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

Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 2)

Powering through

Week 35: 15-19 May

I needed a productive week, and I got one. It was entirely my preference that I worked for a decent proportion of the bank holiday weekend. I’d identified 18 things that I wanted to get done and completed the 15 most important. We had an all day workshop with Microsoft on Tuesday so I had feared the consequences for my inbox by Wednesday morning but I started the week in a good position and it was enough to be in control throughout the following week. Spare a thought, though, for all the teams that were on the receiving end of my flurry of weekend productivity. Delaying sending emails until the working week didn’t stop them needing to be read!

Our day at Microsoft had a strong focus on productivity and the potential posed by the application of Large Language Models. There is huge potential to transform many of the drudge tasks that so many of us have to do on a daily basis – whether that’s summarising documents, identifying actions during meetings or writing standard replies to emails. But we’ll need to think really carefully about people’s first experience of using these tools. Knowing when and how to use them will be critical for building our users’ confidence and overcoming cynicism that it’s a new generation of Mr Clippy ‘assistance’.

On Wednesday morning we had our Strategic Leadership Team meeting. Almost regardless of the agenda I look forward to the group coming together and exploring key topics about how we work. We had a really good discussion to review the key results for the quarter across our respective teams and then about the three strands of work that are starting to experiment with different ways of working. I’ll be leading one of the strands which will experiment with product ownership for our mission critical system, a multidisciplinary DevOps team for a product and a Community of Practice.

The TDA had an important discussion this week about a technical decision associated with one of our priority projects. Whilst we identified a clear way forward I suspect that the conversation re-created some fault-lines that we’ve been working hard to reduce. I can see the problem that we need to solve and I can see the end-state we need to reach. I don’t have a clear enough picture of the route we take to get there.

The other feature of my week was about the good and the bad of early conversations with prospective suppliers. I’ve made a habit of refusing to engage with generic sales pitches that come into my inbox. I could spend a decent proportion of my week spending time explaining information that sales people could have found out themselves with a tiny bit of investment; that’s not good value for the public. But I had two unsolicited contacts that put me in a particularly bad mood. I still remember how hard it is to build a sales network and you need a level of brazenness that I didn’t find easy. But you also need judgement to understand when no means no, and unsolicited calls to my personal will always land badly.

But I was also fortunate enough to have some conversations this week which were very worthwhile in helping understand how we can be a ‘better buyer’ with people who had evidently worked hard to prepare a good conversation. One of the reasons I’m so looking forward to publishing our technology strategy is that it gives us the opportunity to have good conversations with prospective suppliers that have done their homework.

I set three modest goals for the week and largely met them: establishing my personal objectives, which are now linked to the technology strategy and the OKR framework that we’re using across the Directorate. I supported the Polaris team in de-risking the product delivery which is expected in the next few weeks. The strategy tracker dashboard isn’t quite completed but the data we’ve now got is really useful and the things that are left are relatively straightforward to bring together.

There are two key features of next week: a visit to meet colleagues in Mersey-Cheshire and our first Service Standard assessment. In different ways they’re both really great learning opportunities. Alongside that, I’m also hoping to complete a business case for the Future Casework Tools cloud strategy and finalise a technical paper on how we manage devices.

Time to get going

Week 34: 2-5 May

I had a proper bank holiday weekend which involved a Haven Holiday park, lots of beach games and too many late nights. I didn’t even get round to writing my weeknote which is a rarity.

So by Tuesday morning I wasn’t quite ready for work. It felt like one of those weeks when you’re losing one nil from the first minute and don’t really threaten the opposition goal at all in the first half. My first meeting was at 9am on Tuesday during which my internet connection kept cutting out and I didn’t regain control of my inbox, my preparation before meetings or a sense of control in my week until Thursday.

The upside, as far as it goes, was that I’d set three fairly modest goals: to communicate our link sharing capabilities to a couple of key groups, to agree the scope of the options analysis for our Wifi business case and agree the user survey and the process for getting it live. I met all three – even if largely they were met on my behalf.

We’re currently developing a repository to support teams designing, building, releasing and improving digital products. It’s one of those tasks which is never ‘done’ and some of what we’ll publish to begin with will only serve to acknowledge the things we haven’t learnt or standardised yet. But it’s an important step towards our strategic objective of being able to make small changes constantly and learn whether they’re improving outcomes.

