Author: Matthew Cain (Page 3 of 11)

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 . . .

Week 8 

Week beginning 24 October

I bought a journal this week. It’s got a template which enables you to summarise things like your goal for the day, what you’re excited about and to reflect on your productivity. It was a well-timed distraction to help me avoid dwelling in the football results at the weekend for longer than desirable. I had visions of sharing each entry on my weeknote. But I hit too few of the goals, so I’ve changed tack. 

The story of my week was seeing slightly too many opportunities to get stuck in and being excited by different ideas for how to do it. And whilst I did lots of different things it came at the cost of the stuff that’s already underway and a clear focus on making a big impact.

So here’s some of the stuff that I did, in addition to the day-to-day meetings:

• Refine the proposal for a technology blog, responding to feedback from colleagues in comms
• Contribute to our thinking about how the CPS can become a better client
• Started to design a session for our senior leadership team about Wardley Mapping: what it is and how we can use it
• Designed a piece of user research to help us understand what an excellent ‘Developer Experience’ would look like
• Worked through the financial options for replatforming our Case Management System (CMS)
• Design the high-level requirements for our tenders for partners to help us replatform CMS
• Contribute to the spec for the tender for our service desk contract
• Develop proposals for how we govern CMS and (not particularly relatedly) our technical governance

And of course that meant that I didn’t make progress on some important stuff. In particular, I failed to make much headway on the tech roadmap. Michael is on holiday, which is a handy excuse, but if I’d really got my head down and denied myself the distractions above, I could have done.

Next week, there’s the opportunity to open-up even more strands. I’m looking forward to exploring:

• How we could explore the opportunity for machine learning models to support our operational recovery
• What we’d need to do differently to accelerate our WiFi rollout
• How we can explore the different groups of people that could benefit from our victims transformation programme
• The scope and capacity needed for our applications rationalisation project

I’ve also been thinking about how we can learn more about the user experience of working with our teams. That theme has come up a couple of times but as yet, I’ve not found the opportunity to take it forward.

But I will need to find a way of framing these enquiries so that I can qualify various opportunities without creating too many open-ended threads; and do so in a way that makes it easier for the work to be picked up again when the time is right. 

Week 7

Week beginning 17 October 2022

I began this week with some really clear goals but contrived not to meet them all. I wanted to hold a successful first show & tell for our technology roadmap (just hit; engagement was good but from a small group) gain agreement to create a technology blog (completely missed) and develop a better understanding of CPS operations (hit).

The benefit of having these goals at the forefront of my thinking was to provide a focus in a week that could easily have been full of distractions. It would have been easy to spend longer refreshing Twitter than focusing on the job at hand. I deleted TikTok over the weekend, which was also sensible.

On Tuesday I joined the Service Management away day in Manchester. Debbie had done a lovely job of designing the session which felt very professional but also had enough space for people to connect and build relationships. About half of the team had joined the CPS in the last two years which underlines the value of getting people together. Ric did a lockbox exercise which ends in everyone getting a personal note of appreciation, which was really thoughtful.

I gave an intro and reproduced my talking points from the intro to the event below because it felt like a useful way of summarising some of my thinking so far.

On Wednesday I went to Eastleigh, near where I spent my teenage years, to visit our Wessex office. Most of the time was taken up by the operational delivery meeting which gave me a really good feel for the sorts of issues that our areas grapple with. I also enjoyed meeting one of our paralegals and seeing how she uses our systems. She was in the process of producing a bundle for a forthcoming trial which involves evidence spanning 75 lever arch files. And we need to provide one for each juror, one for every advocate as well as for the judge and witnesses. The trial of digital bundles can’t come soon enough.

I spent a bit of the week feeling slightly short of confidence. Spending two days out of the office was certainly informative, and I saw how quickly you can become distanced from the day-to-day activities of the business. But I haven’t really got anything to show for my time in the organisation yet. And I’m not confident that I’ve found a concerted or sustainable way of delivering value.

However I had a useful conversation with Jon Ayre on Friday, who I’ve long followed on Twitter, learning from his time at the DWP. It gave me a bit more resolve to focus on finding opportunities to ‘show the thing’ and a bit more confidence that’s the right thing to do. I’m also surrounded by people telling me that I need to be patient.

