Matthew Cain

Personal blog. Day job: Technology at the Crown Prosecution Service

Page 2 of 11

Gathering momentum

Week 23: 6-10 February

A couple of people remarked that things feel more positive now than they did at the start of the year. I agree and think it’s a combination of reasons. We’ve got a couple of important pieces of work starting to reach a point of maturity. The proof of concept for how we disaggregate CMS is likely to deliver something of value to users in the next couple of sprints. It’s the first thing I’ve sponsored and we’re only six-eight weeks into the project (depending on how you measure it). The project to develop a technology platform is coming together, with agencies submitting tenders at the end of the week. And the draft technology strategy and roadmap is now ready to be shared with external partners for early feedback. That’s three of my five ambitions for the year nicely-poised.

I’m pleased to report that my goals were much better chosen this week. There were four, ranging from the important but not time-consuming to the important and demanding; I finished the week with all four completed. And there were a couple of occasions when it felt like I’ve made progress with something that I’ve been chipping away at for some time, from different angles. We’ve used a couple of examples of where we were getting stuck in delivering non-standard software to users to design a safety valve in the process so that we can come to a decision inside two weeks. And we’ve agreed a set of common goals across our Directorate which reflect genuine choices about what’s most important.

We’re doing a Productivity Ninja course as a team, which is helping establish a new shared vocabulary in the team (as well as giving us some practical tips for working productively). The facilitator was surprised to hear that most participants reckon they have just 8 hours available each week to focus on what’s most important though I suspect that’s typical of public services.

Coincidentally, I’ve started a course this week with Harvard Business School Online. It contains a video with the CEO of Adidas, Kasper Rorsted, who says that he reviews his diary each week to ensure it’s aligned to his top three priorities. I did 37 meetings this week and in retrospect, five of them aligned to my priorities which is better than I feared. I also had 4.5 hours free to devote to my priorities. It’s not that the remaining 40-odd hours were spent badly, in the main. I could justify the value of each activity. What I’ve learnt from this is the importance of actively aligning how I spend my time, my goals for the week and our strategic objectives.

We also spent some time this week talking about the findings from our disproportionality research and what happens next. There’s a corporate statement which explains what we’ve found out and what we need to do next. But it was obviously important to ensure that our teams had a chance to ask questions and contribute to the discussion about what it means for our work to deliver justice for victims and witnesses.

This week was also exciting because I attended an event for people who previously worked for the Institute for Public Policy Research. I worked there for three years on a part time basis, whilst I was at university. It was an exciting place to work and the experience was hugely formative for me. It took a while, but I’ve tried to bring the same sense of mission, organised-chaos and togetherness to teams that I’ve led subsequently.

Next week I’m off for half term which typically combines with Valentine’s Day and my wife’s birthday. It’s almost frustrating to have to put things down just when they feel like they’re gathering momentum. But I also know I’m a bit tired because I’m not getting out of bed when my alarm goes off, and I’m spending slightly too long on my phone at night. So I’ll use my weeknote to share more about my early reflections on the course.

Breaking it down

Week 22: 30 January – 3 February

It was a funny old week. By an objective measure, I failed. I set three goals and met just one of them. Our Product Owner has made a good start in leading our proof of concept and the team is starting to feel like a multidisciplinary product team using Agile approaches to deliver value to users. But I made no progress with the business case to give the overview of the Ensuring Service Continuity programme. And I didn’t touch the tech strategy and roadmap.

The senior team of the directorate had an ersatz away day on Tuesday. There were eight different topics we wanted to cover but we managed to do it as if a single conversation which worked well. The perennial challenge is whether the actions match the analysis and how on earth you find time for the actions alongside everything else (particularly when, by virtue of having spent a day away from things you’re already chasing your tail for the rest of the week). But by sharing a summary of the discussion with the team I’m hoping that we can use the expectation and accountability that creates to make progress. One of my reflections following the day is that I’ve been effective at landing a handful of phrases to describe where we are. Now I need to find ways of articulating positive phrases to describe where we want to be.

The other big commitment this week was a collaborative session with a supplier. We’re reaching the end of the rollout phase and need to transition into service. We’ve got stuck on working through some of the contractual details. So by getting everyone around the table we were able to crack through most of the issues and develop a clear plan for what’s left. I do wonder what the true ROI looks like but given it has to be done, better to do it well.

