Weeknote 12? That’s a whole quarter down (though it does include the Christmas break. Still…) . It feels like I joined Homes England a week ago and I still have lots to learn about the organisation. When I joined before Christmas I mentally set my first 100 days clock to start on 1 January, using the quiet time before the holidays to do some due diligence. That effectively puts me two months into my first 100 day plan. Plans and planning have been a bit of a theme this week.
What I’ve been up to
- Led my first wider leadership team (WLT) day on Wednesday which included eight hours of train travel to get me from London to Newcastle and back (engineering works the day before prevented a smoother travel plan). I got a lot out of being in the same space as my managers for a day, some of whom I hadn’t met fact to face before. The focus of the day was on moving forward – agreeing our priorities for the coming year, how we are going to work together, delegating effective decision making. A lot to build on from the day, not least nailing down our top level roadmap to share with our colleagues across Homes England.
- Digital future ways of working is a term that has widened in scope significantly in the short time I have been in Homes England. Originally it meant scoping our future procurement needs to support our digital services but it now includes the strategy, the roadmap, our annual business plan, our funding bid, our target operating model, our modernisation strategy and our future prioritisation model. A lot of connected pieces of work coming together at pace with tight deadlines to get to an agreed position by the end of March in time for the new financial year. This work is exhausting and I am really grateful to colleagues involved in shaping this work as we try to land this.
- Part of digital future ways of working is understanding in more detail how the products being delivered by our transformation programme, Evolve, will be supported when they move into live service. I’ve invested quite a bit of energy in helping my team and the Evolve team to get to a common understanding of the tasks and the timelines so we can be prepared.
- I’ve been trying to meet as many of our suppliers as possible to understand how we work together and how we manage our supplier base. I met with colleagues from Kainos and PwC this week and its good to get perspective from them (and a fair bit of history too).
What I’m doing next
- I’m briefing our change executive committee this week on future service support (part of digital future WoW) to ensure they are up to date with our plans.
- We have a Digital Executive Leadership Team (DELT) day on Wednesday. Its our monthly get together to review strategic issues and plan for the future. We are going to be spending a fair bit of time on risk management this time round.
- Lots more workshops and sessions on various parts of digital future ways of working.
- I need to get some quality time to get into the detail of the numbers for next years budget and be really crisp on the language I use to describe various proposed initiatives. I am still in the early stages of understanding how Homes England describe things and I am not sure colleagues always mean what I think they mean when describing things.
Whitehall Webby 