Weeknote 9.2022

I skimmed through my last weeknote before beginning to reflect on this week. It seems laughable now. I actually thought I might spend three days getting stuck into something meaty. Such naivety. It mostly felt like bouncing between multiple topics and issues without much structure or meaning. Looking back, though, there were some clear themes. 

Clear outcomes 

We’ve been working hard to develop a clear set of objectives and key results for our key projects. I feel increasingly confident in framing objectives and spotting ones that lack the clarity they need to know when they’re achieved. We’re starting to spot opportunities to use them to guide prioritisation. And looking back I can see projects we did previously that would have been easier if they had a clearer framework to guide their work. One of my fears and hopes is that the clarity of the objectives gives teams sufficient freedom to design, and change their work as they learn more about how to meet the objectives. At the moment I don’t have quite enough evidence in the ‘for’ or ‘against’ column to be completely confident. 

Our best work

Our ICT strategy show & tell heard from some of the team that have been working to increase the number of people who get Discretionary Housing Payment in Hackney. The team is empowered to meet a set of clear outcomes, is multidisciplinary (including behavioural insights, benefits expertise, service design, user research) and iterating their approach weekly in response to data. And each week we can see how many more people in Hackney are getting this support. The approach is guided by user-centred, Agile approaches but the process is worn lightly and they’ve been particularly thoughtful in working out how to lead the change with colleagues who’ve been working in the same way for many years. 

Not all projects can work like this. But we can be clearer about the opportunity costs associated with the time and effort that goes into projects that don’t have that clarity, leadership and purpose. 

I spoke to the GovICT conference in Westminster on Thursday about our work to develop APIs and how that enabled us to provide better, safer services more quickly to residents. I was giddy with the excitement of not talking about cyber security. The presentation was easy to pull together because we’ve worked in the open throughout. And it was great to be reminded of how the long term investment is starting to pay dividends, even though there’s much more we can do. 

Feedback loops

I have a pet theory that the core competence of any large organisation is managing complex change and that a key measure of its ability to do so depends on the speed at which it can observe, implement and evaluate change. 

We’ve tweaked the way that the IT recovery board is working, following a retrospective last week. We will be alternating the running of the group and dividing our time between focussing on specific projects and focussing on key themes. We decided not to do the same for the nascent Technical Design Authority (TDA), because the two need to learn from each other (whilst remaining distinct). 

There’s another piece of work I’m involved with where an action plan was developed in November and each fortnight we meet for 90 minutes to discuss progress on implementing the actions. My personal view is that not all of those actions are as relevant now and we’ve learnt that some other actions might also be necessary. But we don’t have a space in that piece of work to reflect and so we’re continuing on the hamster wheel of checking that we’ve done what we said we’d do, almost regardless of the consequences.

With that comparison in mind, I floated some tweaks to the TDA this week. We already had a packed agenda so I did it over email. I’m a bit uncomfortable canvassing views like that because it’s rarely a good way of making proposals better. But it felt more important to make the changes now rather than letting things drift for another couple of weeks.

We also had a couple of important escalation meetings with suppliers this week. Many of our suppliers are more comfortable with working in a waterfall fashion – because that’s what the sector is used to, and because often line of business applications are better suited to ‘all or nothing’ adoption. But one consequence of this is that it’s hard to spot problems until they’re big. One of the most important things we discussed was how to have regular touchpoints which enabled an open dialogue which is often so hard at a project board. 

Next week

Looking through my diary for the next couple of weeks, it would be easy to just bounce from one meeting to another. I’d certainly feel busy but not necessarily achieve much. So I’m going to carve out some time to define some clear goals. But right now, my son wants to play FIFA and I haven’t mopped the kitchen floor in a fortnight and I’ve learnt that goals set in haste don’t normally survive to Monday lunchtime.