Jekyll2024-03-01T14:11:46+00:00https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/feed.xml@CIOPortfolioPersonal blogRichard Bartonabout.htmlWeeknote 19 - 23 July 20212021-07-21T00:00:00+00:002021-07-23T00:00:00+00:00https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2021/07/weeknote-58<p>On shared provocations, developing agile leaders and anti-racism policies.
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<h2 id="sharing">Sharing</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-sitemap" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> I’ve joined a cross-Government group that is looking at how the public sector designs and uses operating models<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote">1</a></sup>. There is general agreement that we could make it easier and cheaper to do this sort of work but we are still working out what sort of intervention would help. Can we just publish examples and guides and let people find them or is something more formal and substantial needed to make any difference? We are starting to experiment with a few ideas. One of the experiments is to share some statements about operating models to help expose what is obvious and agreed and what could be controversial and need more discussions. Here is an early draft:</p>
<blockquote class="notice--info">
<ul>
<li>A business model summarises your organisation’s role and purpose. An operating model summarises how you work</li>
<li>Operating models are multidimensional. You can show aspects of your operating model through diagrams, charts and tables but one view won’t capture the whole thing</li>
<li>Operating models are multidisciplinary and touch people, process, tools, money, external parties etc</li>
<li>Operating models are dynamic. Structures such as role hierarchies are important but so are relationships, information, stocks and flows of work, movements of people etc</li>
<li>Just like a map isn’t the territory, operating model documents are simplified views of how you actually operate</li>
<li>Some parts of an operating model can be changed simply and directly (e.g. the reporting line for a role) but many aspects are emergent e.g. pace and productivity</li>
<li>Your organisation has an implicit operating model even if you have never written it down</li>
<li>Documented operating models can be helpful but the only ones that really count are what actually get implemented</li>
<li>A target operating model with no feasible path from where you are now is useless. Each step on the path needs to be operable</li>
<li>All operating models are interim and new things start emerging immediately</li>
<li>A target operating model can be helpful but you will probably never reach it and, if you did, it will no long meet your needs</li>
<li>You can’t tell that the ideas in a documented operating model are valid through document reviews. Modelling and simulation can increase confidence and expose more mistakes but real life is the ultimate test.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>We’ve also started to draft a sort of “beginner’s guide” and I hope we can discuss how to share this more widely at our next catch up.</p>
<h2 id="doing">Doing</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-comments-dollar" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> I’ve been introducing the teams running our finance and workforce systems to our new Delivery Manager and introducing our new Delivery Manager to all the jargon and acronyms we fall into when we talk about these systems. For a few months I’ve been covering both the Delivery Manager and Product Manager roles and not doing either of them especially well. I will gradually get back to focusing on all the Product Management I have been neglecting.</p>
<p><i class="fas fa-umbrella-beach" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> Preparations continued for our talk at Agile on the Beach<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">2</a></sup> in September. The team from the last event in 2019<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">3</a></sup> set the bar pretty high and we are quite a way short of that at the moment. We are refining some stories about our work over the last year or so. Some of them won’t make it into the final talk but they will still be useful for other events and possibly our internal training. We are now shifting our attention to story boarding so we can commission the images and videos we want to include in the presentation. As we get closer to the event it will be rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.</p>
<p><i class="fas fa-chalkboard-teacher" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> This week we ran a training session to introduce a group of managers in Adult Social Care to agile ways of working. The team already had some practical experience of agile from their transformation programme but wanted to learn more so they could use it more widely in their work. We made some minor adaptations to the training we had delivered to some of our IS colleagues last week but I hope to get some feedback to help make it even more relevant to their teams. We tried some different tools and techniques so that we could check the attendees were engaged and getting something useful from the session. These seemed to work well so we will take these back into the next IS course and keep improving. We also collected user stories to help plan some follow up. Some of this can be addressed through more training but we might also blend in coaching and sharing between teams. One of the Council’s learning and development team also attended to observe. It looks like there is some good alignment between our agile introduction and the Council’s leadership development curriculum so we are going to follow up and see how we can reinforce the key learning points.</p>
<h2 id="caring">Caring</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-fist-raised fa-flip-horizontal" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> The leadership development programme also came up at this month’s meeting of the Staff Race Equality Forum. We talked about the role that all leaders should have in addressing racism and how to make sure that people from under represented groups got the support they needed to take part and get the benefits of attending. We also continued discussing anti-racism policies. I had previously investigated this area<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote">4</a></sup> but most of the examples I could find just focus on minimal legal compliance. I am hoping we can adopt some of the ideas from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote">5</a></sup> which seem to be more ambitious but also quite practical.</p>
<h4 id="footnotes">Footnotes:</h4>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>There is a <a href="/2021/02/we-need-to-talk-about-TOM.html">bit more about operating models in a previous blog post</a> <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><a href="https://events.agileonthebeach.com/event/15740756-f9c3-4fcc-8348-ba191b63bb53/summary">Agile on the Beach</a> will be the World’s best agile conference this year and not just because it takes place in Cornwall! <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/bVg1o3sq4yA">Cornwall’s previous talk</a> was so good I changed by job! <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:6">
<p><a href="/2020/09/weeknote-32.html#caring">More about anti-racism strategy in a previous weeknote</a> <a href="#fnref:6" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:7">
<p>CIPD ideas for <a href="https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/fundamentals/relations/diversity/anti-racism-strategy">anti-racism strategies</a> <a href="#fnref:7" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Richard Bartonabout.htmlOn shared provocations, developing agile leaders and anti-racism policies.Weeknote 5 - 16 July 20212021-07-06T00:00:00+00:002021-07-17T00:00:00+00:00https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2021/07/weeknote-57<p>On visiting an office, audits and virtual training.
