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