I’ve spent most of my life trying to find shortcuts. I was always impatient for the next challenge and more interested in what’s next than what’s in front of me. But, in my increasing years, I have some gratitude for the value of experience. One of the most important things I’ve learnt in the last five years is different techniques to solve a problem. I’ve now got five different tools I use regularly whereas before I really only had one. The world of consultancy doesn’t really provide scenarios to do this.

I finished the week by going to an event on rugby coaching with the guru for all amateur coaches, Dan Cotterrell. One of the key things that I’ve seen training children is how much more effectively they learn when a skill is ‘layered’. The drill begins with a single, short idea and then as the session continues a new aspect is added at regular intervals. Of late I’ve been obsessed with how this could be adapted to a work environment. I’ve not yet convinced anyone else of this. But the key events this week showed opportunities to break down how we could work differently into small components that we can simplify, practice, improve and then build up.

At our priorities meeting on Friday morning I revealed how I failed to meet any of my goals and tried to get out of jail free by making more vague commitments to next week’s goals. I’m still not confident I’ve nailed them. I think there’s something around:

  1. Our readiness to initiate the tender process for the Service Desk
  2. Preparing for the first show & tell for our proof of concept
  3. Sharing a draft tech strategy and roadmap, incorporating feedback from our teams, ahead of our TechUK seminar in a couple of week’s time
  4. Ensuring we complete the actions to transition our contract into business as usual

Busy – but to what end?

Week 21: 23-27 January 2023

It’s funny how easily busy-ness appeals to me. It gives me a sense of importance and purpose. From time to time I even marvel at my own ability to switch from one topic to the next and congratulate myself on the fact that I’ve done so seamlessly. It would be easy to write this week up as a success because I was busy.

Not only did I have five days crammed full of meetings but I managed actually to do some stuff, too. We had a purposeful TDA meeting which made three decisions. And we initiated the process to recruit a Product Owner, although we won’t actually make a decision until early next week.

On top of that, I led the first of the internal engagement sessions we’re running to build out our technology strategy and roadmap. I was particularly pleased that Debbie, Michael and Russell will each run one themselves as it’s an opportunity for them to engage with it differently. The session I led sparked useful set of points and subsequently Russell’s session appears to have prompted even more feedback.

At the end of the week I attended by first in-person CTO Council meeting. The important cross-government forum was exploring a number of issues directly relevant to our work including principles for effective cloud adoption and how to tackle legacy technology. I’m still figuring out how the central government stuff works between departments but it seemed to be a positive, purposeful and collaborative meeting.

So it was a good week.

There were a couple of important caveats, though, and I suppose it shows why I put so much emphasis on the process of setting weekly priorities. We got really valuable feedback on the design of our Service Desk procurement and identified four key things that will shape our evaluation criteria. We weren’t able to get the procurement published, though. Whilst that was for reasons beyond our control it was an important qualifier on the success of the week. We did design a response to our People Survey but despite a good conversation at our leadership team meeting it felt like we were exploring rather than solving.

I’m not actually sure, therefore, that I was any more effective this week than any others. It felt good and energetic but without any greater delivery.

My diary is distinctly lighter next week. We were expecting to have a Senior Leaders Conference which was postponed due to the train strikes and so I suddenly became free on two days. So I’ll need to use the extra time really well in order to really focus on delivery. We had an interesting, albeit brief, discussion in our weekly catch-up about how to balance supporting the goals of our teams with using our team to engineer what happens next.

I’ve set three goals for next week but they still feel a bit short of vision and drive. Currently they are to:

  1. Draft the paper for investment committee to explain the scope of the ‘Ensuring Service Continuity’ programme. It’s not urgent but if I don’t do it now, I’ll regret not putting the sare time to good use
  2. Onboard the Product Owner for the proof of concept so that we can support the product team and grow our understanding of what could be achieved beyond the proof of concept phase
  3. To use the feedback from the engagement sessions to design the next iteration of the tech roadmap

I’ll spend some time over the weekend looking at the quarterly objectives for the team and my personal objectives in order to work out whether I could aim higher.