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<h2 id="moving">Moving</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-building" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> I started working from home full time a week or so before the start of the first official lockdown. Aside from a very short visit to collect some equipment, this week was the first time I have returned to do some work in our office. A large portion of our IS department was based in an area on the ground floor but this has been put to use as bookable team collaboration spaces and the whole office now has a reduced capacity, COVID-safe layout. I’m not sure we will ever return to the way we worked in 2019 but I am sure we will get back to some level of face-to-face working. It will probably be done deliberately for specific purposes rather than the default way of working. We’ve started to experiment with things like the Team Canvas<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote">1</a></sup> so that each of our teams can think about their unique circumstances and agree what will work for them.</p>
<h2 id="doing">Doing</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-comments-dollar" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> A new engineer has joined our finance and workforce systems team recently so we have started to rebalance the work around the team. As we move people into new areas we need to allocate some time for on-the-job training and pair working, but this is actually a positive benefit as it will increase our resilience and give us more flexibility for covering absences such as annual leave.</p>
<p>Over the last couple of weeks I have been helping coordinate some of the evidence we need for an external audit. This hasn’t been as easy as it should be, partially due to lack of familiarity. A year or so ago we were running some of our monthly processes for the first time and now it is much more familiar. Recently we completed our first year-end on the new systems and a few of the steps were difficult as they were new. This is the first audit of this kind for these new systems so, in some cases, we need to gather the audit evidence in new ways or clarify what is needed to take account of the fact that we are now using cloud computing services run by a supplier rather than computers running in our own data centre. Next time around will be much easier.</p>
<p><i class="fas fa-clipboard-check" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> A few weeks ago we formed a small group looking at how to improve our testing practices and I joined another catch up with the group this week. Testing is one of those things that everyone knows a little about and it gets more complicated the more you find out.</p>
<p>Most people get involved in a bit of testing occasionally, for example, checking that things seem to work just before a big change is going to be made. For other people, testing is their full time job and they will work with teams right at the start to clarify the goals and expected outcomes which will shape what tests will be needed and how they will be done. For occasional testers, finding an error is disappointing and a cause of anxiety. For testing specialists, finding no errors probably means the tests are not good enough and that is a cause of anxiety.</p>
<p>Some teams actually construct tests before they construct the thing they intend to test. Other teams are working with things created by external suppliers which have already been thoroughly tested but, because things can still slip through, they perform even more tests locally for critical elements. There are lots of ways that we can improve and it is great to have a group like this that is passionate about what we should do.</p>
<p><i class="fas fa-umbrella-beach" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> We are hoping to return to Agile on the Beach<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">2</a></sup> in September to continue the story that we started to share at the last event in 2019<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">3</a></sup>. I am part of a small group pulling together some stories we can share, which stay true to the spirit of the conference pitch we submitted over a year ago without pretending we haven’t been through a once in a lifetime crisis. I’ve started to sketch out a couple of these stories and it has been really useful to go back over past weekknotes<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote">4</a></sup> as a reminder of what happened and what I felt about it at the time.</p>
<p><i class="fas fa-chalkboard-teacher" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> Delivering training has been one of the most satisfying parts of my work throughout my career. I was training people in how to write programs<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote">5</a></sup> within months of starting my first proper job and have been delivering training on and off all my career. It was great to get the chance to run some of our introductory agile training last week and there is more to come.</p>
<p>We have used external training providers with mixed results. A lot of agile training is linked to specific frameworks and recognised certifications and the courses can feel like cramming for an exam rather than building skills and understanding. A lot of generic agile material can feel like common sense. The hard part is applying it in context and dealing with the specific constraints and compromises you have to face. I hope that sharing our trainers’ experience of applying the ideas and techniques in practice in the same environment will turn out to be more valuable than ticking a certification box. Let’s see what the initial trainees share in their feedback.</p>
<p>I have to admit I found the shift to virtual training really hard. I like to go off script and respond to trainee feedback during a course. Sometimes this can be in response to a question or comment but, in a training room setting, it can often be people’s facial expressions, unconscious sounds and body posture. You will get signals that people are tired, want to move on or are struggling to keep up way before anyone will put it into words. It is electric to experience the wave of nods, smiles and quiet exhalations when a group suddenly understands a difficult or subtle concept. Sometimes, it might take an unscheduled group exercise or on-the-fly rescheduling. Sometimes, it just takes a different visual aid or even just a change of position in the training room. Loads of these signals and responses are muffled in a virtual course. This should have been easy to anticipate but I realised too late that I hadn’t prepared enough for it and hadn’t developed enough virtual alternatives. I’ll do better next time but it will take a lot of research and experimentation to break my old habits and find new ways to train virtually.</p>
<h2 id="caring">Caring</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-laptop-code" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> Sorry if you are getting fed up with this but here is my regular reminder that codebar<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote">6</a></sup> is a group of really great people trying to do some really great things. This month’s session was fun and challenging again. I was helping someone get to grips with the sorts of testing expected in a professional environment. You can get quite a lot done with software without thinking about testing but once you work with something more complex, or as part of a team, then testing quickly becomes an essential skill that you need to master. You often need to be quite knowledgeable and proficient with the programing language to make full use of the testing tools as well but we got there in the end.</p>
<h4 id="footnotes">Footnotes:</h4>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:3">
