Month: September 2022

Week 4

26 September 2022

This week feels like work has begun. A colleague contacted me with a concern about something, I had a couple of more detailed conversations with supplier and I started to get stuck in to projects. The honeymoon is over. And now I’m as tired as you should be at the end of the week and have enough to do that next week I’ll need to balance my diary with my actual work!

Most importantly, Michael and I started work to develop our technology roadmap. We began by making a request to create a blog so that we can do this entirely in the open. And then started drafting some stakeholder needs (I want to preserve the term user needs for actual users) and validating these with groups. We then designed the success criteria for the project, a high level approach to the project and a workshop format to elicit the goals that we want the roadmap to work towards

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in York – a lovely city, good for a morning run, the home of my best friend and my first visit. The senior leadership team gets together from around the country to work through some of the cross-cutting issues that need our attention. We covered digital confidence, assurance, portfolio management, business continuity and business planning.

Tuesday was also significant because we developed a plan for the partnership arrangements that we need to take the next step in the life of our main case management system. We’ve got different needs: to safeguard the current application whilst also developing a new future and we need to achieve that whilst developing our own capability. We understand that our future needs to be flexible and that our contracting arrangements need to support that, whilst also reflecting the needs of commercial, financial and procurement requirements.

I also explored more about what the team means by, and needs from, technology leadership. There are a couple of areas where we’ve learnt rapidly through innovation and now need to mature and standardise our approaches so that we don’t get blocked. Across the team we’re approaching these issues from a number of perspectives and need to embrace those differences and use them to move forward. I’ve faced this before and been frustrated by it, so with the benefit of that experience I’m looking forward to approaching this in a constructive way.

We also had our tier 1 security risks meeting this week. I’ve obviously got a particular interest in cybersecurity for better and worse and so need to strike a balance between drawing on my experiences but not trying to apply a narrow focus onto a new context. I was able to help the security team move a new project forward and whilst I had a, frankly marginal, impact on the outcome it was a useful opportunity to show how important security was to me.

Next week I lead my second Feedback and Playback session to report to explain what I’ve done in the last two weeks and get feedback on the plan for the next couple of weeks. My big three priorities are the technology roadmap; informing the scope of a robotics process automation opportunity and exploring a possible proof of concept to inform the technical risks around our approach to CMS replatforming.

Much of that probably sounds a bit like an opaque shopping list. But at least it feels like I’m starting to get down to business.

Week 3 – 20 September

A week of three different characters. I began with a really clear idea of what my first deliverable should look like for the CPS. I thought I had just enough space to spend some time facilitating the co-design of a set of principles for how we worked. I was a little uneasy that it might be a solution looking for a problem but heard just enough cautious welcome to think I could move ahead.

But the focus of my first couple of days was dominated by the Senior Leadership Conference in the East Midlands. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but people in suits and ties focused solely on the meeting rather than drifting in and out of their inbox was a surprise.

It was an unparalleled opportunity to get to know 80-or-so senior colleagues explore the highest priorities for the service and understand the organisational story. I learnt a huge amount, some of which confirmed what I had already found but the following particularly stood out from the conference:

• The work we’re committed to doing in digital will have a huge impact on our current ways of working over the next three years – but the language doesn’t immediately connect with the way leaders see their work
• The permeability between jobs and areas means the CPS is much more of a national organisation than its strong regional structure would normally suggest (compared to other regional organisations I’ve witnessed at work)
• As the only prosecution service and the only organisation where many colleagues have worked, we lack an easy reference point to drive our agenda compared to the benchmarking that other public sector organisations can use, so honest reflection is particularly important
• There’s a determination to do the right thing for public confidence in the service and the individual experiences of victims and witnesses; and my experience in customer services might be useful for some of this work

I left the conference tired – I’d over-estimated the impact of experiencing so many new things and people in such an intensive way. Or just that running 10 miles in 30 hours on the treadmill was overly ambitious.

The third character emerged towards the end of the week. I started to feel frustrated because I could see the short-comings in my expectations for my first deliverable but couldn’t identify another ‘thing’ to show how I wanted us to work differently.

I started to work through a second idea but had two useful conversations on Friday, with Michael in my team and Mark, my manager, which gave me a clearer steer. The day felt energetic and gave me a clear focus. Over the next week I’m going to work with a group of people to explore how we can develop our technology roadmap. And whilst much of the heavy-lifting will be done by others, I’m going to find out how we might be able to do that ‘in the open’ – which would also respond to some feedback we had from a supplier engagement event over the summer.

We’re spending two days in York next week as for our senior leadership team meeting. That’s an opportunity to design the development of the roadmap and explore particularly how it relates to our Future Casework Tools programme. And then towards the end of the week I should be able to spend my first day in court, witnessing the impact of our technology in supporting the prosecution of cases.

At some point next week I also need to revisit my induction Trello and test myself on whether or not I’ve achieved the outcomes that were set, and make sure that I make as much possible the following week, so that I can end that well and set a clear direction for my work in October.

