Talking about data
Since Citizens Advice moved to remote working in March, we’ve changed the way we work with and talk about our data. The organisation has had to make huge changes to the way we operate. We’ve moved all our advice out of face to face settings and into advisors’ homes. People right across the service need access to data on a daily basis to help them make any number of decisions.
In response, we’ve moved away from quarterly updates and ad hoc requests and towards something more nimble and shareable. Dan has already blogged about our work on building an organisation-wide dashboard here.
Along with the work of building the dashboard and populating the figures, we’ve also set up a weekly discussion of what the dashboard shows us. It seems like a little thing but it’s actually driven real changes in how we work.
It started off small. There are around 10 analysts in the dashboard team, and the Covid 19 dashboard has around 15 tabs. Most of them cover time series data from our service — the number of people we’ve seen, the problems they’ve come with, the channels they used. Some of them are more internally focussed — the staffing resources we’re using, our ability to meet demand, that kind of thing.
The first few times we met — on Google Hangout — we would go round the virtual room and people would comment on what they were seeing in their bit of the dashboard. Generally, I host the meeting and Dan takes any actions for the team to help us develop the product. That was pretty much it, but it gave people an opportunity to show and develop their domain knowledge in a fairly low pressure environment.
We’ve expanded the invite list to a point where there are now more people from outside the team than inside it at the meeting. That has changed the nature of the discussion. It’s now more two-way, with people from other parts of the organisation such as policy, operations and governance offering their views to help us understand what the data is showing us. Last week, for the first time, we had someone from an adjacent team presenting some of their own findings, as a spin off from a previous discussion.
This might all sound pretty straightforward and really it’s not revolutionary. But compared to product development for instance, there aren’t many established practices for data focussed teams working in our sector or in public service more widely. So we needed to set one up. Also we’ve found this practice to be beneficial to our current remote working set up for two big reasons.
First, we never would have done this in the office. Booking a room for that many people would have been a headache, and the whole thing would have felt like too much of a production. As it is, people don’t need to prepare a presentation, stand up in front of a group or do any of the things that make big group meetings in person so anxiety inducing.
Second, what many people miss from the office environment are the small, unplanned conversations. These little chats can give you an idea of how to unlock a problem, or improve a piece of work you’re doing. They are, though, hard to engineer if you aren’t bumping into colleagues around the office. This virtual meeting can’t recreate that environment. But as a loose, general discussion of what is happening in Citizens Advice, it offers plenty of hooks.
People can say — yes this is happening in my work, or ask- have you thought of speaking to this person about it? For instance, one area we’ve been able to really dig into is around the demographics of our clients since moving to remote services. We’ve got our service level data, to which policy colleagues can add national context, and colleagues from our operations team can then take into their work.
As a result we’ve found that the understanding of our performance data across the organisation has progressively improved. At the same time, as a team we’ve learned a lot about how our data can be used, and how we can make it more useful. This improvement isn’t due to any technique or data visualisation. It came through talking about our work.
