The work spot, 10.04.08

More tea, and more, and more!  I was on cup #5 by about 11am yesterday (but that’s not surprising when I started work promptly – I love working from home.  Today I was up and out of the house by 7.40am but I didn’t get here til nearly 8.30am, standing all the way on the bus. Pah).

This week’s quandary is a meditation on partnership working, a.k.a. delegating to those you’ve no power to delegate to.  Restrictions on budget / resources, plus the desire to make members feel that they are part of a network, and to use their connections and expertise, means that I need to get them involved in activities – which they are (mostly, subject to their own restrictions) happy to do.  Converting that into activity is a challenge of its own.

And in having neither the right to delegate, nor the right to manage that delegation, I’m in a difficult position when, for whatever reason, members don’t deliver what I need.  I can only rely on the group’s desire for progress, which is difficult to corral outside meeting times.

In addition, it would be all too easy to become dependent on those who are able to input – and as ever, I need to demonstrate a balance of requests and returns for members.

I am making progress – but I feel more than ever that a mentor, someone who understands the conceptual situations I encounter (rather than needing to know personalities and so forth) would be of great value.  How to find that person, approach them and then be assured that I’ve got the right mentor, is another challenge entirely.

But – time to remind myself of my positive steps!

Website – content (mostly) updated.  Understanding of the CMS radically improved.  Method found for hosting secure pages, documents and a research database to which members can upload / edit / delete records.

Presenting statistics – a joint event with this region’s observatory.  One speaker tapped up recently.  One to chase.

An open event of interest to users – principle agreed, venue sorted, date to be agreed.  Contact is happy with all I am able to contribute at present.

Lobbying – two key points of contact agreed in principle and have given availability.  Input forthcoming from other members.

Workplan – revised edition dispatched.

Business plan – version 2 underway.

The work spot, 31.03.08

Twelve months after starting a work blog, I have decided that I will get greater benefit from it as a work tool if I am able to use it on a regular basis. Therefore, I have decided to try and set myself the task of writing a post once a week. During learning / courses etc, time is built in for reflection on what’s been learnt, how it might be used, whether you are putting it into practice and where further training / research needs lie – or how to better adopt the training you’ve had. I think I would benefit from this in a work context, making my actions and my evaluations more mindful.

This is also a good time to start on this, because it is time, once again, for the LARIA conference – the event which initially sparked a blog as a place to log my thoughts on the various speakers and topics at last year’s conference. This year, I am only attending for the opening day (not least because I have noted a certain number of similarities in this year’s programme – but also because I have encountered the speakers in other places) and so I am hoping to make best use of the time by seeing the opening keynotes and plenaries without spending a lot of time in very specific breakout sessions.

Last year was also very useful as a networking exercise and this is something that I need to remind myself is worth doing. It is perhaps an inevitable corollary of being based in a very separate organisation, with virtually the smallest observatory, and with few connections to relevant national policy, that networking can get a little bit forgotten.

There has been talk recently of ARO building a closer relationship with LARIA, and perhaps putting ourselves forward for a place on the steering committee (or equivalent title). It is an interesting notion but the recent strategic planning process has left me questioning the extent to which the strategic objectives of ARO would be served by such a move. Would being part of, essentially, a local government professionals network, serve our wish to support evidence-based policy-making?

Evidence-based policy-making (I’m sticking to my hyphens!) [EBPM, or EBP] has become something of a dirty word(s) of late. Perhaps after 10 years of avowing obeisance to the concept, the patter is wearing thin, particularly for policy-makers who find that evidence is at worst unhelpful (difficult to understand or not answering their questions) and at worst positively obstructive to their plans. Also, throughout the planning process, the consultant assisting my colleague in her comparable process has sworn away from ‘evidence’ as a concept. I appreciate the challenging nature of his thinking but in some ways it is less helpful for me due to my explicit remit to support observatories, whose role (as set down in legislation) is to provide an evidence base.

EBPM can also sound a bit trite. Perhaps the fact that all those in the evidence world feel underappreciated or underused by their policy colleagues means that some cynicism about the real efficacy of the process is creeping in?

You’ll notice that this blog is not hosted on the original server – sadly my original blog host appears to have disappeared beneath the waves (perhaps it felt neglected by my lack of posting). I will try to back up my original posts here as a useful archive of notes and thinking.