Week 29: 20-24 March 2023

It’s one of those weeks where I’ve hit Saturday and I just don’t have the energy to write a readable weeknote. I persist because of a sense that if I fall off the wagon, I won’t get back on. And one week, when I have something to say, it’ll be too significant to try and just restart the habit.

I hit only one of my three goals this week and it was the easiest to achieve. We had a really good staff conference in Liverpool, and I made a real commitment to spend time with people I knew least well.  I’ve noticed that some of my show & tell style events have been better attended in the last few weeks and this week I noticed some of the people join that I’d spent time with in Liverpool. Of course it might just be that I recognise them a bit better!

Liverpool was particularly helpful for the feedback we got to the introduction of OKRs. In a couple of areas teams said something to the effect of ‘we do important work and there isn’t a key result for us in the next quarter’ and there were some astute observations about things that were missing from the ‘effective and healthy teams and people’ objective. We’re still very much experimenting with the framework and with the opportunity to refresh each quarter, we’ve got the opportunity to incorporate these thoughts.

We didn’t close off the Wifi business case as I’d been hoping, and made even less progress with the cloud business case. The former suffered, completely reasonable, because of the amount of time that went in to the staff conference. The latter struggled because our commercial team’s operating above capacity right now and we’ve got things with more pressing deadlines at play.

Whilst I hadn’t set it as a priority, we did agree the measures we’re going to use to track delivery of the strategy; three for each of the objectives. Some of them are used more widely (we’ve adopted a version of the DORA metrics, for example). Now we need to do the hard work of creating a reporting framework and then get into the discipline of tracking the stats. I’ve been thinking about how we can introduce more of a rhythm to our leadership group meeting so that we develop good habits.

Next week is our senior leaders conference. I’m really excited (and slightly nervous) to see how our digital casework presentation lands and hoping we communicate the clear balance between ‘jam tomorrow’ and benefits today. One of my other priorities is to support the delivering of our casework search and redaction tool and, in so doing, learn about the effectiveness of our governance and what we need to evolve about how the TDA works in practice.

I’m also coming to the end of the Harvard Business School course I’ve been doing on Strategy Execution. We’ve got an essay to write at the end of the course, exploring which element of executing strategy we expect to find most challenging.

So my priorities for next week are to:

  • Agree the WiFi business case (pending feedback from an early market engagement event we’re planning)
  • Ensure we’ve identified the outcomes we need to achieve to take our redaction tool live
  • Listen and learn at the Senior Leaders Conference about what we need to do to meet and raise expectations for our digital casework programme