{"version":"https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1","title":"@CIOPortfolio","home_page_url":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/","feed_url":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/full.json","description":"Blog","user_comment":"@CIOPortfolio JSON feed (full articles)","authors":[{"name":"Richard Barton","url":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/"}],"language":"en","icon":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/icon-192.png","favicon":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/icon-512.png","items":[{"id":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/07/weeknote-19th-july-2024/","url":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/07/weeknote-19th-july-2024/","title":"Weeknote 19th July 2024","date_published":"2024-07-19T16:08:00Z","language":"","content_html":"<p>Lots of stuff about team working and a little about the global technology outage.</p><p>I hope you managed to avoid the worst impacts of the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpe3zgznwjno">Crowdstrike outage</a>. It would be nice to think that a positive side-effect will be to raise awareness of the weaknesses of technology and the important of security and contingency planning. I fear that this won’t be the case. There is already too much talk about preventing this from “ever happening again” and what should be done about the incompetent individuals or organisations responsible. That sort of binary thinking is unhelpful and could make things even worse. We can take steps to reduce frequency of these sorts of thing and reduce the impact when they happen but thinking the risk can be reduced to zero is fanciful. Risk reduction involves money and effort that can also be put to other good uses and careful trade-offs are required.</p><p>This is an area where some regulation could be helpful. Not the kind that mandates how individuals and organisations make these trade-offs but the type that insists the decisions are made explicitly and transparently. That is plenty for a weeknote but one of my <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2017/08/forget-about-being-secure/">old blog posts</a> has more on this kind of thing.</p><p>Lots of my work this week touched upon how teams work in isolation, how they work together and why teams are the shape and size that they are. Occasionally, we deliberately design teams. We generally do this for formal teams that you can see in our organisation structure. It takes a lot of effort and once it is done these teams tend to get locked in place by role profiles, budget allocations and management hierarchies. If we learn new things or circumstances change it can be hard the change these teams to fit.</p><p>We also have teams that are less formal that are put together for projects, initiatives or to provide specific functions such as governance. These teams can be easier to adjust to new things but we rarely take as much care in designing them, thinking through how they will work or creating the best possible environment for team members to work together.</p><p>This week I’ve worked with a variety of teams of different shapes and sizes. Here are some examples of the team challenges that have come up this week.</p><ul><li>We needed some extra capacity for some work so we got some help from a supplier. Their staff worked as a team but also needed to collaborate with people in several of our services. This work was to create some outputs required by a large project. The outputs would become the inputs for other teams that make new systems and proceses for our services. Representatives from all of these work together in light touch teams to coordinate the work or to provide governance or assurance. Just making sure all of these people know enough about what is going on to collaborate well is a challenge.</li><li>Depending upon how you count these things we have between 15 and 20 product teams within our IT function. Most of these could be described as “secondary” products. Our primary products are services such as waste collection, social care and housing. Our IT products provide tools and internal services needed to make our primary products work well. There are advantages to splitting this this way such as pooling scarce specialist skills but it makes it hard to keep priorities aligned and ration out these scarce skills to the most valuable work.</li><li>The council has a pretty good grasp of strategy and our ultimate direction is well thought through. There are multiple paths to reach our end goals and paths offer different trade-offs. For example, some paths offer a faster route to the end-goal but at the cost of some short term customer impact. Other paths provide an immediate positive customer impact but increase the time and cost required to reach the end goal. It is quite reasonable for people to disagree over which is the best path. Our habits are to escalate these disagreements up the management hierarchy to exceptionally busy managers who won’t have such a rich understanding of the trade-offs involved. Teams at a lower level are quite capable of negotiating and reaching an agreement but, traditionally, we haven’t given people at this level the training and support they need to be feel comfortable with this.</li></ul>"},{"id":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/07/weeknote-12th-july-2024/","url":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/07/weeknote-12th-july-2024/","title":"Weeknote 12th July 2024","date_published":"2024-07-12T17:00:00Z","language":"","content_html":"<p>A bit about measuring value in an agile way and - oh no - some UK politics</p><p>Reporting for projects, changes and improvements is frustrating for everyone at the moment. Over the last couple of months I have been trying to make it a bit less so. For some stakeholders it is difficult to get a clear picture of what is going on through reports. For others it is frustrating to put so much effort into reporting with very little visible return. I’m hoping that adopting a lean and agile mind set can help. Some examples of this are:</p><ul><li>Accepting that reporting is only one half of a management control system. The other half is the action which is informed by the reports. At the moment our reports are quite generic but the actions available to us are pretty limited. A lot of effort on reporting goes to waste as we are gathering information that can’t make a practical difference. We should be able to flip this around and start with what the feasible actions are and gather just enough information to make a well-informed choice.</li><li>Getting smarter about risk management which includes taking well-informed, calculated risks rather than always seeking perfect information.</li><li>Exploring what we can learn from the information teams generate as a side-effect of doing their work - effectively free reporting.</li><li>Testing approaches at a small, cheap scale such as a prototype dashboard that is able to show the information we already have in new ways. We are using the prototype to answer conventional questions (which projects are being blocked) and also try out some new ones (what is the overall flow efficiency and potential impact of our whole portfolio).</li><li>Creating new opportunities for action such as adjusting capacity or changing our risk profile rather than just rationing which work gets done first.</li></ul><p>Probably the most important aspect is recognising the social and emotional aspects of reporting, deciding and taking action. This isn’t like reading a dial on a machine. Reports come from people and are filled with opinions, assessments, assumptions and interpretations. The quality and accuracy of the reports is influenced by things like experience, motivation, incentives, trust and self-confidence. Ignoring this context is a recipe for continued frustration.</p><h2 id="warning-a-bit-about-uk-politics">Warning: A bit about UK politics</h2><p>The recent UK election got me thinking back to the EU membership referendum in 2016. Back then I didn’t know if things would be better for the UK inside or outside the EU. That wasn’t the biggest issue for me. The biggest issue was the cost and effort of making a change and that clearly outweighed even the most optimistic forecasts of the benefits of leaving.</p><p>In contrast the cost of switching between our major policitcal parties is pretty small. A batch of new MPs are currently trying to find their way around the Houses of Parliament but your public services are still working today pretty much just as they were a couple of weeks ago and still will be in a few months time. In some ways you can argue that the election isn’t that important and around 40% of the voting age population decided it wasn’t worth making their views known this time.</p><p>I don’t know which centre-left or centre-right party is best for the UK in the long run but, once again, there was a bigger issue for me. Our present political system depends upon holding several things in balance. An example, is balancing being liked by 30% or more of the population and tollerated by another 30% whilst taking the necessarily unpopular decisions needed to keep the country working. Even to get to this point any politician hoping to have a chance of getting into power needs to balance sticking to the party line and speaking up for what they think is right. This is incredibly (impossibly?) hard and I am not kidding myself that I could do it. It seems to get harder after a couple of terms in power. My big issue was that we had lost balance several years ago and we needed a clear change to have any chance of getting it back.</p><p>Unfortunately, we haven’t got it yet. Getting back into balance will require lots of humility and pragmatism from the incoming Labour team and it will need an effective opposition. Right now that is the Conservatives but they won’t have long to re-energise and we will have to see if they learn the right lessons from the last few years. A different voting system would make this a lot easier to achieve but I can’t see that happening in my life-time. Let’s send all of the main parties our good wishes for the next couple of years. If they are all doing well then maybe they can concentrate on what the country needs rather than opinion polls and sound bites.</p>"},{"id":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/07/monthnote-june-2024/","url":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/07/monthnote-june-2024/","title":"Monthnote June 2024","date_published":"2024-07-10T07:28:00Z","language":"","content_html":"<p>Wow! Where did June go? Here is a catch up on the weeknotes I missed over the last few weeks.