Three questions to ask yourself when you win an award (or when you don’t)
Yesterday the apprenticeship service won the Permanent Secretary’s award at the annual Department for Education awards. The Permanent Secretary’s award is a kind of ‘best in show’ award across a range of categories including policy, leadership, innovation, operational excellence and project delivery. We were delighted because the whole team across all the different sites (London, Coventry, Sheffield) and all disciplines (policy, digital, finance, analytical, customer support, legal, comms, operations…the list goes on) have put an enormous amount of effort into building something that works for all of our users.
But even more encouraging than the glossy certificate or makeshift red carpet were the words that Jonathan Slater (the Permanent Secretary) used to introduce the award. He recognised that for government to build something of this scale requires delivery and policy working seamlessly together. It requires openminded innovation and transparent working. It requires us to listen to the needs of our users and to put them first. In fact Jonathan pretty much ran through the principles of #OneTeamGov working. It was precisely because the team adopted the #OneTeamGov approach that it has been so successful.
The thing is that if you build a service like this and it quietly slips into operation, nobody except its users really know about it. And as Mark O’Neill says, users shouldn’t really know they are using a service either. When we launched there was no press statement or media flurry. It just worked and you can’t make a news story out of that.
So this was our 5 minutes of fame and Jonathan used it to pose three questions to us. What was hard? What was fun? What made you proud? This is a good question because working in a #OneTeamGov way should make us feel all of these things. Mark Stanley talked about how hard it was to work across departments — something we did this time but still need to crack across government — and how proud he was the we spoke to 1,500 users. Gary Tucker talked about the enjoyment you get when teams are working well together. Julie Braithwaite talked about the pride she felt when the whole thing came together to meet user needs — especially those of our aspiring apprentices.
For the record, mine were just a little bit different.
What was hard?
The time we were given seemed impossibly challenging at first but by working in the open and making policy and delivery the same thing we managed to do all of the most important stuff to get the service launched.
What was fun?
Seeing services come together before your eyes and the reaction of users when they realise that they’re going to have a great experience.
What made you proud?
Knowing that we have potentially changed the life chances and skills of hundreds of thousands of apprentices in this year alone and millions in the years to come.
In #OneTeamGov we think that ‘microactions’ — small but perceptible acts — slowly but inevitably lead to reform (we’ll be writing about this next week). Each of our #OneTeamGov blogposts will have a microaction so I thought I’d start the ball rolling. Take 2 minutes this Friday afternoon to write down what is hard, what is fun and what makes you proud in your role. Then share it with the person sitting next to you, and with us. Then use that conversation to build empathy and understanding of one another’s roles and motivations.
