Weeknote: 18 to 22 March 2024
On the bright side
I spent time in both our London offices as well as the Leeds one which is my usual base. At all three locations, I managed impromptu chats with colleagues who I wouldn’t otherwise have caught up with.
An intro meeting with Jenny who is taking up an important role, and who my team will need to work closely alongside. We have lots to do!
An opportunity to talk briefly about our plans for next year at an internal delivery board, where digital has not previously been present. I picked up a couple of actions to follow up.
Joining in a planning day for the Find the right service cluster which is part of my product portfolio. I was given a few minutes to set some strategic context, and the team asked great questions about the metrics I have chosen to focus on.
A catch up with a user researcher who has joined my portfolio from another NHS organisation. Amid the pressures of trying to fill vacancies it’s good to know we are gaining new recruits in at least some areas.
John, our Chief Information Officer, hosted a call for senior leaders in the digital area about the implications of the recent budget announcement of future funding for digital in the NHS. I spoke up about the discovery I have sponsored which will form a foundation for a chunk of this.
Seeing a couple of important strategic pieces of work in the drafting stage. On one of them I urged colleagues drafting it to be more ambitious by speaking in the voice of our whole new organisation, not just as a single team deep inside it. We have merged 3 organisations, each with different skills and levers, and now we need to make the most of them all.
An afternoon out of the office at a workshop as part of Nesta’s UK 2040 Options work. Just the shift in horizon I needed after a few weeks where short term challenges seemed to be closing in.
Harder than it should be
I spent the train journey to London finishing off a briefing paper on why my team is reporting Red on its ability to continue delivering. We’re not alone in facing challenges, but the mitigations we need to take are quite specific to the unique role we play in underpinning NHS services.
Decisions about the funding and people to work on our services in the new financial year are being taken in rooms where my team are not represented. Only when the feedback comes back from that decision-making do I discover how partial or mangled the message has become about what we are trying to achieve and how.
Trying to assume good intent here, I fear that one of our support functions has become fixated on a narrative that reverses the cause and effect of how we are in the position we are. This narrative unfairly throws blame onto teams like mine, while absolving the support function of its own responsibility to work with us to address the root cause.
Meanwhile another support function has made decisions with potentially big implications for our ability to deliver using a baseline that I had already protested was out of date and incomplete. What’s especially frustrating is that the colleagues from this support function acknowledge the errors but feel unable to do anything about them in the short term. I have to trust their assurances that they will help us to untangle it at the first opportunity.
Also, that feeling where a senior stakeholder asks for a conversation about a great new technology opportunity that my team would love to have the time to explore but don’t because they’re struggling to resource the service we have now. I always have mixed emotions about those things and want to go in positively to the conversation with this person next week.
Teams chat of the week
Me: This is somewhat frustrating but I will take it as an opportunity
Colleague: Very frustrating more like!
Me: It’s only the second or third most frustrating thing I am dealing with today :)
Originally published at http://blog.mattedgar.com on March 23, 2024.
