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.