Weeknotes S01E02 — Can’t break the rules if you don’t make any…
By: Martyn Bennett
Tags: Stakeholder Management, Delivery Management, Delivery, User Centered Design, Citizens Advice

Congratulations if you’re a returning reader, it means you made it through the first one without getting too bored.

Welcome if you’re a new reader, please don’t let my “promise nothing and over deliver” statement above deter your readership, I’m REALLY interesting, honest.

Though I am definitely cheating by having this as weeknote number 2, as it actually covers Thursday and Friday of last week and Thursday of this (Last week’s having covered Monday to Wednesday) and me having been on annual leave the first half of this week.

Doc Brown picture with overtypes “rules? where we’re going, we don’t need rules.”

Deep diving!

I’ve been working with some of the continuous improvement team to review some of the processes of the wider team.

They’d already identified their problem statement when I came into post, but I’ve been offering some help with facilitating their top level thinking and action planning.

It’s been great to come into a team who are right at a point where I really think I can add value and help them along.

Especially when the topic is one so close to my heart — the main brunt of the work they’ve covered off so far has been to reduce admin work to enable team members to focus on other tasks. It wasn’t so long ago that I was in admin roles screaming “why are we doing this!?” and “there must be a better way!”.

Return of the Map

So the stakeholder mapping session I’d helped to design seems like it went really well about half of the attendees left a feedback dot, with most being on the good side, I’m going to go ahead and claim that one on the right as being an off the scale amount of love — just you try and stop me!

A feedback chart showing how much attendee’s at an away day session enjoyed the stakeholder mapping activity.

It was a simple exercise based on a fictional scenario with stakeholders provided alongside a definition of how they relate to the work. With groups then asked to map them using a fairly common interest vs influence martix, then design and share an engagement plan for one quadrant per group.

The goal was for people to get familiar with the format, to build confidence for them to carry this out with real life scenarios, but also for them to be able to share approaches and knowledge between them, and it seems to have hit the mark.

I’d already edited the exercise into a template usable for real world scenarios in both Miro and Jamboard format. Handily, I got my first opportunity to take it for a spin this week with a real world scenario.

We’ve got a piece of work bubbling away where it’s going to be really important to engage lots of different people in different ways and at different times.

A simple stakeholder interest vs influence matrix

One of the key aspects of my role as a Senior Delivery Manager on help to claim is to make sure we’re delivering the right things and that what we’re doing is valuable. Engaging with as many people who have an influence on or interest in what we’re doing is imperative.

The idea of stakeholder mapping and engagement can be something that makes people instantly switch off — it’s something which is almost taken as a given “well of course we’re going to manage our stakeholders”. And people are right, they will, because there’s only so long you can ignore the really important ones before they come knocking.

But what you miss by not looking at and understanding your stakeholders is early engagement, two way communication and the opportunity to get feedback on your plans at the earliest point possible — you also mitigate the risk of someone popping up in three weeks time with a list of questions you weren’t expecting and don’t really have the time to answer.

Not to mention the amount of support and knowledge that will be out there you can draw on by engaging the right people early on.

One of the things I’m keen to ensure we start doing is revisiting our stakeholder mapping exercises as projects progress, evolve and change. The people who we need to influence and be influenced by now are probably not the same people we’ll be wanting to focus on in 6 months time — building an awareness of that and thinking about it periodically (if not regularly) will stand us in good stead to make sure we can deliver the best things and stuff.

Planning

The Senior team across help to claim have been working on planning out the focus for the next quarter over the last few weeks.

Though a lot of the context needed for me to input valuably is still missing, having only been working on the programme for a month or so — it’s been great to be a part of it. I’m learning, and more importantly engaging with the breadth and depth of the work the programme does.

As part of my induction I’d read lots of things and spoke to lots of people but that can often be quite overwhelming and you’re never entirely sure what’s worth going back over and retaining.

Taking part in planning has enabled me to get a real sense of where we are right now and how things link up, I’m still not completely there but the puzzle pieces are all starting to fit together.

I can’t wait to get going on helping to deliver on the ambitions!

Non work life

So I promised last week that returning readers would get my frozen daiquiri recipe, it went down a storm at the barbecue last weekend even if one person did claim it looked like mashed potato (more owing to the fact I made a 5l batch of it and served it up with a ladel from a metal mixing bowl…) and despite the fact I broke my blender in the process (by dropping it… doh!).

I make it in a nutri-bullet’esque blender, though I hate recipes that use “cups” I didn’t actually measure anything and cups seems about the easiest way to estimate my eyeballing, the weight and measures act doesn’t apply at Casa De Bennett, unfortunately.

A “recipe” for Tropical Frozen Daiquiris

I’ve actually been off work for the majority of this week, owing to my second wedding anniversary, the wife and I spent a lovely couple of days away at a spa and even played some miniature golf.

I’ve also watched far more football than I’d like to admit to over the last week and there’s a phenomenal 10 games on between now and Sunday night!

PLUS Formula 1 is back this weekend — for anyone that’s spent more than 5 minutes with me you’ll already know that F1 is “my thing” and I can barely have a conversation without mentioning it. The mixture of science, strategy, speed and soap opera sits perfectly in the sweet spot for me. But, more on that in weeknotes to follow I’m sure!

Recruitment

If you’ve made it this far and don’t already work with me, then you must be at least somewhat interested in what I do and what we do at Citizens Advice.

Well the good news is — we’re hiring! You can find all the details about our Delivery Manager vacancies on our website and can reach out to me, Jo Garwood or Matt White if you’d like an informal chat, they both also weeknote if you’d like to read more about the work of the delivery team here at Citizens Advice.