The Rocketship Files III: The Birth of 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

The Birth of Rocketships

When we started digging deeper…

As the Heads of Profession team we got together on an Away Day where we shared all our backlogs.

We had set up a Miro board and prepared and filled in the templates beforehand — and then we spent a whole day sharing them:

• Pink lane: The Heads of Profession personal objectives, goals and interests
• Green lane: Our Profession Leads working on cross-cutting topics
• Blue lane: The wider Profession & community backlogs and objectives

And we found a lot of overlap and things that match.

… But we also realised… we had become the problem.

Instead of working together, the heads of our digital professions were individually dealing with the same problems. We didn’t show a united front and struggled with having to prove value over and over. We felt very reactive and not in control.

We were running our professions as siloes, even though we set up teams for collaboration — We were ignoring what we know works!

A lot of initiatives were happening to solve problems and we had started work on some of the main pain points already. BUT the work progressed very slowly and didn’t have the impact we wanted because the skills of the other professions were the firepower these initiatives needed!

This was the Lightbulb moment that started the ‘Rocketship’ idea:

When we shared our backlogs, we shifted our own perspective from a pure-profession view of the problems to a view of “what are the things the organisation needs?” By doing that, we realised where we need to work together to tackle issues. That was the missing link for us to have real impact.

We also realised that the horizontal view we have as Heads of Professions is shared by our Chief Digital and Information Officer (CDIO), who also looks across the verticals. She sets the strategy and vision — and cross-cutting initiatives like Rocketships offer a mechanism to deliver change and directly drive forward her strategy; to create a flexible organisation, working collaboratively with users at the heart.

READ THE NEXT CHAPTER: Blog IV: What are 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.