Weeknotes s03e18
TL;DR: Looking up and finding some headspace. NGH’s cloud-first policy off the blocks.
[week ending 21/05/2021]
Who did you talk to outside of your organisation? Kirstie and I had a discussion about CIPHA —Combined Intelligence for Population Health Action. The Northamptonshire ICS has signed up to be part of this initiative, so we’re just feeling our way into what that means and what we’ll be able to do.
I had a real-life trip to visit Ian Hazel, Director of IT at Chesterfield Royal Hospital. We’ve been sharing ideas for a few months now, but it was good to actually meet and talk more about the work Chesterfield have done in Outpatients Transformation. We also have a lot of systems in common, so was good to talk approaches to managing them.
I had a quick chat with BCS — mainly about the benefits of corporate membership, which I’m pretty keen on. I did also manage to ask about the progress of my FEDIP application — turns out my sponsor had not responded in sufficient time, so my application was in the process of being closed and my application fee refunded. Turns out I’d not seen the email that said I had 5 days to nudge them. Anyway, looks like this has managed to be saved this week, and I now wait with baited breath for the review board to decide if I’m suitable to join the club.
I attended the workshop to discuss the East Midlands Imaging Network. The NHS Long Term Plan committed the NHS to establishing imaging networks across England by 2023. There is already a Radiology network in the East Midlands; EMRAD, which includes all but one Trust. The discussion was to determine if EMRAD was the seed into which the East Midlands Imaging Network would grow, or if we needed to start again. The outcome was a pretty strong consensus that EMRAD is a pretty good place to develop the network from, particularly noting that Imaging Networks are thought to take 5–10 years to get to maturity. There’s lots to improve regarding the tooling all the partners in EMRAD are using, and I think we all hope that this new development would be the impetus to help address some of those issues.
What do you wish you could have changed? This week a key member of the team announced they were leaving. I can’t really say more at this point, but there’s a lot to think about in relation to this situation.
This week I’ve had to admit that I’m becoming overwhelmed with all the stuff that is on my plate. I’ve been thinking for a several weeks that I just need to hunker down a bit more and get a few things completed, and it will get better, but it wasn’t happening — other things kept coming in left-field that required immediate attention, or there were things that I’d not done as well as I’d normally like to, causing other problems. I was also struggling to try and think my way out of the situation and work out what to do. This was the signal to me that I needed to do something about it and admit that I’ve got a problem. I was lucky enough to have a session with my coach this week and we disgarded the thing I had planned to talk about to focus on this. As a result, at the end of the week I managed to carve out a bit of time to do a bit of thinking of what I need to do to get on top of stuff. It won’t solve things immediately, but just having a bit of plan feels much better than where I was earlier in the week. I’m writing this on a Saturday and have just come back from 5 hours on my bike which has been great for letting my thoughts meander, and have some ideas about next steps that emerged very gently and without forcing (which is strange given I was going up and down 20% hills in the Peak District). This tells me that when you’re under pressure, you don’t give your brain any time to let those ideas bubble up and just need to step off the treadmill. I feeling hopeful for enacting a couple of things next week.
What did you learn? I had a coaching session this week. Not really a learning point, but just a reinforcement of how critical having that relationship and opportunity to step off the treadmill. The conversation in .
What did you enjoy? This week there was the Kettering and Northampton Digital Operational Meetings (KDOM and NDOM). There’s a lot happening and we’re going to need to do some prioritisation, particuarly as we get into delviery of the Group Digital Strategy. At KDOM we finished the meeting talking about the planning for a Hack Day — there’s some fabulous ideas on the table, we just need to work out when we can support it to make sure the execution matches the ambition. It was great to see the Northampton Cloud-First Policy making its way through the approval route. Eventually we’ll merge the Kettering and Northampton policies, but we’ve got a very different set up currently, so separate policies are fine.
What did you achieve? The KDOM and NDOM meetings were good, papers were good and the discussion was healthy.
Made a bit of progress on resolving an IG issue. Nothing to do with IG really, just getting the right people around the virtual table to talk.
Talked to some more people about the change to the criteria of the Digital Aspirant funding process that I mentioned last week. There is a glimmer of hope, but we’re currently planning for the worst and hoping for the best.
I finally made a start on an induction plan for Dan, the incoming Digital Director at NGH arriving. More to do, but just putting a skeleton together will mean I can dip in an out next week to complete it.
What are you looking forward to next week?
- We’re doing a Group Business Continuity Event. Not sure what to expect, but looking forward to learning and thinking how we could improve
- The leadership teams from both Digital teams are coming together to talk about enacting the Group Digital Strategy. I’m looking forward to discussing how we make this real for all our teams.
- CHCIO pre-exam meeting. Given that I’ve only looked at 2 of the 6 modules, I’m hoping this is going to be the exam-cram of my life! The exam is some point in June.
- KGH and NGH Board meetings.
Interesting Stuff read/consumed:
- The Old Guard. Interesting article about massive growth in tech companies, and the impact of Dunbar’s Number — The number, which is somewhere between 100 and 250 describes a point at which a group of people can no longer effectively maintain social connections in their respective heads.
- Service Design in Government, where do we influence the system? by Sam Villis
- Government Digital Service: Our strategy for 2021–2024. Nice simple strategy from GDS, who seem to have been less influential over the past year or so, so wondering if this will set them back on track.
- Observing an out-patients clinic by our very own Ian Roddis. This very much links to the #1 principle in our Group Digital Strategy about putting user needs first.
Books finished this week:
- Fiction: None.
- Non-Fiction: Tim Harford — Messy. We discussed it at the NGH-KGH Leadership bookclub this week. The premise of the book is that attempting to bring order and structure can stifle creativity and cross-pollination of ideas. Some stories in the book that I’d already heard on the Cautionary Tales podcast, plus one about the mathematician Paul Erdos who never cooked a meal or washed his own clothes — just sofa surfed with other mathematicians across the world, collaborating on over 500 papers in doing so. If he was staying in your house and woke up hungry at 4am, he’d stand in your kitchen banging saucepans until someone made him a meal!
Currently Reading:
- Non-Fiction: Parliament: The Biography, Vol. 1 — Ancestral Voices.
- Non-Fiction: 50 People Every Christian Should Know: Learning from Spiritual Giants of the Faith by Warren W. Wiersbe
- Fiction: The Marseille Caper by Peter Mayle. The book before this was a thinly veiled celebration of wine, and suspect this will be too, but at least if I read it, it makes some space on our bookshelves and heads into the charity box.
