The great / bad thing (delete as appropriate) for me about writing weeknotes is they often remind me what I was supposed to do at the end of a time period, so you curse your lack of productivity and focus. After a time my priorities for the coming period become more and more abstract making it even harder to demonstrate progress but easier to not feel bad about.
I am writing this here because, although I haven’t published much online this last several years, I have been writing weeknotes internally as a method of reporting upwards and as a form of journal. I want to remind myself and commit in public to why they are important, for me and for those I work with. So I’d better make them good.
What I’ve been up to
1. Continued with the introductory meetings with heads of practise and some of the enabling business partners. Really useful discussions about how we might work together better across the functions going forward, especially in a climate of tightening budgets and headcount restrictions.
2. Pulling together existing artefacts to inform work we need to do quickly to prototype a digital strategy and top level outcomes roadmap. A lot of the building blocks already exist, which is reassuring, it needs a better coherence wrapper around it.
3. Doing some thinking about the kinds of regular meetings I need to/ want to hold with my reports – format, frequency etc to inject some pace and make things feel a little bit different (and hopefully better)
4. Learning about our approval for a website exemption from GDS (this takes me back in time), how the proposition will fit in with our GOV.UK presence and why we need to deliver fast on this.
What I’m focusing on next
1. Its going to be a quiet week as all my direct reports are away so it gives me time to run a workshop with the executive director on pulling together a straw man digital strategy and outcomes roadmap that we can test with colleagues immediately after the Christmas break.
2. Finances and headcount planning is in full flow. It doesn’t stop for Christmas so I need to use the quiet time to delve into the detail.
3. Similarly I need to carve out some time to read the business cases funding in flight programmes and projects to understand what we originally committed to.
4. A few more stakeholder intros this week before people slink off for the holidays.
Issues and escalations
1. Mentioned money and people last week and above. It helps to focus the mind on what’s achievable but it’s also a big challenge.
Anything else to note
This was a useful reminder of the imperative behind our organisational mission, regardless of the political flavour of the administration.
Whitehall Webby 