</p><p>Lots of people in the public sector have avoided blogs, weeknotes and social media recently due to <a href="https://www.local.gov.uk/our-support/communications-and-community-engagement/pre-election-period">official restrictions</a> during the pre-election period. These didn’t really affect me but a bout of COVID followed by some family care challenges did. I could have made a special effort to keep weeknoting but I decided to be kind to myself.</p><p>I was out of the office most of last week. Tuesday was the finale of the <a href="https://www.tecgirls.co.uk/">TECgirls</a> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7214991228348624896/">micro:bit Mentors programme</a> helping the girls complete the smart home projects they have been developing in after school clubs over the last term. I was helping with wind powered lighting for the model smart homes and sound-and-light door bells.</p><p>On Wednesday I helped out at the <a href="https://agileonthebeach.com/youth-edition/">Youth Edition of Agile on the Beach</a> and stayed on for the <a href="https://agileonthebeach.com/the-conference/previous-events/2024-2/schedule/">main conference</a> on Thursday and Friday.</p><p>I usually have some specific things I want to learn about at Agile on the Beach and mix in pre-planned sessions with ones that just take my mood on the day. This year I wanted to dig into the structure of agile teams and how to fund them and picked out sessions on these. We’ve become quite comfortable applying agile ways of working with existing funded teams but sometimes the shape and size of the teams we have puts a limit to how effective we can be. We can get around some of the limits by making temporary working groups or projects but this can be disruptive and stressful for the people invovled. Perhaps we can find a better way. The Agile on the Beach talks included some book recommendations and I’ve already been talking to colleagues about forming some groups - perhaps a kind of book club - so that we can follow up and try out some of these new ideas. First up will be <a href="https://bbrt.org/">Beyond Budgeting</a> and then maybe <a href="https://teamtopologies.com/">Team Topologies</a>.</p><p>Looking back into June I divided my time between a mix of work. At one end of the scale are things that were my main day-to-day responsibility a couple of months ago but have been mostly handed over to new leaders and I am now just supporting behind the scenes. An example of this is my work with our Regulatory Services department. At the other end are things which will become my main day-to-day responsiblity and I am getting things ready and sounding out the key stakeholders I’ll be working with. An example is the new focus I’ve been given on helping our community of Product Managers to get the most value and impact from the products they lead. In the middle are my current active tasks which is helping the people managing our portfolio of changes and projects to understand the value of our work and get useful insights about the flow of value that they can use to steer money and effort to the most effective work.</p>"},{"id":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/a-journey-into-discovery/","url":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/a-journey-into-discovery/","title":"A journey into Discovery","date_published":"2024-05-29T13:55:00Z","language":"","content_html":"<p>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.</p><p>An obvious reference point for our work is the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/service-manual">UK Government Service Manual</a> and the closely related <a href="https://www.localdigital.gov.uk/declaration/">Local Government Digital Declaration</a>. These share some common ancestry with the approaches familiar in the commercial world but with some adaptations we need for public services. A big adaptation is public services can’t relying on profit and competition to drive performance. Money and satisfying customers still play a massive role in developing public services but, at the very least, the language needs to be different.</p><p>Some local authorities have closely aligned their work to the Service Manual and talk about <a href="https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile-delivery/how-the-discovery-phase-works">Discovery</a> as it is defined there. The start point for us was more complicated. Our IS team and Strategic Projects team both had defined project lifecycles that included a discovery phase. These phases differed from each other and the Service Manual. We also had an innovation lifecycle with another definition which had fallen out of common use. On top of that we have partners and suppliers helping us in various services who used their preferred approaches which could also include a stage called discovery.</p><p>We started with some working assumptions that we could validate and test. Our key assumptions were:</p><ul><li>There were some common drivers and needs behind the various flavours of discovery</li><li>We could better meet those needs by changing the way we carried out discovery work</li><li>We could establish a new team to build our new discovery approach and provide it as a service to the council.</li></ul><p>We looked at the Service Manual, good practice in other organisations and some of our existing work that carried some kind of “discovery” label to make sense of how this all fitted together. In the spirit of working out loud we shared what we learned and sought feedback as we went along.</p><p>Based upon the Service Manual, we started to share a framework for discovery work that could accommodate the different types. For example, we could group work around some common needs and start to be clearer about who the discovery work was for and what the discovery team were seeking to learn from it.</p><table><thead><tr class="headimages"><td></td><td><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbinvestment.png" alt="" /></td><td><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbtechnology.png" alt="" /></td><td><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbmanagement.png" alt="" /></td><td><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbstaff.png" alt="" /></td><td><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbresident.png" alt="" /></td><td><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbcommunity.png" alt="" /></td></tr><tr><th>Discovery Scope</th><th>Investment</th><th>Technology</th><th>Management</th><th>Staff Needs</th><th>Resident Needs</th><th>Community Needs</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>Learning</th><td>How do we achieve good value?</td><td>How should we use our technology products and services?</td><td>How should we change our processes and organisation?</td><td>What do our people need to do their best work?</td><td>what do residents need to achieve their individual goals?</td><td>What to places need to reach our collective goals?</td></tr><tr><th>Examples</th><td>Business justification</td><td>IS Assessment, IS Discovery</td><td>Service Review, continuous improvement</td><td>Business Analysis</td><td>User research, service design</td><td>Strategy, consultation</td></tr><tr><th>Elements</th><td>Savings, funding, budgets, contracts</td><td>Platforms, components, applications, cyber security</td><td>Roles, procedures, data flows, team structures, operating models</td><td>Workflow, internal systems, performance measures</td><td>Journey maps, personas, user experience</td><td>Partnerships, service architecture</td></tr></tbody></table><p>We also looked at when discovery work was happening - and that wasn’t confined to a named discovery phase or stage. Discovery happened throughout the service development lifecycle, including for existing services that had been in place for a long time. The diagram below was our attempt to illustrate this.</p><p><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbservicelifecycle.jpg" alt="A diagram of the agile delivery stages from the Government Service Manual overlaid with a graph indicating the blend of work and how it varies over time which is described further in the next section" /></p><p>The diagram is based upon the Service Manual stages but using terms that are more familiar in our organisation. Layered over these stages are an illustration of the typical balance of work.</p><ul><li>Lots of discovery work is about learning. This happens throughout the lifecycle but is front loaded. In the first phase it is the dominant sort of work.</li><li>In later phases the focus shifts to making choices (such as which problems to prioritise, how much effort and money to commit, which options to pursue), making things (such as systems and the changes needed to take advantage of them) and finally using them and getting the benefits.</li></ul><p>Our existing approaches and the ones we borrowed when working with partners and suppliers could be viewed in this context. They might only cover part of the life-cycle and might use different terminology but they were fundamentally variations on this common pattern.</p><p>This analysis helped us understand what a new approach to discovery needed to achieve:</p><ul><li>Discovery should help us make better decision e.g. learn about the root-cause problems before deciding how to fix them.</li><li>Discovery should also help us accelerate the release of value e.g. take quick wins and make incremental improvements where that was appropriate.</li></ul><p>We got to this point quite quickly and then our journey got more difficult. Some of the team felt we should use what we had learnt to design our new approach and launch it. Others felt we should run trials with some projects and services, learn some more and let the best approach emerge. We ended up with a mix of both. Perhaps that was the best approach but we didn’t manage how the decision was made very well.</p><p>The trials turned out to be frustrating but also provided valuable lessons. The frustrating part was that almost all of the trials got stuck, postponed or cancelled. The valuable lessons came from analysing what had gone wrong and why. We’d fallen into the trap of thinking we could make a sort of machine that would reliably churn out solutions in response to service problems. The reality was much messier. The services faced challenges that had a life of their own. Our challenges wouldn’t wait patiently to be addressed and they wouldn’t sit passively in the categories we had created for them. Here is a cartoon I drew in an attempt to lighten the mood when we shared these lessons as, to our team, they could feel like a failure. A machine was never going to be a useful way to think about this work. An aquarium was probably more helpful!