<p><a href="https://medium.com/agile-outside-the-box/the-team-canvas-building-trust-via-transparency-cf88ac05c66d">Read more about Team Canvas</a> <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><a href="https://events.agileonthebeach.com/event/15740756-f9c3-4fcc-8348-ba191b63bb53/summary">Agile on the Beach</a> will be the World’s best agile conference this year and not just because it takes place in Cornwall! <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/bVg1o3sq4yA">Cornwall’s previous talk</a> was so good I changed by job! <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4">
<p>This is a <a href="https://productforthepeople.xyz/the-why-of-weeknotes-c1cd98967842">good introduction to the idea of weeknotes</a> <a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:5">
<p>As a sign of the times, I was teaching people to program in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)">Ada</a> as loads of our customers and contracts demanded it but few people will have heard of it now. <a href="#fnref:5" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:6">
<p>Codebar are always looking for more coaches so <a href="https://codebar.io/">find out what is involved</a> and <a href="https://codebar.io/member/new">sign up as a coach</a>. <a href="#fnref:6" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Richard Bartonabout.htmlOn visiting an office, audits and virtual training.Weeknote 28 June - 2 July 20212021-06-30T00:00:00+00:002021-07-04T00:00:00+00:00https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2021/06/weeknote-56<p>On interim roles, trade-offs and looking outside my “woke” filter bubble.
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<h2 id="doing">Doing</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-comments-dollar" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> For the last six months or so, I have been spending most of my time working on our finance and workforce systems but the intention was always to get back to my core agile coaching role at some point. We’ve got a full year of experience working with the new systems so we have a pretty good idea of what we need to do to run them effectively. This week we have been putting the finishing touches to some of the new roles we are going to need. Once we have recruited into these roles I will be able to hand over and get back to, what should be, the day job.</p>
<p>This week we have also been helping the last few people move off our old finance and workforce systems so we can then shut them down and dismantle them. Everyone has been using the new systems for day to day work for over a year but a few people need to access historic information and will occasionally need to do this for years to come. Since the historic data does not change we have created a set of reports to meet the most important needs, such as the records we must keep for tax and other regulatory purposes.</p>
<h2 id="thinking">Thinking</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-balance-scale" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> As we fill out the long term organisation to run our finance and workforce systems we will open up some opportunities but will also have to make some tough trade-offs. We will get the opportunity to pick up more of the items in our roadmap and deliver the benefits they promise but the trade-offs also start with the roadmap items.</p>
<p>All of the roadmap items are good ideas in their own right but we can’t do them all and certainly not at the same time. We could tackle the items with the greatest benefits first but that can crowd out smaller items which, as a collection, may produce more value for the same effort. To find the optimum schedule we need a bit more information about the costs, benefits and risks of the items. Developing that information will take effort but any more work we do on items that are subsequently rejected will be a waste.</p>
<p>Managing the roadmap itself also involves trade-offs. I would like to see richer information about the expected benefits from the work we are being asked to do but other stakeholders are comfortable with the benefits and want better information about when the work is likely to start and finish. We could do more work on all of this but that involves making estimates which might prove to be unreliable and consumes effort that might be better spent on delivering the most important items.</p>
<p>Why not just increase capacity so we can cover all of the work? For a variety of reasons, our finances are effectively fixed in the medium-term so increasing capacity in one team means that another team will have to do without. This becomes another trade-off and when the other teams are on the front-line providing essential care services these are not simple trade-offs to make. We can shift how our capacity is allocated within the team. For example, reducing the effort we put into training, quality or contingency measures would boost capacity in the short-term but would store up potentially dangerous problems for the future.</p>
<p>There are other trade-offs to make in how we get the work done. For example, when teams collaborate it can help if they have adopted similar approaches such as how they organise, prioritise and plan their work. We could set standards and apply controls to achieve this but these would then become obstacles to teams developing new and better ways of working. Even the structure and scope of the teams themselves is a trade-off between a multitude of alternative ways to organise ourselves.</p>
<p>To be honest, I can’t hold all of this in mind at one point in time so even which challenge to focus on is a trade-off. So far, my focus has been on getting the right capacity in our team. We are not there yet but the next few steps are clear. It is probably the right time to focus on something else. I can see some more roadmap work coming my way!</p>
<h2 id="caring">Caring</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-exclamation-triangle" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> I am trying to be a good ally<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">1</a></sup> and work against inequality. Part of this work is about being better informed and there are two sides to this. One is to learn more about the experiences of people facing discrimination because of their gender, skin colour, physical abilities or other characteristics. The other side is to learn more about the people who don’t share my views on these topics. Personally, I quite like the idea that someone might think I am “woke” but many people use this as a derogatory term and that probably includes some of my friends and family. I am not a fan of the Daily Mail or GB News but there is no point in me pretending that they aren’t influential and I would just become a different sort of bigot if I dismissed criticisms or challenges to my views out of hand. It isn’t comfortable getting out of my filter bubble<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">2</a></sup> and engaging with some of this material but there can be some pleasant surprises on occasions. Anyway, it is a trivial burden compared to the bias and inequality that others have to face on a daily basis.</p>
<h4 id="footnotes">Footnotes:</h4>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Every time I write about this I remember an occasion when I fell short of my ideals. If you are also finding this difficult I recommend following <a href="https://twitter.com/betterallies">Better Allies</a> for regular reminders and practical suggestions. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble">More about filter bubbles</a>. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Richard Bartonabout.htmlOn interim roles, trade-offs and looking outside my “woke” filter bubble.Weeknote 21 - 25 June 20212021-06-25T00:00:00+00:002021-06-27T00:00:00+00:00https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2021/06/weeknote-55<p>On new starters, public sector sharing and race equality in Cornwall.
