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Continuing in my tradition of writing last week’s weeknote almost halfway through the next but determined to get back into some kind of rhythm of recording my thoughts on whats top of my mind at the moment.

What I’ve been up to

1. I got out of the office last Tuesday to visit the Digital Government expo at the Excel centre. Managed to see a few old faces, talk with potential suppliers and soak up some of the excellent demos and talks. All without picking up loads of the useless freebies that inevitably get foisted on you at these kinds of things. I always marvel at just how LARGE the Excel centre is and how much is going on there every day of the week.
2. Had a few meetings with our Microsoft account team last week which gave me more insight into how we can make more use of our contractual relationship. We have access to loads of training opportunities that we need to make more use of and publicise across the agency to give anyone interested access.
3. Our fortnightly management team focused on performance and priorities. We have some big challenges around improving the measurement of our service delivery and how we guide colleagues through our various approvals processes
4. We held an extraordinary portfolio assurance board to gain approval for some new initiatives to move into discovery. The digital centre of government has recently restated the critical importance of enforcing spend controls and we have been working with MHCLG colleagues to tighten up our processes around this. Great to see it in action.
5. We reviewed our posture around our principal cyber risk in advance of the executive board’s regular review of principal risks. This one is _always_ a live issue but we feel like we are managing the risk to the best of our ability at the moment.

What I’m planning next

1. Focused very much on information sharing and how decisions are communicated to whom, and when. We make a lot of decisions every day as a collective leadership team but they don’t always get communicated to all the right people. Looking actively about how we improve this discipline.
2. On Wednesday we have our monthly all hands call. A rare chance to connect with the whole team, share some thoughts on priorities and challenges, and hear back from them on what they are working on.
3. On Thursday I have the quarterly board meeting for NASEN, the charity I am a a trustee of.
4. Our monthly digital review is also on Wednesday, a checkpoint that feeds up into the Change Portfolio Executive report and promotes our key achievements and successes over the last month.
5. We are reviewing progress against our annual business plan now that we have reached the end of the second quarter of the year(! – already) as we have to report where we are against a plan at the end of the week.

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!

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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

1. 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!

For once it was a four day week that didn’t feel like trying to compress six days of work into the time available. So that was good (I suspect the fact it was half term in many parts of the country contributed to the reduction in noise and email traffic). I am on leave next Monday but don’t expect it to be quite so relaxed when I return to work on Tuesday.

What I’ve been up to

1. A crammed agenda at the Change Executive meeting on Tuesday meant I didn’t get to set out all the excellent work have done on resource demand and forecasting in the detail I had wished. That means returning next month to update the committee but the detail we now have is helping us to better estimate future demand spikes and how we resource them better.
2. Our all staff call rolled well, ably chaired by Sarah our head of delivery. Two excellent lightning talks, one on how and what our integration service team operates on and another our recent successful data centre migration project. I also took part in an unscripted “get to know Jeremy” session which I managed to get through without tripping over.
3. On Wednesday evening a few of us got together to say goodbye to Adrian for his work as Executive Director of Digital and wish him luck in the future.
4. We’ve continued to support the team working on the agency op model and they presented back their diagnosis to us, which chimed well with what I’ve picked up since I joined just before Christmas.

What I’m planning next

1. The big event this week is a leadership workshop for all the senior leaders (digital leadership team members plus heads of practice) in the directorate. We don’t get together in-person enough so time together is precious to build trust and confidence in each other.
2. The op model work moves into future state vision and direction thinking.
3. We’re reviewing objectives and deliverables for next year across the directorate this year to comply with organisational deadlines to have these in place soonest.
4. I’m attending the regular Evolve programme board to review progress over the last month.
5. Related – Digital are working closer with the Evolve programme team to support and advise them. We are planning more joint structured touch points and workshops to improve ways of working and a shared understanding of the roadmap.