Week 3 – 20 September

A week of three different characters. I began with a really clear idea of what my first deliverable should look like for the CPS. I thought I had just enough space to spend some time facilitating the co-design of a set of principles for how we worked. I was a little uneasy that it might be a solution looking for a problem but heard just enough cautious welcome to think I could move ahead.

But the focus of my first couple of days was dominated by the Senior Leadership Conference in the East Midlands. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but people in suits and ties focused solely on the meeting rather than drifting in and out of their inbox was a surprise.

It was an unparalleled opportunity to get to know 80-or-so senior colleagues explore the highest priorities for the service and understand the organisational story. I learnt a huge amount, some of which confirmed what I had already found but the following particularly stood out from the conference:

  • The work we’re committed to doing in digital will have a huge impact on our current ways of working over the next three years – but the language doesn’t immediately connect with the way leaders see their work
  • The permeability between jobs and areas means the CPS is much more of a national organisation than its strong regional structure would normally suggest (compared to other regional organisations I’ve witnessed at work)
  • As the only prosecution service and the only organisation where many colleagues have worked, we lack an easy reference point to drive our agenda compared to the benchmarking that other public sector organisations can use, so honest reflection is particularly important
  • There’s a determination to do the right thing for public confidence in the service and the individual experiences of victims and witnesses; and my experience in customer services might be useful for some of this work

I left the conference tired – I’d over-estimated the impact of experiencing so many new things and people in such an intensive way. Or just that running 10 miles in 30 hours on the treadmill was overly ambitious.

The third character emerged towards the end of the week. I started to feel frustrated because I could see the short-comings in my expectations for my first deliverable but couldn’t identify another ‘thing’ to show how I wanted us to work differently.

I started to work through a second idea but had two useful conversations on Friday, with Michael in my team and Mark, my manager, which gave me a clearer steer. The day felt energetic and gave me a clear focus. Over the next week I’m going to work with a group of people to explore how we can develop our technology roadmap. And whilst much of the heavy-lifting will be done by others, I’m going to find out how we might be able to do that ‘in the open’ – which would also respond to some feedback we had from a supplier engagement event over the summer.

We’re spending two days in York next week as for our senior leadership team meeting. That’s an opportunity to design the development of the roadmap and explore particularly how it relates to our Future Casework Tools programme. And then towards the end of the week I should be able to spend my first day in court, witnessing the impact of our technology in supporting the prosecution of cases.

At some point next week I also need to revisit my induction Trello and test myself on whether or not I’ve achieved the outcomes that were set, and make sure that I make as much possible the following week, so that I can end that well and set a clear direction for my work in October.