Next week is incredibly varied and with a couple of earlier starts, I’ll do well to keep my mileage up. So setting some clear goals again feels smart, although we’ve got a couple of key people taking well-deserved leave and these aren’t entirely within my gift but:

• Our mid year reviews enables us to have a shared understanding of the objectives to the end of the year and the support we need to get there
• We have valuable feedback from a small number of colleagues about early thinking of the goals for our technology roadmap
• We have identified the activities that are needed to setup our applications and hosting rationalisation project

Week 6

Week beginning 10 October

A fair number of ups and downs this week. I didn’t shake off the side-effects of the Arsenal result until the end of the midweek Champions League game. In fact, on Tuesday evening I nearly missed my tube stop as I was thinking about the fine margins that separate a credible draw and a depressing defeat. In some senses, that set the tone for much of the week.

We began the week by agreeing how we would design a supplier opportunity to develop our Robotics Process Automation capability and then followed it up by pulling together some of the specifications that we’d need to help commercial colleagues determine the right procurement routes. It’s dived into that work because I thought I could be useful to colleagues so it was rewarding to see that we were able to make progress.

I spent some time over the weekend reflecting on what I’d learnt from a workshop to develop our technology roadmap goals. In essence, it was hard to do it from first principles when the workshop didn’t acknowledge commitments we’ve already made and without understanding the level of detail that the roadmap will be covering. So I drafted some goals to explore whether ‘working backwards’ gave colleagues a more tangible target. On Monday I took the same approach to considering how our Future Casework Tools programme would align to the Technology Code of Practice.

Both of these guided a really positive conversation with Michael, our Principal Architect. There were some areas where we’ve got different perspective, which we’ll need to work through together but most valuably, he also gave me some useful advice and feedback.

The Digital Demand Forum considered my proposal for a public blog to support developing our roadmap ‘in the open’. I only caught up with the conversation after the meeting, which felt slightly voyeuristic but helped me bring forward some ideas for how we could sharpen up our technical governance which I’d been holding back.

I was also prompted to commit to paper some of my emerging thinking about how we could think more boldly about the scope of our Future Management Information project. I did that to test where my thinking fell short and where there might be other people with a similar vision. The ideas were positively received, so now I need to figure out how we can take the next step.

The biggest event of the week was our Strategic Supplier Relationship Management meeting, kindly hosted, and informed by, colleagues at BEIS. The 360 feedback was really important and we used it to identify three practical tasks that we’re going to work on to strengthen the relationship. As ever, it’s difficult to match the size of the intervention to the scale of the challenge. So we’re going to work over a short timeframe to try and make progress – and I’m going to make more effort to connect with more of the team directly.

Towards the end of the week I was getting a bit concerned that I still haven’t identified a successful way to ‘make things happen’. I feel like I’ve tried a couple of different tactics and whilst they haven’t yet failed, they also haven’t exactly ‘worked’. But with a show & tell on our roadmap scheduled for Thursday and a burgeoning to-do list, I’ll head into the weekend optimistic for what I can achieve next week.

With a team away day, a visit to our Eastleigh Office and three strategic supplier meetings it would easy for next week to be driven by the diary. So I’ll need to commit to a couple of clear goals so that I can use my spare time well and reflect on whether or not the week has been successful.

Week 5

Week beginning 3 October

This week felt predictable. I began expecting to focus on three things and I did. I didn’t have a generic discovery meeting. There were few TLAs that I encountered for the first time. The interactions I had with people roughly went as expected. That’s basically a good thing.

The week began with my second Playback and Feedback session, talking to the team about what I’ve observed and learnt so far at the CPS and asking for feedback about where I can make the most impact for the team. There was more time for discussion as a result of having a dedicated session and despite being early on a Monday morning, I was energised by the discussion

The main feature of my week was some work around robotics process automation (RPA). The executive group discussed the opportunity a couple of weeks ago so now we need to identify a partner to help us begin our RPA journey. It’s urgent because it’s a contribution to helping alleviate the pressures caused by the significant and growing backlog of cases in the criminal justice system. But there are some reasonable questions from colleagues about whether we know enough about our requirements to go and buy the right solution. I don’t know if we do, but promised to work with the team to take my knowledge and their experiences and see if that was sufficient that we could explain what we were doing and what we needed from suppliers. We meet on Monday for a peer challenge and to work out what that means next.

Work continued to develop our technology roadmap. I met our Digital Transformation Leaders to introduce myself and learn what they needed from the roadmap. The key message was: how to influence it. The DTLs seems like a really good group and I was pleased to hear they want to help us develop it.