Relentlessly positive

Week 20: 16-20 January 2023

I was relentlessly positive this week. I could guess about the reasons. I was motivated by addressing the results of the People Survey. I was excited about a couple of important procurements that we’re starting. I was looking forward to the inception workshop for the Technical Design Authority. But it was also because I decided to be positive. I nearly slipped back. There was a moment in bed on Monday morning. But even when something didn’t go well it didn’t knock me off my stride.

I also felt the gentle pressure of important and imminent deadlines this week: on Wednesday preparing for our pre market engagement event on the application support contract for the case management system (CMS); on Thursday to prepare for our market engagement event on the service desk as well as the frequent pull of the inbox.

The Service Desk event was really well attended, though we shared a recording for suppliers unable to attend at relatively short notice. The feedback will help us unblock one of the issues we’d been grappling with which had delayed us initiating the bidding process. Generally I think more, smaller engagement points with suppliers will help us learn more and adapt.

Despite all of that, I still had time to do things well. I thought carefully about how we’d do the inception workshop. I needed a format that would support us being user-centric and fit the findings from the book reviews into the design of how we’d work together. And it needed a bit of movement in an otherwise sterile basement room. I realised I’d asked everyone else to read something and not prepared anything myself and was worried that might seem unduly hierarchical, so worked my way through The Habit of Excellence by Lt Col Langley Sharp – which reinforced a significant number of the key messages from the other texts.

I also began the process of digging in to our People Survey results through some good conversations with colleagues to explore what we need to stop and start doing differently.

With a different shape and size portfolio previously I felt I didn’t have the chance to invest the same level of effort; that I was constantly doing things ‘just well enough’.

I also tried to do some smaller things differently. A meeting on Monday was scheduled to look at the strengths and weaknesses of managing our hosting contract directly. Rather than meet and then draft a doc, I asked us to develop a document in realtime. Not everyone experienced that in the same way, but it was good to show people how a different approach can have benefits.

I didn’t do enough to move forward the tech strategy and roadmap this week. Whilst it’s not one of my four priorities for next week, we are beginning a set of engagement strategies for colleagues within the department so that’ll give me the excuse to find more time ahead of an event that TechUK will be hosting for us in February.

So my four priorities for next week are to:

  1. Use the feedback from the Service Desk to initiate the procurement
  2. Help the first substantive meeting of the TDA work in the way we’ve co-designed
  3. Identify a Product Owner to support the development of our Future Casework Tools proof of concept
  4. Enable our leadership team to design the response to our People Survey results

Time: the most precious commodity

Week 19: 9-13 January

I’m just old enough to believe, fervently, that time is the most precious commodity we have. Given the right conditions most other things are replaceable. It’s also, often, the thing that’s least visible. I ran the Battersea Park half marathon in 1:33 on Saturday which was not my fastest – but just enough reward for my spasmodic preparation. I then broke my toe on Tuesday.

Amazon has a concept of one way doors: decisions that are irreversible and two way doors that are easily reversible. I believe that the longer it takes to do something, the more it becomes likely to be a one way door. For example, if I’d run on Tuesday before I broke my toe, I’d have recorded extra miles this week. The challenge with time is that it’s often the least visible risk (like kicking a chair leg whilst wearing socks).

One of the advantages of my role at the CPS is that with a more specific remit and a smaller team I do, at least theoretically, have more time to play with (albeit in an organisation which is still new).

I’ve been thinking about that for three more substantial reasons this week:

  1. It’s been at the heart of some of the more challenging issues that I’m trying to resolve at the moment. On the upside, I’ve had a couple of good conversations where, at the very least, we’ve been able to identify that the underlying reason for the frustration is just a different prioritisation of what matters
  2. I haven’t used my time particularly well. There are a couple of things which have been important to me this week but where I’ve not done them as well as I could have done because I’ve moved on in my mind rather than challenged myself to work out how they could be better
  3. Given the above, I might gain more solace from recognising things that benefit from more time so that I don’t try and force the pace on everything out of frustration at a few things

There have been plenty of positives. We have agreed a business case for how we provide secure internet access over the next 18 months in near-record time. We had a really positive discussion at the Change Delivery team away day about their needs from a technology platform. And we did some important work to map out the project landscape for a programme I’m leading to ‘Ensure Service Continuity’ – practically, deciding what happens to 23 applications that are provided for by a contract which expires in mid-2025.

