Month: December 2022

Week 15: 12-16 December

It would have been easy to let this week slip away. When you look at the diary it’s tempting to assume not much more can be achieved until the New Year. So I had to push that little bit harder to make sure I got things done.

As I watched the snow fall on Sunday night it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas. And so when I walked up the steps of the crown court on Monday morning for my first visit to court since joining the CPS, I didn’t have high hopes for a busy day.

I spent the morning listening to a set of procedural hearings. I marvelled at the logistics involved and at the power of video conferencing. It was helpful to see how much more iterative the process of bringing criminal proceedings is than I assumed. I learnt over lunch that there’s an intention to reduce the number of hearings that occur before a case reaches trial. In the afternoon I saw a jury trial and whilst the case wasn’t directly relevant to some of the more complex technology issues we’re grappling with, the judge was a fan of digital jury bundles and had some useful observations about how they needed to work.

On Monday evening I did a briefing note for a colleague that was coming back from leave. It grew to 11 subheadings covering the things that I’d seen since they’d been away, and I forgot to include one topic so amongst other things, it made me feel like I’d been busy at the very least.

The main event on Tuesday was a prioritisation session for our Future Casework Tools programme at the Digital and Major Projects Group. One of the challenges we’ll need to explore through the programme is how we make decisions with colleagues, reconcile different ways of working whilst moving at pace. So the prioritisation session was an important starting point to ensuring the programme meets people’s expectations.

Wednesday was my best opportunity to make progress with my goals for the week. We worked with our partners, NTT Global, to ensure we had a clear scope for the discovery for our proof of concept and then to introduce them to some problem-owners to understand how we can add value. Separately, we also developed the terms of reference for our technical design authority and discussed how we could ensure it was meeting colleagues’ needs. I also had a catch-up with commercial colleagues so that we could move ahead with the procurement of a team to develop the technology platform.

The most significant feature of Thursday was a P1 incident with our network. We’d also had intermittent issues for some users accessing our core systems. The combination of the two meant it was helpful that I had an introductory session with trade union colleagues already in the diary. Both were resolved – and it’s the first P1 since I’ve joined the organisation. I was impressed by how colleagues responded to the incident. When it doesn’t happen frequently it can be harder to have those incident management practices in place. But it does mean that we need to spend time next week to ensure we understand the root cause. Any outage will feel frustrating for colleagues who are already working under pressure and they’ll expect us to do whatever’s needed to reduce the likelihood of it happening again.

At the end of the week I joined my first cross-government CTO Council. Whilst we’re theoretically all doing a similar job, each organisation is a different size and at a different state of maturity. It was interesting to hear from some perspectives very different to my own but also to understand the importance (and limitations) of collaboration across government.

Next week

I’ve got three goals for next week:

1. To support the team in publishing the IT Service Desk requirement before Christmas. We’ll be ensuring there’s enough time for suppliers to bid and are hoping that publication before Christmas will help people prepare their plans in January
2. To understand the critical path for going to market for the team to help develop the Technology Platform
3. To ensure the proof of concept product team has all the tools and support they need to make rapid progress in the New Year

Depending on time, I’d also like to spend time on our roadmap. Fortunately, despite a slightly unstructured approach, it’s starting to take shape. But it would benefit from a day’s proper focus.

Week 14: 5 – 9 December

I achieved two of the three goals I set for this week. Our senior leadership team agreed to creating a Technical Design Authority and provided good feedback on the vision and strategic objectives to guide our technology roadmap. The best contributions pointed to the importance of explaining why the goals would be useful for colleagues. But the categories received positive engagement and the value of meeting each goal was largely recognised.

We haven’t quite agreed a plan to go to market for a team to help develop our technology platform, but I’m optimistic that will become clearer on Monday/Tuesday next week.

Despite that, I didn’t feel particularly positive as the week drew to a close. I started feeling a big under the weather on Tuesday, which involved a relatively early start to get to an event in Birmingham. Whilst I was a bit better on Wednesday I was still operating in second gear and even by Friday didn’t quite have the freshness or crispness to feel energetic and positive. It’s the second time I’ve been slightly unwell since the summer, which is unusual for me. I blame my lack of resilience on how infrequently it happens.

However, on Friday afternoon a group of us gathered to discuss how we work. I’d drafted five attributes of ‘good work’ (below) to start a conversation about where and when this was true for us and what we could do differently to make it more true, more often. We’ve identified a couple of things that we could do together to set a standard for how we work.