</p><p><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbcartoon.png" alt="Cartoon showing the text book view of discovery as a machine processing neat problems into neat solutions followed by a real world view where the challenges are buckets containing octopuses. The buckets spill their contents on the discovery machine and the octpuses escape and make a mess of things" /></p><p>I took three big lessons away from this:</p><ul><li>Responsiveness and flexibility are more important than standardisation and consistency. Our challenges wouldn’t fit into neat catergories. We might come across a crisis situation where a supplier has let us down and our residents could be impacted very quickly. We might be monitoring some new social trend or government policy proposals so we can be ready when it hits our service demand in the future. We might be working in the infinite range of alternatives in the middle. The teams in these situations need to learn very different things over vastly different timescales and are exposed to very different risks. These are not favourable conditions for a centralised, standardised discovery service.</li><li>Good discovery that meets our needs is an inherent part of running a service well. Services can use specialist help but they can’t hand over the job and step aside. It can be tempting to try a short cut and commission another team (internally or a supplier) to carry out some discrete discovery work. This can result in very professional outputs but those are rarely what we need. The driving reasons to do discovery work are to make smarter decisions and to shape subsequent delivery to optimise the release of value. The discovery insight needs to end up in the hearts and heads of the decision makers and delivery teams. A report at the end of a discovery stage, even a highly polished report, is a pretty poor way to achieve this.</li><li>The final lesson is that, confusingly, the discovery stage isn’t the first step in discovery. The first step, or probably several steps, is building the team, providing the right conditions and facing up to the constraints. These are steps of negotiation and making trade-offs. In almost every case we won’t be starting with all the ideal ingredients for the sort of discovery work we might see in text books or promotional brochures. Some of those ingredients might be in reach and it might be worth fighting to get them. Often, we need to accept the limitations and get on as best we can, acknowledging that the results will be compromised but still valuable. Occasionally, we will find discovery work will have very limited value right now and should accept this and move on.</li></ul><p>I am still working out how to apply these lessons to our Discovery work. We are experimenting with doing just enough discovery when needed rather than forcing this into a one-size-fits-all process. As illustrated in the cartoon below, I like to think about this as a test tube which we fill up just enough to move on to the next stage. If we find we don’t have enough information, certainty or new ideas we can top up the test tube with the right sort of discovery work. That could be by using one of our established processes or doing something we are not used to such as building a prototype, performing an experiment or running a limited trial.</p><p><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbmeasure.jpg" alt="Cartoon of a test tube, partially filled with discovery, with glasses of innovation, insight and confidence being poured in to reach the level needed to move on to delivery" class="centre" /></p><p>We are also experimenting with using principles and guidelines to manage the work rather than set processes. We are not sure what form this will take yet but are trying out some alternatives. An example is illustrated below which aims to preserves the idea of doing just enough discovery but wrapping this in a minimal amount of control.</p><table><thead><tr class="headimages"><td><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbweather.png" alt="" /></td><td><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbpack.png" alt="" /></td><td><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbnature.png" alt="" /></td><td><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbhills.png" alt="" /></td></tr><tr><th>Check the forecast</th><th>Pack rucksack</th><th>Get into nature</th><th>Head for the hills</th></tr><tr class="subheading"><th>2 hrs effort</th><th>2 days effort</th><th>2 weeks effort</th><th>2 months effort</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td><ul><li>An energetic and authoritative sponsor</li><li>One or more important questions that need to be answered</li><li>Basic facts and figures e.g. strategic alignment</li></ul></td><td><ul><li>Outline challenge statement(s)</li><li>Stakeholders map/summary</li><li>Key parameters (order of magnitude or t-shirt sizes)</li><li>Plan for the next phase of work</li><li>Available, briefed and empowered team</li></ul></td><td><ul><li>Remote/desk research</li><li>Refined and ranked problem statements</li><li>Outline plans</li><li>Stakeholder commitment</li><li>Outcome map</li><li>“Rich picture” of the scope and context</li><li>Show and share findings</li></ul></td><td><ul><li>Field/lab research</li><li>Refined and ranked design options</li><li>Defined and ranked assumptions to test</li><li>Independent design assessment</li><li>Show and share work</li></ul></td></tr><tr class="em"><td>Do we have broad agreement that we have something valuable to work on together?</td><td>Have we identified the right people and give them authority to do this sort of work?</td><td>Are we confident we have uncovered the top problems to solve in this area?</td><td>Have we done enough tests or collected enough evidence to be confident in the solution and delivery approach?</td></tr></tbody></table><p>Another way to look at this is extending the service life cycle further upstream. As illustrated in the diagram below, the stages that we currently treat as the start of the lifecycle are preceded by one or two more where the emphasis is on building alignment amongst the various stakeholders and building the team and the conditions for whatever sort of discovery is needed.</p><p><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbprediscovery.jpg" alt="An updated version of the Service Manual stages preceeded with a triage stage dominated by work to achieve alignment and a mobilisation stage dominated by work to empower a team" /></p><p>We are also considering where discovery work should sit in our operating model. We probably need to take a blended approach but we can take inspiration from other services within the Council. For instance, financial management in the Council is distributed throughout the organisation. There are some central finance teams setting policy and operating basic financial systems but there is a scheme of delegation and a framework of training, guidance and support that allows managers to make local spending decisions safely. Something similar works well for managing people and procurement. The diagram below shows one way this might be configured for discovery.</p><p><img src="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/images/dbopmodel.png" alt="A discovery operating model represented as a triangle. At the top are centralised functions to set strategy, develop good practice and align supply and demand for discovery work. At the bootom is the actual discovery activity distributed around project, product and service teams" /></p><p>We are not at the end of our journey into discovery but some of the next turns in the road are visible. We’ve got some clues about what the shape and size of discovery could be in the future and some more working assumptions we can put to the test.</p>"},{"id":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/","url":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/","title":"Weeknote 17th May 2024","date_published":"2024-05-18T13:07:00Z","language":"","content_html":"<p>Weeknotes are supposed to be a quick download and not a polished article. You can probably tell I end up in the middle quite a lot. This week is another example that starts and ends as a weeknote but diverts into discussing three different levels of being an Agile Coach.</p><p>The TechJam<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a></sup> at the weekend was satisfying. The weather was good and TechJams are always a bit quieter on those days. I don’t mind the quieter sessions. We get time to grab a cup of tea now and again and spend more time with each of the attendees, helping them come up with ideas or fix bugs in their code.</p><p>I also helped out with the micro:bit Mentors scheme being run by TECgirls<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/#fn2" id="fnref2">[2]</a></sup>. It is a really interesting scheme which, not only aims to encourage girls into tech, engineering and creative subjects, but also create a community of mentors. Next year the mentors will be able to help teach a new cohort and get some valuable experience in team leading.</p><p>I’ve had mixed feedback this week. Some of the things I’ve done have gone well and prompted requests for more of my help. That is satisfying, but so is finding out where I have missed the mark and can improve. It is best to get this feedback directly but, even if it is second or third hand, I can still use it. What I really find stressful is no feedback at all. It is like crossing a space blindfolded. You might be making good progress, or about to fall down a hole, but have no idea which it is.</p><p>Some of the teams I’ve been working with are now pretty much self-sufficient. I’m staying involved to provide some support, and be a point of escalation, but soon the teams won’t need me on a day to day basis. I’ve been working with my boss and some other key stakeholders to agree my next priorities. Whilst we do that, I am getting involved in new work where there is an obvious good fit.</p><p>Sometimes I need to provide quite basic support. If this counts as Agile Coaching at all it is probably at level 0. This sort of work involves creating the conditions for a team to work well together. Declaring that, “we need to work as one team”, is a pretty good signal that we aren’t working that way now and we wont soon, unless we work at it.</p><p>It starts with identifying who is in the team and introducing them to each other - yes, really. Next comes getting the team to feel safe sharing their unfinished work and finding a place to share it. That place is never email. Email is the worst tool for collaboration we have yet invented.