Weeknote #41 — DeliverCon 2018
This week has had a massive highlight of DeliverCon 2018. It was an unconference for cross-Government Delivery Managers hosted in the Priory Rooms in the centre of Birmingham. I was one of the people who volunteered to organise and facilitate. We only started organising about 3 months ago, and were ably led by some very talented people: Chief organiser: Dan Beasley, Chris Thompson, James Cattell, Rob Stirling, Ian Ames, Richard Blake, Zuz, Mike Deeble and me. We were ably helped by everyone who contributed and gave presentations on the day — it was a real community effort.
The day started with an excellent icebreaker from Chris that got people mixing up and talking to each other. The basic idea was that when people arrived and signed in they were given a note with a word on it and told to keep it a secret. When the icebreaker session started everyone had to find out people with notes with a similar topic and get together as a team (for example, one group was all TV detectives, another was food items).
James then ran a session for generating the unconference sessions using the Liberating Structures “25/10 crowd sourcing” technique. Again this got people meeting each other and talking. The sessions were then determined from the highest scored cards.
The rest of the day was then split into a number of parallel sessions with people deciding what they wanted to go and discuss. There were no speakers, just facilitated discussions on the chosen topic. The morning had 2 sessions, at lunchtime we had a number of lightning talks from Nic Teeman (@Nic_Teeman) on the https://pipeline.localgov.digital/, Darren McCormac on “Digital transformation in the charity sector”, Cate McLaurin on “governance so good, people prefer to use it” and Trapti Tiwari on “User Research/Feedback vs Scope documents”.
In the afternoon we continued with 3 more sessions.
There were some common themes on organisational changes needed for better agile delivery, team structures, and even how to make better use of space (which included remote vs co-located teams).
Overall the day was a great learning experience from talking with other people from across the country, and also from a personal perspective on being behind the scenes helping to run it. We had a good spread of people from across the country. There are some obvious areas with no attendees, and the real time retro had some points about increasing visibility, communication and diversity.
Notes
My notes from the day are:
Change will slow people down. In the current organisational transformation, have we considered this? There seems to be an expectation that transformation will make things better and quicker, but I am not sure we have had much thinking on the short-term impacts that the changes may slow things down.
A recommendation on reading the Dan North swarming blog: https://dannorth.net/2018/01/26/in-praise-of-swarming/
Showing example successes can really show and encourage behaviour change. Other people see the examples and the benefits of them, and are inspired to do the same thing. We need to do this more on the DevOps work as we have made some great progress but for many reasons the communications are reaching people.
Behavioural change can be affected, positively or negatively, by the smallest things including body language or actual language used. An example used was if people are always looking bored or uninterested on a conference call or in a meeting (even if they are not) then the whole vibe of the meeting can be down.
Some local government councils are using “Outcome based accountability” to measure success. The fundamentals of this are that instead of introducing metrics for individual areas, think about what outcome you want. The example in one session was that the council was looking to reduce the number of children in care in schools, but the actual important outcome was to support children in care to get the best GCSEs they can and therefore have the best chance of moving into work or further education.
Final thoughts
The day was a success and everyone on the organising team seemed a bit surprised at it, especially given we only started thinking about it a few months ago.
There are a lot of common themes from across all government departments, and charity sector. This just goes to show that more opportunities to share best practices and improve are needed — this could be common Slack channels, networking and personal meetings, and more DeliverCon sessions (if anyone wants to start one in Wales let me know).
