Matthew Cain

Personal blog. Day job: Technology at the Crown Prosecution Service

Month: January 2023

Busy – but to what end?

January 27, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Week 21: 23-27 January 2023

It’s funny how easily busy-ness appeals to me. It gives me a sense of importance and purpose. From time to time I even marvel at my own ability to switch from one topic to the next and congratulate myself on the fact that I’ve done so seamlessly. It would be easy to write this week up as a success because I was busy.

Not only did I have five days crammed full of meetings but I managed actually to do some stuff, too. We had a purposeful TDA meeting which made three decisions. And we initiated the process to recruit a Product Owner, although we won’t actually make a decision until early next week.

On top of that, I led the first of the internal engagement sessions we’re running to build out our technology strategy and roadmap. I was particularly pleased that Debbie, Michael and Russell will each run one themselves as it’s an opportunity for them to engage with it differently. The session I led sparked useful set of points and subsequently Russell’s session appears to have prompted even more feedback.

At the end of the week I attended by first in-person CTO Council meeting. The important cross-government forum was exploring a number of issues directly relevant to our work including principles for effective cloud adoption and how to tackle legacy technology. I’m still figuring out how the central government stuff works between departments but it seemed to be a positive, purposeful and collaborative meeting.

So it was a good week.

There were a couple of important caveats, though, and I suppose it shows why I put so much emphasis on the process of setting weekly priorities. We got really valuable feedback on the design of our Service Desk procurement and identified four key things that will shape our evaluation criteria. We weren’t able to get the procurement published, though. Whilst that was for reasons beyond our control it was an important qualifier on the success of the week. We did design a response to our People Survey but despite a good conversation at our leadership team meeting it felt like we were exploring rather than solving.

I’m not actually sure, therefore, that I was any more effective this week than any others. It felt good and energetic but without any greater delivery.

My diary is distinctly lighter next week. We were expecting to have a Senior Leaders Conference which was postponed due to the train strikes and so I suddenly became free on two days. So I’ll need to use the extra time really well in order to really focus on delivery. We had an interesting, albeit brief, discussion in our weekly catch-up about how to balance supporting the goals of our teams with using our team to engineer what happens next.

I’ve set three goals for next week but they still feel a bit short of vision and drive. Currently they are to:

  1. Draft the paper for investment committee to explain the scope of the ‘Ensuring Service Continuity’ programme. It’s not urgent but if I don’t do it now, I’ll regret not putting the sare time to good use
  2. Onboard the Product Owner for the proof of concept so that we can support the product team and grow our understanding of what could be achieved beyond the proof of concept phase
  3. To use the feedback from the engagement sessions to design the next iteration of the tech roadmap

I’ll spend some time over the weekend looking at the quarterly objectives for the team and my personal objectives in order to work out whether I could aim higher.

Relentlessly positive

January 20, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Week 20: 16-20 January 2023

I was relentlessly positive this week. I could guess about the reasons. I was motivated by addressing the results of the People Survey. I was excited about a couple of important procurements that we’re starting. I was looking forward to the inception workshop for the Technical Design Authority. But it was also because I decided to be positive. I nearly slipped back. There was a moment in bed on Monday morning. But even when something didn’t go well it didn’t knock me off my stride.

I also felt the gentle pressure of important and imminent deadlines this week: on Wednesday preparing for our pre market engagement event on the application support contract for the case management system (CMS); on Thursday to prepare for our market engagement event on the service desk as well as the frequent pull of the inbox.

The Service Desk event was really well attended, though we shared a recording for suppliers unable to attend at relatively short notice. The feedback will help us unblock one of the issues we’d been grappling with which had delayed us initiating the bidding process. Generally I think more, smaller engagement points with suppliers will help us learn more and adapt.

Despite all of that, I still had time to do things well. I thought carefully about how we’d do the inception workshop. I needed a format that would support us being user-centric and fit the findings from the book reviews into the design of how we’d work together. And it needed a bit of movement in an otherwise sterile basement room. I realised I’d asked everyone else to read something and not prepared anything myself and was worried that might seem unduly hierarchical, so worked my way through The Habit of Excellence by Lt Col Langley Sharp – which reinforced a significant number of the key messages from the other texts.

I also began the process of digging in to our People Survey results through some good conversations with colleagues to explore what we need to stop and start doing differently.

With a different shape and size portfolio previously I felt I didn’t have the chance to invest the same level of effort; that I was constantly doing things ‘just well enough’.

I also tried to do some smaller things differently. A meeting on Monday was scheduled to look at the strengths and weaknesses of managing our hosting contract directly. Rather than meet and then draft a doc, I asked us to develop a document in realtime. Not everyone experienced that in the same way, but it was good to show people how a different approach can have benefits.

I didn’t do enough to move forward the tech strategy and roadmap this week. Whilst it’s not one of my four priorities for next week, we are beginning a set of engagement strategies for colleagues within the department so that’ll give me the excuse to find more time ahead of an event that TechUK will be hosting for us in February.

So my four priorities for next week are to:

  1. Use the feedback from the Service Desk to initiate the procurement
  2. Help the first substantive meeting of the TDA work in the way we’ve co-designed
  3. Identify a Product Owner to support the development of our Future Casework Tools proof of concept
  4. Enable our leadership team to design the response to our People Survey results

Time: the most precious commodity

January 13, 2023 / / 1 Comment

Week 19: 9-13 January

I’m just old enough to believe, fervently, that time is the most precious commodity we have. Given the right conditions most other things are replaceable. It’s also, often, the thing that’s least visible. I ran the Battersea Park half marathon in 1:33 on Saturday which was not my fastest – but just enough reward for my spasmodic preparation. I then broke my toe on Tuesday.

