Weeknotes 2024-W37

Full disclosure, I'm almost a week late writing these, so they'll be a bit patchy!

A couple of big thoughts: one about value of various types of work and one about a business model that might be worth exploring.

I was pondering the things that we spend time on in projects and things we don't. In an ideal world the balance between time spent on the hard technical stuff and time spend on the even harder people-related stuff should tip towards the people-related. I've invested a lot of time in ensuring I know how to make the techy stuff get out of the way. You want a website: I know how to build it. You want some some visualisations? I know how to do that, and moreover, I've invested time with the people I work with on making it easy for anyone in the team to create a pretty good map, or chart or whatever. Pipelines? I've got patterns that help me make robust and repeatable data processing pipeline pretty fast. This means that we can prototype at speed and get stuff done. However, there are times, and particularly in more open ended projects where delivering fast is not really desirable. This isn't because we need to spend longer building the tech, but because we need to spend more time dealing with the really interesting stuff, which tends to be squishy, human stuff. That might be researching, pondering, discussing with colleagues, exploring prior art. Sometimes, delivering fast is a sure-fire way to miss the point.

I'm sure at various points in the week, those thoughts have been more well defined, so I might loop back to them and see if I can tighten them up a bit.

The other 'biggish thought' I had was about the idea of founding a co-op which delivers IT services to other co-ops. This came out a tech incident that I was called upon to help out with at Equal Care Co-op. They are a small team, and don't have a dedicated IT Service team. This is arguably problematic given the dependence that people are beginning to have on the tech. Getting a full service team, with cover dedicated simply to Equal Care is likely to be beyond their means, and it feels like signing up with a commercial organisation might not mesh well with their ethos and instruments. Maybe a like-minded team, constructed to service a number of organisations could have the economies of scale to deal with this. Some initial challenges are seed funding the organisation, defining the offer and recruiting both service delivery team and the client organisations. Would this be a co-op of co-ops: each providing their IT folk to support others? Would there be a TUPE element to this if acting as a de facto outsourcing organisation? More to think about, but worth developing.

That'll do for now: it's nearly time for the next weeknote!