The Field Manoeuvres

The last two weeks have gone fast for me, I’ve had a few days off to enjoy the Regata Abersoch and now I’m off to Field Maneuvers. But when I’m in work, it feels like things are going slow. That’s absolutely because other people are rightfully on holiday too, and you can’t make as much progress when your capacity is constrained. But that demon of productivity is always whispering behind your left ear in this game. Always there, always haunting.

In truth, what’s happening is very good.

The Data Design team are making excellent progress on defining a national data standard for planning applications and decisions. I’m blown away by the complexity of the space and how they’re working through it, co-designing it with existing software providers, local planning authorities and new data consumers. It’s the golden goose of planning data, locked away in proprietary systems currently, but the prospect of open, interoperable data about planning applications is getting nearer into sight each week. It’ll be monumental.

The team scaling the platform are making good progress too. Making it possible to process datasets in minutes, not hours, has been an objective for almost 12 months now, with no quick-wins. In some ways they’ve been deconstructing an approach that worked in alpha to find something that’ll work at beta, while maintaining the same core technology principles. But thankfully we’re now in a position where the only remaining test is to try an approach in production before rolling it out to other data collections. Truly on the edge of cracking that nut.

We’re getting many more emails from people looking to use the data too. This is a really good signal that the value the data platform provides is validated. The tricky thing is providing enough data across the country, and the right collections of data. Everyone wants a firehose of every planning application right now, but realistically that’s going to take a while to come to fruition. Building this sort of digital infrastructure doesn’t just happen overnight, no matter how much we might will it to. Having said that, have a clear mandate from leadership – and a clear steer it’s the right direction to travel – may just help with a reorganisation of efforts to achieve the mission.

Anyway, I’m tired and need to do other things. I started writing these on Friday morning, now it’s Tuesday and I need to move on.

Wrote two new pieces last week: one about getting a clear steer from leadership and another about making your weeknotes educational. See what you think.

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