Week 14: 5 – 9 December

I achieved two of the three goals I set for this week. Our senior leadership team agreed to creating a Technical Design Authority and provided good feedback on the vision and strategic objectives to guide our technology roadmap. The best contributions pointed to the importance of explaining why the goals would be useful for colleagues. But the categories received positive engagement and the value of meeting each goal was largely recognised.

We haven’t quite agreed a plan to go to market for a team to help develop our technology platform, but I’m optimistic that will become clearer on Monday/Tuesday next week.

Despite that, I didn’t feel particularly positive as the week drew to a close. I started feeling a big under the weather on Tuesday, which involved a relatively early start to get to an event in Birmingham. Whilst I was a bit better on Wednesday I was still operating in second gear and even by Friday didn’t quite have the freshness or crispness to feel energetic and positive. It’s the second time I’ve been slightly unwell since the summer, which is unusual for me. I blame my lack of resilience on how infrequently it happens.

However, on Friday afternoon a group of us gathered to discuss how we work. I’d drafted five attributes of ‘good work’ (below) to start a conversation about where and when this was true for us and what we could do differently to make it more true, more often. We’ve identified a couple of things that we could do together to set a standard for how we work.

The conversation was necessarily private, but I’m sharing not to showcase my poor drafting per se but in case there are resources or tools you can point me towards which would help our thinking.

  1. We maintain a high level of motivation with regular sustenance provided by seeing the importance and impact of our work
  2. We deliver value to users regularly and work at a sustainable pace which keeps us healthy
  3. We are inclusive, embrace diversity and engage in radical candour
  4. We are psychologically safe in what we do and how we work, and can harness innovation thanks to our awareness of privacy and security issues
  5. We are open, well-networked and situationally-aware which supports our ambitions

Anyhow, it was a good conversation which did well to acknowledge the odd challenge but stay positive and constructive, although I was a bit disappointed with my am-pro efforts at facilitation at various points. So I ended the week feeling better.

I’ve got three clear(ish) goals for next week which follow on from this week’s:

  1. To design the programme to set-up the Technical Design Authority
  2. To draft the next version of our strategic objectives and put the next level of detail onto the roadmap
  3. To develop the stakeholder engagement programme for our Future Casework Tools proof of concept

But one of those weeks where the vast majority of my time is going into other things. On Monday I finally get to go to court to see the impact of our work and speak to some of the colleagues involved and at the end of the week I’ve got a couple of networking opportunities across central government. So I’ll need to use spare bits of time at the start and end of the day really well if I’m to head into the last week of the year knowing that we’ve got everything in place to make a good start to 2023.