This month’s strategy all-hands was on Thursday and I’d been a bit more thoughtful about the design of the session after the valuable feedback I got last time around. At the end of the session attendees gave 3.9/5 for ‘increasing my understanding of how my work contributes to our objectives’, which was 10% higher than the previous session. I was particularly grateful for the work Debbie and Russell had done to unpack our key results and explain the role of each team in achieving them.

Next week, we’re spending all of Tuesday with Microsoft and have two workshops dominating Wednesday. Luckily I’ve got a fair bit of spare time on my own this weekend so I’m looking forward to getting some admin out of the way so that I can start next week better. But I’ve set similarly modest goals for the four days:

  1. To complete the strategy tracker dashboard
  2. To support the Polaris team ahead of the first release to users of the document redaction tool
  3. To agree my personal objectives for the next year

Gathering momentum

Week 23: 6-10 February

A couple of people remarked that things feel more positive now than they did at the start of the year. I agree and think it’s a combination of reasons. We’ve got a couple of important pieces of work starting to reach a point of maturity. The proof of concept for how we disaggregate CMS is likely to deliver something of value to users in the next couple of sprints. It’s the first thing I’ve sponsored and we’re only six-eight weeks into the project (depending on how you measure it). The project to develop a technology platform is coming together, with agencies submitting tenders at the end of the week. And the draft technology strategy and roadmap is now ready to be shared with external partners for early feedback. That’s three of my five ambitions for the year nicely-poised.

I’m pleased to report that my goals were much better chosen this week. There were four, ranging from the important but not time-consuming to the important and demanding; I finished the week with all four completed. And there were a couple of occasions when it felt like I’ve made progress with something that I’ve been chipping away at for some time, from different angles. We’ve used a couple of examples of where we were getting stuck in delivering non-standard software to users to design a safety valve in the process so that we can come to a decision inside two weeks. And we’ve agreed a set of common goals across our Directorate which reflect genuine choices about what’s most important.

We’re doing a Productivity Ninja course as a team, which is helping establish a new shared vocabulary in the team (as well as giving us some practical tips for working productively). The facilitator was surprised to hear that most participants reckon they have just 8 hours available each week to focus on what’s most important though I suspect that’s typical of public services.

Coincidentally, I’ve started a course this week with Harvard Business School Online. It contains a video with the CEO of Adidas, Kasper Rorsted, who says that he reviews his diary each week to ensure it’s aligned to his top three priorities. I did 37 meetings this week and in retrospect, five of them aligned to my priorities which is better than I feared. I also had 4.5 hours free to devote to my priorities. It’s not that the remaining 40-odd hours were spent badly, in the main. I could justify the value of each activity. What I’ve learnt from this is the importance of actively aligning how I spend my time, my goals for the week and our strategic objectives.

We also spent some time this week talking about the findings from our disproportionality research and what happens next. There’s a corporate statement which explains what we’ve found out and what we need to do next. But it was obviously important to ensure that our teams had a chance to ask questions and contribute to the discussion about what it means for our work to deliver justice for victims and witnesses.

This week was also exciting because I attended an event for people who previously worked for the Institute for Public Policy Research. I worked there for three years on a part time basis, whilst I was at university. It was an exciting place to work and the experience was hugely formative for me. It took a while, but I’ve tried to bring the same sense of mission, organised-chaos and togetherness to teams that I’ve led subsequently.

Next week I’m off for half term which typically combines with Valentine’s Day and my wife’s birthday. It’s almost frustrating to have to put things down just when they feel like they’re gathering momentum. But I also know I’m a bit tired because I’m not getting out of bed when my alarm goes off, and I’m spending slightly too long on my phone at night. So I’ll use my weeknote to share more about my early reflections on the course.

Time: the most precious commodity

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

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

Possibilities

Weeknote 20.22

My first weeknote for a while. Purdah is a handy excuse, but there were a couple of weeks where I just couldn’t face it – and then I fell out of the habit. Tonight it’s just a desperate attempt to spend some time not thinking about Sunday; its possibilities. 