The technology strategy and roadmap is one of the things that will benefit from more time. The current draft has 30 commitments of various sizes for the next 18 months, some of which are already planned. But there are a handful of bigger ideas which do need debate and experimentation if they’re to be meaningful commitments. We’re currently designing a set of initiatives to ensure these have the time they need to move from being buzzwords and concepts into shared commitments.

At the end of the week we also got the more detailed breakdown of the results from the Civil Service people survey which was conducted late last year. The results are fine overall but there are a few things that really do need attention.

So, I’m making slightly fewer commitments next week:

  1. To have three good conversations with colleagues to understand better how to respond to the people survey results
  2. To prepare thoroughly for the best possible initiation for the Technical Design Authority
  3. To complete the documents necessary for the launch of our Applications, Databases and Infrastructure Management procurement – aka maintaining and supporting CMS

Picking it up

Week 18: 2-6 January 23

The first week back is always hard. Like most years, I had one of those nights where I spent more time awake than asleep. And then I faffed around early in the morning. I’m back playing Wordle, long after it’s fashionable. But I started the week by articulating five goals relatively clearly:

  1. Helping come to a clear understanding on the financial evaluation model for the service desk tender, which delayed its publication just before Christmas
  2. Ensuring we have a clear lessons learnt and recommendations from the CMS outage
  3. Drafting a rationale for the 23 services we want to disaggregate to try and avoid unnecessary complication in the approvals process for lower risk / lower value pieces of work or less scrutiny for the more complex parts
  4. Set-up the refreshed approach to the Assurance Board
  5. Design the preparation activity for the inception workshop for our Technical Design Authority  

That’s a couple more than I’d normally set for a week but I was feeling ambitious. And Mark pointed out that I missed a goal around the agreement on our requirements for the support and maintenance of CMS from 2025. Although I was feeling refreshed, it felt as though it wasn’t too hard to pick up from where I’d left off at the end of 2022.

I began the week writing the technology strategy and roadmap. It’s been in my head for a little while but I haven’t had the time to sit down and focus on articulating it. My family got cross with my idea of doing it between Christmas and New Year but I was sat on my own on the plane back from holiday, so I made an early start.

I’m looking forward to being able to share it more widely but it does need a bit more work. We’re planning towards an event for prospective suppliers in early February – and I’d also like to get input from colleagues in other parts of the criminal justice system.

Despite the stop/start nature of the first day, I broke the back of the roadmap and it benefitted from an extra day to revisit the drafting, before I shared it with colleagues on Wednesday afternoon. That gave me time to move to doing the rationale for service disaggregation on Thursday which turned out to be much easier when I sat down to right it than it felt when I was thinking it through on Wednesday evening.

I’m excited by how we’re preparing the TDA and the early signs are that the members of the group are buying into the suggestion – which is probably different to what they’re used to. I’ve asked each person to familiarise themselves with the central ideas in seven key books (Teaming, the Phoenix Project, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Good Services, Radical Candour, No Rules Rules and the Art of Humble Inquiry). How we work together will be critical to our effectiveness, so I reckon that being familiar with some of common concepts will help build our collaboration.

We’re waiting for the analysis report on the CMS outage but it seems that we’ve got general agreement on the key things we want to improve.

Frustratingly, I’ve achieved least progress on the Service Desk. It might be that trying to push it to a conclusion is identifying more issues than its closing down. But we’ll need to make a decision within the next week or so what to do because continual delay will have an impact on other work – as well as the costs and service that colleagues receive.

I’ve set five priorities for next week:

  1. To resolve the outstanding issues blocking publication of the Service Desk tender
  2. Supporting the production of a business case for how we provide secure internet access
  3. Developing the strategic rationale to explain our approach to public cloud
  4. Developing the initial scope for the Technology Platform
  5. To test some ideas I’ve got for how we evolve our approach to delivery management

Keep pushing

Week 15: 12-16 December

It would have been easy to let this week slip away. When you look at the diary it’s tempting to assume not much more can be achieved until the New Year. So I had to push that little bit harder to make sure I got things done.

