(forgot to press “Publish” on this last night but better late than never)
A looooong week with travel and and extended stay in London for part of the weekend. Took in a gig with my wife which made a nice change and largely managed to keep her away from the shops!
What I’ve been up to
- Tuesday and Wednesday was up to Newcastle to participate in the people survey action plan workshop. Its the largest group of colleagues I have been in a room with since joining Homes England and it was a great opportunity to hear from others and experience the energy in the room. Really gratifying to be amongst people with a shared purpose of making things better.
- While I was in Newcastle, ran a short workshop exploring better ways of working. We used Mark Eddleston’s new ways of working canvas as a guide and, while we weren’t able to cover it all, generated some good ideas on improving working – namely better meeting etiquette and using Microsoft Loop to generate agendas, meeting notes and capture actions.
- As a management team we ran a session examining the recommendations from our recent digital target operating model work. Not many surprises but good to have hypotheses checked. The hard work is with us now to turn the recommendations into actions and move this work forward.
- The briefing sessions with executive leadership team members have been an opportunity to get feedback but also pick up some niggles and actions which I now need to follow up. Its really good to hear what is bothering leaders and consider how Digital might be able to help with these problems.
What I’m up to next
The diary looks pretty crazy this week but its a shorter week at least for travel.
- We’re trying to nail down the roadmap this week so we’ve got absolute clarity on what we _think_ we are doing whilst we engage with the wider Agency to check our assumptions *and* wait for budgets to be confirmed.
- We have a wider leadership team meeting on Tuesday. Virtual this time, so shorter and more focused on management issues but we will also be covering the roadmap and strategy work that has been going on.
- Our digital all staff meeting is on Wednesday. An opportunity for us in the leadership team to update everyone about whats going on as well as hear from others about what they are up to.
- We have our monthly risk review board on Tuesday. These are starting to develop their own rhythm and help us to mature our approach to managing and reporting our risk.
- Lots of business change sessions filling in the gaps in my diary as we develop business cases for critical work over the next year or so.
Whitehall Webby 