Month: November 2022

Week 12: 20-25 November

I’ve been inadvertently inflating my length of service this week. I told our Executive Group that I’ve worked for the CPS for 14 weeks and told someone else that it was 15 weeks. I guess that’s because I feel like I’ve settled-in. It’s also because I’m becoming a bit anxious about how much I’ve actually achieved.

I achieved the goals that I set out this week, yet that doesn’t feel like the most important thing.

We’ve identified a shortlist of some pertinent questions we could ask of our data to support operational recovery and got a meeting booked in with a wider set of colleagues to probe these and prioritise how we take it forward.

I’ve got a more detailed set of user needs for the technology platform, and am now fairly sure that this could be a useful tool across the service. I also developed a bit of a vision statement, though that needs work, and a very simple prototype to get more user feedback.

Finally, our senior management team workshop went well and not only introduced people to Wardley Mapping but also started to gather some data for our technology roadmap (and in doing so, tested the value of the approach as an output from the roadmap).

But there were a couple of things that were much more important about this week than hitting those goals.

A group of colleagues have been working intensively, using some of the tools of the GV Design Sprint method to identify our requirements and supporting documents for the tender for services to support our mission critical business application from 2025 onwards. I’m really chuffed that they took my suggestion to timebox the work and made it much more creative. The approach will teach us some really interesting things about how we work and help us assess which bits we can apply to other procurement activities.

In other news this week we also gained approval for the tender of our IT service desk from the investment committee and for our continued use of Service Now – which is the culmination of lots of hard work by Ric, Wayne, Julie, John and others.

I was also pleased to find time to continue the conversation, and act on some of the issues that emerged from last Friday’s software development workshop. I’ve got a bit of a habit of getting to the end of an event like that and then being sucked back into all the other things that had to wait whilst I did the event; rather than being able to use it to build momentum.

Goals for next week

1. To gather some insight into what combination of things might form the MVP for our technology platform
2. To have an agreed brief, which reflects users’ feedback, for the discovery and prototyping of our technology platform
3. To have an agreed scope for the proof of concept work on transforming the database of CMS to enable development of user-centred services on top

I’m hoping that’s a recipe to end the week feeling as though I’m on a path to achieving something.

Week 11: 14-18 November

My goal this week was to do something every day to move forward my three priorities. And I’ve done it! Ok, so not the most ambitious goal. But here’s what I was able to do:

• Monday: Michael and I started preparing for a senior leadership team workshop on the technology roadmap. We’ve got a format that will help participants develop a view of the maturity of the main components of our existing technology
• Tuesday: I got a good challenge from Mark on my draft guiding principle for our roadmap (namely that ‘fast to change, fast to learn’ might encourage too much short-termism)
• Wednesday: I developed a shortlist of questions we could ask of our data as we explore the opportunities for predictive modelling and machine learning
• Thursday: I explored the technical design of our ‘Digital Case File’ project in order to assess how it fitted into our technical vision for the Future Casework Tools programme
• Friday: we had a really productive workshop to begin exploring how to make the CPS the best place in the sector to develop software

Some of those things are evidently more meaningful than others where progress is, at best, symbolic. Nevertheless, after a few weeks of ‘general busyness’ it feels good to have inched forward on all fronts.

I’m again on a train back from York on a Friday night (although I found the more trendy pub on the station forecourt this week). It’s given me a couple of hours to reflect on the software development workshop. After a tricky start due to equipment shortcomings and document sharing permissions I was really pleased by how everyone joined in with the spirit of the event. I wasn’t sure how familiar colleagues were in using workshop techniques like personas and future visioning, and there was a significant disparity of perspectives and expertise on the topic. However, we produced a really strong, comprehensive set of outputs and didn’t shy away from some of the tougher issues.

I’ve tried to distil the discussion into an open welcome note for new software developers. At the moment it’s a set of aspirations and assertions but I’ve got a sense that it’ll help us focus on the outcome we’re seeking and can use the tension between the organisation we are and the organisation we want to become to inject urgency into closing the gap. It’d be interesting to hear thoughts to the contrary.

Our business continuity exercises on Tuesday helped me achieve one of the final objectives from my induction period: I understand my role in business continuity issues. It answered lots of my questions, which was reassuring. But it also reminded me how reliant we are on the knowledge of a relatively small number of people.

I also supported colleagues from HR to interview for a data analytics role. It was interesting to be on the other side of the table (and helpful because the civil service uses a common approach to interviewing across different levels of seniority), Even more than that, it was a good opportunity to build relationships with colleagues.

I also benefitted from working as part of a broader community this week. I tapped into the experiences of the Ministry of Justice using Backstage which was a shortcut for learnings that otherwise would have taken months, and had really energetic conversations with colleagues in the police and at MOJ about collaborating on data science.

For most of the month I’ve been taking detailed notes in each meeting I’ve attended, inspired by Mark’s note-taking. I don’t know how helpful it’s been (the notes tend to be ‘they said’ rather than reflective) and I’ve not had reason to read the notes back, yet. But somehow it feels like the right practice to adopt.

In amongst all of that, I’ve fallen behind significantly on my running targets. Trips to Petty France on Tuesday and Wednesday, together with the early start for York meant that I’ve just not run often enough. I’m going to struggle to hit 25 miles this week.