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<h2 id="doing">Doing</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-comments-dollar" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> Highlight of this week was getting one of our new engineers started and introducing them to the team. COVID restrictions still make this harder than normal but we are getting better at it as we get more practice.</p>
<h2 id="sharing">Sharing</h2>
<p>Cornwall Council is unique but parts of what we do and some of our issues have a lot in common with other organisations, especially in the public sector. I am a member of a number of groups which are trying to collaborate on shared challenges so we can make our limited individual efforts go further. I attended meet ups for two of these groups this week.</p>
<p><i class="fas fa-handshake" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> One group is taking a fresh look at how we might share more across councils<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">1</a></sup>. For example, suppliers are often able to offer better prices for larger volumes. If several councils collaborated in purchasing supplies or equipment then they might be able to save money. This is not a new idea and you will always be able to find examples going on but many of us think we are only doing a small portion of what is possible. One of the topics the group looked at this week was funding and governance. The current arrangements for councils aren’t set up to make this sort of sharing easy so the group collected examples of what they had seen work in other sectors.</p>
<p><i class="fas fa-sitemap" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> Another group is looking at how the public sector designs and uses operating models<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote">2</a></sup>. Some of the group are new to the topic and seeking to learn more. Others have a lot of experience but aren’t satisfied with how things are done at the moment. Several of the group fed back on actions they had taken following our previous catch up and we discussed what would be most useful to do as a group. One of the things the group could do is to tackle the jargon and counter some of the common misconceptions. We could also create a beginners guide to help teams that don’t have a lot of direct experience themselves but who are capable of taking the first steps with some good hints and tips.</p>
<h2 id="caring">Caring</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-fist-raised fa-flip-horizontal" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> I enjoyed attending the Cornwall Race Equality Forum<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">3</a></sup> meeting this week although I think it will take me a bit longer to make sense of how the Forum will work. The Forum is comprised of public bodies, charities and interested individuals who share an ambition to increase racial equality across Cornwall. Aligning the efforts of all these participants will, hopefully, increase the impact they can all have but getting such a diverse group to work well together may not be easy as we all have different resources and constraints.</p>
<h4 id="footnotes">Footnotes:</h4>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>David Durant has written <a href="https://cholten99-61869.medium.com/introducing-the-local-gov-multi-tenant-services-meetup-6b6852e66e12">a blog post to explain more about these ideas</a>. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>There is a <a href="/2021/02/we-need-to-talk-about-TOM.html">bit more about operating models in a previous blog post</a>. <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><a href="https://letstalk.cornwall.gov.uk/building-bridges">The Cornwall Race Equality Forum</a>. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Richard Bartonabout.htmlOn new starters, public sector sharing and race equality in Cornwall.Weeknote 10 - 21 May 20212021-05-23T00:00:00+00:002021-05-23T00:00:00+00:00https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2021/05/weeknote-53<p>On growing our team, cost of delay and a book you must read.
