Month: March 2023

Week 29: 20-24 March 2023

It’s one of those weeks where I’ve hit Saturday and I just don’t have the energy to write a readable weeknote. I persist because of a sense that if I fall off the wagon, I won’t get back on. And one week, when I have something to say, it’ll be too significant to try and just restart the habit.

I hit only one of my three goals this week and it was the easiest to achieve. We had a really good staff conference in Liverpool, and I made a real commitment to spend time with people I knew least well.  I’ve noticed that some of my show & tell style events have been better attended in the last few weeks and this week I noticed some of the people join that I’d spent time with in Liverpool. Of course it might just be that I recognise them a bit better!

Liverpool was particularly helpful for the feedback we got to the introduction of OKRs. In a couple of areas teams said something to the effect of ‘we do important work and there isn’t a key result for us in the next quarter’ and there were some astute observations about things that were missing from the ‘effective and healthy teams and people’ objective. We’re still very much experimenting with the framework and with the opportunity to refresh each quarter, we’ve got the opportunity to incorporate these thoughts.

We didn’t close off the Wifi business case as I’d been hoping, and made even less progress with the cloud business case. The former suffered, completely reasonable, because of the amount of time that went in to the staff conference. The latter struggled because our commercial team’s operating above capacity right now and we’ve got things with more pressing deadlines at play.

Whilst I hadn’t set it as a priority, we did agree the measures we’re going to use to track delivery of the strategy; three for each of the objectives. Some of them are used more widely (we’ve adopted a version of the DORA metrics, for example). Now we need to do the hard work of creating a reporting framework and then get into the discipline of tracking the stats. I’ve been thinking about how we can introduce more of a rhythm to our leadership group meeting so that we develop good habits.

Next week is our senior leaders conference. I’m really excited (and slightly nervous) to see how our digital casework presentation lands and hoping we communicate the clear balance between ‘jam tomorrow’ and benefits today. One of my other priorities is to support the delivering of our casework search and redaction tool and, in so doing, learn about the effectiveness of our governance and what we need to evolve about how the TDA works in practice.

I’m also coming to the end of the Harvard Business School course I’ve been doing on Strategy Execution. We’ve got an essay to write at the end of the course, exploring which element of executing strategy we expect to find most challenging.

So my priorities for next week are to:

• Agree the WiFi business case (pending feedback from an early market engagement event we’re planning)
• Ensure we’ve identified the outcomes we need to achieve to take our redaction tool live
• Listen and learn at the Senior Leaders Conference about what we need to do to meet and raise expectations for our digital casework programme

Week 28: 12-17 March

There were three highlight this week. I led a session at our SLT to showcase different techniques for problem-solving: Crazy 8s, starting with the press release and pre-mortems. The exercise produced some thoughtful responses but we had consistently good engagement and receptiveness to trying different approaches. The even bigger highlight was a user-focused show & tell for our proof of concept around email automation. The preparation time had been effective and we landed it in exactly the way I hoped. The product is now generating interest from other teams and I can’t wait to show it off to some of my key stakeholders. Thirdly, and unexpectedly, I heard a couple of stories about how the team had been working together to support users: one around our approach to receiving data from the Police and another about a patch of a vulnerability.

I also met two of my three goals for the week. We submitted the business case for our Ensuring Service Continuity programme and we’re within sight of completing our business case for ubiquitous Gov.Wifi. Next week we’re looking to do an event for prospective suppliers to learn about our proposed design and ensure that we design a procurement which delivers what we think we need. Neither felt quite so energising but both are important.

My third goal was to develop a draft of the performance management framework for our strategy. I can almost feel myself procrastinating. I made a start, but really want it to be good and feel as though I’m still some-way short of having the right answers. I’ve probably reached the tipping point where I need to commit something to paper to give others a chance to make it better.

I had some fantastic examples this week of effective Return on Management, even if that does sound a bit self-congratulatory. I had an opportunity to get a bit more involved in the work of one of our teams. It ended-up being a bit uneven but a relatively small investment of time and effort gave me insights into tasks, issues and challenges that would otherwise have remained invisible or at least taken months before I’d have found out. I was pleased because I’ve had a nagging doubt for a little while that I’ve not been active enough in developing relationships with people who report to people who report to me.

There are also a couple of non-strategic issues where I’ve intentionally invested a bit of effort in trying to support people resolve things that were taking them disproportionate time for diminishing returns. I’ve got an approach which I’ve learnt (and probably co-opted badly) from Rob Miller but I don’t yet have his persistence for following things through. Protecting time in my diary has been particularly challenging with a 2-day conference next, and then the following week, meaning meetings are getting increasingly squeezed into the remaining space. In the last four days of this week I had 28 hours of meetings.

I’ve been more focused in my goals next week:

1. To have an agreed business case for Gov.Wifi
2. To have a draft public cloud business case ready for consideration by our commercial team
3. To develop deeper relationships with team members during our staff conference

Week 27: 6-10 March

I’m doing a course at Harvard Business School online which has introduced me to a catchy phrase: return on management. It’s not much more complex than it sounds: ensuring that you focus on the things that matter. I’ve been grappling with this for a few years but armed with my colour-coded diary and a small piece of work to put in place a set of measures to help understand our performance against the strategy, I’ve never been clearer on whether or not I’m maximising my return on management.

