The Rocketship Files X: 1 year in Space!

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

A year ago we set out on a mission to help Justice Digital solve cross-cutting, impactful problems. We created a blueprint for new ways of working, gathered passionate crews, and launched 6 Rocketships into the unknown. We’ve experienced enormous successes, navigated through periods or turbulence, avoided meteor showers & set foot on planets we didn’t think would be possible. In this blog we openly share what went well, what we’re iterating, where we are now and what’s next for Rocketships in 2024.

Impact so far

We’ve launched 6 Rocketships over the course of the year. These are summarised below, but we go into more detail further in the blog.

• Created a single onboarding process — Improving employee experience. Simplifying onboarding for people managers. Helping with retention
• Redesigned the triage process — Simplifying the way we authorise spend. Making triage easier for our users
• Experimented with subject matter experts to co-create a prototype — Increasing adoption of Digital Prisons Services. Being user-led. Solving a common problem across Prisons Digital
• Curated resources into a pre-joiners ‘Welcome Pack’ — Getting people excited about joining, engaging with our work & feeling connected to our mission
• Tested an ‘Agile Foundations’ course — Helping colleagues within Justice Digital & wider MoJ develop skills and confidence in agile & digital ways of working
• Made it easier to find L&D opportunities — By designing a replicable process for professions to find & share appropriate L&D training aligned to Government Digital & Data skills

What went well

We launched with a bang!

One year ago we officially launched Rocketships at an all-hands events in front of 1,500 people. We were energised by the interest from people connecting with our vision and sharing their own ideas for Rocketship missions and problems they want to tackle.

We’re changing the culture

The missions not only solve problems, they are also cultivate the culture that we want to have in Justice Digital.

Rocketships have delivered brilliant work and as additional consequences they are;

• Building relationships and trust with new areas of the organisation
• Demonstrating the value of agile and user-centred ways of working
• Normalising lean delivery models
• Finding new ways to bring in innovative thinking
• Proving that we can and do tackle pain points

The Rocketship initiative is inspiring and encouraging us to actively look for high-impact missions and help us develop a culture of collaboration, experimentation and “can do” attitude. It highlights the impact every single one of us can have, even in a huge organisation — and it proves how everyone can directly contribute to our strategy and really make a difference.

We’re developing our people

We’ve seen that Rocketship missions not only solve cross-cutting issues for our areas and raise the maturity of the wider organisation, they also have real positive impacts on our crews. People who took part in missions reported they’ve;

• Developed new skills
• Dusted off old skills
• Worked on a wider scale
• Been able to try out different roles or responsibilities
• Grew their network
• Relished working in different & innovative ways
• Felt energised by the safety of the Rocketships

Crew members told us they loved

“Working with new people in an innovative way!”

“Working with people outside of my immediate team, sharing knowledge and learning new things, trying out new techniques.”

“Cross pollination! People from other areas experience how we approach a problem.”

“The approach and methodology behind solving the problem was creative and revolutionary. Using non standard methods of ideation and adding a little time pressure pushed me to think outside the box.”

We’re supporting our 2025 strategy

Our leadership team have been champions for the initiative and sponsors for specific missions from the beginning and we keep getting more buy in and great feedback:

“I just want to acknowledge the excellent work that Nikola and Lianne from the Ministry of Justice have been doing on Rocketships. A creative and effective way for cross-functional teams to solve problems quickly.” — Adam Boyse, CTO

“Driving a culture of innovation is essential to de-mystify what we do and provoke different types of conversations.” — Gina Gill, CDIO

What we’re iterating

After a year and several missions with different crews we’ve been identifying where we can iterate to improve.

We need to focus on Metrics

Our missions are varied, which meant identifying universal metrics to measure the impact of Rocketships upfront was difficult. However, we now have a better understanding of the different types of impact a mission can have and how we can start measuring them. We are working on;

• Measuring impact on crew members — A feedback form for the crew to gather more insights on the personal impact that Rocketships can have
• Measuring impact for our Stakeholders & sponsors
• Measuring impact on an organisational level — Defining what success looks like, and what metrics could be used across all Rocketships
• Rocketship dashboard — To bring together the metrics at different levels.This is something we really want to dig into and it might be its own Rocketship

Improving how we talk about the work

There’s more work to be done to explain Rocketships and how they can be used to our wider teams and new starters. Including;

• What Rocketships are — An intro for all
• Mission updates — Some of the crews have done successful missions but haven’t yet shared them with a bigger audience.We’re thinking about how to make it easier for them and how we can make sure that the organisation hears about the missions.
• General comms — We still haven’t quite cracked the right channels and frequency for our general Rocketship comms.

Sustainable ways of working

Our Rocketship Runbook was developed to support our crews and offer activities, artefacts and templates to use for their missions. We’re constantly seeking feedback and iterating to make it even better.

