Weeknote 10.2022

I’m absolutely convinced I put in a significant shift this week. Yet on Friday when I compared progress against my goals for the week I was left spluttering: surely there had to be a mistake? I couldn’t have failed this badly! Maybe two nights out distorted my sense of how much I’d actually done.

So here’s a flavour of what the week entailed, so you can come to your own conclusions. 

I will take temporary charge of our applications management teams from next week, following some recent departures from the team. I had a detailed discussion with the team about the key pieces of work involved to ensure we had the right support arrangements in place for our social care products, whilst recognising where we would need to ‘respond to events’. I also designed a format for the weekly meeting that would help us get a shared sense of the priorities, blockers and performance. I’m feeling energised by the opportunity. 

We briefed a group of councillors on the software we’ve developed in partnership with FutureGov to manage applications to join the housing register. I sprang a surprise on the team by asking them to show it on a mobile, as they began the demo. Of course it worked! At the end of the week the Product Owner and I started scoping out the roadmap for further improvements – particularly around applicants recording a change of circumstances. The project also represents an interesting design challenge; for most people, joining the housing register isn’t their best option for securing appropriate housing. So whilst we want to make it easy for people who need to, the user need is more complex than the transactional service suggests. 

I also dipped into the design of the service to distribute the government’s energy rebate to council taxpayers. For residents in receipt of direct debit, it’s really quite straightforward. But it quickly becomes complex for those that aren’t and where people live together but don’t share money (students sharing a house, for example). The guidance makes a number of assumptions about how the service will be provided but doesn’t provide any of the tools to enable it to be done. There have been lots of pan-London conversations so we’re learning from each other but inevitably pace and capacity will produce different processes to achieve the same outcome. 

On Thursday morning I joined an executive education course run by DLUHC and AWS. We heard some great examples of digital transformation from around the world, thanks to Liam Maxwell. I feel pretty confident that I know where innovation is happening across England but know that I’m completely unsighted on innovation in other cities around the world. GDS was much-mimicked on a national level, but I’d love to know more about regional and local initiatives. Mark Thompson was at his provocative best (which, given the format, is particularly impressive). I’m sure he both managed to criticise the sector for being too dependent on too few suppliers and not collaborating enough. 

Our fortnightly repairs improvement board met, The board is focused on a significant number of short term actions to address a backlog of repairs. Part of the discussion was focused on our work to enable a major contractor to use our systems. This will enable us to provide a significantly better experience because currently we have to put a tenant on hold and phone the contractor before we can update them on the progress of a repair. We’re also gearing up to provide the ability to book a repair online, reusing the work developed by City of Lincoln (which in turn, built on work we did in 2019). 

The previous day, the Chief Executive had convened a small group to discuss transformation in the borough. The starting point was very different – our capabilities, our budgets and the challenges in our communities. Both of these perspectives are vitally important. We can’t deliver meaningful change if we don’t truly understand where we are. And we can’t change radically if we don’t understand how things could be profoundly different. But the contrast between these three conversations (repairs, AWS and our transformation) made me reflect on how often the different horizons, drivers and lived experiences more frequently constrain rather than enable transformation. 

Different perspectives was also an underlying feature of the retrospective that our management team had on Monday. We’ve talked previously about being aware of where we might be in danger of being too similar. So this was a healthy exercise, and I hope that I listened more than I spoke because I learnt more about my own strengths and weaknesses. 

There were some other bits, too:

  • We’ve been working closely with Idox on the launch of a new piece of software to manage building control, which also enables residents to self-serve. After a couple of irritating delays due to small but important bugs, we’re expecting to be able to launch it next week – thanks to the persistence and patience of Sachin and Soraya
  • I caught up with Chris to learn more about his experiences as a solution architect on our Single View project which, in turn, helped me think more carefully about how we work with agencies
  • Our customer services management team met to develop our service OKRs for the next financial year
  • I was quizzed as part of a review of how our facilities management and property teams work together
  • I organised a set of short check-ins with some of our new joiners in customer services to learn more about how we welcome, train and support new colleagues 
  • There’s a piece of work where we’re not sure if we’re making the right decisions about what to buy and what to build, so we’re agreeing how we best explore that at pace – delivering where we can but ensuring we don’t spend money that we later regret

So, maybe I just didn’t set the right goals. Maybe I wasn’t disciplined enough in saying no. Probably a bit of both. So I’d love to commit publicly to my goals for the next week. But right now, I need to take a bit of time to filter. And right, right now, I need to do a bit of Cello practice. I’ve a concert in 11 hours and the Cello’s start two of the pieces. If the tuning isn’t bang-on, we’ll lose both members of the audience.