Week notes v2.0

Monday – 21 June

After I had dropped the children at school, I wrote notes to update Jasmeen and Lucy on stuff that happened whilst they were away, helped Nic and colleagues at the GLA identify the best tender to help build our Pipeline product and wrote the release notes for the update to HAL that I’d done over the weekend.

Next, I spoke to someone from Accenture who wanted my input ahead of a workshop to inform the development of the London Office for Technology and Innovation. I didn’t particularly warm to the questions, but the discipline of speaking to attendees to prepare for an effective workshop is important.

We then had our digital and data management stand-up. I’m really pleased we do this, but it isn’t working particularly well. The time is too short to get a real understanding of what people are doing and everyone has too much to be able to give a clear sense of their priorities. Liz has got some good ideas for how to improve it.

Next, I went to meet Michael Benn from parking to get his insight into a Discovery that I’m doing with Eoin Quiery from corporate programmes about what support managers need to help the council achieve savings. His perspective on the parking transformation was particularly useful.

I finished the day by meeting up with Eoin as part of his review of corporate programmes and sharing my thoughts on how we could work better together to support services that are undergoing significant change, but also how Agile, user-centred approaches aren’t the preserve of digital.

Tuesday

I began the day reviewing the prototyping user research library. It wasn’t quite what I expected, so it took me a bit of time to get my head around it, but I could totally see the value of basing it around user stories. I was also wary about being too opinionated because what matters most is that it’s so easy our user researchers prefer to use it.

Then it was over to the Town Hall to join the kick-off meeting for the Hackney Welcome service. I’m not sure whether there’s a user need for the service, so the Discovery phase will be really important. But it was good to have Keith and Andreas’ input at this stage, and will be interesting to work with Rainmaker.

My last meeting in the office was with the Neighbourhoods CRM team to help review their work as the Discovery phase comes to an end. The team (Susan, Wing, Rahma, Will, Sachin) have done exceptionally well. It’s our first in-house Discovery phase and the team were new to each other and largely new to their roles. The fact they’ve reached the end of Discovery is a real achievement, and the quality of their work makes me really excited for what will come next.

Then it was off to Excel to speak on a panel at the Public Sector Show. It was positioned as AI and Robotics – so I had prepared some remarks along the lines of ‘most people here, us included, need to fix the plumbing before we can leverage these technologies’. But actually turned into a more generic chat about transformation. It was good to be able to praise fellow panel members, Future Cities for their planning work, GDS for Government as a Platform products and HMRC for their help with APIs.

Wednesday

I began by preparing for Thursday’s management away day. I wanted a clear idea of how I was going to present my papers and what I thought about the other items we were going to discuss.

Eoin and I met Tessa Cole to get her input into the ‘savings Discovery’. Her

perspective from EY and Islington was really valuable, and helped me think about how we could draw on skills that the council doesn’t have currently.

Next, Andy and I met the digital planning applications team to talk about the scope of work. One of the things I hope that I can do for all our projects is ensure that the scope remains well-defined and achievable, and that this is communicated clearly and consistently. There are lots of opportunities to improve things for residents and staff through the journey, but this work needs to improve how people submit, view and can comment on a planning application.

Liz, Lee and I then discussed Property Index to ensure we had a shared understanding of the user need, the existing work and what needed to be done next.

Wednesday ended by posting the ‘Pay My Rent’ opportunity to Digital Outcomes. Whilst I’m really proud of how effective the service has been so far, I’m even more excited by the fact that we’ve a shared ambition to revisit it so soon and improve it further.

Thursday

I bought some snacks for the away day, which had to include fresh fruit, thanks to the hard work of the public health team. I had a quick catch-up with the team supporting us on Temporary Accommodation and shared my observations from spending time watching the team do bookings and allocations currently.

The away day was the best so far. Each agenda item had enough time to really explore the issue without getting distracted by too much detail. Aligning our individual goals was useful, and then we had important discussions about how we measure and report on the effectiveness of our work (via a return on investment) and the opportunities and challenges associated with our API platform. I was also really excited to hear Henry and the team’s plans for improving our platform. But you’ll be able to dip into our conversation from the notes that Rob shared.

I left slightly earlier than usual because the children expressed a slight interest in watching the England game. The performance and the result was probably enough for them to let me watch the remaining games in the pub.

Friday

I began by writing a paper for the NHS IT Enabler Board. I do like writing a good paper, although I won’t find out if it is until the meeting. Cate then shared her week note, which nudged me into trying a new format. I also reviewed my diary for next week and noticed that we’ve got the customer services board on Monday afternoon, so began preparing.

I then spent a bit of time working with comms and recruitment to get the new recruitment site ready for launch and worked with Liz to try and understand the finances around Qlik. There are lots of reasons not to like edocs, but it serves a purpose for that kind of thing.

Adam and I had lunch – I’m trying to make sure I spend a little bit of time with everyone in the team – and I enjoyed sharing notes about our interest in applied psychology.

Jasmeen and I talked about her emerging plans to support our Product Owners. Her involvement will mean we can make a more coherent, concerted effort than we’ve been able to so far.

Rahma and I then discussed some of the things that she’s been learning and would like to improve about the way we work, before I then led a question and answer session for potential bidders to understand more about the context for Pay My Rent.

I finished the day by fixing some one to ones with colleagues in other services. It’s so important to check-in with people on a regular basis, but unless I give it some time I find that weeks have gone past without having proper conversations.

This week, I’m looking forward to:

• The next step in our work to develop an open portfolio Pipeline
• Giving a training session on presentation techniques
• The next show and tell for our adult social care front door project
• Meeting colleagues in housing services to talk about how we can better use data