We are also thinking about writing a small explainer or manual to make all the information easily accessible and digestible.

As a Rocketship Leadership Team we’re trying to find ways to design ourselves out of the process, whilst also ensuring crews are supported in the right way.

2023 Missions

So far we’ve launched 6 different Rocketships

1. Improving our Onboarding

The crew has created a Trello board to be the single source of truth for our onboarding process. It is replacing multiple lists, boards and guides that were around. This is drastically simplifying onboarding for people managers, Heads of Professions and the recruitment team. We are also getting excellent feedback from new starters about how smooth and pleasant the onboarding process has been.

Our sponsor Deputy Director Mark Stanley says:

“I’ve long felt we could do better by our new joiners. Government runs at a real lick, and people are often expected to set off at a run before they really know what they’re doing. This makes them fell unappreciated and can leave them feeling left behind. When I heard about a design to fast track improvements in the onboarding experience for people joining Justice Digital I wanted to support this. This involved sponsoring the initaive and ensuring it had adequate funding and buy in. I’m proud the outcome of this ‘rocketship’ is that people feel much better prepared, welcomed and well supported on their arrival in our team.”

2. Redesigning Triage

In a week-long design sprint the crew redesigned how we distribute budget across our projects. By simplifying the way we authorise spend and moving to a more collaborative and fundamentally user driven approach the crew started taking the user dread out of Assurance.

3. Developing a Welcome Pack for new starters

The government process to onboard new starters can be very long due to security processes that have to be followed. The crew looked for opportunities to connect with new starters earlier to keep people excited about joining, engage with our work & start connecting to our mission. The new welcome pack offers recommendations for books, podcasts, TV programmes that give an insight into our work and the lives of people in the justice system.

4. Experimenting with our ways of working

The crew worked with subject matter experts in the prison space to co-create a prototype helping to increase adoption of Digital Prisons Services. Being user-led we worked to solve a common problem across Prisons Digital that can hopefully be scaled across the wider Digital teams.

5. Teaching Agile Foundations

A evolution of the Agile self managed learning coaching programme. Coaches have created a three day in person course. We’re sharing the Agile love and growing our capability across the wider MoJ — making it easier for digital teams and stakeholders to work together

This course covers the different aspects of agile delivery into one interactive, bespoke and in person session — with the added benefit of allowing for collaboration and learning from each other too.

6. Mapping our L&D offers

Having conducted a Peakon survey back in 2023, we asked the delivery community to feed back on the things that matter to them and in an All-Hands meeting, we prioritised the need for a clearer delivery manager career pathway.

We formed a rocketship to form ideas on how we could solve this problem.

Three areas were prioritised and were the focus of the rocketship for several months, and we came back to the delivery community with three artefacts:

Delivery Manager Skills Framework

This tool’s intended use is for delivery managers to work with their line managers to discuss their skills against the DDaT Capability Framework & Civil Service Success Profiles for Delivery Managers.

Doing this should help them informally assess which areas against each of the different skills & behaviours.

This tool enables delivery managers to set objectives, plan their learning & development, and discuss their next steps in their careers.

Delivery Manager Pathways Miro

This Miro Board helps to bring the DDaT skills to life for each role level with examples of what those skills look like in practice. This board is a useful tool for setting objectives, reflecting on areas to develop & deciding when to apply for other roles.

Delivery Manager Learning and Development Catalog

The rocketship curated a catalogue of suggested training that’s available on Gov Campus, covering both professional (e.g. scrum & kanban) & softer (e.g. assertiveness) skills. This tool has been put together to help delivery managers find training and information on how to book for the skill that they would wish to improve.

Over the course of 2023 we were seeing Rocketships mentioned in more and more places, for example in our onboarding materials or when our leadership team talks about innovation and problem solving.

What next?

Launching more Rocketships

We are in conversation with several pilots who are assembling their crews and defining their missions for 2024. The topics are very exciting and we are looking at things like Service Ethics, Trauma informed working, Professions and AI, and Lean Design. Really looking forward to watching them fly!

Testing the limits of Rocketships

We are planning to experiment with Rocketship ways of working for a R&D team. We know Rocketships represents an innovative delivery model for exploring problem spaces. It’s very exciting to use this opportunity to better understand what the limits of Rocketships are, and how they might offer an alternative model to more established ways of working within digital teams.

A shifting of planets

2024 will bring a lot of change for the Rocketship Ground Control. Lianne is going on a career break so the crew will have to reconfigure and hopefully onboard a couple new members. This links in with discussion we had about how and when we can start designing ourselves out of the process. “Not quite yet.” I think, is the answer for now.

Propose a mission

In the spirit of “going where the energy is” we’ll keep looking for fascinating topics and the people who are excited to take them on! As always — watch this space!

This is a series of posts. Read all chapters here https://medium.com/rocketships

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