Week 32: 17-21 April

A young cricketer scored a century and took a hattrick for Gloucestershire in the County Championship this week. Given neither of my readers are County Cricket fans it’d worth emphasising that this is an historically rare achievement. And it couldn’t have been more different to the week I had!

I was in the office Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and spent Tuesday at an all-day event. And that’s what I’m attributing to the fact that I was just knackered by Thursday evening. The sort of tired where I knew there were so many things I could do and some which I even needed to do. But just couldn’t focus on anything long enough. I kept telling myself that I’d go for a run but I couldn’t even organise myself to do that. So I gave up and watched Manchester United fall apart against Sevilla. As a child of the 1990s United being awful isn’t getting any less amusing.

Despite that I did actually manage to achieve two of my goals for the week. I’ve drafted a ‘go live checklist’ so that we’ve got clear criteria that product teams need to meet; and we’ll use that for the email automation solution (which really needs a name). Coincidentally, I ended up having a number of unplanned conversations about the onboarding of the new call handling system for CPS Direct and from that emerged a clear set of objectives for the project (albeit not actually the clear plan that I was aiming for). I didn’t do enough to set a baseline for our strategy metrics but we have made progress (ie – I asked someone else to).

I’ve also been working with my leadership to think about how we demonstrate how each of our teams contributes to each of our Key Results. It’s a potential way to respond effectively to the feedback from our last monthly strategy call.

On top of that, I actually delivered something. The Technical Design Authority agreed to allow links to be shared with people outside CPS. It’s a small way that we’ll make things safer (it means we control the document as opposed to attaching it to an email and effectively losing control over it) as well as to enhance collaboration. We’ll introduce it slowly and need to support colleagues in how to use the settings well. But I always take pleasure at having a things to point at.

We also had a good event on Tuesday with Vodafone, one of our key suppliers. We focused on the ‘how’ of innovation with a particular focus on the experience for victims and witnesses. There were lots of thought-provoking ideas and some really smart people we learnt from. The thing that particularly resonated with me was that the essence of the government’s Service Manual reflects how most successful organisations approach innovation. And how infrequently we get to focus on the culture and behaviours that enable innovation given the dominant (and completely reasonable) pressure to achieve results.

I’m trying really hard at the moment to focus on small, achievable interventions that can deliver an outsized impact (maximising a ‘return on management’ if you will). My sense of the calendar is that the combination of bank holidays and school breaks means it’s going to be really tough to build momentum so a flurry of stand-alone initiatives is the better way to make sure the time is used well.

So over the next week I’m hoping to:

  1. Agree the scope of our engineering plan as part of my goal to make CPS the best place in the sector to develop software that matters to users
  2. Get actionable feedback from our pre market engagement event on WiFi connectivity
  3. Deliver the first version of our strategy tracker dashboard