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<h2 id="doing">Doing</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-comments-dollar" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> The next quarterly release for our finance and workforce systems goes live at the weekend so the last two weeks have been filled with testing. I’ve also been progressing the recruitment to expand our engineering team with interviews, evaluations and feedback. There will be more to do over the coming weeks such as following up references and issuing offers. Although it will be a little while yet, I have also started to get to grips with our onboarding process and how to help our new people make a great start under the COVID restrictions.</p>
<h2 id="experimenting">Experimenting</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-history" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> After discussing the idea for quite a while we are now seriously experimenting with cost of delay<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote">1</a></sup> as a tool to help us make smarter decisions about priorities and allocating our scarce time.</p>
<p>These can involve uncomfortable conversations because we are sometimes asking people to contemplate waiting when their work has been sitting in our IS backlog for some time. It can also be uncomfortable talking about costs when people are, quite rightly, more concerned about the impact to our services or the risks to our staff and the people we serve. We are starting to find practical ways to model these non-financial concerns in terms we can use with cost of delay.</p>
<p>We need to keep experimenting but, so far, things are going well. In some cases it has helped us identify requests which are of relatively low value and release people to get on with workarounds rather than fruitlessly waiting in the IS queue. We have had other examples where we have been able to create capacity to do the work because we can demonstrate it would be more expensive to wait for our existing capacity to become available. There is other work that falls between these extremes where we can use the cost of delay to schedule work in the most cost effective way.</p>
<h2 id="learning">Learning</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-book" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> I’ve finally got round to the final chapters of Sooner Safer Happier<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">2</a></sup>. I started enthusing about this before I finished the second chapter. Jonathan Smart will not realise this but he has written a book about how we are approaching agile ways of working at Cornwall Council.</p>
<p>Like Jonathan, we’ve been inspired by a body of knowledge about agile ways of working but we’ve learnt some hard lessons along the way. We’ll use ideas from frameworks such as Scrum<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote">3</a></sup> and SAFe<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote">4</a></sup> but we won’t follow them dogmatically. Our job is to develop great public services. Using agile ways of working can help us do that but it isn’t an end in itself.</p>
<p>As well as the content, I really like the structure which makes it easy to dip back in and re-read parts when the need arises.</p>
<h2 id="caring">Caring</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-fist-raised fa-flip-horizontal" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> Over the last two weeks I’ve attended another meeting of our race equality forum<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote">5</a></sup> and coached at another codebar event<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">6</a></sup>. I’m feeling more comfortable in both of these settings but now I am wondering if that is complacency rather than effectiveness. How do I put this to the test?</p>
<h4 id="footnotes">Footnotes:</h4>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:5">
<p>If you want to know more about Cost of Delay you should probably start with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du2WV1IbULU">Don Reinertsen’s work</a>. <a href="#fnref:5" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>You can read more <a href="https://soonersaferhappier.com/">about the book</a> and there are also a couple of fun videos to introduce the ideas. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:6">
<p><a href="https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html">The Scrum Guide</a>. <a href="#fnref:6" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4">
<p><a href="https://www.scaledagileframework.com/">Scaled Agile Framework(SAFe)</a>. <a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>There is a <a href="/2020/09/weeknote-31.html#a-word-about-a-good-cause">bit more about our race equality forum in a previous note</a>. <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Codebar are always looking for more coaches so <a href="https://codebar.io/">find out what is involved</a> and <a href="https://codebar.io/member/new">sign up as a coach</a>. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Richard Bartonabout.htmlOn growing our team, cost of delay and a book you must read.Weeknote 24 May - 18 June 20212021-05-23T00:00:00+00:002021-06-18T00:00:00+00:00https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2021/05/weeknote-54<p>On apprenticeships, testing and some large and small achievements.
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<h2 id="doing">Doing</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-comments-dollar" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> There has been a lot going on around our finance and workforce systems over the last few weeks.</p>
<p>We went live with our latest quarterly release. We had done a lot of testing before the release but a couple of annoying things slipped through. The team did a great job of jumping on these to sort them out but it did create some inconvenience for people.</p>
<p>Once the quarterly release was out of the way we switched attention onto our backlog and managed to clear off some important items. Interestingly, some of the insights we got from fixing the quarterly release issues provided the clues we needed to resolve some longer running issues. So that cloud had a silver lining.</p>
<p>We held the final board meeting for the implementation project. It has taken a huge amount of work from the project team to get to this point and is a great achievement. Some of the team have now moved on to other projects and assignments but many are continuing to work with us on running and improving the platform. Governance of this ongoing effort now shifts to our design authority which will officially kick-off next month.</p>
<h2 id="learning">Learning</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-user-graduate" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> Over the last few weeks I have been learning about apprenticeships and talking to colleagues about how we can make the most of the opportunities apprenticeships create. There were a lot of assumptions I had made which I need to update; in particular, how people can take up apprenticeships part way through their careers and not just at the beginning. This could be a really good way for people to develop the skills we need to run our finance and workforce systems.</p>
<p><i class="fas fa-clipboard-check" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> I have been getting an update on leading practices in testing by joining in a working group led by our testing specialists. When I started my career testing was mostly a laborious manual process but, like most things in technology, this can be highly automated to be more effective and productive. To make the most of these opportunities we need to change the way we plan and organise our work and even change the way people think about testing. We are hoping to use one of our projects as a showcase of how powerful these practices can be. It should also make it easier for all of our teams to understand what is needed and start making changes in their areas of work.</p>
<h2 id="caring">Caring</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-hand-holding-heart" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> Over the last few weeks I’ve been able to:</p>
<ul>
<li>join a Codebar<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">1</a></sup> event to coach someone hoping to start an IT career</li>
<li>show a local charity how to save money on file sharing by using secure tools which are free to non-profits</li>
<li>talk to one of the leaders working on the Cornwall People Hub<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">2</a></sup></li>
<li>attend the latest staff forum for race equality<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote">3</a></sup>.</li>
</ul>
<h4 id="footnotes">Footnotes:</h4>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Codebar are always looking for more coaches so <a href="https://codebar.io/">find out what is involved</a> and <a href="https://codebar.io/member/new">sign up as a coach</a>. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><a href="https://www.ciosgrowthhub.com/peoplehub">The Cornwall People Hub</a>. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>There is a <a href="/2020/09/weeknote-31.html#a-word-about-a-good-cause">bit more about our race equality forum in a previous note</a>. <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Richard Bartonabout.htmlOn apprenticeships, testing and some large and small achievements.Weeknote 4 - 7 May 20212021-05-08T00:00:00+00:002021-05-09T00:00:00+00:00https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2021/05/weeknote-52<p>On a busy short week, local elections and COVID in India.