</p><p>We need to make time for some low pressure interaction, so that people can get to know each other better. This helps people deal with the emotional effort needed to confront issues, reach agreement and make decisions together. It is possible to put aside emotion in making decisions, but most people in a team won’t have had the training and conditioning need to do that. It will take time and effort to help people in the team work through the emotions, and help people outside the team accept that it is necessary.</p><p>Beyond level 0 is the kind of Agile Coaching most people expect, for example, introducing tools and techniques so that the team doesn’t get stuck. At first, this can be exhausting. It can feel like you are having to drag the whole team along. Eventually, with some trial and error, things will work out. If the level 0 topics have been addressed, frameworks like Scrum<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/#fn3" id="fnref3">[3]</a></sup> are a fairly safe bet for getting started.</p><p>This sort of coaching continues to the point where the team is comfortable to pick and implement their own tools and techniques, and research new ones when they need them. Part of the art of Agile Coaching is spotting when the team is pulling ahead of you, and you are becoming the drag and need to get out of their way.</p><p>I also have quite a lot of level 2 coaching to do. These are topics that are beyond the scale of a team, or the collection of teams in a project or programme. It includes things like funding and budget allocation, design in its broadest sense, the flow of information, organisation culture, leadership and line management, contracts and procurement, business cases and benefits.</p><p>Level 2 can be a disputed area. Many people, including some professional Agile Coaches, think these topics are out of scope, and avoid working in situations where these agile foundations are not already in place. I consider them fair game for an Agile Coach. I don’t think my job is just about “agility”. My purpose is to maximise the “flow of value” so, if these level 2 things are getting in the way, it is my job to do something about them, or at least try.</p><p>Some of the feedback this week concerned these level 2 things. I had forgotten these are disputed topics and I hadn’t created the right conditions to work in those areas. That sounds like pretty basic level 0 stuff, and I’ve not been taking my own medicine. Still, the feedback helped me see that, and I’ve already started to do something about it.</p><h2 id="from-the-archives">From the archives</h2><p>A thread that ran from the end of 2022 and through most of 2023 was the DLUHC Future Councils scheme<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/#fn4" id="fnref4">[4]</a></sup>. We were very lucky with the timing of this scheme. We had just got formal approval for our digital strategy, and the business case for the initial phase. This meant that we already had a clear, persuasive story and a sensible plan. We had strong backing from the executive team and the full Council. This gave us great foundations for our bid to join the scheme. We also had a pretty good idea of where we needed help and those gaps were also a good fit for Future Councils.</p><p>We had to wait ages for a decision, but we were delighted to be chosen as one of the 8 councils for the pilot stage<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/#fn5" id="fnref5">[5]</a></sup>. Yes, I did a dad dance on one of our teams calls to celebrate.</p><p>The first few months were quite frustrating but there was a good reason behind this. Everyone in the local government sector knows that things can’t go on as they are. We’re at, or close to, the limits in many ways. We can’t get much more improvement through the techniques we traditionally use. Future Councils was about breaking away from what we know to find something new. It was risky and, to be honest, it didn’t work very well at first. That’s ok for an experiment like this. In a sector that is worth £100 Billion or so a bet of a few million isn’t outrageous. Together with the central team in DLUHC, we regrouped a couple of times and eventually found the right ingredients.</p><p>The pilot phase officially completed late last year, but the scheme is continuing in several ways. The funding, skills and insight from Future Councils allowed us to start some projects that are on-going. DLUHC are planning the next phase based upon the feedback from the pilot<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/#fn6" id="fnref6">[6]</a></sup>. I’m really excited about this but it is taking a long time to materialise. Understandably, it isn’t the most important priority for the Government right now.</p><h2 id="footnotes">Footnotes:</h2><hr class="footnotes-sep" /><section class="footnotes"><ol class="footnotes-list"><li id="fn1" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://techcornwall.co.uk/event/cornwall-tech-jam-17/">Cornwall TechJam</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn2" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.tecgirls.co.uk/">TECgirls</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/#fnref2" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn3" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2019/11/so-what-exactly-is-a-sprint/">A bit more about how Cornwall Council uses Scrum</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/#fnref3" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn4" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://dluhcdigital.blog.gov.uk/category/local-digital/future-councils/">DLUHC Future Councils</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/#fnref4" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn5" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://dluhcdigital.blog.gov.uk/2023/03/07/future-councils-meet-our-8-pilot-councils/">The 8 pilot councils</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/#fnref5" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn6" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://dluhcdigital.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/222/2024/04/FC-Pilot-Report-2024.pdf">The pilot report provides some clues about where the programme will go next</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-17th-may-2024/#fnref6" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li></ol></section>"},{"id":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/","url":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/","title":"Weeknote 10th May 2024","date_published":"2024-05-10T08:22:00Z","language":"","content_html":"<p>It felt good leaving some frustrations behind in my previous week note. This time I thought I would try to dispose of some persistent mistakes that organisations of all types make. These are also frustrating as I am not very good at persuading people that these are, in fact, mistakes and so they get repeated more than I would like.</p><h2 id="persistent-mistakes">Persistent Mistakes</h2><ul><li>Increase the rate of starting new things in an attempt to increase the rate of delivery. It almost always does the opposite.</li><li>Undertake risky and uncertain work without making allowance for learning and surprises. This usually multiplies the risk and reduces control - the opposite of what is usually intended.</li><li>Confuse accuracy and precision or think that they normally increase and decrease together. They are almost always a trade off. People often drive up precision without realising they are reducing accuracy or recognising that accuracy is often the more useful of the two.</li><li>Putting effort and investment into gathering and reporting information which is not used. This is a particularly pure form of waste. A subtler version of this mistake is when the information is used but the use has no consequence. An example of this is using the information to chose between options which are not feasible.</li><li>Seeking a single source of the truth but ignoring how context, value and audience changes what the truth is. Even if someone can see this is a mistake for complex things like the status of a project they might still make the mistake with apparently simple things like money and physical dimensions.</li><li>Forgetting that projects and organisations are just labels. Real work only gets done by a load of small groups of people collaborating together. If you manage the projects or organisations but neglect the small teams you won’t get much real work done.</li></ul><h2 id="this-weeks-touch-points">This week’s touch points</h2><p>Checked in with our supporting families team and heard about new ways we might be able to use the data that we are required to compile for Central Government <sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a></sup>. We also covered the obstacles. Some obstacles are deliberate and legitimate such as privacy. Some are unintended side effects that, with some effort, could be removed.</p><p>Attended the latest LocalGovDigital event<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fn2" id="fnref2">[2]</a></sup> online and learnt about the different ways Councils set up their website content. This community is a big part of why I became a Local Government Officer so it is nice to join after a long spell away.</p><p>Helped facilitate an online meet up for Service Designers in Local Government<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fn3" id="fnref3">[3]</a></sup>. This was the first time the group had tried the lean coffee format<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fn4" id="fnref4">[4]</a></sup> and it seemed to work really well. My breakout group spent most of the time talking about how the roles of Service Designer and Business Analysis get mixed together. Views on this varied quite a lot. Some people identify strongly with their job role and want to protect it. Others see it as a transient thing and are more likely to blend the roles together.</p><p>I got my first look at some of the detailed work being done on our digital customer journey opportunities. It is easy to pick holes in this sort of analysis work but that can miss the point (see some of my persistent mistakes earlier in this note). Councils, especially unitary authorities, provide an enormous range of services. It would be comforting to know we are working on the absolute most valuable opportunity but not really necessary. We are going to need to work on many of these so as long as we start with something plausibly near the top of the list that will be good enough. Any effort we put into fine tuning the priority rankings would be better spent getting started, aligning the teams involved and helping them get ready to do the hard work required.