Amazon has a concept of one way doors: decisions that are irreversible and two way doors that are easily reversible. I believe that the longer it takes to do something, the more it becomes likely to be a one way door. For example, if I’d run on Tuesday before I broke my toe, I’d have recorded extra miles this week. The challenge with time is that it’s often the least visible risk (like kicking a chair leg whilst wearing socks).

One of the advantages of my role at the CPS is that with a more specific remit and a smaller team I do, at least theoretically, have more time to play with (albeit in an organisation which is still new).

I’ve been thinking about that for three more substantial reasons this week:

  1. It’s been at the heart of some of the more challenging issues that I’m trying to resolve at the moment. On the upside, I’ve had a couple of good conversations where, at the very least, we’ve been able to identify that the underlying reason for the frustration is just a different prioritisation of what matters
  2. I haven’t used my time particularly well. There are a couple of things which have been important to me this week but where I’ve not done them as well as I could have done because I’ve moved on in my mind rather than challenged myself to work out how they could be better
  3. Given the above, I might gain more solace from recognising things that benefit from more time so that I don’t try and force the pace on everything out of frustration at a few things

There have been plenty of positives. We have agreed a business case for how we provide secure internet access over the next 18 months in near-record time. We had a really positive discussion at the Change Delivery team away day about their needs from a technology platform. And we did some important work to map out the project landscape for a programme I’m leading to ‘Ensure Service Continuity’ – practically, deciding what happens to 23 applications that are provided for by a contract which expires in mid-2025.

The technology strategy and roadmap is one of the things that will benefit from more time. The current draft has 30 commitments of various sizes for the next 18 months, some of which are already planned. But there are a handful of bigger ideas which do need debate and experimentation if they’re to be meaningful commitments. We’re currently designing a set of initiatives to ensure these have the time they need to move from being buzzwords and concepts into shared commitments.

At the end of the week we also got the more detailed breakdown of the results from the Civil Service people survey which was conducted late last year. The results are fine overall but there are a few things that really do need attention.

So, I’m making slightly fewer commitments next week:

  1. To have three good conversations with colleagues to understand better how to respond to the people survey results
  2. To prepare thoroughly for the best possible initiation for the Technical Design Authority
  3. To complete the documents necessary for the launch of our Applications, Databases and Infrastructure Management procurement – aka maintaining and supporting CMS

Picking it up

January 6, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Week 18: 2-6 January 23

The first week back is always hard. Like most years, I had one of those nights where I spent more time awake than asleep. And then I faffed around early in the morning. I’m back playing Wordle, long after it’s fashionable. But I started the week by articulating five goals relatively clearly:

  1. Helping come to a clear understanding on the financial evaluation model for the service desk tender, which delayed its publication just before Christmas
  2. Ensuring we have a clear lessons learnt and recommendations from the CMS outage
  3. Drafting a rationale for the 23 services we want to disaggregate to try and avoid unnecessary complication in the approvals process for lower risk / lower value pieces of work or less scrutiny for the more complex parts
  4. Set-up the refreshed approach to the Assurance Board
  5. Design the preparation activity for the inception workshop for our Technical Design Authority  

That’s a couple more than I’d normally set for a week but I was feeling ambitious. And Mark pointed out that I missed a goal around the agreement on our requirements for the support and maintenance of CMS from 2025. Although I was feeling refreshed, it felt as though it wasn’t too hard to pick up from where I’d left off at the end of 2022.

I began the week writing the technology strategy and roadmap. It’s been in my head for a little while but I haven’t had the time to sit down and focus on articulating it. My family got cross with my idea of doing it between Christmas and New Year but I was sat on my own on the plane back from holiday, so I made an early start.

I’m looking forward to being able to share it more widely but it does need a bit more work. We’re planning towards an event for prospective suppliers in early February – and I’d also like to get input from colleagues in other parts of the criminal justice system.

Despite the stop/start nature of the first day, I broke the back of the roadmap and it benefitted from an extra day to revisit the drafting, before I shared it with colleagues on Wednesday afternoon. That gave me time to move to doing the rationale for service disaggregation on Thursday which turned out to be much easier when I sat down to right it than it felt when I was thinking it through on Wednesday evening.

I’m excited by how we’re preparing the TDA and the early signs are that the members of the group are buying into the suggestion – which is probably different to what they’re used to. I’ve asked each person to familiarise themselves with the central ideas in seven key books (Teaming, the Phoenix Project, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Good Services, Radical Candour, No Rules Rules and the Art of Humble Inquiry). How we work together will be critical to our effectiveness, so I reckon that being familiar with some of common concepts will help build our collaboration.

We’re waiting for the analysis report on the CMS outage but it seems that we’ve got general agreement on the key things we want to improve.

Frustratingly, I’ve achieved least progress on the Service Desk. It might be that trying to push it to a conclusion is identifying more issues than its closing down. But we’ll need to make a decision within the next week or so what to do because continual delay will have an impact on other work – as well as the costs and service that colleagues receive.

I’ve set five priorities for next week:

  1. To resolve the outstanding issues blocking publication of the Service Desk tender
  2. Supporting the production of a business case for how we provide secure internet access
  3. Developing the strategic rationale to explain our approach to public cloud
  4. Developing the initial scope for the Technology Platform
  5. To test some ideas I’ve got for how we evolve our approach to delivery management

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