Week 9: 31 October – 4 November

My week made sense by the end, I think, thanks to the third Playback and Feedback session I did with the team. I was ill on Wednesday and Thursday. The sort of ill when you can’t really not work. One of the upsides of working from home is that you don’t begin the day exhausted by the commute. Another is that you can summon up enough energy for a video meeting which is probably slightly less than being ‘always on’ as you are in the office.

On Thursday evening I went for a run – mostly because I’ve set a target to run the same distance this month as last and I can’t have two days off. I knew I wasn’t quite right because you shouldn’t sweat that much in five degree heat. I was trying to work out how to make the story of my last month coherent and pose some good questions to the team for the session.

I’ve been dabbling in a whole bunch of things over the last few weeks. Some of these have been chosen intentionally and others chosen by my inbox. But it felt slightly dissatisfying to not have anything to show for it. And I was starting to feel inadequate for not being able to communicate a clear purpose to my new team.

The idea I presented on Friday was that we’re builders of a technology platform. The platform already provides tools and some guides. But we can increase the notion of self-service, bring together the decisions we’ve made and provide access to data. I showed examples like Spotify, Kraken, Alibaba and the GOV.UK Design System. And I talked about the anti-patterns of a platform: depending on conversations, running a closed-ecosystem, having data everywhere, for example. My goal for the day was to get interest from members of two different teams. What was particularly noticeable about the feedback was that it all came from women; the number of women at all parts of the organisation is a real strength of the CPS.

I was quite excited by the idea and inevitably pleased with myself for coming up with it. Part of me wondered whether I was getting carried away in my ‘fever from a run’. The presentation wasn’t met with acclaim and adulation but nor did it land on stony ground. So it’s an idea that I need to develop further and probably would benefit from ‘showing the thing’. But we’ll also need to work out how it fits with our intranet and Service Now to avoid creating a knowledge silo.

Another feature of my week was some ‘getting to know you’ sessions with one of our strategic partners. I also completed the Mid Year Review process. The combination forced me to think about my priorities for the next 6 months or so, now that I’ve largely completed my discovery phase. I haven’t yet got into the drafting but am testing the following areas with team members:

  1. User centricity
  2. Technical governance
  3. The efficiency of our software development lifecycle
  4. Building our brand
  5. Leading the team

Of course, all of this meant that I went nearly another week without making a material impact on our project to develop our technology roadmap. The big question that I’ve been working through is how to identify the ‘guiding principle’ that needs to underpin the approach. I woke up on Wednesday morning thinking I had a good way forward but the more I worked with it, the less clear it became. So it’s back to the drawing board next week.

Next week

The biggest feature in my next week is the Deputy Director programme in York. Being out of the office for two days with people from across the civil service will be a real privilege, but it has a dominating affect on the diary and limits the number of things I’m able to pursue. We’re finalising the business case for our service desk tender, which then clears the ground for the work towards the end of November to define our requirements for the hosting and support of our mission critical systems.

I’m also wondering about how to design a workshop to explore how we might use data differently to help with operational recovery. I have some really simplistic ideas of what we could do, but need to tap into the core daily challenges faced by colleagues – who might not understand the art of the possible. And do all of that without it seeming too conceptual.

So I’m not going to be short of things to do . . .