</p><p>I caught up on some replays of events and meetings that I had missed due to diary clashes. One I will need to explore more was about scaling agile frameworks <sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fn5" id="fnref5">[5]</a></sup>. I am pretty sceptical about most of the large scale agile initiatives but this new one isn’t anything like the others. It might be worth exploring further.</p><p>This week included another Race Equality Drop-in. These are based on the Tea Break format promoted by Race Equality Matters<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fn6" id="fnref6">[6]</a></sup>. We usually start these with a prepared topic and then let the attendees take the conversation where they want. Our opening topic this time was Volunteerism<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fn7" id="fnref7">[7]</a></sup>. I talked a bit about the anxiety this triggered before my recent holiday in Kenya. It was good to hear about some much more positive examples from others during the call.</p><p>The idea of a data community and/or challenge for Cornwall is ticking along. We are at an interesting stage where we need to think about stakeholder management. We would like to welcome anyone who has an interest but is it practical to be that broad to get started? We will need leaders but is the small self-selected group enough and are we the right people? We can do a lot on a voluntary basis but, at some point, we will create demands upon people that haven’t chosen to take part. For example, imagine a data challenge event, working with public domain data, that uncovered issues with a Council service. Can we create the conditions so that everyone is able to engage in a safe and constructive way? On my own, I think I would get stuck here but I’m working with some great supporters and collaborators with the experience to keep things moving.</p><h2 id="from-the-archives">From the archives</h2><p>Before I moved down to Cornwall I often spent hours a day commuting to central London and most of those hours were filled by reading. Without that imposed time I got out of the habit. I seem to have lost the stamina for reading and even a chunky article or blog post seems like a chore now. Over the last couple of years audio books have given me a bridge back into reading. I’ve started a blog post<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fn8" id="fnref8">[8]</a></sup> with work related titles from the last couple of years (and one or two from before that because they are awesome).</p><h2 id="footnotes">Footnotes:</h2><hr class="footnotes-sep" /><section class="footnotes"><ol class="footnotes-list"><li id="fn1" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/supporting-families-2021-to-2022-and-beyond/supporting-families-2021-22-and-beyond">Background to the Supporting Families scheme</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn2" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://localgov.digital/events/live/">LocalGovDigital Live</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fnref2" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn3" class="footnote-item"><p>Get in touch by one of the social media links below if you want an invite to join the community <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fnref3" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn4" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.agile42.com/en/blog/lean-coffee">An introduction to the Lean Coffee format</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fnref4" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn5" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.scrum.org/resources/scaling-complex-systems-building-agile-frameworks">The scrum organisation launch of an framework they are calling Hexi</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fnref5" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn6" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.raceequalitymatters.com/tea-break/">Race Equality Matters Teabreak</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fnref6" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn7" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/13/the-business-of-voluntourism-do-western-do-gooders-actually-do-harm">Volunteerism</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fnref7" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn8" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/public-service-bookshelf/">My books blog post</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-10th-may-2024/#fnref8" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li></ol></section>"},{"id":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/public-service-bookshelf/","url":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/public-service-bookshelf/","title":"Public Service Bookshelf","date_published":"2024-05-08T20:27:00Z","language":"","content_html":"<p>Some favourite reads (mostly listens these days) from my Public Sector bookshelf.</p><h2 id="foundations-of-public-services">Foundations of public services:</h2><ul><li><a href="https://www.hilarycottam.com/radical-help/">Radical Help, Hilary Cottam</a>, tells the story of some amazing experiments into new ways of thinking about public services and policies. Easy to read and relate to. Has the feel of a set of research notes and the stories will keep popping back into your mind years later.</li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_(book)">Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein</a>, is an engaging introduction to behavioural economics and choice architecture. The “nudge” label has fallen out of favour but behavioural economics is still hugely influential in public services. You will keep  spotting choice architecture all around you after reading this.</li><li><a href="https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/the-five-giants-a-biography-of-the-welfare-state-nicholas-timmins">The Five Giants, Nicholas Timmins</a>, recounts the history of our modern welfare state. I consumed this like an epic historical thriller. I’m glad we don’t face the same giant problems any more but maybe we could use a bit of William Beveridge’s “cranky zeal” in tackling  the ones we face today.</li><li><a href="https://oneworld-publications.com/work/the-blunders-of-our-governments-2/">The Blunders of Governments, Anthony King and Ivor Crewe</a>, is a sobering and slightly cruel review of some damaging mistakes made by UK government over the last few decades.</li><li><a href="https://info.mheducation.com/rs/mheducation/images/Digital%20Doctor%20Sample%20Chapter.pdf">The Digital Doctor, Robert Wachter</a>, shares some warnings and encouragement about the introduction of digital technology. It is a balanced book written by someone who clearly has a deep understanding of technology and healthcare. With different examples, I expect the lesson would hold for many other public services.</li></ul><h2 id="the-big-picturereally-really-big">The big picture…really, really big!</h2><p>This batch of titles have an enormous scope covering the whole Earth over generations (or eons). They all challenge accepted ways of looking at the world and expose these as very transient or even just tricks of our collective imagination. The way our world works could be shaken by a collective act of will. That is a bit frightening but also a quite inspiring. I think you will spot smaller examples of the things these books cover around you and you may be able to use the insights from these books to better deal with them or just accept them <sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/public-service-bookshelf/#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a></sup>.</p><ul><li><a href="https://www.ynharari.com/book/sapiens-2/">Sapiens</a> and <a href="https://www.ynharari.com/book/homo-deus/">Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari</a></li><li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/31670196">Scale, Geoffrey West</a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factfulness">Factfullness, Hans Rosling</a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior:_The_Return_of_Race_Science">Superior, Angela Saini</a></li></ul><h2 id="finding-the-right-things-to-work-on-and-getting-them-done">Finding the right things to work on and getting them done:</h2><p>This collection covers developing and delivering products and services. These are much more down to earth and pragmatic than the last set. They include practical calls to action backed by strong arguments. I’ve applied things from all of these in my work over the last few months and expect to go further in future. The different styles might not work for everyone. Eliyahu Goldratt wrote “business novels” where you learn alongside the characters in the book. Don Reinertsen has written a dry instruction manual but it is not nearly has hard going as its reputation suggests - especially if you have warmed up by looking at his conference talks and interviews.</p><ul><li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/6461800-the-principles-of-product-development-flow-second-generation-lean-produ">Principles of Product Development Flow, Don Reinertsen</a></li><li><a href="https://www.tocinstitute.org/the-goal-summary.html">The Goal</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Chain_(novel)">Critical Chain, Eliyahu Goldratt</a></li><li><a href="https://good.services/home">Good services, Lou Downe</a></li><li><a href="https://itrevolution.com/product/accelerate/">Accelerate, Nicole Forsgren</a></li><li><a href="https://www.soonersaferhappier.com/">Sooner Safer Happier, Jonathan Smart</a></li></ul><h2 id="working-with-humans">Working with humans:</h2><p>This final set are a healthy reminder that the managers, team members, customers, users, suppliers, opponents and whatever are all humans. Individually they are far more complex and capable than the roles or categories we try to put on them. Collectively they can achieve extraordinary things, especially if we treat people as humans rather than as pieces in a board game or components in a machine.</p><ul><li><a href="https://davidmarquet.com/turn-the-ship-around-book/">Turn the Ship Around, David Marguet</a></li><li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/22529127">Team of teams, Stanley McChrystal</a></li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_I%27m_No_Longer_Talking_to_White_People_About_Race">Why I am no longer talking to white people about race, Reni Eddo-Lodge</a>,</li><li><a href="https://simonsinek.com/books/start-with-why/">Start with Why, Simon Sinek</a><sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/public-service-bookshelf/#fn2" id="fnref2">[2]</a></sup></li></ul><h2 id="footnotes">Footnotes</h2><hr class="footnotes-sep" /><section class="footnotes"><ol class="footnotes-list"><li id="fn1" class="footnote-item"><p>I’ve shared some examples in a <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/03/transforming-at-scale-series-pilot/">series of posts</a> about trying to change things at the scale of a big team or organisation. