Excited by the possibilities

Week 13: 28 November – 2 December

I took my uncertainty and doubt into the start of this week. I was resigned to the fact that it was the calendar was against me and it would be unlikely to get anything moving this side of Christmas. By Monday afternoon I could not only feel short of energy but didn’t really care if I showed it.

But a conversation on Tuesday morning with Michael to design our proof of concept for our Future Casework Tools programme had me fired up. We went straight from that to sharing our draft document with our partner, NTT Global. In the afternoon I had a meeting with Tony from the Police Digital Service. He’s a former Police Officer rather than a technical expert but we have a similar perspective on the importance of inter-agency collaboration, done right. I’m planning to bring together some people from across the sector in early 2023 to discuss their user needs from our technology roadmap and see whether there’s interest in aligning our work.

I carried that optimism and positivity into Wednesday. I had a discussion on cloud readiness and devops with one of our partners before our technology leadership meeting explored our technology strategy, how we might form a TDA, and what we wanted to do differently to role-model making decisions with data. I made some progress towards one of my objectives by discussing how we could create opportunities for colleagues and suppliers to get closer to our users. I spent the afternoon getting up to speed with the design of the Digital Case File project. It’s our major investment over the next two years so I wanted to understand all the moving parts and to what extent it aligned (or could be changed to align) with our Future Casework Tools strategy.

Thursday was a bit less productive because so little of my day was allocated to meetings. I had a similar pattern on Friday. With a bit more planning I could have cracked through a couple of really big things but with a bit of tiredness after four days in Petty France, and too little running, I wasted the opportunity.

However, I had Friday night to myself so managed to crack through a couple of the things on the to-do list that required a bit more concentration

So in terms of my goals:

1. I facilitated a discussion amongst our architects and designed a survey to help determine what things might constitute the MVP of our technology platform
2. I drafted a brief for the work to run discovery and build a prototype platform, which is currently with colleagues for comment (I’ve also started drafting a business case)
3. We have an agreed brief for the proof of concept

I’ve managed to squeeze a couple of items onto the agenda for next week’s Senior Leadership Team meeting so by the end of next week I plan to have:

1. A proposal to establish a Technical Design Authority, using the Service Standard and Technology Code of Practice as our initial frameworks for decision making, ready for consideration by one of our organisational governance boards
2. A plan to go to market for support to develop our Technology Platform
3. An agreed vision and strategic objectives for our technology roadmap

I’m also leading a set of conversations to try and iron out a commercial issue with one of our projects, which will take up some time and energy – but is even more important to get right.

That notwithstanding, I’m also particularly excited by a small discussion group that’s meeting at the end of next week to explore our ways of working. I’ve an open mind about what emerges but have a rough concept of using it to form an action learning set to explore how we can build our culture. It’s not an exclusive group (but I did try and identify a diverse group of people in the initial invitations) so if you’re in the department and want to get involved, do let me know.

I don’t know if that’s sufficient to make me feel like I’m on track to accomplish something, but it’s certainly a better position than a fortnight ago.