Month: October 2022

Week 8 

Week beginning 24 October

I bought a journal this week. It’s got a template which enables you to summarise things like your goal for the day, what you’re excited about and to reflect on your productivity. It was a well-timed distraction to help me avoid dwelling in the football results at the weekend for longer than desirable. I had visions of sharing each entry on my weeknote. But I hit too few of the goals, so I’ve changed tack. 

The story of my week was seeing slightly too many opportunities to get stuck in and being excited by different ideas for how to do it. And whilst I did lots of different things it came at the cost of the stuff that’s already underway and a clear focus on making a big impact.

So here’s some of the stuff that I did, in addition to the day-to-day meetings:

• Refine the proposal for a technology blog, responding to feedback from colleagues in comms
• Contribute to our thinking about how the CPS can become a better client
• Started to design a session for our senior leadership team about Wardley Mapping: what it is and how we can use it
• Designed a piece of user research to help us understand what an excellent ‘Developer Experience’ would look like
• Worked through the financial options for replatforming our Case Management System (CMS)
• Design the high-level requirements for our tenders for partners to help us replatform CMS
• Contribute to the spec for the tender for our service desk contract
• Develop proposals for how we govern CMS and (not particularly relatedly) our technical governance

And of course that meant that I didn’t make progress on some important stuff. In particular, I failed to make much headway on the tech roadmap. Michael is on holiday, which is a handy excuse, but if I’d really got my head down and denied myself the distractions above, I could have done.

Next week, there’s the opportunity to open-up even more strands. I’m looking forward to exploring:

• How we could explore the opportunity for machine learning models to support our operational recovery
• What we’d need to do differently to accelerate our WiFi rollout
• How we can explore the different groups of people that could benefit from our victims transformation programme
• The scope and capacity needed for our applications rationalisation project

I’ve also been thinking about how we can learn more about the user experience of working with our teams. That theme has come up a couple of times but as yet, I’ve not found the opportunity to take it forward.

But I will need to find a way of framing these enquiries so that I can qualify various opportunities without creating too many open-ended threads; and do so in a way that makes it easier for the work to be picked up again when the time is right. 

Week 7

Week beginning 17 October 2022

I began this week with some really clear goals but contrived not to meet them all. I wanted to hold a successful first show & tell for our technology roadmap (just hit; engagement was good but from a small group) gain agreement to create a technology blog (completely missed) and develop a better understanding of CPS operations (hit).

The benefit of having these goals at the forefront of my thinking was to provide a focus in a week that could easily have been full of distractions. It would have been easy to spend longer refreshing Twitter than focusing on the job at hand. I deleted TikTok over the weekend, which was also sensible.

On Tuesday I joined the Service Management away day in Manchester. Debbie had done a lovely job of designing the session which felt very professional but also had enough space for people to connect and build relationships. About half of the team had joined the CPS in the last two years which underlines the value of getting people together. Ric did a lockbox exercise which ends in everyone getting a personal note of appreciation, which was really thoughtful.

I gave an intro and reproduced my talking points from the intro to the event below because it felt like a useful way of summarising some of my thinking so far.

On Wednesday I went to Eastleigh, near where I spent my teenage years, to visit our Wessex office. Most of the time was taken up by the operational delivery meeting which gave me a really good feel for the sorts of issues that our areas grapple with. I also enjoyed meeting one of our paralegals and seeing how she uses our systems. She was in the process of producing a bundle for a forthcoming trial which involves evidence spanning 75 lever arch files. And we need to provide one for each juror, one for every advocate as well as for the judge and witnesses. The trial of digital bundles can’t come soon enough.

I spent a bit of the week feeling slightly short of confidence. Spending two days out of the office was certainly informative, and I saw how quickly you can become distanced from the day-to-day activities of the business. But I haven’t really got anything to show for my time in the organisation yet. And I’m not confident that I’ve found a concerted or sustainable way of delivering value.

However I had a useful conversation with Jon Ayre on Friday, who I’ve long followed on Twitter, learning from his time at the DWP. It gave me a bit more resolve to focus on finding opportunities to ‘show the thing’ and a bit more confidence that’s the right thing to do. I’m also surrounded by people telling me that I need to be patient.

Next week is incredibly varied and with a couple of earlier starts, I’ll do well to keep my mileage up. So setting some clear goals again feels smart, although we’ve got a couple of key people taking well-deserved leave and these aren’t entirely within my gift but:

• Our mid year reviews enables us to have a shared understanding of the objectives to the end of the year and the support we need to get there
• We have valuable feedback from a small number of colleagues about early thinking of the goals for our technology roadmap
• We have identified the activities that are needed to setup our applications and hosting rationalisation project

Week 6

Week beginning 10 October

A fair number of ups and downs this week. I didn’t shake off the side-effects of the Arsenal result until the end of the midweek Champions League game. In fact, on Tuesday evening I nearly missed my tube stop as I was thinking about the fine margins that separate a credible draw and a depressing defeat. In some senses, that set the tone for much of the week.