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<h2 id="doing">Doing</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-comments-dollar" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> Most of this week has been spent on work related to our finance and workforce systems. Here is a selection of items this week.</p>
<ul>
<li>Preparing to interview successful applicants for our new engineering roles.</li>
<li>Attending a review of some unplanned downtime for our recruitment system.</li>
<li>Checking on preparations to test the latest quarterly software update next week.</li>
<li>Reviewing software and service contracts which cover these systems.</li>
<li>Making a final decision on the replacement of some specialist software we use to model organisation structures.</li>
<li>Evaluating proposals for automating how we manage annual leave and changes to staff contracts. We are going ahead with one of these right away but the other is going to pause while we make sure the benefits will outweigh the likely costs.</li>
<li>Catching up with our other Product Managers to review how we are progressing with our agile transformation and looking at how we can get better at managing our technology architecture and design.</li>
</ul>
<p><i class="fas fa-hands-helping" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> I’ve also found or made a little time for some other topics.</p>
<ul>
<li>Attending a really engaging and informative update on our people strategy. The session started with a light-hearted quiz to test our knowledge of key facts and figures about the Council’s workforce.</li>
<li>Introducing one of our Product Managers to some public sector digital communities to make it easier to find and share with others doing similar roles in other councils.</li>
<li>Making plans to try more skill sharing with colleagues at Dorset.</li>
<li>Talking to our Adult Social Care team about one of their experiments with agile ways of working and how we can work together on the next steps.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="admiring">Admiring</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-thumbs-up" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> The final counting is coming to a close in numerous local elections across the country. My colleagues have put in a load of time and effort to make these elections go smoothly, from staffing polling stations and counting votes to keeping critical systems up and running. There are a load of specialist systems which help us manage elections but this was also a big test of the infrastructure behind our new website. The usual effort has been compounded by COVID restrictions and the implementation of new boundaries<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup>. I guess it is a sign of the times that one of the first things the new councillors received was their IT.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">These laptops are waiting to be distributed to elected councillors so that they can get to work straight away! 👩💻 <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CCElections?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CCElections</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/LocalElections2021?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#LocalElections2021</a> <a href="https://t.co/RpPKxHedQs">pic.twitter.com/RpPKxHedQs</a></p>— @cornwallcouncil (@CornwallCouncil) <a href="https://twitter.com/CornwallCouncil/status/1390624308586766341?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 7, 2021</a></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<p>It has been an amazing effort but we won’t get to rest long. COVID still requires constant vigilance and preparations for hosting the G7 continue<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">2</a></sup>.</p>
<h2 id="caring">Caring</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-viruses" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> I’m working with several people who have connections in India and, although the second wave of COVID cases seems to be nearing its peak, it is still taking an enormous toll. As restrictions in the UK ease, please be ready to give time and space to colleagues who may be quietly grieving or anxiously trying to secure supplies and care for friends and family overseas.</p>
<h4 id="footnotes">Footnotes:</h4>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><a href="https://www.cornwall.gov.uk/the-council-and-democracy/elections/boundary-reviews-and-changes/">Cornwall boundary changes</a>. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><a href="https://www.g7uk.org/">G7 website</a>. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Richard Bartonabout.htmlOn a busy short week, local elections and COVID in India.Weeknote 19 - 30 April 20212021-04-20T00:00:00+00:002021-05-03T00:00:00+00:00https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2021/04/weeknote-51<p>On flexing, failing and basic needs.
