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.
Whitehall Webby 