Month: September 2024

After last week’s marathon catch up, an attempt to recreate the habit of weekly updates here. Its sometimes hard to keep this up when thinking about the audience for these notes but the reality is they are primarily for me to reflect on whats been done and focus on whats important next. If they are useful for others then thats a bonus.

What I’ve been up to

1. Last Tuesday involved a trip up to Leeds to meet the agency wider leadership team, the first time we have all (within reason) met in person since I joined last December. These events are always more about spending time with people for an extended period of time and it was great to actually put faces to names (and avatars). Leeds has changed a great deal since I lived there 25 years ago but luckily Marvi has lived there more recently and knew all the shortcuts to get us back to the station in record time.
2. The senior leadership team got together on Thursday for the day. We held a deep dive on our risks in the morning with the help of the risk team. In the afternoon we focused on our tech modernisation plans and next steps in establishing the digital centre of excellence for the agency – combining standards, ways of working, assurance, coaching, communities of practice and training.
3. The digital leadership team met the day before to catch up on priorities, strategy, how we measure progress / success and to prepare for the following day’s senior leadership team day.
4. We’ve been looking at how we can improve service delivery to internal end users – provision of hardware, service desk etc – so I’ve been reviewing a proposal to automate more of this service. This has the dual benefit of improving response and releasing the team to work on higher priority work.
5. Alan and I had a catch up with Rose Waite about establishing a regular product meetup in Canary Wharf. This supports our commitment to amplify our communities of practice as well as building outreach with other government agencies moved “out east” from Whitehall.

What I’m planning next

1. Busy day tomorrow including my monthly meeting with our Microsoft business partner. We are always exploring how can make more use of the services that we get from our contracts and there is plenty more we could do such as access to training.
2. On Tuesday I’m hoping to get along to the Digital Government Expo 24 to speak to potential vendors in a neutral space and catch up with existing suppliers.
3. On Wednesday we have our fortnightly leadership team operations meeting to review progress against plan, budgets, recruitment etc.
4. Thursday is a day of meetings and the data programme board.
5. I’m trying to keep Friday as clear as possible to concentrate on deep work and reducing the length of my to do list. Usually this is hopeful in the extreme but I’m going to be holding the line on refusing meetings then as much as I can get away with.

I am so out of practice with writing these its not even funny. I paused when the election was called for obvious reasons and then….. stuff got in the way and the excuses not to write mounted up. So, here we are, new term and all that. So much has been going on and life is busy.

What I’ve been up to

1. I’ve been working with the digital senior leadership team to think about the future shape and role of the digital team and how we work with the various change programmes across the agency, in particular Evolve. What skills will we need in the future that we don’t have now, how should we be structured and organised, can we improve our ways of working etc. Predicting the future is hard as there are so many variables, and we still have a day job to do with our current responsibilities. As a team we are getting to a clearer, shared, understanding of how it might look but there is still a lot of work to do on how we might achieve it.
2. Related, agency wide there has been a burst of activity around our budgets for the next immediate period and for the medium term as part of the preparation for the next spending review. A change of government naturally means a change of priorities and emphasis so its a good opportunity to test our assumptions and plans.
3. We’ve welcomed Marvi Cotone as our new assistant director of delivery and architecture. Marvi joins us from HM Courts and Tribunals Service and has a wealth of experience in managing the transition of digital services from change to run. Shes made an immediate impact in informing our thinking about the future.
4. We held a wider leadership team day in Newcastle a few weeks back to work through how we operate as a team and how we can better delegate authority through the teams.
5. We’ve had several face to face sessions of the digital senior leadership team over the last few months (that’s the digital leadership team and all the heads of practice together). We’re making some meaningful progress on how we work together, improve processes and ways of working etc. Our focus at the moment is on how we develop the digital centre of excellence to bring together standards, controls, assurance, communities of practice, career paths etc in a meaningful way.
6. The team has successfully supported the London office move from Victoria Street to Canary Wharf which was largely seamless. They’re currently in the middle of supporting the Coventry to Birmingham move as well.

What I’m planning next

1. Its now Tuesday morning and I’m in Leeds for an in-person conference for the whole agency wider leadership team. I’m looking forward to meeting some people in real life who I’ve only seen on a screen before.
2. Tomorrow we have our monthly digital leadership team in person session. We haven’t met much as a foursome over the last few months (and indeed Amanda will be away this time round) as we’ve concentrated on building the digital senior leadership team with the heads of practise. It will be good for us to get our heads together tomorrow on future digital and improving our team efficiencies.
3. Its a week of meetings – on Thursday the digital senior leadership team are meeting in person to continue our work on the digital centre of excellence.
4. Friday morning together with Alan, our head of product, I am meeting with Rose Waite from Home Office and Martin Lugton from GDS. We are hoping to establish a regular product meetup for PMs in Canary Wharf. If you want to join us for breakfast shout!

Anything else to note

1. Summer eh? Where did that go?
2. Thank goodness schools are back.
3. I’m back too!