I wrote about data conversations before. These kinds of forums evolve in my experience. Sometimes you decide they need a change or don't need to happen anymore. Sometimes you think they need to happen but others just aren't feeling it for whatever reason. Generally I like to stick at things for a while before deciding it's time to stop. Start the week with data has been going since May 2022. It was last year when it really came into its own. So yes, sticking at it.
Start the week with data is informed by the principles I set out in that data conversations blog post, especially "conversation not presentation" and "keep it frequent".
Every Monday morning we have a 30 minute video call with a speaker on something to do with data at Citizens Advice. Usually it's 15 minutes speaking to some slides and then the rest of the call for that all important conversation. I chair or maybe it's conduct the session. I sign off every session with "thank you for starting your week with data" which is neat and hasn't got old yet.
The invite list started as the Senior Leadership team but has grown organically to be wider than that. Every session is recorded and linked from a rolling log which is a Google doc. Slides are linked there too if they were used. All the presentations are good, but especially good ones are marked on the log with a fire emoji. Finally there's an email at the end of every week to the invite list telling them what's coming up on Monday and linking to the materials from that week's session.
The emails are especially repetitious. Also my inbox is mostly people declining Start the week with data. But every week numbers are pretty good - 25 to 40 people from all over this fairly big and diverse organisation.
The thing that made Start the week with data in 2023 so good was the variety in the programme. This forum isn't just the data experts talking about the expert data work they've done (although we have that too). We had 35 sessions with 24 different speakers from teams like
- Operations
- Finance
- Business Development
- Technology
- Policy and Advocacy
- Product and Delivery
- Evaluation
- Expert Advice and Content
- and more
The point is that everybody is working with data and can tell an interesting story about it that will be relevant to others.
One of my favourite sessions last year was our Finance team talking about the most successful systems migration I've ever seen. I'd never known a systems migration go well. And there was a strong piece of practical data improvement at the heart of the work, taking the opportunity to change data structures so that they could provide more meaningful insight.
We also get brand new insights at the session, like investigating access gaps for our clients across England and Wales. And we see things that absolutely everybody in the organisation should know, like fundamentals about our client base or how we measure our financial and social impact.
Another benefit of sticking with a forum like this for a while is you get the opportunity to revisit topics and see how they've developed. Or you hear about the next steps in a piece of data work that have been facilitated by something delivered earlier.
Managing to do 35 sessions isn't bad, especially accounting for holidays. It is a fair amount of effort to curate a programme like this, but the fact of doing that helps to build connections and visibility across the organisation for me. There's also something rewarding about encouraging people that they have an interesting story to tell. Every week I say please volunteer a topic if you want to and on the occasions people do come forward it makes me happy. But most of the effort is on me to keep that forward plan going. I think it's worth it though.
Recently a colleague said how much they appreciate the session because it's always relevant to them and their work and it gives them insight into what's happening at Citizens Advice in an effective way. I will take that as a win.
This is the work. It's fairly simple but it does require sustained effort to keep it going. If you're in a role where you're leading data improvement in a fairly large organisation I recommend giving something similar a try.
Thanks for reading.