Dan’s Weeknotes s07e20
By: Dan Barrett
Tags: Leadership, Data Science, Data, Charity, Weeknotes

Dan’s Weeknotes s07e20

Oh, hi

It was a couple of weeks of things winding down and people maybe celebrating just the prospect of having a break rather than excitement for Christmas itself.

Last year I was struck by how strong the Christmas game is at Citizens Advice. The quiz last year was really something (see season 5 episode 11). Even with everything remote this year my colleagues put on some special things.

What was good?

I met Jonathan in a nearby park to play a game of chess outdoors¹. It was so lovely. A couple of Eastern European workmen were so impressed with us, sounds like the boards don’t get used that much — let alone in winter. I lost the game, as usual.

I had a video call with Sam which was great. I always appreciate catching up with her.

I liked my colleague Giulia (Head of User Research and Design)’s reflections on 3 months at Citizens Advice:

For our Christmas party Tom (chief analyst) and my teams did an online escape room and it was superb.

I did a collaborative baking session and cake quiz over Zoom. We made gingerbread biscuits. It worked pretty well although I’m glad I practiced the recipe the night before. And 20 minutes before the call I realised I didn’t have any eggs. Thank goodness for corner shops. And also one of my colleagues Vicky was doing a vegan version and I’d like to practice my vegan baking chops next year because I don’t really have any to speak of.

Will Myddelton’s blog post about fixing problems with oral cultures was really thought-provoking. I think particularly because I know that I need to evolve and improve my own ways of working:

This blog post was a good summary and public recognition of some incredible work done by my colleagues:

Tracey Gyateng published a couple of posts based on her recent research:

Tom had an idea — a new finding and theory from patterns in our data — and then wrote a Workplace post the next day. I contributed some suggestions. Would either of us have done such a thing at the start of 2020? I don’t think so. Plus Tom writes really well about our data.

In this blog post by Vicky Houghton-Price I loved the point about content designers being able to indicate how good your service is. I too am a big fan of content designers:

I really liked Natalie (digital workplace lead)’s blog post about team culture. The ingenious use of emojis is great:

Ireti (data architect) and Pooja (data scientist) are coming to the end of their contracts and I can honestly say that their handover has been the best I’ve ever had from contractors. For the data architecture it’s been great to have Josh (data architect) join so he can build on Ireti’s work. And Pooja made a breakthrough in making her machine learning model sustainable, and has really put the effort in to documenting her work on Confluence. Next year I’m going to be encouraging documentation on Confluence in a big way.

I took part in a kick off workshop with Emily Webber for work that Giulia is leading on establishing a capability framework across our part of the directorate. I’m looking forward to working on this in the new year.

I ran an internal interview process for a short term opportunity and I was really glad to get it done before Christmas, plus I think I did a thorough and fair job of it.

Our regular open data dashboard session (now fortnightly) where we discuss data trends was one of the most significant in a long time. I was really struck by how different the topic patterns of advice we’re giving to clients are compared with the period after the first lockdown, and before lockdown.

I won the ‘star baker’ award at this year’s staff awards for our part of the directorate².

What could have been better?

I wish I had finished more things.

What are you looking forward to next week?