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