As I watched the snow fall on Sunday night it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas. And so when I walked up the steps of the crown court on Monday morning for my first visit to court since joining the CPS, I didn’t have high hopes for a busy day.

I spent the morning listening to a set of procedural hearings. I marvelled at the logistics involved and at the power of video conferencing. It was helpful to see how much more iterative the process of bringing criminal proceedings is than I assumed. I learnt over lunch that there’s an intention to reduce the number of hearings that occur before a case reaches trial. In the afternoon I saw a jury trial and whilst the case wasn’t directly relevant to some of the more complex technology issues we’re grappling with, the judge was a fan of digital jury bundles and had some useful observations about how they needed to work.

On Monday evening I did a briefing note for a colleague that was coming back from leave. It grew to 11 subheadings covering the things that I’d seen since they’d been away, and I forgot to include one topic so amongst other things, it made me feel like I’d been busy at the very least.

The main event on Tuesday was a prioritisation session for our Future Casework Tools programme at the Digital and Major Projects Group. One of the challenges we’ll need to explore through the programme is how we make decisions with colleagues, reconcile different ways of working whilst moving at pace. So the prioritisation session was an important starting point to ensuring the programme meets people’s expectations.

Wednesday was my best opportunity to make progress with my goals for the week. We worked with our partners, NTT Global, to ensure we had a clear scope for the discovery for our proof of concept and then to introduce them to some problem-owners to understand how we can add value. Separately, we also developed the terms of reference for our technical design authority and discussed how we could ensure it was meeting colleagues’ needs. I also had a catch-up with commercial colleagues so that we could move ahead with the procurement of a team to develop the technology platform.

The most significant feature of Thursday was a P1 incident with our network. We’d also had intermittent issues for some users accessing our core systems. The combination of the two meant it was helpful that I had an introductory session with trade union colleagues already in the diary. Both were resolved – and it’s the first P1 since I’ve joined the organisation. I was impressed by how colleagues responded to the incident. When it doesn’t happen frequently it can be harder to have those incident management practices in place. But it does mean that we need to spend time next week to ensure we understand the root cause. Any outage will feel frustrating for colleagues who are already working under pressure and they’ll expect us to do whatever’s needed to reduce the likelihood of it happening again.

At the end of the week I joined my first cross-government CTO Council. Whilst we’re theoretically all doing a similar job, each organisation is a different size and at a different state of maturity. It was interesting to hear from some perspectives very different to my own but also to understand the importance (and limitations) of collaboration across government.

Next week

I’ve got three goals for next week:

  1. To support the team in publishing the IT Service Desk requirement before Christmas. We’ll be ensuring there’s enough time for suppliers to bid and are hoping that publication before Christmas will help people prepare their plans in January
  2. To understand the critical path for going to market for the team to help develop the Technology Platform
  3. To ensure the proof of concept product team has all the tools and support they need to make rapid progress in the New Year

Depending on time, I’d also like to spend time on our roadmap. Fortunately, despite a slightly unstructured approach, it’s starting to take shape. But it would benefit from a day’s proper focus.

Lining things up

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.

Excited by the possibilities

Week 13: 28 November – 2 December

I took my uncertainty and doubt into the start of this week. I was resigned to the fact that it was the calendar was against me and it would be unlikely to get anything moving this side of Christmas. By Monday afternoon I could not only feel short of energy but didn’t really care if I showed it.

But a conversation on Tuesday morning with Michael to design our proof of concept for our Future Casework Tools programme had me fired up. We went straight from that to sharing our draft document with our partner, NTT Global. In the afternoon I had a meeting with Tony from the Police Digital Service. He’s a former Police Officer rather than a technical expert but we have a similar perspective on the importance of inter-agency collaboration, done right. I’m planning to bring together some people from across the sector in early 2023 to discuss their user needs from our technology roadmap and see whether there’s interest in aligning our work.

I carried that optimism and positivity into Wednesday. I had a discussion on cloud readiness and devops with one of our partners before our technology leadership meeting explored our technology strategy, how we might form a TDA, and what we wanted to do differently to role-model making decisions with data. I made some progress towards one of my objectives by discussing how we could create opportunities for colleagues and suppliers to get closer to our users. I spent the afternoon getting up to speed with the design of the Digital Case File project. It’s our major investment over the next two years so I wanted to understand all the moving parts and to what extent it aligned (or could be changed to align) with our Future Casework Tools strategy.