This week I spent about 20 hours on things that were strategic, important or both. That’s an improvement on last week (I’ve not classified the work out of hours in either week). For now, I’m managing really carefully how many things I’m classifying as important or strategic to avoid gaming my own stats. But it also feels about right: a week in which I was often productive but fell a bit short of knowing that I’d been massively effective. In similar fashion I achieved two of my four goals and moved forward with the other two, but fell short of completion.

There were a couple of things this week where I know I’m struggling. In both cases there are enough elements that are familiar to make me feel as though I know what it should look like and that it doesn’t. But equally there are enough bits that are slightly different that I’m not absolutely confident I don’t just need to work within those differences and realign my expectations. The one that’s easier to write about is a programme that I’m running. We spent a bit of time in previous months trying to set the board up to make sure that we had a common purpose and we knew how we wanted to work together. I felt that board meeting this week fell significantly short of that. The fault is mine alone; I’m the person responsible for the programme and chaired the meeting. But I also haven’t yet worked out what to change or how to make it more effective. There’s three weeks until the next one for me to figure that out.

We’ve also had a collision of a few different procurements all requiring attention this week. We knew in November that it was a possibility and thought we’d worked hard to avoid it but for a bunch of different reasons, we fell into the trap. On the upside, the team worked really effectively to swarm around the challenge in order to meet key deadlines. Looking at the pipeline for the remainder of the year, being good at that is going to get more important.

There’s a busy end to this month with conferences in Liverpool and Bristol. So the next week or so needs to have a strong focus on keeping things going. I’m spending some time over the weekend on a couple of business cases that need to be pushed through the sausage factory and am hoping that next week I can find some quality time to pull together the dashboards necessary to track our strategy development. But I’m particularly looking forward to a session I’m running with our SLT to introduce tools to help our collaboration.

So my goals for next week are to:

1. Agree the outline case for the Ensuring Service Continuity programme
2. Ensure we have a clear plan for our WiFi programme
3. Develop a draft of our performance measurement plan for feedback

Week 26: 28 February – 4 March

This week I noticed the impact of the small things. I reckon I was a bit grumpy over the weekend because a kept getting small reminders that a year ago it was Liverpool winning the League Cup. It wasn’t made any easier that another team in red won it this season.

We did a show & tell for our proof of concept which had some really good features. The team was showing us code, talking about the benefits of the CI/CD pipeline and the importance of user centred design. However, I hadn’t spent enough time helping them pitch it right for the audience so my anxiety took over during the presentation that it wasn’t meeting the needs of the majority of the audience. There’s a fine line between trusting the team and watching them through fingers. Mostly I was a bit sad for the team which had done such good work that they deserved it to land with excitement.

I led our first monthly strategy call to help the team understand the work we are doing to deliver against our refreshed vision and strategic objectives. It’s a short experiment to see if we can increase the number of people who can see the link between their work and our objectives. There were bits of the call that were a bit unusual in the CPS (as people arrived, I polled them on their domestic TV streaming habits to avoid starting with low energy – a trick I learnt from one of our partners in Hackney although personally disliked at the time) but people ran with it. And in the questions afterwards I was asked to show how my objectives mapped onto the strategy. I loved the call for openness and accountability. And at the end scored the event 4.1/5 on average, in terms of its usefulness in understanding how their work will deliver our strategy. It’s enough to be looking forward to the next session.

We had a major incident, briefly, which affected some of our offices. At its conclusion we were joined by all of the senior stakeholders from the suppliers. It was a small but visible sign of how seriously they took the incident and demonstrated their determination to put it right.

I had a really useful ‘keeping in touch’ with the boss where we reviewed my progress against objectives. Whilst I remained pleased overall with the progress I was making it was also a useful reminder of where to sharpen my focus. There were slightly too many things that remain on ‘red’ to be too pleased.

Those short moments probably amounted to less than 10% of my week. But they had an out-sized impact on my morale.

There were a couple of half-day sessions this week as well. Both were incredibly useful. We had an open conversation with our main supplier to better understand their strategy globally, in the UK and in our sector. It was immensely helpful to enable me to start joining the dots. We also spent time exploring strategic partnerships and what we needed to do to be an effective partner within the criminal justice system. As usual with these sorts of workshops they’re mostly useful for bringing you together with peers in a different environment to help develop your understanding of their world.

At the end of Friday I’d set aside 3 hours. Ambitiously I wanted to redraft the technology strategy and roadmap as well as complete the strategic outline case for our ensuring service continuity programme. I started with the latter which is urgent as well as important and it took me far longer than anticipated. But I’m writing my weeknote now having met both those goals.

I’ve started deliberately waiting before committing to my weekly goals until I’ve heard what my team are prioritising and then making sure I’ve got space to establish my priorities around theirs. So next week I will be:

1. Supporting the team to get approval for the ‘full business case’ (or award report) for new contact centre software for our CPS Direct service
2. Support the production of the business case for transforming our internet connectivity
3. Supporting the POC team to engage with users
4. Time permitting, designing the measurement & evaluation approach to tracking delivery of our technology strategy and roadmap