The week ended with a workshop with our technical architecture team to explore how we might develop the goals (the ‘destination’ for our roadmap). We got some thought provoking questions and useful feedback that will help us iterate the goals workshop. There’s a question hanging in my mind as to whether we need a bit more detail on the vision and strategy before we can articulate the roadmap. But I also know that isn’t what lots of stakeholders are asking for. I also met colleagues in our communications team to work through proposals for a technology blog that will provide a focal point for people who are interested in following (and potentially contributing to) the development  of the roadmap.

One of my personal commitments on joining the CPS was to re-establish some of the habits and behaviours associated with being a responsible leader / a nice human being, which took a back-seat in the crises in Hackney. I’m not yet in a habit but there are a couple of areas where I’ve used the absence of pressure and smaller team to ‘do better’. I haven’t got a habit yet, though, and generally think I scored less well this week than last.

The theme of next week look like it’ll be supplier relationships. We’ve got a big strategic session to review 360 feedback with one of our larger suppliers which should be challenging but constructive. And I’ve been asked to review our initiation process to understand what we can make better. Then on Friday I’ve got a visit to the ‘frontline’, which I’m really looking forward to.  

Week 4

26 September 2022

This week feels like work has begun. A colleague contacted me with a concern about something, I had a couple of more detailed conversations with supplier and I started to get stuck in to projects. The honeymoon is over. And now I’m as tired as you should be at the end of the week and have enough to do that next week I’ll need to balance my diary with my actual work!

Most importantly, Michael and I started work to develop our technology roadmap. We began by making a request to create a blog so that we can do this entirely in the open. And then started drafting some stakeholder needs (I want to preserve the term user needs for actual users) and validating these with groups. We then designed the success criteria for the project, a high level approach to the project and a workshop format to elicit the goals that we want the roadmap to work towards

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in York – a lovely city, good for a morning run, the home of my best friend and my first visit. The senior leadership team gets together from around the country to work through some of the cross-cutting issues that need our attention. We covered digital confidence, assurance, portfolio management, business continuity and business planning.

Tuesday was also significant because we developed a plan for the partnership arrangements that we need to take the next step in the life of our main case management system. We’ve got different needs: to safeguard the current application whilst also developing a new future and we need to achieve that whilst developing our own capability. We understand that our future needs to be flexible and that our contracting arrangements need to support that, whilst also reflecting the needs of commercial, financial and procurement requirements.

I also explored more about what the team means by, and needs from, technology leadership. There are a couple of areas where we’ve learnt rapidly through innovation and now need to mature and standardise our approaches so that we don’t get blocked. Across the team we’re approaching these issues from a number of perspectives and need to embrace those differences and use them to move forward. I’ve faced this before and been frustrated by it, so with the benefit of that experience I’m looking forward to approaching this in a constructive way.

We also had our tier 1 security risks meeting this week. I’ve obviously got a particular interest in cybersecurity for better and worse and so need to strike a balance between drawing on my experiences but not trying to apply a narrow focus onto a new context. I was able to help the security team move a new project forward and whilst I had a, frankly marginal, impact on the outcome it was a useful opportunity to show how important security was to me.

Next week I lead my second Feedback and Playback session to report to explain what I’ve done in the last two weeks and get feedback on the plan for the next couple of weeks. My big three priorities are the technology roadmap; informing the scope of a robotics process automation opportunity and exploring a possible proof of concept to inform the technical risks around our approach to CMS replatforming.

Much of that probably sounds a bit like an opaque shopping list. But at least it feels like I’m starting to get down to business.

Week 3 – 20 September

A week of three different characters. I began with a really clear idea of what my first deliverable should look like for the CPS. I thought I had just enough space to spend some time facilitating the co-design of a set of principles for how we worked. I was a little uneasy that it might be a solution looking for a problem but heard just enough cautious welcome to think I could move ahead.

But the focus of my first couple of days was dominated by the Senior Leadership Conference in the East Midlands. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but people in suits and ties focused solely on the meeting rather than drifting in and out of their inbox was a surprise.

