This week I’m trying what should be a straightforward and intuitive approach — the daily breakdown. I used this format a lot when I first started writing weeknotes but I’m always worried about it becoming stale (and also very long if I documented everything everyday). So here’s a snapshot of my week:
Monday
Monday started with a swim (yay!) and then straight into a row of meetings.
I joined the contracts team for the weekly catch up so that we could discuss our priorities for the next quarter — these include replacing the sims in all of the tablets and ipads with a cheaper contract (this’ll save us a substantial amount of money), and working on our ‘printing as a service’ offer to staff so that we’re ready to re-procure that contract later this year. For both of these we’ve already done a discovery phase which has given us much better insight into the current service.
It was great to welcome Eko into the team, and also catch up with Karim who’s just been on a scrum master course with Tobias Mayer and come back full of ideas and raring to put them into practice.
Tuesday
On Tuesday I caught up with Nic, our Lead Delivery Manager and had a great chat about recruitment**, skills development, and the flow of work coming into the team. Later on we worked with our financial systems team to look at our user needs for both payment and managing income, finishing off the short discovery we’ve done over the past two weeks. I had some quiet desk time in the afternoon which meant I managed to catch up on a whole load of small things I’d promised to either do/send/read.
Wednesday
One Team Gov breakfast in Hackney — what a great start to the day this was. This was a bit of an experiment — would people want to come to Hackney, would the logistics work etc***. It was a great discussion — thank you to everyone who came and helped make it so. Rahma Mohamed wrote up some great notes from the discussion.
Talking of One Team Gov — James Reeve wrote this great piece on bureaucracy this week, and is proposing a bureaucracy hack (I am very excited by this idea), and it chimed really well with discussions I’ve been having with henry lewis, looking at how we can use used centred design and agile methods to improve our internal processes. It’s the sort of thing that, done badly (and we’ve all seen it done badly), distracts, de-energises and slows down teams, and makes them less productive. We’ve been thinking about this for ourselves at Hackney — governance so good, people prefer to use it.
The afternoon was mainly about show and tells — three very different projects, but all of them were informative, engaging and open. First up was Rahma Mohamed and Joanne Moore talking about the work they’re doing to iterate our Hackney Agile Lifecycle, then our adult social care colleagues who are working with Convivio Team on developing a directory of services. Finally our architecture and infrastructure colleagues showed us what they’ve been doing around single sign on for staff, which will make it much easier for us to access our work on any device, any time, securely.
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Thursday
As a public servant I want to understand Agile so that I can better manage complex change
I started to focus on how we’ll run our intro to agile course for the second time — we learnt a lot from the pilot, and this is our chance to make it even better. Matthew and I spent some time thinking about what the next most important things are we need to do so that we’re ready for the end of February. I spent some time with Hidayat, one of our delivery apprentices, helping him refine his trello board for our printing as a service project, thinking about the skills needed to writing great acceptance criteria and how he might structure the board so that the team can work more effectively together.
I also had a cup of tea with a colleague from our parking service, who wanted to know more about what we’re doing, how she might learn more about agile ways of working and what my job actually involves. I love talking to new people, and finding out more about what they’re thinking about, and I was able to point her in the direction of some further reading/thinking that she can do, and I’m going to organise for her to shadow some of the team as well.
Friday
I worked from home in the morning, and managed to write my application for the London Leadership programme. It’s a relatively new programme and something I’d really like to be part of, but it’s also really competitive (there’s only a couple of spaces per borough). Fingers crossed . . .
In the afternoon I had a few meetings, including catching up with Mal, one of the line managers of our apprentices. He can’t come to the retro I’m running on Monday to look at how we’re doing with our apprenticeship programme, from the line managers’ point of view. So we sat down together and chatted about his feedback — what’s working really well, what we need to focus on next, and what do we need to improve. Mal’s really proud of the work they’re doing in his team, and of being part of the programme, and he’s already thinking ahead to what happens next for this first cohort next year, and how we’ll help them move on to a job (either with us or somewhere else — success is progression on to the next thing).
What I read this week:
Louise Cato published the reading list we’d collated at bookcamp. I’ve started reading Radical Candor, and am really enjoying it.
I didn’t get to see Cassie Robinson. this week (we were meant to catch up but couldn’t) but I read this excellent piece from her on the Tech For Good movement:
*in all honesty the minute by minute bit of the title was an excuse to include a picture of the clock. Sorry — a totally gratuitous lobster reference.
**we’ve had a great response to our delivery ads, and are working our way through the shortlisting process. Am really looking forward to interviewing potential new team members.
***as ever I distracted myself from my nervousness by over catering. Deep down I firmly believe that if you get the food right very little can go wrong . . . this may or may not be true.
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