Weeknote v9.3

Matthew Cain
Web of Weeknotes
Published in
3 min readSep 20, 2020

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Week beginning 14 September

It was one of those weeks where at the end, I couldn’t remember the start. But somewhere in between those two points, we got some stuff done. It’s tempting to explain what all of those things were, because it was such a range. but the note would be intolerably long and not interesting enough for my reader (Hi, Kelly).

Focus for the week

If I was being brutal, I was close to achieving my goals but not close enough. We have a spec and selection criteria for out of hours, but not yet the agreement of colleagues. We have a plan to improve some parking customer journeys but the brief hasn’t been agreed. And we have a core team and a clear brief for the housing register, but some questions about how we balance discovery and prototyping.

But most importantly, we’re ready to start making track and trace calls to help support residents who couldn’t be reached via Public Health England. As we explained to visiting officials from the Cabinet Office this week, this is partly a product of investment for years in our postcode database, business intelligence tools and technology platform – and builds on the skills developed by the team during lockdown.

At times it felt as though I was being genuinely helpful to those efforts – unblocking a couple of things, helping the team think through the list of tasks before we could go live. At other times I was less sure, so instead worked hard to explain to the team that I was offering a perspective but not an instruction, so that people closest to the problem could figure out what was best.

Ones to watch

Repurposing the vulnerability snapshot to support vulnerable residents on the 3111 service – this project has finished for now and I’m really chuffed with it. Essentially there are three separate tools that we’ve brought together to make things better for residents: the I Need Help registration; the snapshot and Find Support Services. There are immediate and longer term potential applications for the tool, ranging from social care to enabling lots more services to re-use the tool. Whilst this is exciting it will need really strong product ownership to ensure the tools don’t become bloated and at the moment, I suspect that’s on me.

Telephony discovery – we’re coming to the end of a project with Stance Global to help us understand the user needs for our telephony infrastructure because the contract expires next month. The draft report recommends an approach I wasn’t considering, which makes it seem all the more worthwhile.

What I’m learning

Good processes – I was getting frustrated this week with how complicated it felt to capture progress on our OKRs. But I’d not considered the process in sufficient detail and, as I should know by now, there’s only good design and bad design – a ‘no design’ option doesn’t exist. If I’d done the hard work to make things simple for the team, I wouldn’t have had to get frustrated.

Central / Local – When I joined local government in 2015 I couldn’t understand the antipathy towards central government and dismissed it out of hand. As the facts changed, I changed my mind;) But I was right that it’s ultimately self-defeating. It’s unhelpful when government departments don’t understand the operational reality of achieving a policy intent just as it’s unhelpful that the sector seems to struggle to represent itself effectively. Being able to tackle some of these tensions would help inside organisations, too.

Next week

I’ve tried to write goals which are in step with the team whilst also about a week ahead of where we need to be. That way, I can be doing things in collaboration whilst helping us prepare for what comes next. That’s the theory, anyhow.

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Customer services, Digital and Data @ Hackney. Obsessed by digital + policy. Ex policy wonk and failing entrepreneur. Distracted by sport. Personal views