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Getting everyone together

This week, we got about 80 or so of our stakeholders together for the afternoon to update them on our policy and delivery work, and to solicit feedback on some emerging areas. We do these events fairly frequently now, and I always hugely appreciate the time our stakeholders are willing to offer to enable us to move our collective endeavour forward.

This time we mixed things up a bit, introducing “surgeries” that ran in parallel to the event. Often we find that people have questions about what we’re doing but they don’t want to ask those questions in front of a room of people, especially when some of those people work at places that are their competitors. The surgeries gave them an opportunity to get some bespoke advice about what the policy meant for their particular business.

They seemed to go really well! They were useful for our team to hear more about what people were worried about, and they gave us a chance to offer direct insights into what our policy means in practice directly to those that needed to know. The feedback we’ve had so far has been great too.

We’re considering how we can run these surgeries on a more frequent basis going forward.

Prototyping

Members of our digital delivery team made the mistake of suggesting I might “sketch out some ideas” for what future iterations of our service might look like last week. That’s been the perfect excuse to get my hands dirty with the Design System.

In a couple of hours I had more than half a dozen prototypes spun up. it took seconds to build the bits I wanted to build; the hard part was deciding what I wanted it to look like!

We’ve got a session to go through my ideas next week.

Smart lunching

We had a big-but-casual cross-team lunch with the Smart Data team on Thursday. Lots of us speak quite regularly to the Smart Data team – what we do on digital identity policy could unlock a lot of the work in that programme – but there were so many people across the team that had never met in person!

One interesting turn in the conversation was about how we describe our work; our elevator pitch. The smart data team were curious about how consistent ours was across the team. I was sure that everyone in our team would leap to the same definition – because we’ve written it down and been reciting it in every document for 4 years. A definition very similar to this one.

I decided it would be fun to put this to the test. One of the team, sat opposite me passed the test with flying colours. Another member of the team immediately didn’t! I guess we all need a refresher on the top lines pack.

Regardless, this was a great way to get to informally make those connections that we don’t normally make, because we aren’t based in the same department, let alone in the same building.

Copiloting

Following on from last week’s commentary on the new Copilot tools that I now have access to, I’m still attempting to find a use for them.

I’ve had several failed attempts at the tools doing what they should be capable of. The most baffling was one of the most simple.

I was setting up a call with a colleague from another department on Thursday. I had written to them with a list of possible dates and times and they had written back to me with exactly one choice.

“This is it”, I thought, “This must be a thing Copilot can do.”

There’s a button that explicitly says ‘schedule a meeting with Copilot’ on it. Surely, clicking that button will take the date and time from the email, create a new calendar event, add in the invitees, and done.

Wrong. Instead, the button opened a calendar invite, summarised the email chain (something I didn’t need, as most of the chain wasn’t relevant to the meeting, and I then had to spend time removing it) and tried to schedule the call to take place later that day.

In amongst repeated failure though, there were two moments of usefulness.

The first was about a chain of emails my team had been exchanging this week. I was copied in. I’d missed most of the emails as they were being sent back and forth. By the time I’d opened the most recent message, we were 6 messages deep.

Copilot provided a brief summary of what was being discussed. Three sentences to cover 6 emails; the key phrase in them being “you are copied for information only”. I decided I didn’t need to get involved based on that quick summary.

The second, even more useful example was on a singular email. It had been sent to about 200 people and it was laced with obtuse language and acronyms that made it impossible to understand. Copilot simply gave this summary:

“Information is being shared with a wide distribution list across several departments and agencies. There is no indication that you are required to take action or that the content specifically relevant to your immediate responsibilities.”

Brilliant. No notes. Exactly what I want to know when I open an email.

So this week Copilot has saved me, maybe, 4 minutes of time. These are the kinds of productivity gains we’re talking about, right?

The exciting thing…

Last week I teased that something exciting had happened and that I might know more about it this week. Well, I don’t know enough yet to say more, so you will have to stay in suspense.

The best GIF library ever

In amongst the more mundane parts of my week, I discovered a library of GIFs which, on the face of it, appears to be every line, frame, scene and episode from my favourite TV show ever: the Thick of It.

You search for the line you want, or even overtype your own. Genius.

I routinely see scenes from the Thick of It play out in real life with no sense of irony, so having a full, search driven library of GIFs is almost too much power. I will be deploying it liberally.