Weeknote 42: week ending 20th 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.