@CIO Porfolio Blog

Throughout 2023 I was seconded to work in our Digital Strategy team as Discovery Lead. This post is a summary of some of the key lessons and insights the team gathered about Discovery.

Some favourite reads (mostly listens these days) from my Public Sector bookshelf.

I have always loved the coast of Cornwall but living here all year round has allowed me to see some new things and I’ve been using this as an analogy for thinking about things at different scales of time and place.

This time let’s look at scaling across processes and systems.

In this episode let’s look at scaling across people and organisations.

We are making changes at Cornwall Council[1] all the time but sometimes we have grander ambitions, as we have for Digital Futures[2]. We talk about changing things at “scale” and to add more emphasis we sometimes swap out “change” for “transform”. If we are scaling across a period of time we might use a phrase like “repeatable” and if we are scaling across teams or services we sometimes talk about “standards” or “re-use”.

Most people go their whole lives without encountering a Target Operating Model (TOM). If you are one of the unlucky few who have to work on a TOM this post provides some hints and tips. I hope it will help you survive the experience and even get something useful out of it. Enormous amounts of money and energy go into TOMs so we should get more value out than we put in.

On a year in Cornwall Council.

My previous update on Backlogs provided an introduction to the term. This post provides a little more detail on how to work with Backlogs.

People would love it if we could predict the future. We get this all the time in our work: