Weeknote v2.12

Week beginning 24 September

There were two massively exciting things this week: the digital design team were conducting a design sprint to consider how best to onboard new starters, and the platform team were ‘backlog busting’ 2,500 outstanding requests. They’ve told their stories beautifully on our G+ Community.

Focus for the week: Developing the commercial aspects of our change support agency proposition.

Learning for the week: We’ve been grappling with the consequences of making the wrong decision in a project earlier this year. We developed something that we don’t understand well enough to maintain – an issue the product team raised at the time. We didn’t make a tough decision at the time so will have to work harder now to make it work. For my part, I wasn’t clear enough with the team about the options and didn’t listen carefully enough.

Monday

Marian and I have been working on a maturity model to explain our vision for how the team of relationship managers can best support services. I dipped in to the Business Relationships delivery group to hear the team update colleagues on progress to improving our content for businesses. The focus of the rest of my day was a visit to Essex to participate in a workshop led by the Cabinet Office to help the council understand how to use Digital Marketplace.

Tuesday

Ross from children’s social care took us on a journey of a child through the service. I’ve been learning about the range of services we provide but this helped me understand how they fit together. I think it’s also given us a useful framework to help colleagues understand where technology and data can support their services.

Wednesday

It was fascinating to meet Mark Thompson and colleagues from Methods. Mark is one of the most thoughtful contributor to understanding of how government can make use of modern technology. In preparation for the session I was considering how co-design of individual products could still lead to componetisation. There’s obviously a danger that, if not done right, product teams create overlapping services. However, if our code, APIs and design patterns are so good people prefer to use them and we extract most of the logic to the API later, then we can consolidate around core components, swerving the organisational pain of corralling multiple services at different stages of technical maturity and with different needs around a big corporate project.

I check in to the design sprint. They’d done such a good job to this point, I challenged them to think really hard about the attractiveness and achievability of each of the concepts that underpinned their proposed service, because it’s too easy to fall in love with the solution when you’ve worked so hard to identify it.

I led a training session to help the team think commercially, which I’d designed around my experiences of running an agency. The last exercise, thinking about how to run a supplier meeting, suggested the team had a really strong understanding.

Thursday

Friday

I returned to the OKR work I’d done earlier in the week. I’d conflated activities and results, so needed to map out the work more clearly. I then got stuck-in to backlog busting and managed to clear 25 tickets – a fraction of the work that the team’s done, but it was good to do my bit.

I also did some work to quantify the ROI that we’re achieving through the new HMO licensing service that went live earlier this week. The initial business case was fine, but more work was needed to quantify the benefits.

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