Cost of living has been high profile for a number of months. Zoe’s team has been working across the council to scope the opportunities and challenges associated with providing an income maximisation service. We administer a number of small grants for people in crisis, and there are wider support opportunities available in the voluntary sector. The team’s building on its effective work to increase the efficacy of the DHP service and it’s an exciting project. 

Agile isn’t hard. But it’s easy (possibly easier, even) to make the simple things harder than they need to be and neglect entirely the bits that are deceptively difficult. Our convention has been to work in sprints because of the benefits the fortnightly rythms provide for stakeholder engagement. But we don’t consistently set sprint goals that express the value delivered for users and they’re rarely quantitative. I’m pleased with the tracker idea that Alex has developed and David is picking up through the Modern Tools programme.

Making good documentation so often becomes like New Years Resolutions. But we’ve got a couple of exciting opportunities to pitch our products to other councils so Marian has been doing the hard work to explain the value of what we’ve done and how it works, at a high level, so that colleagues in other places can consider our open source solutions alongside some of the more high profile alteratives. 

Personally I’m never more tedious than when I discover something which I should have known earlier. It makes me an evangelist out of a sense of guilt and desperation. My latest revelation has been the importance of looking beyond delivering something towards how we support it. We’ve got a couple of things at the moment where we’re picking up work that’s got a clear vision for getting to live but nothing beyond that point. I’m also currently responsible for applications support, which is part of it. But I need to work a bit harder on how I pitch it because I know that my former self wouldn’t have listened carefully to my current self. 

In the work of the TDA (ie outside the meeting) we realised the value of good governance and our leadership principles. We’ve twice visited a thorny data sharing issue with a software supplier. We needed to check back to the notes to make sure we’d correctly interpreted the decisions that we’d made and were committing to the right actions once we’d disagreed well.

One of the tensions In grappling with at the moment is expediency versus strategy. We’ve got a huge strategic potential to develop a high quality people record, using a Person API across our built products. This leans into Hackney’s heritage in master data management and the valuable Citizen Index. But we also need to deliver value to users now and there’s alway a legitimate reason why the Person API isn’t quite right for now. Vision without execution is an hallucination.

Networks are important. I found the value of the senior managers network through COVID and the cyberattack. But the opposite also applied: with that pressure we didn’t have time to invest in personal relationships, and with a lot of change at senior level, that became harder. The Senior Managers’ Network this week wasn’t always easy but nevertheless represented an important opportunity to try and move beyond those conversations and rebuild some personal relationships. 

Each week I’ve been setting personal goals, until my recent weeknote hiatus. Mostly their absence has been negative. In spare pockets of time I’ve lacked the focal point that they’ve provided. But there’s been one obvious advantage: my diary has been a bit freer to respond to stuff that needs attention immediately. 

So on to next week – the purgatory between Wolves and Madrid. But with a conference about public sector data, a couple of projects that need focused attention as well as some financial planning I’m sure to be busy enough to stay distracted. 

Looking long and acting short

Weeknote 8.2022

Just last week I was on holiday. It did actually feel like one. Little did I know that when I started reading Dresden by Sinclair McKay, there would be war again in Europe. Two years ago I heard the Army CGS say that global terrorism would look like a pimple on the nose compared to interstate conflict. The ability to look long yet deliver now, was a key theme of my week.

One of the big things I did this week was convene structured chats with team members to explore how we’re responding to the staff survey. The survey is a crucial annual temperature check of whether we’re working together well enough to respond to what residents need. There are changes we’ve already made and some more things starting so I needed feedback on whether these were right. 

We changed a lot, quickly in customer services as I started at the beginning of the pandemic. We’ve achieved some really big things which I assumed would take years, when I first got the job. But there are a number of things we’ve done which we need to keep reinforcing to make sure they stick (I talked earlier about how transformation remains dynamic not just an achievement). We need to work harder to discuss performance by taking a complete view. The unique ability to manage performance in real-time can lure us into actions that improve one thing only to create a problem elsewhere.

The second cohort of Link Workers completed their academy this week. This group has achieved some impressive outcomes for residents by listening to their problems and finding creative ways of brokering the support they need. It was particularly rewarding to spend time in my regular meeting with the Mayor – as our political lead – discussing the problems we tackled. Now we need to create the environment so that they can take the experience into the fundamental way they work so that the impetus doesn’t fade after the first experience. 

