things i looked at, did, thought, etc vol 9
way too many meetings again this week so not much progress on actual work 😖
still found time for some new tabs tho 😎 apologies I cant remember where i picked some of these up from, normally I would give thanks to other govt people who blogged them first!
Connecting to SQL using pyodbc - Python driver for SQL Server | Microsoft Learn fun for all the family
When to workshop. Understanding when to run a workshop is… | by Jemma Frost | Sep, 2024 | UX Collective (uxdesign.cc) one of those things that seems so obvious that nobody thinks about it, but they should:
A workshop, in contrast, is an engineered meeting. Like carpenter or blacksmith workshops, things happen in a UX workshop. Workshops can inspire ideas, decisions, or alignment. They’re a collection of people coming together at a specific moment in time to do something.
always love a read of The Art of Simple Sabotage - CIA - take a look at p28 of the manual (or page 18 going by the PDF page numbers) and see if you can spot any of those tactics at your meetings 🙃
Dashboards or not. I’ve been mulling the question of… | by James Plunkett | Aug, 2024 | Medium
The image of a dashboard is especially problematic for the way it evokes driving a car, or piloting a plane — pulling levers, pushing pedals, pressing buttons on a machine. Which, as Rachel points out, leads to silly ideas like ‘governing via an iPhone’. And which generally gets you into a mechanistic mindset, when of course a machine is not the kind of thing a state is. (And neither is a healthcare service, or a justice system.) I’m partly just making the obvious point about complexity, i.e. states and healthcare services are more like organisms than they are like machines. But I’m also making the slightly less obvious point that a state’s decision-making capacity and intelligence is spread widely throughout the system, so it’s less like a machine with a pilot— or an animal with a central intelligence — and more like a distributed intelligence/octopus.
and
Build data capabilities that are useful for decision-makers throughout the system, not just a dashboard for No 10. Try to increase the level of understanding in the system, so that the average decision is more responsive, better aligned to the overall mission goal, etc. See the decisions made at the ‘centre’ of the system as important but particular, and remember they sit in a wider system of thousands of decisions.
kinda link up with some stuff I've been working on - training on identifying data projects by starting with decision points rather than KPIs or data. as in - give me a scenario where an officer has the ability to decide or change something, then we work backwards from that...
and thinking about situation rooms and control rooms, they are usually there to focus on a specific situation (clue's in the name!) whereas we look to use data to manage general work and everything going on which is huge and interconnected. like, what even is the situation?