The Parsnips

The seasons have changed. It’s 7 November, it’s cold, and the air is thick with the scent of a failed revolution. A heavy fog sits still over London, cloying with it the smell of last night’s fireworks displays.

Guy Fawkes Night, the celebration of the unsuccessful Gunpowder Plot, is dissipating. But the fog appears like smoke, and smells like it too.

If you look, the evidence of a tough summer is around us. After the harsh sun and droughts of June, July and August, flowers bloomed late in September and continued through a warm October. The trees are only just losing their leaves, trying to coax a little more life out of the shortening days.

This autumn’s parsnips show struggle. The usually fat, blonde roots are instead lanky, straggling spikes with a long tail. They spent the season digging deep through parched earth, searching for life at the edge of the receding water table.

Why the strained metaphor?, you ask. We’re digging deep too.

Our seemingly feasible plans are shedding scope by the day, as we try to find some way of solving the problem that assurance and governance teams will accept. Instead of spending several hours or a few days exploring the problem and potential solutions together, we’re forced to send numerous messages back and forth, clarifying and reclarifying whenever we do manage to meet.

Solving these problems is deep work, in a complicated regulated landscape. But there are only a small handful of skilled professionals doing assurance and governance work, so they have to split their time between the many digital teams, breaking their capacity down into thin slices between which context goes to die.

We are not the only team to shave scope to get something through. When you look sideways, you can see plenty of times that teams have compromised on quality in favour of making progress. It all comes at the expense of the intended outcome.

It feels like a rebalance is in order, adding a few more hands to the effort, and rethinking the processes too. If the organisation wants to achieve its dream of making the healthy choice the easy choice – something which will undoubtedly rely on personalisation and better use of personal data – it’s going to need to have many more of these conversations. A bit of creative destruction could bring renewal.

Some friction is necessary, but it needs to be proportionate.

It isn’t only governance and assurance that’s slow. We started the alpha phase in July and immediately requested access to code repositories and test environments. We can’t properly test or try out our ideas without being able to run some data through some plumbing.

Alas, we’ve been waiting for 129 days and still don’t have access to the tools we need to do the jobs we were asked to do.

One of our experiments won’t teach us anything about meeting users’ needs, the aim is to learn how we can deliver work. It’s an experiment against the environment around us, an autoimmune disease.

Scale of ambition should be contingent on the level of operation. For a strategy to win, it requires good execution. (Having to escalate everything doesn’t feel healthy.)

Given the glacial progress on our main piece of work, this week we talked about other opportunities we could look at in parallel. We think there’s something valuable we can do quickly, before the year closes out. It’ll be nice to re-energise the team with a new brief, a time-limited project, and lots of opportunity to get together and be creative. We’ll check leadership is OK with a brief change first.

Other things

  • I’m on course to finish two books this week, for the first time in a long time. Hyperpolitics and Transcription, both great.
  • If you can, find some Ottavianello wine. A Puglian grape not far from Negroamaro but much more refined.

Bookmarks

· Weeknotes

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