Week 28: 12-17 March

There were three highlight this week. I led a session at our SLT to showcase different techniques for problem-solving: Crazy 8s, starting with the press release and pre-mortems. The exercise produced some thoughtful responses but we had consistently good engagement and receptiveness to trying different approaches. The even bigger highlight was a user-focused show & tell for our proof of concept around email automation. The preparation time had been effective and we landed it in exactly the way I hoped. The product is now generating interest from other teams and I can’t wait to show it off to some of my key stakeholders. Thirdly, and unexpectedly, I heard a couple of stories about how the team had been working together to support users: one around our approach to receiving data from the Police and another about a patch of a vulnerability.

I also met two of my three goals for the week. We submitted the business case for our Ensuring Service Continuity programme and we’re within sight of completing our business case for ubiquitous Gov.Wifi. Next week we’re looking to do an event for prospective suppliers to learn about our proposed design and ensure that we design a procurement which delivers what we think we need. Neither felt quite so energising but both are important.

My third goal was to develop a draft of the performance management framework for our strategy. I can almost feel myself procrastinating. I made a start, but really want it to be good and feel as though I’m still some-way short of having the right answers. I’ve probably reached the tipping point where I need to commit something to paper to give others a chance to make it better.

I had some fantastic examples this week of effective Return on Management, even if that does sound a bit self-congratulatory. I had an opportunity to get a bit more involved in the work of one of our teams. It ended-up being a bit uneven but a relatively small investment of time and effort gave me insights into tasks, issues and challenges that would otherwise have remained invisible or at least taken months before I’d have found out. I was pleased because I’ve had a nagging doubt for a little while that I’ve not been active enough in developing relationships with people who report to people who report to me.

There are also a couple of non-strategic issues where I’ve intentionally invested a bit of effort in trying to support people resolve things that were taking them disproportionate time for diminishing returns. I’ve got an approach which I’ve learnt (and probably co-opted badly) from Rob Miller but I don’t yet have his persistence for following things through. Protecting time in my diary has been particularly challenging with a 2-day conference next, and then the following week, meaning meetings are getting increasingly squeezed into the remaining space. In the last four days of this week I had 28 hours of meetings.

I’ve been more focused in my goals next week:

  1. To have an agreed business case for Gov.Wifi
  2. To have a draft public cloud business case ready for consideration by our commercial team
  3. To develop deeper relationships with team members during our staff conference