November 2020 week notes – 1 year on
And what a crazy year it’s been! After being appointed as service manager for digital strategy and design I spent three months involved in interviewing as we moved to the next tier of the organisations restructure (Dorset council was formed on the 1st April 2019) which pretty much took us to Christmas, with the 1st jan being the date people started in new roles/teams.
I did squeeze in a trip with Aidan Dunn Executive Director for Corporate Development to talk about our digital work at the LGA showcase in November. We had at that point started to set the foundations including behaviours that would enable a culture for digital, a network of digital champions, and we were changing our approach to adopt user centred design and agile delivery following learning in the county council with FutureGov, using Services Week in January to promote this across the council.
The TEC lounge was opened to help people see the opportunities of how tech can be used in the home to make life easier, and help keep people independent as this is a priority area for Adult Care. We’ve had to think about how we can make use of this fab resource and a new video was previewed at a recent session.
We also ran our second digital awareness event for councillors intended to educate and inspire. The level of interest and desire for Dorset Council to be a digital council is really great but does add a certain amount of pressure to my role!
The restructure helped us to formalise service design, content design and user adoption as roles, and moved digital outside of ICT ops into a new digital and change service signalling digital is not just about technology (my second most used phrase after you’re on mute). We still work closely with ICT ops, I meet weekly with the Head of ICT and we have a weekly ‘drive thru’ with managers in ICT, PMO, Digital and Customer to help keep everyone informed and work flowing, this still needs work to use it effectively but is helping.
I came back after the Christmas break very keen about what we could set out to achieve in terms of digital in Dorset council and was really pleased with the talent and mix of skills and experience that was in the new digital team. I continue to feel like I am the luckiest service manager with people always ready to take responsibility, ownership, and leadership in the digital team.
Digital skills has been something we focused on in the lead up to the new council due to it’s importance as an enabler for digital change, and it was great to have our work recognised winning a connected Britain award last month. The digital place team have led on fantastic champions/inclusion work in the community whilst I’ve been more focused on the workforce. MS Teams launched in February and we wanted to think about how we could supercharge our internal digital champions network. To do this we partnered with 365tribe and changing social, we are getting brilliant results and feedback and it enabled us to have capacity to support the organisation during COVID-19 helping people to move activities into the virtual world.
Covid-19 was certainly a help when it came to team development being only 3 months old as a team. I feel we got to know people quicker, learning more about their lives, feelings, challenges, working together, spending much more time together than we normally would have. The team have been extremely supportive of each other and I am so proud of what everyone has and continue to achieve in difficult circumstances. Those first 3 months in particular were intense and everyone went above and beyond. Some of the things we’ve done virtually as a team to help maintain our wellbeing include:
- Daily check in
- Daily tea/coffee breaks
- Friday afternoon social
- Quizzes, charades, art class, yoga, escape room
- Pumpkin carving, dress up for children in need
- Talking about our feelings not just the work
- A channel to share positive feedback to cheer us up when we are having a bad day
- Icebreakers including a scavenger hunt but I’m running out of ideas now!
- Changed monthly supervision to fortnightly
- Extended our monthly team session to two hours, everything seems to take longer virtually!
We managed to catch breath and felt it was important to find a way to continue with our digital network which we have used to develop our digital vision, wanting to understand if our early work was still relevant and if priorities had changed, so we held Dorset Reloaded.
Our CEO Matt Prosser spoke at the two year local digital declaration celebration, yes it really does make my job easier when you have the support of senior leadership team. But that doesn’t mean there still aren’t challenging conversations with the business that think buying a new system or piece of tech will solve their problems.
I used August for a bit of self reflection taking up the offer of executive coaching which I would now recommend. Last year was tough with all the restructuring and uncertainty and I haven’t felt confident for a while. I ended up doing a 360 degree exercise, reading the feedback made me smile, laugh but also feel vulnerable. It was lovely to read all the positive comments and I now have two clear areas to work on and feel much more confident. I’ve also pushed myself this year to participate in a podcast, panel discussion, and GDS design sessions, working up to media interviews which I’ve managed to avoid so far.
In September we launched our service design programme to provide learning and coaching to people/teams. It was an awesome moment for me when someone in the organisation quoted learning from that training in an entirely different setting.
I’ve had to do my first virtual onboarding for our new web manager, I think on the whole it’s worked ok, but to be honest we are all at the point where we want to be able to get together in the real world now.
Our digital vision is going for approval, on one hand it’s not that important as we are getting on and doing stuff, on the other I do feel having that point of reference for the organisation, new employees, and people working with us is really helpful.
We are restarting our team development and have just completed insights, I’ve changed from motivator to inspirer having done this before, and wonder if that’s down to this years events. It feels like everyone is struggling with this second lockdown, maybe because there is no end in sight or we may face Christmas without being with family. As a manager it can be really difficult to motivate and be positive when you just want to crawl under the duvet and hibernate yourself!
The highlight of my year undoubtedly has to be the festival of the future working with Digital Leaders. Check out the session recordings if you missed out as there is so much great digital learning material. It was busy, exciting, creative, fun, and we worked with different people to usual forming new relationships #oneteam
I feel like the pieces of the jigsaw are coming together now, but I’m ready for a break as this year has been relentless. We have our work cut out next year working with Placecube to implement a new digital platform for Dorset, which if we manage to pull off in the way we envisage should be a game-changer for the council longer term.
I know I need to get into better habits and I’m trying hard to do stand up meetings, get that daily walk, and build in breaks. But there is still so much to do, I guess though that is one of the joys of working in digital, it’s constantly changing, there is never a dull moment and you get to meet and learn form amazing people #localdigital