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<h2 id="doing">Doing</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-comments-dollar" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> We have plans to expand our capability to develop and improve our finance and workforce systems. Demand for this work constantly shifts as change programmes come and go so supply needs to be flexible too. It is not cost effective to have a large, permanent team waiting for the peaks in demand, nor to use contractors and suppliers for everything, so we are going to use a blended approach.</p>
<p>Over the last few weeks we have been running a recruitment campaign to expand our permanent team a little and should start interviewing next week. In addition we have been looking at how we can fine tune the blended approach. The sorts of things we are exploring are:</p>
<ul>
<li>what sorts of commercial arrangements would best fit the profile of our work</li>
<li>how to be clear about what we need without locking out great new ideas from suppliers</li>
<li>establishing great collaboration and team working with temporary supplier staff</li>
<li>the skills we need to develop to sustainably work this way.</li>
</ul>
<p>In May we will receive our next quarterly release from our main finance and workforce system. For a few weeks our specialist teams have been getting reading for a short but intensive period of testing. Regular releases means that the amount of change in each release is quite small and so is the potential impact. It is still possible for defects to get through so it is prudent for us to test the parts that are most critical for us. We’ll also review our roadmap of future developments as the release may include things we are not using right now but may want to take on in the future.</p>
<h2 id="failing">Failing</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-window-close" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> I’m covering several roles on a temporary basis at the moment. I knew that I would have to prioritise and drop some things but knowing this, feeling it and doing it are not the same. There are some lower priority things that I have continued and have no regrets. Some of my coaching activities don’t take a large amount of time but they do give me an energy boost which, I hope, makes me more productive and focused when spending time on the priorities.</p>
<p>I’ve made other choices which I do regret, for example, dropping out of a project which has gone on to face some big challenges. I’ll never know if I could have helped the project to avoid or cope with these but I feel like I should have shared more of the burden. I’m also regretting starting or continuing some initiatives which are only getting half the attention they need. These can start to feel like a drain rather than a boost, especially when I am struggling on one of the higher priority bits of work. The test for me now is to make a decision and either commit and continue these initiatives or drop them until I can work on them properly.</p>
<h2 id="caring">Caring</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-fist-raised fa-flip-horizontal" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> I attended another meeting of our staff race equality forum. Every time I learn something new. Sometimes it could be about the impact of something in the news which I have missed. Following the meeting I’ve been thinking about the availability of goods and services tailored to different races and cultures. This part of the world is so prepared to cater for the needs of people like me, I almost never need to think about these things. Shoe size is probably the only category where I don’t count as “normal”. On the rare occasions I get a new pair of shoes it can be exasperating. Struggling to find the basic things you need all the time must be exhausting.</p>Richard Bartonabout.htmlOn flexing, failing and basic needs.Weeknote 5 - 16 April 20212021-04-18T00:00:00+00:002021-04-18T00:00:00+00:00https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2021/04/weeknote-50<p>On introducing agile, single source of truth and responding to more shootings in the US.
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<h2 id="doing">Doing</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-comments-dollar" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> We’ve introduced more agile techniques to the teams running our finance and workforce systems. We aren’t forcing everyone to do the same things but, instead, are trying new ideas when the opportunities arise.</p>
<p>One team has started to adopt a sprint-based<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">1</a></sup> way of working and finished their latest sprint last week. We’ll plan the next sprint on Monday. We’ll need to take account of some absences in the team which will have a big impact on the work we can take on. We have also started to talk about running regular show and share sessions to help everyone keep up to date on the most important bits of work.</p>
<p>Other teams are trying different tools (for instance, building plans in Microsoft Teams or Azure DevOps, or even spreadsheets!) and techniques (e.g. one team is trying Kanban<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">2</a></sup>).</p>
<p>This reactive approach makes sense as the teams are doing such a wide range of work and it isn’t clear what will work best. Our teams operate services, handle user requests and develop new features but the balance of these different types of work varies a lot between teams and over time. For example, some teams have finished their financial year end-processing but for others this continues through April. Some teams only include permanent staff but others also include temporary contractors or partner staff for specific bits of work.</p>
<h2 id="thinking">Thinking</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-info-circle" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> All organisations have to manage a lot of data. Councils have to handle data for an unusually large range of services (more than any of the commercial or central government departments I have worked with) but their data management challenges will be familiar to most data professionals.</p>
<p>All the organisations I have worked with are seeking “a single source of the truth”. Taking action based on incorrect or out of date information can be expensive or dangerous so having one obvious place to get the right information is clearly a good thing, isn’t it? Unfortunately, it often isn’t achievable.</p>
<p>One of the problems is economics. A whole series of actions would be needed to reach a single source of the truth. Each action takes us closer by combining databases or increasing data quality but they also consume effort and money. Once the most obvious problem areas have been addressed you will have “a few sources of good-enough data” and there won’t be a strong enough case for spending more time and effort to go further.</p>
<p>The other problem is that the truth might be hard to pin down or might not exist.</p>
<p>There aren’t single, true answers to simple questions like: what is your address? The answer changes over time and for different purposes such as place of birth, delivery address and billing address. For the homeless or people with complex relationships and family lives it is even harder. To confuse matters the question is sometimes a proxy for something else. For example, we sometimes ask about billing address and town of birth to help establish someone’s identity. In these cases, the answers need to be consistent across our interactions with that person; the physical truth doesn’t actually matter and might get in the way.</p>
<p>So let’s have lists of addresses for different purposes, tracked over time and different levels of assurance. Will that suffice? Sadly, not for some types of data. As an extreme example, the relationship between two people is important for some public services. I’ve seen a guide to determine if two people are a couple which runs to 15 pages and even then the official version of the “truth” is subject to appeal and could need to be settled in a court. In other situations, when dealing with a single individual, it might not be legal or even possible to link information obtained through different services into a single source of truth about that person.</p>
