Week 7

Week beginning 17 October 2022

I began this week with some really clear goals but contrived not to meet them all. I wanted to hold a successful first show & tell for our technology roadmap (just hit; engagement was good but from a small group) gain agreement to create a technology blog (completely missed) and develop a better understanding of CPS operations (hit).

The benefit of having these goals at the forefront of my thinking was to provide a focus in a week that could easily have been full of distractions. It would have been easy to spend longer refreshing Twitter than focusing on the job at hand. I deleted TikTok over the weekend, which was also sensible.

On Tuesday I joined the Service Management away day in Manchester. Debbie had done a lovely job of designing the session which felt very professional but also had enough space for people to connect and build relationships. About half of the team had joined the CPS in the last two years which underlines the value of getting people together. Ric did a lockbox exercise which ends in everyone getting a personal note of appreciation, which was really thoughtful.

I gave an intro and reproduced my talking points from the intro to the event below because it felt like a useful way of summarising some of my thinking so far.

Where are we? 0 Best Prosecution Service is world © System under strain Q Positive but fragile funding settlement Colleagues need us to deliver + want us to succeed What does it mean 2 © Victims + witnesses our compass & User needs our USP Process must make things simpler Contribute to the community To achieve more, we need to do less 6 Teams with a clear mission are reap the biggest rewards

On Wednesday I went to Eastleigh, near where I spent my teenage years, to visit our Wessex office. Most of the time was taken up by the operational delivery meeting which gave me a really good feel for the sorts of issues that our areas grapple with. I also enjoyed meeting one of our paralegals and seeing how she uses our systems. She was in the process of producing a bundle for a forthcoming trial which involves evidence spanning 75 lever arch files. And we need to provide one for each juror, one for every advocate as well as for the judge and witnesses. The trial of digital bundles can’t come soon enough.

I spent a bit of the week feeling slightly short of confidence. Spending two days out of the office was certainly informative, and I saw how quickly you can become distanced from the day-to-day activities of the business. But I haven’t really got anything to show for my time in the organisation yet. And I’m not confident that I’ve found a concerted or sustainable way of delivering value.

However I had a useful conversation with Jon Ayre on Friday, who I’ve long followed on Twitter, learning from his time at the DWP. It gave me a bit more resolve to focus on finding opportunities to ‘show the thing’ and a bit more confidence that’s the right thing to do. I’m also surrounded by people telling me that I need to be patient.

Next week is incredibly varied and with a couple of earlier starts, I’ll do well to keep my mileage up. So setting some clear goals again feels smart, although we’ve got a couple of key people taking well-deserved leave and these aren’t entirely within my gift but:

  • Our mid year reviews enables us to have a shared understanding of the objectives to the end of the year and the support we need to get there
  • We have valuable feedback from a small number of colleagues about early thinking of the goals for our technology roadmap
  • We have identified the activities that are needed to setup our applications and hosting rationalisation project