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/public-service-bookshelf/#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn2" class="footnote-item"><p>I am in the middle of “Start with Why”. I have watched a few of Simon’s engaging conference talks and, at first, I wasn’t getting anything new from the book. It came alive for me again when I reached the sections about finding your own “why” and I am really glad I stuck with it. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/public-service-bookshelf/#fnref2" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li></ol></section>"},{"id":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-3rd-may-2024/","url":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-3rd-may-2024/","title":"Weeknote 3rd May 2024","date_published":"2024-05-06T18:00:00Z","language":"","content_html":"<p>Every week includes a mix of successes and frustrations. Most weeks I write more about the positive side of things but this week felt harder than normal - probably because of things going on outside work. I don’t want to carry the frustrations around with me as that doesn’t do any good. Instead I am going to leave them behind in this weeknote.</p><h2 id="frustrations">Frustrations</h2><p>The vast majority of my work is collaborative. I work with lots of people who are busy on too many things so if I need something unexpected from them my work could get blocked for 2 weeks or so until the next free slot in their diary. Pre-planning, risk management, analysis and prioritisation can help but they can become cumbersome and costly work in their own right. We are trying to make smarter decisions by taking account of these delay costs but it is not part of routine practice.</p><p>A related frustration is when people keep great work hidden. This can be due to lack of confidence that the work is actually good enough or lack of trust that others will respond positively. It might be because quality control or some other process forbids sharing. I wish more people would embrace working “out loud”. It creates a lot of small feedback loops that can improve communication, collaboration, skills development, quality, productivity and innovation. There are some genuine cases where working out loud isn’t appropriate but most of the obstacles are cultural.</p><p>It is easy for teams to become fixated on an output, like a document or IT system, at the expense of the more important outcomes, like improving the performance of a service. One consequence is neglecting opportunities to make improvements because they don’t contribute to the output.</p><p>There are some good reasons for representing opinions in numerical terms. Estimates and forecasts are familiar examples. These get passed around and processed. People who are 3 or 4 steps removed from the original opinion can easily start to treat these numbers as objective data.</p><p>Prioritising is a good thing but there are different ways to do it. The effort needs to be distributed with low impact, volatile priorities set by small teams and strategic priorities set centrally and backed by long term commitments. It is frustrating when we mix these up.</p><h2 id="success">Success</h2><p>A few weeks ago we made changes to the way we handle phone calls for one of our busiest service teams. This had an immediate positive impact but we worried if this would continue after the school holidays. This week we confirmed that the improvement wasn’t temporary and we’ve got some trend data we can explore to fine tune the changes we made. It doesn’t mean we are satisfied but it does mean we can give our customers a better service while we build the processes and technology that will help us go further.</p><p>I’m not employed for my programing skills but I’ve enjoyed doing some coding for work. I’ve been analysing some data about our portfolio of change work. Most people would have shuffled and sorted the data in an excel spreadsheet but because I can code it gives me some better options. I also did some volunteer coding as part of a new scheme organised by the STEM organisation<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-3rd-may-2024/#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a></sup> and TECgirls<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-3rd-may-2024/#fn2" id="fnref2">[2]</a></sup>.</p><p>Over the next couple of years we’ve got a chance to improve some services by investing in new digital tools. One of our teams has been looking at our key processes and quantifying the benefits so that we can put our time and money in the most valuable places. I’ve been arguing that we should consider service readiness as well as the usual technical and financial aspects and this has been agreed. Service readiness is about skills, capacity and commitment to get the benefits out of the new tools. It is about considering what the service already has or could practically get. For example, if capacity is an obstacle, can temporary staff fill the gap.</p><h2 id="caring">Caring</h2><p>I’ve been part of the Race Equality Forum for a few years now and I think it has done me a lot of good. Some people seem to have a natural ability to analyse big issues, form authentic opinions and communicate them clearly and respectfully. I’m not one of those people. The forum - the members and the events they support - has provided a place to work through some of the issues. The atmosphere is really important. There is an acceptance of the layers and complexity involved and that simple, correct responses might not exist and are certainly not obvious. The forum encourages positive action, even small things, like becoming better informed.</p><p>I would like to think we could make a bigger, more public space for some collective effort on big issues like race but that doesn’t seem very likely at the moment. Complexity and subtlety don’t seem to go down very well in politics, news and social media. At times, basic humanity seems to be met with hostility. If you want to talk about stopping fighting and killing somewhere around the world you can expect to be treated as naïve or ignorant. You’ll also be accused of supporting the “other” side and all of the awful things they have done. Could a dialogue create new understanding and reveal new opportunity? No, that’s either naïve or a trick. Reject both of the simplistic “sides” in a conflict? Ignorant or underhanded.</p><p>I wish there were some safe spaces to work on these issues. In the meantime I will take sides. My side is made up of the people who didn’t attack, the people who lost a friend or loved one and the people that didn’t get a choice. My side includes Palestinians and Jews, Ukrainians and Russians, conservatives and socialists. So does the other side. My side isn’t defined by the tribes I read about in the news and on social media. Measured by publicity my side might seem like a minority but I like to think it includes 90% or more of the human population. If you think that makes me naïve or ignorant I can live with that.</p><h2 id="from-the-archives">From the archives</h2><p>For most of 2023 I published my weeknotes on our intranet and most of those notes concerned my secondment to our Digital Futures Programme as Discovery Lead, or as I sometimes called it, Chief Explorer.</p><p>Discovery describes the early stages of a change project where the outlines and indications that were enough to kick-off a project are filled out and refined. Very often the things that are discovered change the direction of the project. People have a well known bias to be optimistic. Discovery often shows the effort and investment will be higher than anticipated and the benefits and outcomes lower. This is not very comfortable but not as uncomfortable as finding out later. Occasionally, we learn the project is unlikely to be worthwhile and it won’t go further. In many cases, changes can be made to improve the chances of success.</p><p>I wasn’t leading the discovery stage of the Digital Future programme but leading the development of a new approach to the Council’s discovery work. I learnt a lot about discovery work and have some of this in a <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/a-journey-into-discovery/">blog post</a>. There were also a lot of other lessons about how the Council makes big decisions, how we manage  changes and why some things are so difficult for us. I’m using all of those lessons now I am back in my substantive role.</p><h2 id="footnotes">Footnotes</h2><hr class="footnotes-sep" /><section class="footnotes"><ol class="footnotes-list"><li id="fn1" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.stem.org.uk/stem-ambassadors">STEM Ambassadors</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-3rd-may-2024/#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn2" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.tecgirls.co.uk/">TECgirls</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/05/weeknote-3rd-may-2024/#fnref2" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li></ol></section>"},{"id":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/","url":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/","title":"Weeknote 26th April 2024","date_published":"2024-04-26T16:00:00Z","language":"","content_html":"<p>It feels like there is too much for one weeknote this time. Perhaps I need to prioritise but I find all these things fascinating. I keep nudging our teams to focus rather than have lots of things going on in parallel. Maybe I should take some of my own advice! Anyway here goes.</p><h2 id="doing">Doing</h2><p>Scoping out a Data Community for Cornwall and, as part of that, a Cornwall Data Challenge event later this year. We are at the strategy and vision stage. I’m more of an engineer than a strategist so I am a bit outside my comfort zone but have some great collaborators inside and outside the Council.</p><p>Continuing the work from last week on shifting to the new team structure for the Regulatory Services Review project and helping keep the various teams across the Council aligned. Fairly soon the teams won’t need my help on a day-to-day basis but I expect I will need to help sort out some on-going risks. For example, some of the work involves developing new technology which is innovative and risky. It makes sense to keep a number of technical options open so that we can change direction quickly but this isn’t an approach that many people are used to.