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I am writing this on Monday 2nd December 2024. A year to the day since I joined Homes England. Time has both flown and felt like an eternity. A lot has happened in the last year.

What I’ve learned

1. I came into this role with some pretty clear thoughts about how I wanted to approach leading a large team: be clear about priorities, set clear expectations, delegate and empower, protect the team at all costs and allow them to flourish. Lofty and idealistic. What I should have known is that life is always messy. There are always distractions, fastballs, problems etc that get in the way of doing what you want to do. The difference when you lead a team of 100+ is that those things exponentially increase giving you even less time to focus on the high level stuff.
2. Being a digital leader (and I suppose, leading any enabling business function) can be pretty exposing and lonely. You are the expert in the room but you are part of a bigger machine and each area is fighting to get its voice heard in the wider picture. Of course I think that digital is the most important component that bigger machine but not everyone thinks this. Crafting, curating and landing the right narrative is crucial but really hard when things are so fast paced and everyone is too busy. I constantly feel I need to get better at this.
3. Digital teams do lots of crucial work to support their parent organisation’s work that is often unseen, unheralded and often just not well understood. Our main interface with colleagues is ensuring they’ve got the right tools to do their jobs. But the team put in an immense amount of work to ensure tooling and applications work, they’re secure and safe from cyber attacks, data is robust, our technology platforms won’t fall over etc. This is a minimum viable expectation from the business.
4. If we don’t get the last bit right then talking about user needs, the service standard, spend controls etc won’t get us very far. To counter that I need to get better at demonstrating performance, progress and success. Building confidence across the wider business is a priority for me so that we can be seen as partners and experts.
5. I don’t want any of the above to sound negative because the Homes England digital team consistently delivers a high quality service to the agency. I’ve been blown away at times by the professionalism and expertise that the team have and how they go above and beyond at the crucial moments when its required. It for me to ensure that everyone else knows about this.

What I’m up to next

1. Building on my first year, taking stock of the lessons learned and continuing to improve.
2. Onwards!

A long week featuring lots of travel and the general chaos that surrounds it. Trying to fit as much into the week, and clear the backlog of tasks as best I can, before disappearing for a week of relaxation with Mrs G somewhere in the hills above southern Spain (I’m being vague because I don’t know where I’m actually going as I write this).

What I’ve been up to

1. All the way up to Newcastle last Monday evening, including a lovely 90 minute delay just outside Doncaster while broken points were fixed further up the line, in preparation for our quarterly in-person wider leadership on Tuesday. We don’t get together very often so it’s important that we make the most of it when we do. Top of many of the team’s mind is the next phase of the digital operating model part of the organisational blueprint programme. Helpfully Giles, the digital TOM programme director, was able to attend and lead some break out sessions to understand teams’ concerns and ideas. We also covered digital priorities and had two excellent show and tells – on our renewed risk management posture and how we delivered the S106 solution for the agency. A day really packed with value.
2. The next day was our six-weekly all staff call. This was also OB/ digital TOM dominated. Kirsty was able to give an update on the organisational blueprint programme and how it affects the digital team. Giles then talked about his emerging thoughts on the digital TOM and next steps.
3. We held our monthly portfolio assurance board. We’ve had a couple of extraordinary meetings recently to cover high priority requests so its was good to have a “normal” meeting. We continue to get into a good rhythm – both on the meetings themselves but also in maturing the agency’s approach to spend controls.
4. We’ve been reviewing our risk tolerance for our cyber risk and had a meeting to agree recommendation for our executive leadership board.
5. On top of this, lots of meetings that reduce actual work time. I’m trying my best to limit the number of meetings and the amount of times allocated to them. But it’s hard when it’s the main currency of decision making right now. I need to put some more focus on how to be more efficient with my meeting time.

What I’m doing next

1. Relaxing in Spain, hopefully.
2. See you all the week after next.

I am getting really out of the habit of writing these. It’s been three weeks since my last weeknote (this feels like a confession). The middle week of the three, half term, was a survival week as I was hit by the lurgy and metaphorically crawled through the five days of work whilst trying to recuperate with lots of cups of sweet tea and sleep. That though doesn’t justify not having written anything last week. But we are where we are.

Work continues to be busy. We’re now more than halfway through the third quarter of the year and I’m fast approaching my first anniversary at Homes England. There are no signs of things slowing down.

What I’ve been up to

1. The digital operating model programme director has now been appointed. He is Giles McCallum. He:s in week two of his role, getting his orientation and starting to form his plans for the detailed design phase of the op model work. We:ve already met a few times and I am looking forward to working with him and introducing him to the wider digital team (see below).

2. The digital leadership team have spent some time reviewing our various initiatives and commitments. We reflected that we had committed to do too much in conjunction with the various heads of and this was making it harder to move change forward. We have rationalised our backlog and committed to three distinct phases of activity, aligned with priorities identified in the early stage digital op model work. We are sharing this plan with managers across the digital team to ensure alignment across the directorate.

3. I got to visit the Churchill War Rooms for a roundtable dinner with other government digital and data leaders. The theme was “Schrodinger’s data” and was a lively debate about data sharing and exploitation opportunities for the public sector.

4. I got to attend Government Transformation Summit in Canada Water last week. An inspiring day of keynote speakers from around the world the world and roundtable discussions. I also got to catch up with some familiar faces from previous government jobs,

5. Our digital governance continues to mature. Shelley has joined us for three months on secondment from MHCLG to help us embed better processes and ways of working.

