S2ep6 value
By: Cate Mclaurin
Tags: Leadership, Digital, Local Government, Change

Another short week although summer has disappeared again.

5 great things that happened

We’ve moved how we publish project weeknotes and our show and tells. We were publishing them on our open G+HackIT delivers** community and on pipeline and now we’ve added a new section on the HackIT blog.

Project weeknotes were started in the teams – we’d encouraged people to work openly and a couple of teams decided that they’d do that by writing a short note each week on what they’ve been up to, and publish it. They’ve become a part of the rhythm of our weeks – Matthew’s right when he says Friday afternoons are a great time of the week, because that’s when the weeknotes start appearing. They are one Of the ways that we’re working in the open by default – and this in turn means our approach to governance can be different.

For me, traditional governance means the team disappears from view – but – the team is the unit of delivery. It’s people working together who build a thing, run and improve a thing, and provide a service to people.

The project weeknotes and the show and tells reflect that much better than any project report or reporting dashboard.

Outcomes for the leadership workshop

2. We had a HackIT leadership network session this week about working in the open by default. I think we’re really good at this – see (1) above, local gov pipeline, user research library, API playbook on GitHub, weeknotes from Rob and Matthew – so it was good to focus on how we can build on what we’re doing already. I used a couple of liberating structures to get the group to think out loud and discuss what’s worked so far, and what we could do more of, and in the second half we looked at the barriers and blocker we might have that are stopping us. Each of us has committed to three micro actions we’ll take over the next quarter that will enable us and our teams to work more openly.

3. Rahma Mohamed hosted an excellent show and tell on the work the teams been doing to redesign our HR forms. Instead of a presentation Rahma set the content up as a self guided journey around the room, ending with a demo of their prototype. I really liked the conversations it generated, and the way people were able to interact with the team and the content. Some great stats for Bureaucracy Hack as well – the team have calculated how much time they could save by redesigning the form itself and the business processes.

4. Roo Reynolds and team came in to kick off a piece of work helping us to look at how we might adopt and embed a devops culture across the teams. Felix, our ace new delivery manager who’s just joined us this week, did a great job of a fairly impromptu show and tell. I’m really excited about this piece of work – it’s a key part of how we build skills and capabilities, think about teams, and how we create smooth and fast delivery of services for users, so good people prefer to use them.

5. I ran a planning workshop with the contracts and procurement team which really helped us work out what the priority goals are for the next quarter — and what we’re going to do to get us there.

What I read this week:

This from Beth Fox on working in the open:

And this powerful piece on being yourself from Darren McCormac

Sarah Walsh wrote about using content design at AddAction:

Why we’re using our webchat service as the starting point for our new content

Cassie Robinson wrote an excellent blog post about the Digital Fund, and change — using a fantastic cafe analogy:

What we’re learning about how the sector understands “digital”

When we launched the Digital Fund in late 2018 we didn’t anticipate 1,200 applications in four weeks, but we knew we’d…link.medium.com

Louise Cato writes such good week notes — thoughtful, open, honest. And I am massively in awe of the 100k run.

Week 13: April 22nd — 28th. Running weeknotes.

This is a mood

Sam Villis wrote some great notes during Purdah — again, thoughtful and open:

Purdah notes

Keeping notes through 5 weeks of Purdah

What I learnt this week:

Quite a lot about Wordpress (see 1) above. I also went to a Liberating Structures meet up and learnt some new techniques for getting teams to design collaboratively.