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.