The recovery board had a retrospective this week (which I blogged about separately). One of the themes in this work is how we make the right decisions for now, whilst also looking at the longer term. Some of the biggest complexity associated with our work is navigating around things that were initially planned as tactical fixes or ‘quick wins’ which have become embedded through years of custom and practice. 

I had three conversations this week that helped me think differently about roadmaps. I’ve always been sceptical, frankly. Yes to a set of clear, mid-term outcomes. Yes to an immediate set of tasks. But articulating the route between those two points can be fraught with difficulty. But firstly, one of my peers said “you underestimate the value of roadmaps in showing staff that their area isn’t going to be forgotten”. And in a different conversation one of my team said “when you don’t have agency, a roadmap can help you look forward to when you’ll see improvements”.

I’m excited about next week. I’ve got three full days where I can focus on a single thing each day: we’re doing strategic planning on Monday, I’m at a conference on Thursday and Friday currently looks like a miracle. So there’s an opportunity to put some of this into practice.  Obviously it’s more likely that by midday on Monday I’ll be faced with so many different issues flying into the inbox that I’ll have forgotten all about it. But it’s nice to pretend. 

Squinting through the fog

Weeknote 4.2022

This week was harder. It felt like all the things that I haven’t done or (worse) where I had presided over things deteriorating, came together. By Wednesday evening I was asking existential questions about what value I really brought. 

But I did have three goals for the week. They may have taken up around five per cent of my time but probably account for 95% of the value. And it was motivational enough that I felt ok by Friday evening. Three teams now have a set of draft OKRs and two more have a process for getting there. I’ve designed a workshop to help us explore opportunities and blockers to articulate the outcomes expected from projects. And we’re starting to understand what’s needed to operationalise a regular response to frequent callers in customer services.  

Our recovery board is starting to show its value. We identify a handful of projects each week from the register where the weeknotes, show & tell or colleague feedback suggests they might need help. And then we agree how we’re going to find that help. The danger is that sort of meeting just becomes an information gathering exercise without creating any new value. But we’ve helped make progress on three projects over the last two weeks.

We had a challenge with our Technical Design Authority, though. I’ve written an internal weeknote on that. But the big thing is how we create a safe space where we can examine technical risks and communicate that to colleagues in a way that remains situationally aware and user centric without seeming aloof or high-handed. 

One of the big things I’m learning about running a high profile operational service (IT is both those things, but somehow still different) is the things you need to continue to care for because they’re dynamic. There are some things which, once achieved, don’t get un-done. But there are practises and behaviours that you need to continue to work at because otherwise they fall backwards. The challenges with those things are making time to continue to pursue them, alongside all the new things you want to do. They can also be hard to spot because you’ve mentally ticked them off the list. 

We’d made some really good progress to improve customer journeys with our planning service last year, but over the last three months some of those benefits have been lost. We made some changes to how we prioritise questions mid last week which led to an immediate improvement, but more work will be necessary to get back to where we were. 

Over the last year I’ve not been able to invest nearly enough time in relationships with colleagues across the Council. Some of that is about remote working – I used to make sure I bumped into lots of folks around the campus. Complacency probably played a part, too: lots of new senior leaders have arrived and I haven’t caught up. It was good to spend some time this week with a new colleagues in our adult social care team and it reminded me how much more of that I should do. 

Next week really does feature all the things – ranging from elections planning to cybersecurity; temporary accommodation to business licensing. So my goals are going to be important to give me a sense of purpose and focus. I’m going to stick with three: a clear roadmap for our temporary accommodation work; a Technical Design Authority meeting that helps embed our principles and starting the next conversation about how we can re-use our work to help other Councils.

What I’ve learnt in 2021

I don’t have the same zest to reflect on the year that I have usually. I’m spending much more time looking forward to next year. Nevertheless, it’d be a shame to break the annual routine for a year which offered so very many learning opportunities. 

Doing, practicing and learning are all different

It’s easy to assume “I must be learning so much from this period” which you’re doing something novel. You might even be stepping back sufficiently to observe things that are happening. All of those are important enablers of learning. But adding them together doesn’t produce learning any more than practicing something badly, or practising the wrong thing helps you learn. It took real effort this year to step back from the week to week, or the fortnightly rhythms we moved to in summer to actually learn. 

