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.