I’m writing these after a beautifully sunny day, where it feel like winter might be over. This is good news — I find winter really quite hard work, and look forward to the sunshine and light each year.
This week I’ve been thinking about all the things that make it harder for us to do our jobs well — from processes that aren’t as efficient as they could be, to meetings and conversations that aren’t as productive as we could make them.
- I’ve been supporting the planning and developing of a Bureaucracy Hack event from One Team Gov. It’s been great to talk to others aross government about the processes that can get in the way, how we might tackle them, and what an event might look like.
2. I’ve been thinking about leadership generally, and also how we work in teams together when we’re trying to work in an more agile way. Not just on projects, but across all of our work. This article (via Sam Villis) was great, and thought provoking . . .
https://link.medium.com/h0EfAp5HgU
3. I spent quite a bit of time this week interviewing candidates with Nic, Richard and Philippa for our new roles in the delivery team. I like interviewing — having the chance to talk to people about what they’d like to achieve in the job. But it’s also tiring — I feel very responsible for making sure that everyone has a chance to demonstrate their skills and experience to their best ability in a process that’s often nerve wracking for the candidate. I’m not sure I have any wise thoughts on a different way of doing things other than interviews, but I do work hard to make sure that it’s a conversation as much as possible, and to remember what it’s like to be interviewed.
I also came across this blog post this week by Laura Portal Avelar, related to what I’ve been thinking about hiring/development/training/putting teams together.
https://link.medium.com/h0EfAp5HgU
4. I asked for help this week from Emma in our delivery team, I’ve got stuck with a project I’m working on and I’ve realised that I can’t get unstuck without some advice. It felt good to be able to say out loud what I’ve been puzzling over in my head, and I’m looking forward to working with her next week on it.
5. I spent some time with colleagues at City Hall talking about why governance is good, and why bad governance processes or elements of processes makes everyone’s work so much harder. It was a really interesting discussion and useful to hear from people working in different areas pulling at common threads.
https://media.giphy.com/media/rzlP5CEsft9ug/giphy.gif
Other things that happened this week:
We put out an opportunity on the Digital Marketplace to help us with our work to build our current team’s capability and skills — we think this approach will help us in a way that engages everyone in the teams involved.
https://link.medium.com/h0EfAp5HgU
Matthew launched our API competition, a really good example of thinking creatively about something, and then working out how to make it happen.
https://link.medium.com/h0EfAp5HgU
I’m looking forward to how seeing the responses to both of these helps us move forwards.
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