What I’m planning next

1. This Tuesday (tomorrow as I write this) is our quarterly wider leadership team meeting. Giles is coming to introduce himself and hear from the team about their understanding of the digital op model.

2. Wednesday is our six-weekly digital all staff meeting. Giles is also coming along to introduce himself to the wider team and give his emerging thoughts about his plans

3. I have a week off next week. A bit of winter sun and a chance to recharge the batteries. Cannot wait.

Two weeks since the last weeknote and I didn’t even notice that I missed writing one last week – not good. I could say “things are busy” but they are always that. Reflective time though is in short supply right now so even a quick note is better than none.

What I’ve been up to

1. Setting our directorate priorities for the next quarter (that’s quarter three) to take us up to Christmas. The team is generally running at, or over, capacity so clear areas of focus help us to manage our resources and effort and try and screen out some of the noise. The priorities are:
   • better management of our current change initiatives. Improving our processes to get more efficient in tracking and delivering them. This includes better communication flows into – and through – digital, clear roles and responsibilities, better expectation management and improved cross-agency collaboration.
   • Planning the next phase of digital’s part in the Organisational Blueprint programme. A programme director has now been appointed to lead us through the detailed design phase. It is critical that we get this right and ensure we are fit for purpose for the agency’s – and its users- needs.
   • Ensuring we get the right processes and decision points in place for service transition and our future live service support model. We have been working well with the Evolve programme team to get this work moving but now we need to accelerate it.
2. We held our monthly portfolio assurance board. Its maturing nicely now and the meeting ran far more effectively than when I first joined the agency. Props to Krystalla and team for all their support.
3. We also held our monthly Portfolio Assurance Board – where we review all work and escalations across Digital in the round. All senior digital leaders attend this meeting and its a chance for us look sideways across the various teams and reflect progress.
4. Yet more governance – time consuming but critical – we held the monthly risk review board. A while back we appointed risk champions to work with, and challenge, risk owners. The consequence is we are seeing a step change in how we manage and report risk. A massive thanks to all involved.
5. Spent quite bit of time with various colleagues to ensure we successfully deliver the S106 project – a quick fix digital solution to support an initiative of the new Secretary of State. The team have expended a huge amount of energy to ensure we can deliver on this. Again, well done.

What I’m planning next

1. Spending some quality time with the digital leadership team this week to deep dive on our priorities and turn them into tangible, trackable actions. I’m v conscious this time of year that the clocks go back, it gets darker, half term comes along and its suddenly Christmas. Its really important that we stay focused on delivery against our commitments so this planning time is important.
2. Catching up with the digital shadow leadership board. They act as a brilliant sounding board / conscience to me and the rest of the digital leadership team so looking forward to hearing their concerns, feedback, suggestions etc.
3. Its the monthly change executive board on Tuesday and we (digital) are presenting a paper on support for help to buy.
4. We’re hopefully holding our second product management breakfast on Wednesday. If you’re a product manager, or interested in product management, and you’re based near Canary Wharf, drop me a line.

Time continues to fly and there is so much going on, its v hard to prioritise at times. I’m trying to keep half an eye on the meaningful noise being generated about the creation of the new Digital Centre design panel in the hope that I might have something to contribute to the debate. Focus, focus, focus…

What I’ve been up to

1. We signed off our review of progress we have made against our business plan for quarter two. That’s the first half of the year done and we’re doing pretty well. Some of our initiatives have been paused while the agency organisational blueprint programme communicates future corporate direction but other than that we are largely on track.
2. Lots of discussions and negotiations about future live service support for new services being delivered by our change programmes. This is starting to shape up well.
3. Related – reviewing our “small g” governance processes to ensure they are optimal and reducing duplication where possible. This is an ongoing task and critical to mode of operation so I am devoting a lot of energy to resolving this as widely as possible.
4. As a response to the intro above – some frank conversations with the digital and senior leadership teams about prioritisation and how we make time to deliver the things that really matter rather than the noise and fast balls generated by the business.
5. Got to hang out for an evening in the Gherkin for a cross-govt round table discussion about the future for AI and data. Great views from the 38th floor!

What I’m planning next

1. Our portfolio assurance board is meeting on Tuesday. Its now got into a good rhythm managing the pipeline and spend approvals which really helps with solidifying our digital governance processes.
2. Got to do some work this week confirming our priorities for next quarter and how we will measure performance.
3. Looking forward the next few weeks, planning how we can best use in-person time as a senior leadership team to tackle the issues that are priorities and currently slowing us down. We built a backlog of issues and initiatives earlier in the summer but we are all busy people so time together to address these is really important.
4. Working on how we better manage the pipeline of change requests generated by the business – how we deal with the enquiries and pull them through our system into live.
5. So much more.

Anything else to note

I mentioned the Digital Centre design panel creation above and my interest in what they are do. Both Jukesie and Neil Williams have provided some excellent commentary themselves and links to others already. Hopes and wishes to which I would add:

• A focus on leadership skills for digital leaders, which I often hear is a problem for people stepping up into senior roles. How do we help future digital leaders navigate the likes of the audit committee or the corporate risk register reporting requirements?
• Sensible and proportionate restatement of why the digital spend controls are important and how they work. The loss of this grip at the centre has been a real problem for digital and tech teams for the last few years. But related theres a lot of confusion about what the purpose is, its often seen as another layer of unwanted governance.
• A focus on wider business change. A blind spot for “classical” GDS IMO. We built great products and delivered amazing digital services. But we often forgot the impact on the enduring business functions. Bodies are good at rejecting organs. Can’t do that again.