September 2: consolidation
This week felt like a week mostly starting to consolidate things that have been thought about/discussed and planned over the summer. Outside of work I’ve been exploring Utrecht, enjoying the last of the summer sunshine, and am back to in person yoga classes for the first time in a loooong time. All of this is improving my overall wellbeing which, like a lot of people, took a battering over the past few months.
5 things that happened this week:
Emma and I discussed a piece of work she’s going to take on in our information management team over the next few months – making sure our mandatory information management training processes and the joins between teams who deliver different parts of it are as smooth as possible so that it’s a good user experience.
I caught up with Judith who’s also looking at existing processes and working with Rahma Mohamed and the print and business support teams to work out how we can improve the user experience. They’ve already made several changes which are showing promise — they might feel small but they’re a good way into how we want to work as a team going forwards. Rahma showed me a simple google form that will sit in front of a clunkier sign on process — making it easier for both the team to administer and the users to get the outcome they’re looking for.
Kit Collingwood and Emma McGowan hosted one team gov local with a lively and purposeful discussion about returning to the office, retention and recruiting talent. The whole sector is facing similar issues and it was great to to compare approaches/ideas and share content openly.
Emma McGowan and the social care team did our strategy show and tell this week — it was great to hear them talk to the whole HackIT team about what they’ve delivered and how they’re approaching the work going forwards.
and finally I spent a great hour with colleagues from MOJ talking about legacy systems, systems change, why legacy data trips us up. It was good to sepnd some time thinking outside of the day to day work, and reflecting on what we’ve learnt and what we’ve achieved in the last 12 months. As ever it reminded me how proud I am of working at Hackney and the team we’ve built together.
What did I read this week?
This from coop team on inclusive meetings. It’s a very useful reminder of good meetings generally – and as we start to see more hybrid meetings we’ll need to think about all of this even more.
This from Kylie Havelock and her team on a leadership focus for women and non binary members of their team:
This on how we use the decision making we need to also explore how we build relationships and trust:
And I listened to this podcast featuring Mariana Mazzucato (am missing the studying already!)
The World as You’ll Know It https://open.spotify.com/episode/59ERfwfpW1XbnClID8S3Rz?si=FihGHcB3Txy5IfE_9-UhsQ&dl_branch=1
