and just like that *seven* weeks flew by. Pre-election period meant staying quiet here for a while. Lets be honest though, I _could_ have posted last week but I’m out of the habit. I’m also conscious that I’m going to be on holiday after tomorrow for two weeks so if I don’t post today then it will be more than two months without an update and that’s not good.
What I’ve been up to
- Several great workshops with my senior leadership team (that’s the digital leadership team plus the heads of practice) to deep dive into some gnarly challenges we face as a group and agree what we do about it. The team is located all over the country, so time together is always difficult. I’m really glad we are prioritising face time to build trust and and confidence in each other. Its important. Kudos especially to Paul Crowley who joined us recently as head of user centred design and is brilliant at designing and delivering workshops.
- As a group we also had a great session with our Microsoft account management team to understand how we can make better use of our support contract. You’d be unsurprised to hear that Microsoft provide access to a whole bunch of training and advisory products. We want to use more of them.
- I’ve inserted a weekly senior leadership stand up to share priorities for the week and use the output from that session to brief the wider digital team on what we are working on. Part of this is working in the open, part of this is to ensure we are a all aligned on the things that matter.
- I’ve been involved in lots of discussions and meetings about the Homes England organisational blueprint, and how the digital team fit into the future vision for service delivery in the agency. These have been complex and complicated. Change is inevitable as we look to improve our service delivery. The work on this is ongoing but I hope we can share the work to date with the wider agency soon.
- Reporting rigour and processes. Work has moved forward at real pace around what we report, how we capture the data we need and how we present it so it provides good context. Krystalla and her team, working closely with ePMO, have done brilliant work to give me a clear view of the information I need to monitor performance and improvement metrics. It really feels like we’ve got a good drum beat on reporting now that gives me great confidence.
What I’m planning next
- After tomorrow’s flurry of last minute meetings, not a lot for the next weeks except lying in the sun trying not to think about work (impossible). See you all on the other side!
Whitehall Webby 