I accepted only a few speaking opportunities this year but prioritised those which forced me to think carefully about what I was learning. The 3,000 or so people who watched the ‘cloud, unless’ presentation remains a highlight of the year. 

Re-reading some of my notes from previous years has been slightly sobering: to see how much easier it is to spot challenges than to work actively to overcome them!

We’re losing the argument for simplicity

Digital, service design and good user experiences all depend on simplicity. But there’s no consensus that simple is good. Everywhere I see people making things complicated. Because some people have complex needs, we make design solutions that are complex for everyone so that no one is excluded. By adding validation steps to a process we provide staff and managers a fake comfort blanket that no one can be entirely at fault.  The argument shouldn’t be about more or less regulation. It should be about the costs of making things complicated and the disempowering affects of a ‘one size fits all’ design.  

Setting good goals is hard

I’ve set somewhere between 150 and 200 goals this year. Most of them weren’t good goals. Some worked; I wanted to set new personal bests for running over each distance up to half marathon. Some did the job eventually (establish a connection to the Public Services Network). The odd one barely made sense a fortnight after it’d been set. Far too many just weren’t thoughtful enough. 

A good goal has, I think, three attributes (assuming that a prerequisite is that the goal is robust enough to withstand most organisational winds). It defines done, it can be achieved within the time available, and it should corral people who want to achieve it (ideally because ‘done’ is a self-evident benefit). Good goals take more time to set than I allowed and probably more communication than I invested in. 

Owning a strategy is harder than conceiving it

I used to be paid for writing strategies. If you understand a market or sector well enough, there are economies of scale involved in doing it lots of times. Writing good strategies is hard, which is why it so often gets outsourced. But owning a strategy is harder. 

In customer services as well as in IT, there were moments when we had conversations along the lines of ‘yes, we agree with all the above, but’. 

Owning a strategy means sticking to it when others question it. It means confronting the inevitability that it draws opponents, not being surprised. It means working through the opposition, not just ignoring it. That’s hard because it’s about people and relationships – and because so much of it is unspoken. You couldn’t outsource _that_ however much it might appeal. 

The limits of a crisis

It’s a cliche that crises shouldn’t go to waste. We weren’t going to spend 18 months to recover from the cyberattack onto solutions that weren’t even right for the internet-era, let alone for 2022. But many people were craving certainty which that didn’t provide. They wanted less ambiguity when more helped actually reduce uncertainty.  And some wanted to see technology a separate workstream just at the moment that it needed to be considered holistically. 

And that’s where most of the effort went this year. 

There are some easy answers: Invest more time in taking people with you, exhaust all the alternative options publicly, get alignment at the top. My experience was that it’s not so easy in a crisis. 

In a different context, I tried to manufacture a sense of crisis in order to accelerate some internal decision making. It helped to galvanise some activity over a short term but wasn’t enough to keep people aligned for long enough to get the thing achieved more quickly. 

Culture is also dynamic 

I’d like to think that I’ve now helped change the culture of three services in the last five years . But I’d previously believed that once established, culture is deep-rooted. Clearly much of it is. But I’d under-estimated how dynamic it can also be. Over the last year the Council has replaced three quarters of its most senior leadership tier and our IT service has faced an existential crisis. 

Some of the changes that this has brought about are more visible to me than others. But one of the things that made me particularly proud was to read the results of an anonymous survey of our software engineers which found that there had been significant change in the last year – and almost all of it in the right direction. 

There are aspects of our culture I’m keen to influence further (our contact centres still feel too separately, and customer services still identifies separately to IT) but it feels like less heavy lifting might be required – and I think the firmly-rooted values play a key part in this. The link work pilot explored the skills and capabilities we needed as a service, not whether or not it was the right thing to do or whether we were the right people to do it. 

Going again will be my biggest challenge

We described this year to be one that defines the decade in IT. And in terms of the big decisions about technology, that was about right. Next year we’ll have to finish the job whilst also showing what’s now possible for our residents and businesses as a result of the choices we’ve made. Some of that won’t be obvious (the time not spent in trying to patch-up old technology) and we’ll need to help set people’s expectations. 

We will be doing that with a new structure and some new ways of working as we step down from the daily rhythms of our Silver command. And to do that we’ll be making some important appointments, once we’ve finalised the posts and jobs in our new structure. 