</p><p>In 2020, the national lockdowns forced us to work in new ways and we are still working through the consequences. We are not going to return to pre-COVID ways of working as the people, pounds and planet benefits are too valuable. We do need to mitigate some of the disadvantages such as helping new joiners feel part of the team and being fair and consistent in how we expect people to work. We’ve been using team charters to delegate making the necessary trade-offs to our service teams. It is time for a refresh as so much has changed over the last couple of years. An example of something we might change is to make the charters more transparent so teams can borrow good ideas from each other.</p><p>I got over excited about one of the proposals at our weekly triage session<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a></sup>. When I was studying for my degree, speech-to-text still seemed like science fiction. Now we have all the hype about the latest AI breakthrough it is easy to forget that speech-to-text is now a cheap and practical tool. Lots of public sector roles involve a lot of note taking and providing computer assistance could have a big impact on productivity. We have shortages of staff in lots of sectors such as health, education and social care. Imagine helping all of these people be 20% more productive. It sounds too good to be true but even if we can only realise a part of that benefit the payback on the technology would be enormous.</p><p>Last year a group of Service Designers launched a professional community for people in Local Government<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn2" id="fnref2">[2]</a></sup>. The community has already passed 300 members with some industry leading experts and some others, like me, who want to learn more. I’m going to help facilitate the next community event and joined some others in the team to work out how we are going to use the lean coffee format<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn3" id="fnref3">[3]</a></sup>.</p><h2 id="learning">Learning</h2><p>I’m a member of several professional communities focused on the public sector. Twitter used to be a bit of a one-stop-shop for staying engaged with all of these but pretty much all of my contacts now stay away or have deleted their accounts. So far there doesn’t seem to be one platform that has filled the gap. My communities have moved to a mixture of places including Slack<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn4" id="fnref4">[4]</a></sup> and Mastodon<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn5" id="fnref5">[5]</a></sup>. BlueSky<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn6" id="fnref6">[6]</a></sup> seems to be the closest replacement for Twitter but maybe the future will continue to be a mix with different specialisations. It will be interesting to see what happens with social media for organisations. LinkedIn<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn7" id="fnref7">[7]</a></sup> seems an obvious place for recruitment and business to business sales. Maybe the Facebook<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn8" id="fnref8">[8]</a></sup> collection of brands for consumer service and sales?</p><p>Our FRED Friday<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn9" id="fnref9">[9]</a></sup> talk this week featured Kevin Cunnington<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn10" id="fnref10">[10]</a></sup> sharing his experience of leading digital public services in Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Government Digital Service (GDS). This brought back some great memories for me<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn11" id="fnref11">[11]</a></sup> and was also a timely reminder of some good tools and practices we can still apply in Cornwall<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn12" id="fnref12">[12]</a></sup>.</p><h2 id="caring">Caring</h2><p>The Cornwall TechJam<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn13" id="fnref13">[13]</a></sup> went well at the weekend. It was great to have a new volunteer join us to guide some of the young, and not so young, attendees towards interesting challenges and help them complete them. We can always use more helpers so get in touch if you are interested in finding out what is involved. This time we had early access to an artificial intelligence challenge which the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Google asked us to try out. Three people, all girls, had a go. They really enjoyed it and gave us some great feedback. They also have access to complete the challenge back at home.</p><h2 id="from-the-archives">From the archives</h2><p>My last weeknote from 2021<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn14" id="fnref14">[14]</a></sup> talked about a public sector collaboration looking at operating models. This started as a discussion at GovCamp21<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fn15" id="fnref15">[15]</a></sup> and grew into a self-managed community of interest involving volunteers from 14 different public sector organisations. Over the next 12 months the group created a Guide to Operating Models aimed at practitioners in the public sector which was adopted as an official Civil Service publication. This isn’t the typical way official publications get developed and I think it is much richer and more useful as a result. It was also a really thought provoking example of what a self-managed group of passionate people can achieve.</p><h2 id="footnotes">Footnotes</h2><hr class="footnotes-sep" /><section class="footnotes"><ol class="footnotes-list"><li id="fn1" class="footnote-item"><p>The triage sessions provide an early opportunity to clarify the value of ideas and proposals and advise teams on some proportionate next steps. It is not a gateway where things are approved or rejected. We won’t have a enough information for definitive decision that early and we don’t want teams putting a lot of time and energy into the wrong things. Instead, we are seeking to clarify and be transparent about the risks and potential value. The next steps are usually determined by the risks, for example, should we get some assurance about security before worrying about other aspects of the work. The value can be shared with the teams that will need to be involved in the work. They can use this to make trade-offs about the urgency of the work and how much effort to commit. This is easier to decide at team level depending upon what else the team has to do. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn2" class="footnote-item"><p>Get in touch by one of the social media links below if you want an invite to join the community. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref2" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn3" class="footnote-item"><p>An introduction to the <a href="https://www.agile42.com/en/blog/lean-coffee">Lean Coffee</a> format. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref3" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn4" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://slack.com/">Slack</a> is really a virtual team workspace rather than social media. Membership is usually controlled and there are tools to help people focus on particular things and not get distracted. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref4" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn5" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://joinmastodon.org/">Mastodon</a> Isn’t really a social media platform but a way for platforms to talk to each other. This is similar to email where everyone can chose their own email provider but can still communicate with each other. This is a brilliant approach but people have already got used to big centralised platforms and the extra effort of picking a mastodon server has put a lot of people off. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref5" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn6" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://bsky.app/">BlueSky</a> looks like a copy of the old Twitter but without all the noise and nastiness which prompted people to start deleting their Twitter accounts. It isn’t yet clear how BlueSky can get big and not fall into the traps that have hit other platforms. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref6" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn7" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/">LinkedIn</a> used to be a great professional community platform but it is now quite noisy with self-promotion and paid-for corporate messages. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref7" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn8" class="footnote-item"><p>The Facebook holding company also runs Instagram, Whatsapp and, their Twitter challenger, Threads. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref8" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn9" class="footnote-item"><p>Every few weeks Cornwall Council invites a guest speaker to share their insights and challenge our thinking. We have had some amazing people come and share their experience of using new ways of working and/or new technology to improve large organisations and the services they provide to the public. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref9" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn10" class="footnote-item"><p>More about <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/people/kevin-cunnington">Kevin’s background</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref10" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn11" class="footnote-item"><p>I worked in Kevin’s team at DWP for a couple of years and, later on, helped with a refresh of the GDS strategy. I was pleased to see <a href="https://dwpdigital.blog.gov.uk/2015/07/23/are-you-just-playing-at-digital-transformation/">some of my work</a> is still on the DWP Digital blog nearly 10 year on. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref11" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn12" class="footnote-item"><p>One of the tools that seemed to resonate with the audience this week was <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/7-lenses-of-transformation/the-7-lenses-of-transformation">the Seven Lenses of Transformation</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref12" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn13" class="footnote-item"><p>Dates are published on the <a href="https://techcornwall.co.uk/event/cornwall-tech-jam-16/">TechCornwall events page</a>. