Week 30: 27-31 March

I met two of my three goals this week. We had a useful discussion at the TDA about the outcomes our document redaction project needs to achieve in order to move into production. We were trying a sort of ‘pre-emptive governance’ to make it easier for the team to understand what’s needed from their work over the next few weeks. CPS hasn’t been responsible for building many apps before so we’re breaking new ground. It’s probably often painful for the team but if we do it well, we’ll make it easier for the people that come next.

We’ve also made important progress with the WiFi business case. We’ve got a clear understanding of the costs of the approach and designed a consultation exercise with prospective suppliers to test our potential model. However, we didn’t get to the point where there’s a finalised business case – so I’m not sure I can chalk it up as a win.

We presented the digital casework programme to the Senior Leaders Conference in Bristol mid-week. I didn’t actually give a particularly good presentation, but the power of the example was enough to carry it. It was a powerful juxtaposition to make people sit through the tedious process ‘as is’ and showing the benefits of the automation at scale. And I think it stuck with the audience the extent to which this was a cross-team effort.

I’ve taken copious notes from the SLC. I’ve had feedback that I don’t give enough visibility to my team of the conversations that I’m in and their not – and they are completely right. I’ve also worked for people who do this incredibly well and want to get better. But with a rich, two-day session the thought of writing these up is pretty intimidating.

We’ve also reached the end of our first quarter of using OKRs. By my reckoning we’ve achieved nine, four remain in progress and we’ve made no material progress on the 14th. I’d have settled for that in January – particularly given the ones that we’ve achieved are the most important.

I’ve also been giving a lot of thought to how to apply what I’m learning from the Harvard online course I’m doing about strategy execution, We’ve now identified some key goals that we’re going to use to measure progress against our strategy (part of a ‘diagnostic control system’ according to Professor Simon). I want to turn to our ‘belief systems’- why we work in the way that we do. The more I look the more I see lots of patterns that we want to accentuate but also teams struggling when they try to work together as we haven’t established a norm.

Next week I’m on holiday, so I didn’t set any goals. I’ve got to complete my ‘capstone challenge’ for my course; explaining the biggest strategy execution challenge we’re facing. Shortly after I get back we’ll do the second of our ‘strategy all-hands’ and give our first award to the person or team who have contributed the most to moving forward our strategy (part of our ‘boundary systems’). So plenty to think about, which is for the best. There are enough bank holidays coming up that we’ll have to really focus if we’re to develop enough momentum to take us into the summer.  

Actually, I forgot: there was a lovely end to the week. The team that had come together over a weekend (and beyond) to support CPS through our connectivity outage received a ‘Director’s commendation’. Having time to reflect on it, it’s really nice to know that we were recognised despite the fact that we were helping to fix something that should ‘just’ work and that we work for an organisation that has this culture.