Weeknote 11.22

I suppose I’m fortunate not to have many weeks like this. Perhaps I should have spotted the pattern before I attempted my first ever shave with a cutthroat razor on Friday morning. Somehow emerging from the bathroom covered in small nicks felt a fitting end to the week. 

It all began with a list of all the things that needed something from me. Writing them all down wasn’t helpful. It just highlighted how many there were. At least last week I just had a general sensation of there being too many. There aren’t any fewer today. 

With that whinge out of the way, here are some things to celebrate:

  • We’ve developed an SROI model to guide our Link Work, assessing the financial equivalent cost to the interventions and the value for each resident we’ve supported. We’re showing a 6% return at the moment which isn’t overwhelming but also feels credible
  • One of the residents we helped through Link Work was sufficiently motivated that we’re now exploring whether they could come and work for the Council
  • Our Events Team in customer services put on their first social – and colleagues were looking particularly smart in the office on Friday
  • I was particularly impressed by colleagues in the finance systems team as they briefed me on the challenges we’d had with Mastercard payments – and the work that they do to support the end of the financial year; part of my responsibilities running the applications team
  • The Techncial Design Authority had a healthy retrospective. We did it through the medium of a ‘letter to a significant other’ to help us talk about the work in non-technical ways and find an accessible way of talking about the outcomes we’ve achieved. Rob reminded us that we can’t just ‘bank’ the things that have been positive about the first 10 meetings; we’ll need to continue upholding our values
  • The Delivery Healthcheck meeting was clearly different from the recovery board which showed that we’d learnt from that retrospective, and I could see the added value in the conversation about priorities and people (rather than tactical issues with projects; though they still have their place)
  • I promised last Friday to help move forward a procurement (for Child Protection Information Sharing services), which I did
  • We used the OKRs that we established for our Documents Products team to assess the progress we made. My take-away was that we’d made better progress towards our objectives than towards our Key Results. I’d certainly prefer it that way around!
  • We had a good conversation with colleagues in our recruitment service about a new approach that we’re going to try. They were really supportive and enabling, which was energising

Personally, I got a massive buzz from seeing To Kill a Mockingbird at the Gielgud Theatre with my children on Monday night (which wasn’t ideal, but COVID meant the performance was reorganised twice) and then, of course, the Liverpool game on Wednesday night. It wasn’t quite enough to provide perspective on other things, but they were a good distraciton. 

One of the challenges that I’ve long grappled with is when to sweat the small things. Done to a micro level, you disempower teams, entangle yourself in problems and leave undone the job you’re paid for. Look too large and you can write off almost all problems as something that will be forgotten in a year’s time. This week helped remind me of three things that are never too small to forget about:

  1. What interactions between good people says about the health of your team
  2. What the speed of feedback loops says about the health of a piece of work
  3. What you can learn from how people articulate something they need to do 

For much of the last eighteen months, I haven’t been able to give these things much attention. We’ve been fortunate not to have to, but I need to be more active in making those matter. 

Next week

I need to define success on my own terms next week, partly as a way of dealing with the things where I’m not succeeding. Bits of the goals need to remain private, but to give you a glimpse, I’m wondering:

  1. Does our SROI stand up to scrutiny and can we use some of our customer insights to guide priorities for action?
  2. How might we explain one of our digital services so that we understand how it compares with a commercial alternative?
  3. How do I ensure I understand the priorities for our applications teams and where I can most help them?
  4. How might we use the support we need to provide to colleagues in adults for our case recording tools to provide an exemplar for other services to follow?