I’ve been a bit naff keeping up the weeknotes cadence in September so attempting a Month note. PD has a bibliography of common phrases, one of them is “laptop in the pond” that feeling when you get to the end of the week and just want to not look at a screen for a while. That’s partially why my cadence has dropped off,publishing to my blog is a bit of a faff. It’s a static site, all the content is in GitHub and pushed to netlify for hosting, the publishing process is a little esoteric and very dependent on me editing the file on my Mac and invoking terminal git commands to push the content. It’s the last thing I want to do at the end of a week, it also doesn’t really support a busy life well. So I’m trying something different today, I’m typing this directly in a file via the GitHub browser that means I can do it on my phone whilst Phoebe is at the gym.
Let’s see if it works and isn’t too riddled with typo’s.
Public Digital.
Enjoying the contract so far. Public digital are great and full of friendly intelligent people doing really interesting work. The client work is challenging as you would expect with any transformation work. I’ve found myself saying ‘change happens at the speed of shared context’ a lot. In large orgs that aren’t currently setup to be self managing low dependency teams this inevitably means change is slow, but that’s part of the work, making that jump.
One interesting thing I hadn’t quite realised is quite how dependent I’ve become on the disco/alpha/beta/live model of delivery. When you’re working in an org that doesn’t have that it makes conversations about how to get things done just a little bit harder, there’s not a shared frame of understanding. However it’s been healthy to go back to basics and think why we do disco/alpha/beta/live, what works well and what could be better. It’s exciting to have a little bit of influence to help shape a model that works for the client.
My role on the project is changing slightly we have 3 main things we’re trying to achieve.
- Setup ‘beacon’ teams to run ways of working experiments to see what works (and what doesn’t) in the clients context.
- Document the results of those experiments in the ‘Wayfinder’ a kind of service manual for the client, although slightly more granular than the GDS one.
- Run a training and coaching curriculum across all levels of the org from senior leadership to squad level.
Up until now I’ve been mostly tracking deliverables, flagging and removing dependencies, and doing the glue work of keeping the project on track and communicating out how we’re getting on. I’ve been asked to take more of a lead establishing one of the beacons and delivering the curriculum which I’ve started to do over the last few weeks. There’s the added challenge of ‘beacons’ now aligning with ‘squads’ (as in Spotify tribe/squad model) which is being driven from the broader change programme so bringing that all together into a coherent offering has been a big focus. One thing I’m really mindful about is not making the ‘ways of working’ the thing everyone fixates on, we need to make sure teams are focused on the outcomes and problems they need to solve, and develop their ways of working to suit. Lots of change transformations fall into the trap of fixating on the process of doing things and losing sight on the problems we’re there to solve.
SDinGov
Last month Priyanca and I finally gave our talk at SDinGov about escaping discovery doom loops . I stupidly missed my flight to Edinburgh and so had to take an impromptu 500 mile trip in the van, which hasn’t been the most reliable of vehicles recently. Amazingly it made it, but it meant the time we had penciled in to practice the talk face to face for the first time was absorbed with travelling. As a result we didn’t see much of the first part of the conference, we caught Rachel Coldicott’s keynote and Audree’s talk on optimism and then spent the rest of the day practicing. Our slot was 3pm we didn’t record it as we were a bit fearful it was going to be a disaster with so little face to face prep. The AV guy was absolutely lovely and helped put us at ease. The room filled up quickly and we had a full house, it went really well we had lots of positive feedback and people said the ideas we presented would be useful to apply to their context. We’ve had a couple of follow up queries about doing it again, we both agreed we would like to, I really enjoyed working with Priyanca she’s a thoughtful and insightful researcher I hope we get to work together properly one day.
The rest of the conference was interesting, co-design was a big theme, I found it interesting how co-design practices overlap a fair bit with delivery/agile practices to help allow people to work together effectively, it will be interesting to see how service design roles evolve as co-design becomes a more embedded continuous thing.
Feeling out of the gov loop
Busy-ness and brain space not being in digi-gov mode means I’m feeling out of the loop on potentially exciting things happening. I haven’t had a chance to read Jeni Tennison’s thread about the work going on shaping government’s digital vision, the snippets I’ve seen have been good but I don’t think anyone is really talking about the way digital stuff gets done. The process of disco/alpha/beta/live could really do with a bit of a shake up, especially around disco and alpha, it’s still implemented far too waterfall-ey in my humble opinion. However because I’ve not looked at what the mandate of the group is I’m not even sure if this is a focus (I hope it is).
Similarly a conversation with Simon led me to say that I didn’t think it was likely, but I would jump at the chance to help build an NHS clinical system to compete with the 3rd party dross currently offered to clinicians, Frankie replied that this is being looked at to my surprise, and have I not been reading his weeknotes I’m ashamed to say I haven’t, need to write that wrong.
In other news
Phoebe’s not had the best of starts with school this year, with one episode ending with her spending the day in hospital because of her heart. We’re finding navigating the EHCP minefield especially difficult. Last year Phoebe didn’t get all the support she needed, so we got some private advice about her EHCP and what should and shouldn’t be in place. It’s fair to say the school is having to learn the process as much as we are and we’re trying to be sympathetic to that, but if she’s not getting the support she’s entitled to then that’s a problem, it’s causing tension as she’s unsure what she can and can’t get help with, which manifested in her being hospitalised. It shouldn’t be this hard to provide kids with the support they need, you can’t help but feel like a failure.
In happier news Phoebe has been asked to do a showcase lift at the adaptive strength world championships at the NEC next month. This month she competed in the IAWA Welsh open and set a new British record in the seated deadlift. Freya and I aren’t going along to the events as much now, it’s not much fun for Freya to sit there for hours only to cheer her sister on for 10/15 mins, so we’ve been taking advantage to go on little camping trips. Han also competed in her first Hirox in Bristol, she did really well and finished it without too much stress. It was at Bristol bears training ground which was an amazing space, one of the coaches gave us a tour of the facilities and told us about the day today activities of training and coaching a premiership rugby team, it was fascinating.
Finally Phoebe is planning her work experience, she needs to do 30 hours throughout the year and wants to do something in ‘fashion’ either design or journalism, I think she wants to be the next Anna Wintour. I know nothing about fashion (as Phoebe regularly tells me!) If anyone has any great tips or contacts for where might be open to a few hours of work experience let me know, thanks!