Week 15: 12-16 December

It would have been easy to let this week slip away. When you look at the diary it’s tempting to assume not much more can be achieved until the New Year. So I had to push that little bit harder to make sure I got things done.

As I watched the snow fall on Sunday night it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas. And so when I walked up the steps of the crown court on Monday morning for my first visit to court since joining the CPS, I didn’t have high hopes for a busy day.

I spent the morning listening to a set of procedural hearings. I marvelled at the logistics involved and at the power of video conferencing. It was helpful to see how much more iterative the process of bringing criminal proceedings is than I assumed. I learnt over lunch that there’s an intention to reduce the number of hearings that occur before a case reaches trial. In the afternoon I saw a jury trial and whilst the case wasn’t directly relevant to some of the more complex technology issues we’re grappling with, the judge was a fan of digital jury bundles and had some useful observations about how they needed to work.

On Monday evening I did a briefing note for a colleague that was coming back from leave. It grew to 11 subheadings covering the things that I’d seen since they’d been away, and I forgot to include one topic so amongst other things, it made me feel like I’d been busy at the very least.

The main event on Tuesday was a prioritisation session for our Future Casework Tools programme at the Digital and Major Projects Group. One of the challenges we’ll need to explore through the programme is how we make decisions with colleagues, reconcile different ways of working whilst moving at pace. So the prioritisation session was an important starting point to ensuring the programme meets people’s expectations.

Wednesday was my best opportunity to make progress with my goals for the week. We worked with our partners, NTT Global, to ensure we had a clear scope for the discovery for our proof of concept and then to introduce them to some problem-owners to understand how we can add value. Separately, we also developed the terms of reference for our technical design authority and discussed how we could ensure it was meeting colleagues’ needs. I also had a catch-up with commercial colleagues so that we could move ahead with the procurement of a team to develop the technology platform.

The most significant feature of Thursday was a P1 incident with our network. We’d also had intermittent issues for some users accessing our core systems. The combination of the two meant it was helpful that I had an introductory session with trade union colleagues already in the diary. Both were resolved – and it’s the first P1 since I’ve joined the organisation. I was impressed by how colleagues responded to the incident. When it doesn’t happen frequently it can be harder to have those incident management practices in place. But it does mean that we need to spend time next week to ensure we understand the root cause. Any outage will feel frustrating for colleagues who are already working under pressure and they’ll expect us to do whatever’s needed to reduce the likelihood of it happening again.

At the end of the week I joined my first cross-government CTO Council. Whilst we’re theoretically all doing a similar job, each organisation is a different size and at a different state of maturity. It was interesting to hear from some perspectives very different to my own but also to understand the importance (and limitations) of collaboration across government.

Next week

I’ve got three goals for next week:

  1. To support the team in publishing the IT Service Desk requirement before Christmas. We’ll be ensuring there’s enough time for suppliers to bid and are hoping that publication before Christmas will help people prepare their plans in January
  2. To understand the critical path for going to market for the team to help develop the Technology Platform
  3. To ensure the proof of concept product team has all the tools and support they need to make rapid progress in the New Year

Depending on time, I’d also like to spend time on our roadmap. Fortunately, despite a slightly unstructured approach, it’s starting to take shape. But it would benefit from a day’s proper focus.