Our proactive outreach to people who might be at risk is starting to yield really positive outcomes. I’m really keen to extend this to other types of service delivery as part of a broader redefinition of what user-centred services means in the Council. 

To make a success of all of that we’ll need to develop a refreshed sense of purpose, excitement for what’s possible and impatience for what we can achieve. And I know that if I’m to play my part in that, I’ll need to really feel it in a way that I’ve lacked of late. It’s what sports teams do each year. But I learnt from my experience of coming back from holiday in June that you can’t force it.

It’s not a year I’d want to repeat (although my 40th birthday celebrations were exactly how I’d wanted them to be). But I think it’s also given us many of the building blocks necessary to ensure that next year enables us to achieve things that simply wouldn’t be possible at most other places. 

Digital transformation beyond exemplars

Digital strategies start with exemplars in the public sector. There are good reasons to do this. Deliver value to users quickly. Start small, fail fast. Learn through doing and build advocates. 

But the more the tactic is used, the less effective it becomes (as with any tactic). Some exemplars manage around rather than confront legacy technology. Starting with users and working backwards can produce duplicate technology rather than reusable components. Working around leadership and cultural barriers doesn’t defeat them. Creating shadow IT (Slack, GitHub) isn’t sustainable. These things not only need to be done but become bigger risks if they remain. 

So how to understand what to do next? In Hackney, our API strategy and then our DevOps programmes helped us tackle more aspects of legacy IT. Now our work on common components is helping us build better technology quicker. But it’d be generous to suggest that was part of a coherent strategy. We evolved to tackle the next challenge we identified. 

Whilst wondering this, I was watching a game of American Football. I don’t really understand it but the central part of the game is simple enough. Two teams line up opposite each other. The team in control of the ball has four attempts to get the ball 10 yards up the pitch. They begin by passing the ball backwards. If they make progress, they then line-up again for the next play. 

All this drew me naturally to digital transformation. You have a set of players on your team, trying to make progress against the ‘opponents’ (things, mostly) by either getting in behind or just blocking them (and your opponents have similar intent). If you don’t make sufficient progress you lose distance and then, ultimately, control of the ball. And to stretch the analogy too far, the ball always moves backwards first, as you step back to understand user needs. 

Imagining strategy as a map has worked well for Simon Wardley. And for some time, I’ve wanted to be able to re-create the dynamism of a Wardley Map, whilst also considering the multiple dimensions that exist in transforming an organisation. 

So, how can that help you visualise a digital strategy?

Start with seeing the whole field, and measuring progress towards the goal.  Transformation can only be achieved by working across the different attributes of an organisation. The image below also divides the field up into five channels – a simple Target Operating Model.

We then look at the ‘players’ for the offense (those advancing transformation) and those for the defense (those forces trying to prevent transformation). Your model might contain different versions of these – perhaps names of various teams or organisational units. 

Then picture a play: this one is the ‘exemplars tactic’, It demonstrates that exemplars can be designed to tackle elements of technology and data, culture and mindset, skills and capabilities and products and services but by no means all. 

Three head-to-head battles created by an exemplar tactic

In this play we’re assuming that:

  1.  We’re redesigning a service but still accepting the starting-point – eg. A better school admissions service within the constraints of the 40-page DfE guidance
  2. We build a small team with some exposure to digital skills, developing a handful of advocates in one department
  3. The team is empowered, with psychological safety but is working in temporary project-based structures
  4. The business case and procurement has accepted the waterfall paradigm
  5. We’re adopting cloud infrastructure for the service, but it works on top of legacy tech

And the combination of all these factors would still represent a pretty good exemplar, by most standards. But it’s important to see what gaps it leaves. A second, tenth or 50th exemplar will make greater distance in these battles, but also leave them more exposed. In an organisational context that might mean a change of leadership leaves then more vulnerable to re-organisation or that they’re dragged back by a failure to make more progress on the other parts of the operating model. 

Three head-to-head battles advance but are left isolated up the pitch

You might not like American football. But hopefully the idea of taking a strategic, dynamic, three dimensional look at how to transform helps you think beyond exemplars.  I’d love to learn more about your experience of playing with these tools and the insights it gives you when developing a strategy.

« Older posts

© 2024 Matthew Cain

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