Thursday was a bit less productive because so little of my day was allocated to meetings. I had a similar pattern on Friday. With a bit more planning I could have cracked through a couple of really big things but with a bit of tiredness after four days in Petty France, and too little running, I wasted the opportunity.

However, I had Friday night to myself so managed to crack through a couple of the things on the to-do list that required a bit more concentration

So in terms of my goals:

  1. I facilitated a discussion amongst our architects and designed a survey to help determine what things might constitute the MVP of our technology platform
  2. I drafted a brief for the work to run discovery and build a prototype platform, which is currently with colleagues for comment (I’ve also started drafting a business case)
  3. We have an agreed brief for the proof of concept

I’ve managed to squeeze a couple of items onto the agenda for next week’s Senior Leadership Team meeting so by the end of next week I plan to have:

  1. A proposal to establish a Technical Design Authority, using the Service Standard and Technology Code of Practice as our initial frameworks for decision making, ready for consideration by one of our organisational governance boards
  2. A plan to go to market for support to develop our Technology Platform
  3. An agreed vision and strategic objectives for our technology roadmap

I’m also leading a set of conversations to try and iron out a commercial issue with one of our projects, which will take up some time and energy – but is even more important to get right.

That notwithstanding, I’m also particularly excited by a small discussion group that’s meeting at the end of next week to explore our ways of working. I’ve an open mind about what emerges but have a rough concept of using it to form an action learning set to explore how we can build our culture. It’s not an exclusive group (but I did try and identify a diverse group of people in the initial invitations) so if you’re in the department and want to get involved, do let me know.

I don’t know if that’s sufficient to make me feel like I’m on track to accomplish something, but it’s certainly a better position than a fortnight ago.

Progress, but not results

Week 12: 20-25 November

I’ve been inadvertently inflating my length of service this week. I told our Executive Group that I’ve worked for the CPS for 14 weeks and told someone else that it was 15 weeks. I guess that’s because I feel like I’ve settled-in. It’s also because I’m becoming a bit anxious about how much I’ve actually achieved.

I achieved the goals that I set out this week, yet that doesn’t feel like the most important thing.

We’ve identified a shortlist of some pertinent questions we could ask of our data to support operational recovery and got a meeting booked in with a wider set of colleagues to probe these and prioritise how we take it forward.

I’ve got a more detailed set of user needs for the technology platform, and am now fairly sure that this could be a useful tool across the service. I also developed a bit of a vision statement, though that needs work, and a very simple prototype to get more user feedback.

Finally, our senior management team workshop went well and not only introduced people to Wardley Mapping but also started to gather some data for our technology roadmap (and in doing so, tested the value of the approach as an output from the roadmap).

But there were a couple of things that were much more important about this week than hitting those goals.

A group of colleagues have been working intensively, using some of the tools of the GV Design Sprint method to identify our requirements and supporting documents for the tender for services to support our mission critical business application from 2025 onwards. I’m really chuffed that they took my suggestion to timebox the work and made it much more creative. The approach will teach us some really interesting things about how we work and help us assess which bits we can apply to other procurement activities.

In other news this week we also gained approval for the tender of our IT service desk from the investment committee and for our continued use of Service Now – which is the culmination of lots of hard work by Ric, Wayne, Julie, John and others.

I was also pleased to find time to continue the conversation, and act on some of the issues that emerged from last Friday’s software development workshop. I’ve got a bit of a habit of getting to the end of an event like that and then being sucked back into all the other things that had to wait whilst I did the event; rather than being able to use it to build momentum.

Goals for next week

  1. To gather some insight into what combination of things might form the MVP for our technology platform
  2. To have an agreed brief, which reflects users’ feedback, for the discovery and prototyping of our technology platform
  3. To have an agreed scope for the proof of concept work on transforming the database of CMS to enable development of user-centred services on top

I’m hoping that’s a recipe to end the week feeling as though I’m on a path to achieving something.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Matthew Cain

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