

In other bucket list news, I finally passed my driving test. Wish I’d just done it when I was 17, to be honest, but I never really needed it at uni – Bath is a pedestrian city – and it was never necessary in London either. But when we lived in North Wales it was definitely a blocker. It’s been nice to drive around Pen Llŷn this weekend, and to pay my partner back by being designated driver so her and her brother can go on a pub crawl. (Got many more favours to pay back too!)

Writing

There’s a couple of pieces you might have missed recently. I wrote about building AI for professionals, shared my writing and publishing process, and how I helped GOV.‌UK Design System throw 2-week sprints in the bin.

Bookmarks

Not reading much either, but here’s what I’ve worked through recently.

· Weeknotes

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