Month: January 2024

A week that started with a power cut thanks to Storm Isha which meant playing catch up with a bunch of people who were pencilled in for catchups on Monday morning. We’re approaching the end of the first calendar month of the year so its been a week of checking in on our priorities and thinking ahead to February.

What I’ve been up to

1. Had my first (virtual) session with my cohort on new directors course run by the leadership college for government. We’re meeting in the real world in a few weeks time so this session was a chance to get to know each other and compare roles and challenges. Key takeway – manage your energy levels.
2. Had a really productive workshop with our risk and assurance colleagues to uplift our risk registers, make sure they are accurately reflecting our biggest challenges and how we are managing them.
3. Some good thinking and activity in support of our digital comms colleagues – planning around how we prioritise work with our GOV.UK presence, separate websites and intranet.
4. An excellent session with the Digital Outcomes team to refine our offer to the business and how we can land service ownership as a concept and an operating model.
5. Planning and preparation for our monthly digital leadership team next week. The first time we will all have been together in the same room since before Christmas, a lot to catch up on and some meaty sessions to get through (including a risk challenge session, our future live services / operating model and annual business planning).

What I’m focusing on next

1. Continuing the huge push on recruitment and skills. Lots of training opportunities being proposed and an assistant director role being advertised next week amongst others.
2. Welcoming back Steve Railton to the leadership team after an extended break. Need to bring him up to speed on what we have been up to in his absence.
3. The monthly leadership team mentioned above, likely to generate lots of activity.
4. Lots of sessions about future live services support, both before, during and after the leadership team day. This work is rightly consuming a lot of focus at the moment.
5. I’m attending what sounds like a really interesting event about building generative AI-powered digital public services. Keen to find out what we can learn from others in this space.

All weeks are more or less busy. The trick is to try and focus on the priorities and not get distracted. Which is hard. This one flew by. Not least because GovcampXL

What I’ve been up to

1. Now I’ve been here a full month proper the regular meetings are starting to flow around again. So it’s been useful to take stock on what I discussed at introductory sessions a month ago now I have a bit more context. Quite a few of those this week.

2. We held our monthly digital all staff and I talked a little about the work I have been leading on our strategy and roadmap. We’ve now shared it with all our staff to get their feedback. I also talked about the plan to introduce teamnotes across the organisation to help us communicate priorities and successes better.

3. I’ve had to take draw breath on how we are engaging with the market to procure some live service support skills that we will need in the near future to ponder what our future lives services model will look like, options to get there, and what the wider business needs to know about our plans before we plunge head first into the activity.

4. Kept the energy going on recruitment to fill our key vacancies, including one of our key leadership team roles – assistant director of digital delivery and architecture. Interested? Advert imminent but ping me if you want more details.

What I’m focusing on next

1. My chief of staff has been doing some great thinking about how we drive the momentum using key meetings and external deadlines during the month to drive decision making and reporting. We’ve got another session to discuss this week.

2. Taking part in my first session for new directors run by the leadership college for government. Looking forward to meeting the rest of the cohort remotely before we meet for a residential course in a few weeks time.

3. Running a workshop to sharpen the definition on our digital proposition development offer with the great digital outcomes team. Looking forward to getting stuck into this.

4. Attending my first change portfolio executive meeting so looking forward to seeing how that operates.

5. Another workshop later this week to take a good hard Paddington stare at our risk registers to make sure we’re tracking the right things and managing them properly. 

Other things worth mentioning.

1. Did I mention Govcamp? 16 years is a long time. So many people. So much positive energy. So many new and old faces. Great conversations. Much inspiration. A lot to follow up on. So little time.

2. Car situation now sorted. One (big) less thing to worry about.

A busy week. Those who were lucky to extend the Christmas holday until the end of last week are now back so the meetings, emails and asks have all exponentially increased. Also the car is kaput so have had the distraction of finding a new(er) one.

What I’ve been up to

1. Consolidating all the feedback for the draft digital strategy and roadmap from team managers in my directorate. Some really good suggestions and questions to get us to a better version that we can share more widely with the directorate as we hone it over the next few weeks.

2. Getting all team leaders to think about team level priorities for this month so we can improve communication across the directorates by getting into the regular habit of writing and publishing teamnotes.

3. Ramping up recruitment activity to fill some key capability gaps. We have an ambitious plan to recruit at pace but it needs sustained energy from the leadership team who are all very busy all the time,.

4. Held our monthly digital leadership team meeting. We covered some really good discussions around recruitment, communicating better our spending plans and the strategy. We are experimenting using the Teams meeting notes to capture and allocate actions.

5. Caught up on the new website and few other business engagements. Partly to help sustain the momentum on these projects but also to help me understand better what are offer to the wider business is and how we might productise that a bit better.

What I’m doing next

1. A busy week meetings wise, including our monthly digital all staff call. Looking forward to the chance to hear from the wider directorate.

2. Meeting the wider team leadership network for the first time. looking forward to us all getting together, especially as the draft digital strategy is taking shape.

3. I have a workshop to try and streamline the business meetings and information flows between them to help try and optimise our time better and ensure the right people are present to make the right decisions.

4. Some supplier meetings to understand better how we work together.

5. Next Saturday is Govcamp 2024 (so Govcamp 17?). Really looking forward to attending in person for the first time in quite a few years.

Missed a week because Christmas ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Even so, think I’ll keep the numbering consistent so Weeknote five it is.

Hope you all had a good break. I did, despite the terrible weather.

What I’ve been up to

I’ve started engaging with my wider management team on the draft digital strategy and outcomes roadmap. Had some great feedback – which is even better when I realised that half the directorate was still on extended Christmas leave. Looking forward to some sleeve rolling on this over the next few weeks so we can share with the wider organisation.

I’ve mapped out our key meetings and shared with my management team so we can be clearer about purpose of each business interaction. Trying to be as efficient as possible, make sure we’ve got the right people in the room with the right management information at the right time etc etc etc

Properly been getting my head into funding needs for the next financial year. We’ve got a lot of demands (hence the digital strategy and prioritised roadmap work mentioned above) including how we will support digital products, services and components developed as part of our transformation programme as they become live.

Been working with our digital outcomes and corporate communications team to nail down the design brief for an external business to business website we are launching in the spring.

What I’m planning next

I wrote out to all of Team Digital just before Christmas outlining my initial thoughts and soliciting feedback. I’m conscious that a lot of people were already away on leave to I’m going to follow up the request. It’s really important I understand what works well and not so well for people who have been working here a lot longer than me.

I’m going to ask the wider HE leadership team for some feedback on how they work with us and how we could make that all better.

Now that people are back, getting into more gnarly details about strategy development, roadmap, funding, website etc etc

Meeting up with Karl Hoods from DSIT/DESNZ to get a bit of peer feedback and support on my plans.

Issues and escalations

Well, my car broke down on Friday afternoon which was a huge distraction and annoyance. So if you were expecting a response from me then, that’s why you didn’t!