Next week, I’m going to set more focused, delivery-oriented goals:

1. To develop a means of testing and validating our hypotheses for how data analysis can support operational recovery
2. To identify a more detailed set of user needs for the technology platform
3. To build an assessment of our current key software as a key input to the technology roadmap

Week 10: 7-11 November

On Thursday and Friday I went to Yorkshire for a cross-civil service induction for Deputy Directors. The event combined inspiring speakers, an introduction to some of the tools of systems thinking and time for reflection and planning. There was a reasonable level of diversity in the group, although it felt like I was one of the newest civil servants. The Deputy Director role is challenging because it’s just operational enough to offer plenty of opportunities to get stuck in the day-to-day (plenty of opportunity for plans to be derailed by requests for ‘things’ by a particular deadline) but is also expected to be strategic and cross-organisational.  

I left, buzzing with all the things I want to achieve. And the event also reminded me what a privilege the job is, and of the determination to deliver great public services that unites so many of my colleagues.

Tuesday feels like a particularly long time ago but it was one of the more interesting . I met Mark to discuss my objectives for the remainder of the financial year and had a wide-ranging discussion with a strategic partner to explore opportunities to modernise how we approach technical development (clue: it’s largely about how people work, rather than the tech we use).

The two things feature so strongly in my week because they came together nicely into my emerging mission. It maybe that these change shape a bit, but the last fortnight suggests that this will be the majority of my focus for the next six months or so.

But I’ve also spent a couple of weeks grappling with how to develop a guiding principle for our technology roadmap. And then, at some point on Thursday evening after drawing a 2×2 grid for what felt like the 78^th time, I finally got it. Or think I have. I’m looking forward to exploring it more with colleagues over the next fortnight.  

I haven’t had a day like Wednesday in a little while: 10 meetings about 12 different topics, packed into seven hours with a 30 minute break. I was beginning to feel like I was too old for this, come the end of the day. And then had to carry-off my impersonation as a rugby coach for my son’s team in the evening.

I’d like to remember what the rest of the week entailed, but as the packed train hurtles back to Kings Cross it feels like a very long time ago.

Next week involves 7 meetings which are all opportunities to move forward my objectives. That feels like a real luxury. It also means I need to prepare really well. I’ve learnt that the event itself doesn’t just need to be successful but my capacity to follow-on from it needs to ensure it doesn’t have a rapid half-life.

Week 9: 31 October – 4 November

My week made sense by the end, I think, thanks to the third Playback and Feedback session I did with the team. I was ill on Wednesday and Thursday. The sort of ill when you can’t really not work. One of the upsides of working from home is that you don’t begin the day exhausted by the commute. Another is that you can summon up enough energy for a video meeting which is probably slightly less than being ‘always on’ as you are in the office.

On Thursday evening I went for a run – mostly because I’ve set a target to run the same distance this month as last and I can’t have two days off. I knew I wasn’t quite right because you shouldn’t sweat that much in five degree heat. I was trying to work out how to make the story of my last month coherent and pose some good questions to the team for the session.

I’ve been dabbling in a whole bunch of things over the last few weeks. Some of these have been chosen intentionally and others chosen by my inbox. But it felt slightly dissatisfying to not have anything to show for it. And I was starting to feel inadequate for not being able to communicate a clear purpose to my new team.

The idea I presented on Friday was that we’re builders of a technology platform. The platform already provides tools and some guides. But we can increase the notion of self-service, bring together the decisions we’ve made and provide access to data. I showed examples like Spotify, Kraken, Alibaba and the GOV.UK Design System. And I talked about the anti-patterns of a platform: depending on conversations, running a closed-ecosystem, having data everywhere, for example. My goal for the day was to get interest from members of two different teams. What was particularly noticeable about the feedback was that it all came from women; the number of women at all parts of the organisation is a real strength of the CPS.

I was quite excited by the idea and inevitably pleased with myself for coming up with it. Part of me wondered whether I was getting carried away in my ‘fever from a run’. The presentation wasn’t met with acclaim and adulation but nor did it land on stony ground. So it’s an idea that I need to develop further and probably would benefit from ‘showing the thing’. But we’ll also need to work out how it fits with our intranet and Service Now to avoid creating a knowledge silo.

Another feature of my week was some ‘getting to know you’ sessions with one of our strategic partners. I also completed the Mid Year Review process. The combination forced me to think about my priorities for the next 6 months or so, now that I’ve largely completed my discovery phase. I haven’t yet got into the drafting but am testing the following areas with team members:

1. User centricity
2. Technical governance
3. The efficiency of our software development lifecycle
4. Building our brand
5. Leading the team

Of course, all of this meant that I went nearly another week without making a material impact on our project to develop our technology roadmap. The big question that I’ve been working through is how to identify the ‘guiding principle’ that needs to underpin the approach. I woke up on Wednesday morning thinking I had a good way forward but the more I worked with it, the less clear it became. So it’s back to the drawing board next week.

Next week

The biggest feature in my next week is the Deputy Director programme in York. Being out of the office for two days with people from across the civil service will be a real privilege, but it has a dominating affect on the diary and limits the number of things I’m able to pursue. We’re finalising the business case for our service desk tender, which then clears the ground for the work towards the end of November to define our requirements for the hosting and support of our mission critical systems.

I’m also wondering about how to design a workshop to explore how we might use data differently to help with operational recovery. I have some really simplistic ideas of what we could do, but need to tap into the core daily challenges faced by colleagues – who might not understand the art of the possible. And do all of that without it seeming too conceptual.

So I’m not going to be short of things to do . . .