We began the week by agreeing how we would design a supplier opportunity to develop our Robotics Process Automation capability and then followed it up by pulling together some of the specifications that we’d need to help commercial colleagues determine the right procurement routes. It’s dived into that work because I thought I could be useful to colleagues so it was rewarding to see that we were able to make progress.

I spent some time over the weekend reflecting on what I’d learnt from a workshop to develop our technology roadmap goals. In essence, it was hard to do it from first principles when the workshop didn’t acknowledge commitments we’ve already made and without understanding the level of detail that the roadmap will be covering. So I drafted some goals to explore whether ‘working backwards’ gave colleagues a more tangible target. On Monday I took the same approach to considering how our Future Casework Tools programme would align to the Technology Code of Practice.

Both of these guided a really positive conversation with Michael, our Principal Architect. There were some areas where we’ve got different perspective, which we’ll need to work through together but most valuably, he also gave me some useful advice and feedback.

The Digital Demand Forum considered my proposal for a public blog to support developing our roadmap ‘in the open’. I only caught up with the conversation after the meeting, which felt slightly voyeuristic but helped me bring forward some ideas for how we could sharpen up our technical governance which I’d been holding back.

I was also prompted to commit to paper some of my emerging thinking about how we could think more boldly about the scope of our Future Management Information project. I did that to test where my thinking fell short and where there might be other people with a similar vision. The ideas were positively received, so now I need to figure out how we can take the next step.

The biggest event of the week was our Strategic Supplier Relationship Management meeting, kindly hosted, and informed by, colleagues at BEIS. The 360 feedback was really important and we used it to identify three practical tasks that we’re going to work on to strengthen the relationship. As ever, it’s difficult to match the size of the intervention to the scale of the challenge. So we’re going to work over a short timeframe to try and make progress – and I’m going to make more effort to connect with more of the team directly.

Towards the end of the week I was getting a bit concerned that I still haven’t identified a successful way to ‘make things happen’. I feel like I’ve tried a couple of different tactics and whilst they haven’t yet failed, they also haven’t exactly ‘worked’. But with a show & tell on our roadmap scheduled for Thursday and a burgeoning to-do list, I’ll head into the weekend optimistic for what I can achieve next week.

With a team away day, a visit to our Eastleigh Office and three strategic supplier meetings it would easy for next week to be driven by the diary. So I’ll need to commit to a couple of clear goals so that I can use my spare time well and reflect on whether or not the week has been successful.

Week 5

Week beginning 3 October

This week felt predictable. I began expecting to focus on three things and I did. I didn’t have a generic discovery meeting. There were few TLAs that I encountered for the first time. The interactions I had with people roughly went as expected. That’s basically a good thing.

The week began with my second Playback and Feedback session, talking to the team about what I’ve observed and learnt so far at the CPS and asking for feedback about where I can make the most impact for the team. There was more time for discussion as a result of having a dedicated session and despite being early on a Monday morning, I was energised by the discussion

The main feature of my week was some work around robotics process automation (RPA). The executive group discussed the opportunity a couple of weeks ago so now we need to identify a partner to help us begin our RPA journey. It’s urgent because it’s a contribution to helping alleviate the pressures caused by the significant and growing backlog of cases in the criminal justice system. But there are some reasonable questions from colleagues about whether we know enough about our requirements to go and buy the right solution. I don’t know if we do, but promised to work with the team to take my knowledge and their experiences and see if that was sufficient that we could explain what we were doing and what we needed from suppliers. We meet on Monday for a peer challenge and to work out what that means next.

Work continued to develop our technology roadmap. I met our Digital Transformation Leaders to introduce myself and learn what they needed from the roadmap. The key message was: how to influence it. The DTLs seems like a really good group and I was pleased to hear they want to help us develop it.

The week ended with a workshop with our technical architecture team to explore how we might develop the goals (the ‘destination’ for our roadmap). We got some thought provoking questions and useful feedback that will help us iterate the goals workshop. There’s a question hanging in my mind as to whether we need a bit more detail on the vision and strategy before we can articulate the roadmap. But I also know that isn’t what lots of stakeholders are asking for. I also met colleagues in our communications team to work through proposals for a technology blog that will provide a focal point for people who are interested in following (and potentially contributing to) the development  of the roadmap.

One of my personal commitments on joining the CPS was to re-establish some of the habits and behaviours associated with being a responsible leader / a nice human being, which took a back-seat in the crises in Hackney. I’m not yet in a habit but there are a couple of areas where I’ve used the absence of pressure and smaller team to ‘do better’. I haven’t got a habit yet, though, and generally think I scored less well this week than last.

The theme of next week look like it’ll be supplier relationships. We’ve got a big strategic session to review 360 feedback with one of our larger suppliers which should be challenging but constructive. And I’ve been asked to review our initiation process to understand what we can make better. Then on Friday I’ve got a visit to the ‘frontline’, which I’m really looking forward to.