The Rocketship Files IV: What are Rocketships?

Follow two Heads of Profession on a mission to make a real difference. We are writing about how we create conditions to get people to collaborate to solve problems that really hold us back.

Read all chapters here https://medium.com/rocketships

Rocketships are initiatives you set up that enable people to collaboratively solve high-impact topics across silos. They accelerate the delivery of the wider strategy.

• Each rocketship tackles a problem that really stops you from having the impact you want — and stops your people from doing their best work.
• They are solving things that are cross-cutting and can be easily scaled up.
• They don’t operate within only one business area, they can be applied across several of your silos.
• They have a crew of several professions coming from different areas.They are very lean and set up for a very specific mission.
• They have sponsors — we’ll come to those later.

Taken together, rocketships should be really empowering for the people in your organisation, and they should make a real difference to the effectiveness of your organisation as a whole.

When you launch Rocketships, there are likely to be several other side-impacts for your organisation as well:

• We get better at real collaboration and relationship building
• We are normalising some wild experimentation and also experimenting on a wider scale
• We improve the visibility of the topics we are tackling and show others across the organisation what massive painpoints they are!

Our Rocketship Contenders

Here are the things currently on our backlog.

We have 6 key themes:

Capability, Experimentation, Knowledge Management, Data, Culture, Brand

Where did the themes come from?

1. Our backlog sharing activity was the beginning, where we merged the things the Heads of Professions were tackling
2. We are adding to this by discussing with senior leadership
3. We are adding things coming out of our various communities of practice (for example, a self-managed agile course developed by the Delivery Managers is now evolving into what might someday be a Digital Academy’)

We want the themes and contenders to be constantly evolving, so we are adding and removing depending on where the energy and the interest is.

Within those themes we have ideas in different stages of readiness. A rough idea is enough as a first step. We then refine the contender if there is interest from sponsors and a crew to take it forward.

To get Senior Leadership on board we demonstrated how themes we uncovered and contenders we identified will directly support the organisation to achieve the wider strategy that’s been set.

Many people were very surprised to realise that this horizontal, cross-cutting work can have direct impact. Traditionally the impact of the organisation has been assumed to be just the outcomes derived from the products and services delivered in each of the verticals (business areas).

On top you see the Justice Digital strategy 2025 vision: Deliver a world-class justice system that works for everyone in society and Changing the user experience of justice — simpler, faster & better for everyone

The Strategic Themes are

• We must become a more flexible organisation
• We must be driven by data
• We must be led by users

On the bottom you see the 6 Heads of Profession key themes discussed earlier. In between you see Rocketships in different stages from drafting to launched.

1. New SD Model: By embedding service designers into policy and operations we get real policy design that is user-centred. This links directly into the “led by users” strategy.
2. By designing a slick Onboarding experience that is the single source of truth we reduce work for everyone and speed things up. This is a direct link to “Changing the user experience of justice — simpler, faster & better for everyone”.
3. By normalising experimentation we can react much faster to new things, reduce risk, and be a lot more innovative. This directly supports the strategic theme of “a more flexible organisation”.

This approach of linking Rocketships into the organisation’s strategy and vision is extremely valuable, and really shifts perceptions about how much impact a single person or community can have in an organisation. It’s quite exciting to be able to change the organisation for the better, because we know that every improvement in how we work will translate into many improvements in what we produce for our users, for many years to come.

READ THE NEXT CHAPTER: Blog V: Conditions for Rocketships

This is a series of posts over the next few months. Read all chapters here https://medium.com/rocketships

The Rocketship Files are a collaborative initiative by Lianne Mellor, Nikola Goger and Louis Allgood.