Week 2 – 12 September

Gosh, Monday feels like a long time ago. I’m currently in that position of false certainty where you recognise the acronyms, start hearing the same idea articulated by someone else, understand the key facts around major projects and remember some people’s names. And that’s just enough to know when you think you can make a valuable contribution to a discussion. It’s just not enough to know whether that’s already been considered, and so you sound like a bore; will land really badly, so you sound like a drunk or is just wildly optimistic, so you sound like a child.

With that in mind, on Monday I decided to move to the narrow point of the double diamond by the end of the week. We’re at the precipice of some pretty big projects: completing our laptop rollout, going to market for replatforming our case management system and testing a smarter way of doing redaction. I’m keen to play my part in making these a success. I know the first thing I deliver will have symbolism so want to make a good choice, but I can see five different opportunities. Thanks to a conversation with Gemma, I decided to capture the thinking in a show & tell format and run it past the senior team. I called it a ‘playback and feedback’ session because I want to set a clear expectation of working in the open but really don’t want to get hung-up on Agile language.

I’ve had a small number of really thoughtful, constructive reactions to the presentation.    As usual, there isn’t one right answer.   

There were three conversations that I found particularly energising. I met Steve, our CFO. He’s relatively new to the CPS and responsible for making sure we’ve got a set of rigorous but proportionate controls in place. More importantly, he’s an absolute role-model for how to synthesise the personal and professional in a conversation with staff.

Moira and I spent an hour together talking about the design of the Future Casework Tools tender (it was meant to be half an hour, but we were finding it too interesting). There is no choice that is without risk, so I was trying to put myself in the position of someone bidding for the work in order to understand how we might structure it to play to different suppliers’ strengths.

I also enjoyed meeting Russell’s Modern Workplace team. Darryn asked a great question about what was on my bucketlist, which was an extremely effective way of getting me to talk imaginatively about some of the things we could do. I talked too much with too little knowledge, but left feeling really positive. (I just hope it didn’t entirely miss the mark for the audience!!)

And for the second week running there were no major operational incidents. It’s easy to take that for granted, so I’m reminding myself how privileged it is to be in that position. And how much work we need to do to ensure we stay in that position.

Next week my diary is dominated by the two-day Senior Leaders Conference in East Midlands. It’s a great opportunity to meet a lot of new people (without Teams to help me remember names) and gain a much richer understanding of their world and how we can help. I’m on course to run 30 miles this week so need to find a decent running route around ‘East Midlands’ to keep the pace next week.

Week 1 – 5 September

There’s no prospect that I’ll forget my first week at the CPS. But I did want to reflect on some of the things I’ve learnt and ideas that I’ve had during the week.

Two important national news stories at the start of the week featured issues that directly relate to our work, which was a useful reminder of the extra profile associated with working for a national organisation.

I’m structuring my induction around a set of outcomes and tasks that I’ve agreed with my boss. I’ve got a lot to learn so it’s been helpful to provide a bit of focus. I am keen to move beyond my discovery phase and start contributing to our work but I had to check myself on a couple of occasions to make sure I wasn’t rushing to judgement. I tried to preface things I said with a caveat that they were likely to be wrong, but I will need to be careful to hold lightly those quickly-formed views.

The breadth of stuff that the team is working on is almost intimidating. It all seems important and I don’t yet have a clear view of where there might be capacity issues. But I’ve also been wondering how we might ensure that the language we use helps tie the task more clearly to the desired outcomes.

The kit and productivity tools exceeded my expectations. I was nervous moving from away from the iPad and Chromebook that I used in Hackney. But the new laptop in the CPS performs really well and Office 365 has some really useful features. The team’s working really hard but we need to make sure we’re getting more of these devices into the hands of colleagues. And we could probably do a bit more to celebrate the efficiency gains the devices achieve.

The energy and openness in Mark’s team, but also across the wider Service also stood out. Given the scale of the challenge in the criminal justice system, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But people have been unfailingly patient with my basic questions, generous with their time and open to ideas. And Louise has done a terrific job of guiding me through the organisation. I have noticed a bit of a habit of referring to people by their level in the organisation, which we need to kick because it’s actually a much flatter culture than it suggests.

On Wednesday I attended the Digital Transformation Leaders conference for people across the CPS to hear more about the big issues, challenges and improvements that are underway. It was a really useful forum to hear from people who use our systems routinely are really invested in their success. On my first day I also saw a joint statement from the trade unions emphasising the value of user research – so that was encouraging.

I am really excited by the Future Casework Tools programme, being led by Gemma. We gleaned some useful feedback from potential suppliers following an engagement event before I joined and Michael and the team have got a fair bit to work through so that we can provide some clear guardrails for the . But from my perspective, I hope it means that I can help influence some of the thinking about the technology vision and strategy for the programme.

Next week will continue to be a busy sheep dip into a whole range of issues. I’m going to try and use it to figure out a couple of the key concepts that I want to land with my new colleagues and test some ways in which I can start to add value. But as this week draws to a close, I’m more excited about what’s to come than I was a week ago – which is energising.