Week 27: 6-10 March

I’m doing a course at Harvard Business School online which has introduced me to a catchy phrase: return on management. It’s not much more complex than it sounds: ensuring that you focus on the things that matter. I’ve been grappling with this for a few years but armed with my colour-coded diary and a small piece of work to put in place a set of measures to help understand our performance against the strategy, I’ve never been clearer on whether or not I’m maximising my return on management.

This week I spent about 20 hours on things that were strategic, important or both. That’s an improvement on last week (I’ve not classified the work out of hours in either week). For now, I’m managing really carefully how many things I’m classifying as important or strategic to avoid gaming my own stats. But it also feels about right: a week in which I was often productive but fell a bit short of knowing that I’d been massively effective. In similar fashion I achieved two of my four goals and moved forward with the other two, but fell short of completion.

There were a couple of things this week where I know I’m struggling. In both cases there are enough elements that are familiar to make me feel as though I know what it should look like and that it doesn’t. But equally there are enough bits that are slightly different that I’m not absolutely confident I don’t just need to work within those differences and realign my expectations. The one that’s easier to write about is a programme that I’m running. We spent a bit of time in previous months trying to set the board up to make sure that we had a common purpose and we knew how we wanted to work together. I felt that board meeting this week fell significantly short of that. The fault is mine alone; I’m the person responsible for the programme and chaired the meeting. But I also haven’t yet worked out what to change or how to make it more effective. There’s three weeks until the next one for me to figure that out.

We’ve also had a collision of a few different procurements all requiring attention this week. We knew in November that it was a possibility and thought we’d worked hard to avoid it but for a bunch of different reasons, we fell into the trap. On the upside, the team worked really effectively to swarm around the challenge in order to meet key deadlines. Looking at the pipeline for the remainder of the year, being good at that is going to get more important.

There’s a busy end to this month with conferences in Liverpool and Bristol. So the next week or so needs to have a strong focus on keeping things going. I’m spending some time over the weekend on a couple of business cases that need to be pushed through the sausage factory and am hoping that next week I can find some quality time to pull together the dashboards necessary to track our strategy development. But I’m particularly looking forward to a session I’m running with our SLT to introduce tools to help our collaboration.

So my goals for next week are to:

  1. Agree the outline case for the Ensuring Service Continuity programme
  2. Ensure we have a clear plan for our WiFi programme
  3. Develop a draft of our performance measurement plan for feedback