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref13" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn14" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2021/07/weeknote-19-23-july-2021/">Final weeknote from 2021</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref14" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn15" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.ukgovcamp.com/">More about UKGovCamp</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-26th-april-2024/#fnref15" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li></ol></section>"},{"id":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/","url":"https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/","title":"Weeknote 19th April 2024","date_published":"2024-04-19T16:00:00Z","language":"","content_html":"<p>I’m back from a couple of weeks leave (it was amazing, thanks for asking), cleared the usual backlog of messages and got stuck into the projects I am supporting.</p><h2 id="doing">Doing</h2><p>We’ve continued to develop the roadmap of improvements highlighted through the review of Regulatory Services<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a></sup> last year. These are services which lots of local authorities run and it is pretty clear where the team wants to get to. It is a bit harder to plot out the steps to get there and take account of the depdendencies and constraints along the way. We need to stick to our budgets and meet high standards of service whilst moving work around teams and introducing new technology and processes. Sometimes people compare this sort of thing to changing the wheels on a moving car. That’s probably too extreme but this is very demanding for everyone involved.</p><p>There are a couple of places where a roadmap (effectively a picture of our working assumptions) can be more helpful than a traditional plan (usually quite precise and often under formal governance). Developing digital technology is a creative process and so quite risky. We can draw up a roadmap which acknowledges the risk and make it visible but still answer our stakeholders questions about timescales. The answers from a roadmap won’t be very precise but a lot of questions don’t need precision anyway. Roadmaps can also help with realising benefits. One of the early versions of our roadmap showed there was going to be a gap where teams were building things behind the scenes but our customers wouldn’t see much improvement to the service. We kept working on this gap and found some improvements we could fit in early. One of our quick wins improved one of our service measures by more than a factor of 2.</p><p>This week we continued to get ready to refresh our Regulatory Services project structure. We are part way through moving from teams organised by phase (things like customer research, design, digital development, change adoption) to one organised around services (things like environment, licensing and planning). This has been going on for quite a while but we are taking care to move things bit by bit and maintain the pace of work rather than interrupt everyone with a big bang change.</p><p>Here are some other bits of work I thought were worth sharing.</p><p>DLUCH have not validated our figures yet but it looks like we did well against our targets for the Supporting Families scheme<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fn2" id="fnref2">[2]</a></sup>. The bar will be raised again next year but there is a great team in place working through the issues. For the last 18 months or so the team have been crunching data so we can identify families that are struggling and proactively help them. Over 1000 families have been helped this way and the goal is to double this over the timescales of the scheme. There will still be a lot of data crunching this year along with all of the careful scrutiny and assurance you would expect for such sensitive information. I’m hoping we can grow the team and do more. For example, the data gives us some clues about how we could coordinate services and prevent some families getting into difficulty in the first place. It isn’t easy to act on these opportunities but the benefits for the families concerned and the council could be enormous.</p><p>Many of our FRED Talks guests<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fn3" id="fnref3">[3]</a></sup> have talked about the importance of managing flow and I’ve been doing some analysis of our project portfolio. It is pretty easy to capture and visualise the data for this but the reason for doing it now is that our FRED Talks experts have raised people’s curiosity about flow. Without that we won’t be able to improve. Flow accounting is still quite a niche topic and it doesn’t attract the same attention or understanding as a budget variance in financial accounting. Hopefully we can show people how powerful it can be over the next few weeks.</p><h2 id="learning">Learning</h2><p>Most of our Digital Futures work is focused on making improvements to our key services but a portion of our efforts goes into learning and improving. As part of this we’ve been looking at how to run trials and experiments and what controls and governance are appropriate for this sort of work. This week a small group looked back over some of the trails and experiments Digital Futures has funded so we can learn lessons for the next batch.</p><p>We are used to doing innovative, high-risk technology development but experiments and trials can take this to another level. We are used to scrutinising designs and looking for evidence that they are technically feasible but sometimes the purpose of the experiment is to find out what is feasible so we won’t have this up front. Some experiments are desgined to provide evidence about business benefits so a traditional up-front business case won’t make much sense. Compared with our usual project work an experiment can feel chaotic, disorganised and a bit out of control. I think we were expecting to learn some hard lessons but, in fact, the picture looks pretty good.</p><p>Our small group put aside the usual expectations and looked back at the original brief for the experiments, what they were intended to achieve and the guard rails put around them to keep them safe. As always, we can do better but our framework seems to be sound. We probably need to do more to show people what an experiment feels like and provide support to people managing them. Now that we have a few examples we can show, that should be much easier.</p><h2 id="caring">Caring</h2><p>We’ve started preparing for our next Race Equality Drop In session in May. As usual, we’ll go wherever the attendees want to go but we will offer up a topic or theme to get us started. We are going to talk about Voluntourism<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fn4" id="fnref4">[4]</a></sup> which is a new bit of jargon for me. I don’t have direct experience but my recent trip to Kenya got me thinking about some closely related topics such as white saviourism<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fn5" id="fnref5">[5]</a></sup>. It will probably be quite an uncomfortable topic for me but that’s ok. A bit of discomfort will probably do me some good.</p><h2 id="from-the-archives">From the archives</h2><p>I’ve recently restarted public weeknotes after a spell writing internal notes and blog posts for our intranet. The last public ones started when I became a public service employee in 2019<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fn6" id="fnref6">[6]</a></sup> and stopped when I found I had to put my energies into getting ready for a conference presentation in 2021<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fn7" id="fnref7">[7]</a></sup>. Now and again I’ll dip back and fill in some gaps. First up is that conference presentation. In my final 2021 weeknote I was worried that we wouldn’t be ready but it actually turned out really well. I would have been happy if only 10 people had turned up but it ended up being standing room only with some engaging questions from the audience. You can see for yourself in the recording<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fn8" id="fnref8">[8]</a></sup>.</p><h2 id="footnotes">Footnotes</h2><hr class="footnotes-sep" /><section class="footnotes"><ol class="footnotes-list"><li id="fn1" class="footnote-item"><p>This covers a large number of things such as trading standards, taxis, waste, foot paths and planning permission. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn2" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/supporting-families-2021-to-2022-and-beyond/supporting-families-2021-22-and-beyond">Background to the Supporting Families scheme</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fnref2" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn3" class="footnote-item"><p>Every few weeks Cornwall Council invites a guest speaker to share their insights and challenge our thinking. We have had some amazing people come and share their experience of using new ways of working and/or new technology to improve large organisations and the services they provide to the public. <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fnref3" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn4" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/13/the-business-of-voluntourism-do-western-do-gooders-actually-do-harm">Voluntourism</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fnref4" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn5" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/white-saviorism-in-international-development-theories-practices-and-lived-experiences/#:~:text=We%20define%20white%20saviorism%20as,communities%20of%20the%20global%20South.">White Saviour</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fnref5" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn6" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2019/11/an-introduction-to-backlogs/">Blog about backlogs</a> from 2019 <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fnref6" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn7" class="footnote-item"><p><a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2021/07/weeknote-19-23-july-2021/">Final weeknote from 2021</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fnref7" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li><li id="fn8" class="footnote-item"><p>Cornwall Council’s presentation at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kIzbOceLpo">Agile on the Beach 2021</a>. You can also hear about how our transformation started in our talk at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVg1o3sq4yA">Agile on the Beach 2019</a> <a href="https://www.cioportfolio.co.uk/2024/04/weeknote-19th-april-2024/#fnref8" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p></li></ol></section>"}]}