Weeknote v9.5

Matthew Cain
Web of Weeknotes
Published in
3 min readOct 3, 2020

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Week beginning 28 September

I’ve refreshed the Trello board, summarising the key priorities for our teams between now until Christmas. I’ve managed to have slightly fewer commitments, in keeping with my advice to the team. And I’m getting more comfortable with setting clearer targets.

Goals for the week

This week was about finishing things. There’s not a fibre of my being which is built to do that. I don’t enjoy it. I’m not particularly good at. But we’ve got so many different things nearly done (and lots of other things started), it was the only responsible thing to do.

I succeeded, to a point. But the achievements were mostly the teams rather than mine. Thanks to Kamran we’ve got the new customer satisfaction survey. Thanks to Abdul, Lloyd and other managers we’ve got new codes to understand better the time we’re spending away from the phones. Thanks to Nanette and Judith our procurement for the out of hours customer services is now running. And a large group has come together under Felix’s facilitation to finish setting-up the system to distribute the test and trace support grant.

The teams needed less support than I anticipated to write their key results. In fact, the only thing that was entirely mine – helping people provide actionable feedback – didn’t make any progress. That’s for the weekend.

Ones to watch

API platform – this work is transitioning to a new phase. It’s really important that developing and improving our APIs isn’t a project but a process of continuous delivery. From time to time we might need to expand our capacity, but I’m keen to make sure that building APIs isn’t a project again but business as usual. The next phase is going to focus on our transactional data so is a nice fit with what we want to offer residents for self-service.

Decommissioning Universal Housing – we had another positive, forward-looking steering group meeting this week and Francois has joined us to manage the programme. My next challenge is about how we design a way of doing reporting which helps us anticipate where we need to be in three months time so that we can have the right conversation about velocity and delivering value.

Redesigning the housing register – a multidisciplinary team started work this week to redesign the housing register. It’s composed almost entirely of our own team (with help from an external front-end developer). It’s just the sort of scenario which would have had us reaching for a digital agency two years ago. So it’s a big ask but we’re starting the project with sufficient time to make mistakes and adapt our approach as we learn more.

What I’m learning

Determining done – Planning our key results for the quarter is a useful opportunity to determine when we’ll be ‘done’. Some things are straightforward: a new system is either in use or not. But many things aren’t. Our Agile mindset welcomes that, but it regularly poses prioritisation questions and can create a resourcing crunch. But we can use the process of expressing our key results to agree with stakeholders what done looks like.

Working remotely – I go to the office about once a week. And when I do, I feel a fraction as productive as the days I stay at home. That’s not just because the days are shorter. There’s just more walking round and chatting. I don’t know if it was always like this, but I suspect it was. At the very least, it probably took 2–3 minutes to move from one meeting to the next.

Next week

At the moment I’m looking at my diary and the list of things I must, should and could do and it’s feeling a bit like watching Jürgen Klopp’s first Liverpool teams: busy, energetic but chaotic and brittle.

So I’m tentatively committing to the following, but without really knowing whether it’s feasible or what else I’m missing. So maybe by the end of the week, I’ll be celebrating like a draw against West Brom.

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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