It was an unparalleled opportunity to get to know 80-or-so senior colleagues explore the highest priorities for the service and understand the organisational story. I learnt a huge amount, some of which confirmed what I had already found but the following particularly stood out from the conference:

• The work we’re committed to doing in digital will have a huge impact on our current ways of working over the next three years – but the language doesn’t immediately connect with the way leaders see their work
• The permeability between jobs and areas means the CPS is much more of a national organisation than its strong regional structure would normally suggest (compared to other regional organisations I’ve witnessed at work)
• As the only prosecution service and the only organisation where many colleagues have worked, we lack an easy reference point to drive our agenda compared to the benchmarking that other public sector organisations can use, so honest reflection is particularly important
• There’s a determination to do the right thing for public confidence in the service and the individual experiences of victims and witnesses; and my experience in customer services might be useful for some of this work

I left the conference tired – I’d over-estimated the impact of experiencing so many new things and people in such an intensive way. Or just that running 10 miles in 30 hours on the treadmill was overly ambitious.

The third character emerged towards the end of the week. I started to feel frustrated because I could see the short-comings in my expectations for my first deliverable but couldn’t identify another ‘thing’ to show how I wanted us to work differently.

I started to work through a second idea but had two useful conversations on Friday, with Michael in my team and Mark, my manager, which gave me a clearer steer. The day felt energetic and gave me a clear focus. Over the next week I’m going to work with a group of people to explore how we can develop our technology roadmap. And whilst much of the heavy-lifting will be done by others, I’m going to find out how we might be able to do that ‘in the open’ – which would also respond to some feedback we had from a supplier engagement event over the summer.

We’re spending two days in York next week as for our senior leadership team meeting. That’s an opportunity to design the development of the roadmap and explore particularly how it relates to our Future Casework Tools programme. And then towards the end of the week I should be able to spend my first day in court, witnessing the impact of our technology in supporting the prosecution of cases.

At some point next week I also need to revisit my induction Trello and test myself on whether or not I’ve achieved the outcomes that were set, and make sure that I make as much possible the following week, so that I can end that well and set a clear direction for my work in October.

Week 2 – 12 September

Gosh, Monday feels like a long time ago. I’m currently in that position of false certainty where you recognise the acronyms, start hearing the same idea articulated by someone else, understand the key facts around major projects and remember some people’s names. And that’s just enough to know when you think you can make a valuable contribution to a discussion. It’s just not enough to know whether that’s already been considered, and so you sound like a bore; will land really badly, so you sound like a drunk or is just wildly optimistic, so you sound like a child.

With that in mind, on Monday I decided to move to the narrow point of the double diamond by the end of the week. We’re at the precipice of some pretty big projects: completing our laptop rollout, going to market for replatforming our case management system and testing a smarter way of doing redaction. I’m keen to play my part in making these a success. I know the first thing I deliver will have symbolism so want to make a good choice, but I can see five different opportunities. Thanks to a conversation with Gemma, I decided to capture the thinking in a show & tell format and run it past the senior team. I called it a ‘playback and feedback’ session because I want to set a clear expectation of working in the open but really don’t want to get hung-up on Agile language.

I’ve had a small number of really thoughtful, constructive reactions to the presentation.    As usual, there isn’t one right answer.   

There were three conversations that I found particularly energising. I met Steve, our CFO. He’s relatively new to the CPS and responsible for making sure we’ve got a set of rigorous but proportionate controls in place. More importantly, he’s an absolute role-model for how to synthesise the personal and professional in a conversation with staff.

Moira and I spent an hour together talking about the design of the Future Casework Tools tender (it was meant to be half an hour, but we were finding it too interesting). There is no choice that is without risk, so I was trying to put myself in the position of someone bidding for the work in order to understand how we might structure it to play to different suppliers’ strengths.

I also enjoyed meeting Russell’s Modern Workplace team. Darryn asked a great question about what was on my bucketlist, which was an extremely effective way of getting me to talk imaginatively about some of the things we could do. I talked too much with too little knowledge, but left feeling really positive. (I just hope it didn’t entirely miss the mark for the audience!!)

And for the second week running there were no major operational incidents. It’s easy to take that for granted, so I’m reminding myself how privileged it is to be in that position. And how much work we need to do to ensure we stay in that position.

Next week my diary is dominated by the two-day Senior Leaders Conference in East Midlands. It’s a great opportunity to meet a lot of new people (without Teams to help me remember names) and gain a much richer understanding of their world and how we can help. I’m on course to run 30 miles this week so need to find a decent running route around ‘East Midlands’ to keep the pace next week.