<p>In many cases “single source of the truth” is a convenient label for ongoing work to improve data and data management but we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking about it too literally. Removing errors and other sorts of waste from our services is actually what we should be putting our scarce effort and money into.</p>
<h2 id="caring">Caring</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-fist-raised fa-flip-horizontal" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> My professional network is focused on the IT and digital industry so a lot of people reading this are likely to be white men. I hope many are allies and are thinking about how their colleagues might be feeling about recent events. The shocking way Adam Toledo was killed last month has hit the news in the UK and there are also headlines linked to Breonna Taylor and George Floyd who were killed last year. I could view these as just headlines from a distant, troubled country without much impact on me. That is a privileged viewpoint. I’m lucky to feel that I and my loved ones are safe and fairly treated here. That experience isn’t shared by everyone and these events might make others feel upset, angry or frightened.</p>
<p>Some might feel powerless to do much more than be sympathetic but IT and digital professionals can take some small but important actions to counter the systemic bias in our industry. IT is a highly paid profession so we wield a lot of economic power. In addition, the things we build are inceasingly influential but they can perpetuate our own biases. We should be really uncomfortable that the IT industry is so dominated by white men and does not reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. Fortunately, there are things we can do. Last week I joined a group of coaches at another codebar<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote">3</a></sup> event to help people from under represented groups start or advance their career in IT. If you don’t feel comfortable being a coding coach there are numerous other groups you could help or support.</p>
<p>Accept you can’t do everything but please try to do something.</p>
<h4 id="footnotes">Footnotes:</h4>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>See an <a href="/2019/11/so-what-exactly-is-a-sprint.html">earlier post</a> about sprints. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development)">Kanban</a> <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4">
<p>Codebar are always looking for more coaches so <a href="https://codebar.io/">find out what is involved</a> and <a href="https://codebar.io/member/new">sign up as a coach</a>. <a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Richard Bartonabout.htmlOn introducing agile, single source of truth and responding to more shootings in the US.Weeknote 22 March - 2 April 20212021-04-05T00:00:00+00:002021-04-05T00:00:00+00:00https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2021/04/weeknote-49<p>On our new website and second-order agile.
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<h2 id="congratulating">Congratulating</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-globe" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> Last week we switched to our new council website<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup>. You might notice the bold new layout on the homepage but the most important changes may not be so easy to spot.</p>
<p>The design is based on good practice developed by the UK Government<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">2</a></sup> supplemented by feedback from representative users. The priority is to help people do what they need to do in their own context. This means the content needs to work well with the devices people actually use (mostly small touch screens on mobile phones) and for all sorts of people (such as people using screen readers).</p>
<p>Our old website was hosted on public cloud services but didn’t take full advantage of the flexibility available. Our new website makes use of more advanced features to employ more computing power during busy periods (such as the local elections next month) and release it when things are quiet.</p>
<p>It has taken a lot of work and a few sleepless nights to get this far and teams from across the Council can be proud of their part in this. We now have a much better platform but the new website isn’t finished yet. Our services and user needs keep changing so we will never finish adapting the site to keep up.</p>
<h2 id="thinking">Thinking</h2>
<p><i class="fas fa-question-circle" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> Around the world, many people have been using agile techniques to get their work done and are generally very generous in sharing what is working, or not, for their teams. This is the raw material for more formalised frameworks like Scrum<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote">3</a></sup> which are still evolving based upon this collective experience. In simple cases, where there is a clear team and a clear product, it is easy to find good advice about how to do all sorts of work in an agile way and keep improving over time.</p>
<p>Sometimes the team and the product are not so clear or need to change. I think of this sort of problem as second-order agile and there isn’t such a rich body of knowledge here. For public services, the UK Government Service Manual covers some of these second-order topics but even this makes some assumptions about the context that don’t always apply.</p>
<p>At the Council we are getting quite comfortable with first-order agile and consistently getting good results. When we struggle there is a good chance it is down to a second-order problem. Here are some examples:</p>
<ul>
<li>The work involves coordinating the efforts of a group of people that is too large to run as a single team. There are lots of ways of dividing the group into smaller teams but none of the options are ideal. When we spot these situations we can make deliberate choices or run experiments to find the best structure. Sometimes the situation emerges gradually and the structure that made sense at one point now doesn’t fit.</li>
<li>The scope of a product and the outcomes of a change we want to make don’t match. For example, imagine we want to make changes to staff expenses. We already have an expenses system which is a component of one of our IT products. The expense system may need to change but so will our expense policies. We will also need to engage staff in the change and train our support teams in how the new rules work and how to handle exceptions. A lot of this is out of the scope of the IT product. If we based our products around business services, like managing expenses, much more of this work would be in the scope but we would need a very different product team.</li>
</ul>
<p><i class="fas fa-comments-dollar" aria-hidden="true" style="padding: 0 5 0 0; font-size: 1.5em; color:#3876be;"></i> Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been wrestling with a few of these second-order issues related to our finance and workforce systems. We have an integrated set of services, systems and teams which are too big to manage as a single unit. We’ve made some decisions about the overall principles we will use to structure this area but many of the details aren’t obvious. It isn’t even clear if one approach will work across the whole area. Some of the answers will come from further work to design our future operating model but some will need to come from experiments and trials so that we can learn what works in practice.</p>
<h4 id="footnotes">Footnotes:</h4>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><a href="https://www.cornwall.gov.uk">Cornwall Council’s new website</a>. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><a href="https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/design">UK Government Design</a>. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>The <a href="https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html">Scrum Guide</a> had a useful <a href="https://scrumguides.org/revisions.html">update</a> at the end of last year <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Richard Bartonabout.htmlOn our new website and second-order agile.