Week 8 

Week beginning 24 October

I bought a journal this week. It’s got a template which enables you to summarise things like your goal for the day, what you’re excited about and to reflect on your productivity. It was a well-timed distraction to help me avoid dwelling in the football results at the weekend for longer than desirable. I had visions of sharing each entry on my weeknote. But I hit too few of the goals, so I’ve changed tack. 

The story of my week was seeing slightly too many opportunities to get stuck in and being excited by different ideas for how to do it. And whilst I did lots of different things it came at the cost of the stuff that’s already underway and a clear focus on making a big impact.

So here’s some of the stuff that I did, in addition to the day-to-day meetings:

  • Refine the proposal for a technology blog, responding to feedback from colleagues in comms
  • Contribute to our thinking about how the CPS can become a better client
  • Started to design a session for our senior leadership team about Wardley Mapping: what it is and how we can use it
  • Designed a piece of user research to help us understand what an excellent ‘Developer Experience’ would look like
  • Worked through the financial options for replatforming our Case Management System (CMS)
  • Design the high-level requirements for our tenders for partners to help us replatform CMS
  • Contribute to the spec for the tender for our service desk contract
  • Develop proposals for how we govern CMS and (not particularly relatedly) our technical governance

And of course that meant that I didn’t make progress on some important stuff. In particular, I failed to make much headway on the tech roadmap. Michael is on holiday, which is a handy excuse, but if I’d really got my head down and denied myself the distractions above, I could have done.

Next week, there’s the opportunity to open-up even more strands. I’m looking forward to exploring:

  • How we could explore the opportunity for machine learning models to support our operational recovery
  • What we’d need to do differently to accelerate our WiFi rollout
  • How we can explore the different groups of people that could benefit from our victims transformation programme
  • The scope and capacity needed for our applications rationalisation project

I’ve also been thinking about how we can learn more about the user experience of working with our teams. That theme has come up a couple of times but as yet, I’ve not found the opportunity to take it forward.

But I will need to find a way of framing these enquiries so that I can qualify various opportunities without creating too many open-ended threads; and do so in a way that makes it easier for the work to be picked up again when the time is right.