The conversation was necessarily private, but I’m sharing not to showcase my poor drafting per se but in case there are resources or tools you can point me towards which would help our thinking.

1. We maintain a high level of motivation with regular sustenance provided by seeing the importance and impact of our work
2. We deliver value to users regularly and work at a sustainable pace which keeps us healthy
3. We are inclusive, embrace diversity and engage in radical candour
4. We are psychologically safe in what we do and how we work, and can harness innovation thanks to our awareness of privacy and security issues
5. We are open, well-networked and situationally-aware which supports our ambitions

Anyhow, it was a good conversation which did well to acknowledge the odd challenge but stay positive and constructive, although I was a bit disappointed with my am-pro efforts at facilitation at various points. So I ended the week feeling better.

I’ve got three clear(ish) goals for next week which follow on from this week’s:

1. To design the programme to set-up the Technical Design Authority
2. To draft the next version of our strategic objectives and put the next level of detail onto the roadmap
3. To develop the stakeholder engagement programme for our Future Casework Tools proof of concept

But one of those weeks where the vast majority of my time is going into other things. On Monday I finally get to go to court to see the impact of our work and speak to some of the colleagues involved and at the end of the week I’ve got a couple of networking opportunities across central government. So I’ll need to use spare bits of time at the start and end of the day really well if I’m to head into the last week of the year knowing that we’ve got everything in place to make a good start to 2023.

Week 13: 28 November – 2 December

I took my uncertainty and doubt into the start of this week. I was resigned to the fact that it was the calendar was against me and it would be unlikely to get anything moving this side of Christmas. By Monday afternoon I could not only feel short of energy but didn’t really care if I showed it.

But a conversation on Tuesday morning with Michael to design our proof of concept for our Future Casework Tools programme had me fired up. We went straight from that to sharing our draft document with our partner, NTT Global. In the afternoon I had a meeting with Tony from the Police Digital Service. He’s a former Police Officer rather than a technical expert but we have a similar perspective on the importance of inter-agency collaboration, done right. I’m planning to bring together some people from across the sector in early 2023 to discuss their user needs from our technology roadmap and see whether there’s interest in aligning our work.

I carried that optimism and positivity into Wednesday. I had a discussion on cloud readiness and devops with one of our partners before our technology leadership meeting explored our technology strategy, how we might form a TDA, and what we wanted to do differently to role-model making decisions with data. I made some progress towards one of my objectives by discussing how we could create opportunities for colleagues and suppliers to get closer to our users. I spent the afternoon getting up to speed with the design of the Digital Case File project. It’s our major investment over the next two years so I wanted to understand all the moving parts and to what extent it aligned (or could be changed to align) with our Future Casework Tools strategy.

Thursday was a bit less productive because so little of my day was allocated to meetings. I had a similar pattern on Friday. With a bit more planning I could have cracked through a couple of really big things but with a bit of tiredness after four days in Petty France, and too little running, I wasted the opportunity.

However, I had Friday night to myself so managed to crack through a couple of the things on the to-do list that required a bit more concentration

So in terms of my goals:

1. I facilitated a discussion amongst our architects and designed a survey to help determine what things might constitute the MVP of our technology platform
2. I drafted a brief for the work to run discovery and build a prototype platform, which is currently with colleagues for comment (I’ve also started drafting a business case)
3. We have an agreed brief for the proof of concept

I’ve managed to squeeze a couple of items onto the agenda for next week’s Senior Leadership Team meeting so by the end of next week I plan to have:

1. A proposal to establish a Technical Design Authority, using the Service Standard and Technology Code of Practice as our initial frameworks for decision making, ready for consideration by one of our organisational governance boards
2. A plan to go to market for support to develop our Technology Platform
3. An agreed vision and strategic objectives for our technology roadmap

I’m also leading a set of conversations to try and iron out a commercial issue with one of our projects, which will take up some time and energy – but is even more important to get right.

That notwithstanding, I’m also particularly excited by a small discussion group that’s meeting at the end of next week to explore our ways of working. I’ve an open mind about what emerges but have a rough concept of using it to form an action learning set to explore how we can build our culture. It’s not an exclusive group (but I did try and identify a diverse group of people in the initial invitations) so if you’re in the department and want to get involved, do let me know.

I don’t know if that’s sufficient to make me feel like I’m on track to accomplish something, but it’s certainly a better position than a fortnight ago.