Pay and reward
I’m reading No Rules Rules, the Netflix management book. It’s really good, lots of interesting stuff in there about doing things differently and although clearly there’s a lot I can’t do in the NHS, there are lessons in there for sure. I’ve just read the bit about paying people top of market rate and I’m so happy because it describes loads of people who are on $250,000, crazy money, moping around and leaving because they can get a 40% pay rise somewhere else.
Graphs > tables
One phenomenon that I find very strange in the NHS (and elsewhere, probably, I’ve never worked anywhere else) is the obsession people have with having tables of numbers instead of graphs. I have encountered this absolutely everywhere. People really want to know whether something is 21.4% of the whole or 19.2% of the whole and they can’t tell by looking at the beautiful graph that you’ve drawn. I saw an analysis today which had nine separate tables of proportions.
Stop punishing people with data
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes It was then popularised by Strathern as When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure So far, so ordinary. What else do we all know? League tables are a bad idea too. Somewhat related to Goodhart’s law, the problem with league tables is that they often ignore nuance.
Shoddy data
You know, naming no names because I’ll get in trouble but someone somewhere has paid for some data from a proprietary vendor and they’re shipping absolutely unusable garbage data. They won’t fix it because “no-one else has complained”. HAVE SOME PRIDE IN WHAT YOU’RE DOING. How about that? How about fixing it because it’s an embarrassment? I’m a random idiot in some random NHS Trust in the countryside and I couldn’t sleep if my database looked like what you’re sending.
Managing data science teams in the trenches
We’re systematically devaluing management and leadership in the analyst space, and I encounter a lot of people who think that a day with no code written is a day wasted. I do write code, but I do a lot of other valuable stuff too. I’ve written this post as someone who is very new to managing people with my personal opinion, so just like my posts on proxied SSL with Apache, there is your caveat emptor 🙂
What do we want from senior analysts in the NHS?
I’ve been meaning to write this for ages and I’ve just had a rather silly conversation on Twitter about managers and leaders in the NHS which has inspired me to get on with it. I think most people are agreed that we have A Problem with mangers and leaders in the analytic space. Much ink has been spilled in the subject, and I think that the two main conclusions of all this ink are broadly accepted by everyone.
SQL versus analytic tools
From a tweet from my NHS-R buddy John MacKintosh “Two schools of thought : 1. Do as much as possible using SQL (joins/ munging/ calculations and analysis) so that your analysis is portable between different BI / Viz tools 2. Do the basics (e.g. joins and simple aggregates) in SQL, calcs and analysis in front end tools” This is a great question, and I don’t mean to detract from its greatness when I say it is over simplistic.
Building generic Shiny applications with a data module
We’re rebuilding our patient experience dashboard at the moment, partly to incorporate some of the work that we’re doing on text mining and partly to connect it up to other types of information we have like staff experience and clinical outcomes. It has to be reusable because we’re using it as the basis of the text mining dashboard that we’re building for any provider trust to use with their friends and family test data.
Accessing plot characteristics in Shiny modules
It was my New Year’s resolution to blog more and that’s going really well because this is the first blog I’ve done all year and it’s nearly the end of January. Well, I suppose to be fair I did do a post on our team blog but that feels like I’m making excuses. Anyway, never mind! This is a quick blog post because this problem I had the other day has, as far as I can tell, absolutely no Google juice at all and it stumped me for ages, even though it is very simple.
Serving RStudio Connect content to logged in and anonymous users
We have our patient feedback dashboard in the open where anyone can see what Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust’s patients are saying about us. Now I’ve got a Connect licence I thought perhaps I might build another version for our staff where I put stuff that we can’t share- for example the comments of people who click the “I do not wish to share this comment” box. But I don’t want to build and maintain two versions, that would be hideous, and I was going to put a litte