Weeknote: S1 Ep 23
Five things about this week
1. Staring down a blocker
Capacity in our tech teams has been a blocker for a while now. Talented people have been turning themselves inside out to juggle variously sized projects and the day-to-day of keeping the lights on. This isn’t great for people’s well-being or for maintaining momentum. We’re taking steps to narrow and clarify where to focus our efforts, add capacity and prioritise what’s left into a manageable backlog.
2. Comfort zone break out
Heads of Service did some baking this week producing a spectacular cream tea on Thursday. The highlight of my day was taking armfuls of scones down to customer service colleagues on the phones so they could join in as well. I hate baking, but I did it anyway. My scones looked more like rock cakes — we dubbed them “stones”. The point of exercise was bigger than the baking. It was an opportunity to show our appreciation for our teams and have some social time in the office. Most of the “stones” got eaten and generously re-named “rustic scones” by Eleanor.
3. An overdue conversation
We spent a couple of hours with colleagues from DRES* exploring how we might work together more strategically next year. Together, we were able to articulate nine potential opportunities spanning tech, data and process improvement. There’s more to unpick here and further decisions about priorities but it feels good to have given them some much needed time and attention this week.
4. Ready, Set, Go
We are one “sign off” away from procuring our tech and product partners. Two digital agencies will be joining us this side of Christmas to lift capacity. One of my earliest experiences as a delivery manager was onboarding a digital agency at Acas. We did it well I recall. Crucially, we gave them time to settle and orientate themselves, space to question and explore, and structure to operate in. Lingjing and I took a stab at what this might look like at Greenwich this week. Her agency background is really helping me to see this from both sides. I’m looking forward to trying something out and getting feedback from the agency teams.
5. Feeling my way in the dark
Staying on the procurement theme, we’re looking at how to make procurement processes easier to understand and follow. We are super users of procurement and information about how to do this well efficiently is stuck inside people’s heads and buried in weighty documentation. Paul and I are going to take a stab at making this more open and transparent. We started by gathering people’s pain points and looking at which ones of these are 1) in our gift to control, 2) are able to influence, and 3) out of reach in terms of affecting change. My challenge here is finding enough time to focus to shift this from pipe dream to progress over the next few weeks.
Next week
I’m looking forward to:
- Greg joins our growing delivery manager team
- A team day with the project managers
- Learning more about social value in procurement
- Matthew’s Lunch and Learn on human centred policy design
What I am reading/watching/listening
My reading list comes from Danny, Matt and Karolina this week.
Matt’s re-energised my thinking on governance with this blog from Louise Armstrong. I find the idea of governance as a journey very compelling (as well as quite challenging). It makes sense that if we want to use governance as an enabler for teams, it needs to be adaptive. We often assume that we will lose the assurance part of governance if it is not standardised. Consistent, not uniform springs to mind here.
Danny’s contribution offers some really useful insights about our addiction to meetings. Meetings interfere with deep work that arguably provides more value. I like the idea of using a meeting to mark a deadline and cancelling it if the work is completed. Or declining a meeting if you input can be provided in a different way. I’m a believer in good meeting hygiene: clear and agreed outcomes, showing up fully (close some tabs people) and well articulated action points.
And from Karolina — Madonna’s acceptance speech when receiving the Billboard’s woman of the year award in 2016. A no nonsense reminder that sexism and misogyny impacts every part of a woman’s life whether you are famous or not.
*Directorate for regeneration, enterprise and skills.
