Series 4 episode 10/11 what’s next?
A double weeknote — not sure what happened but I somehow didn’t manage to get round to finishing last weeks*. It’s been a couple of weeks of real ups and downs — amazing work being delivered by teams, progress on wider plans that I’ve found time to focus on, but also several challenges and strands of work that haven’t progressed or are actively blocked.
So what happened this fortnight?
We’ve had several show and tells — all presented online and recorded. It’s been brilliant to see teams work out how we can carry on doing the great things we’re doing but differently, creatively, and effectively. They’re all published here on our HackIT blog. I’m so proud of our open, engaging culture.
Over the last two weeks we’ve moved more applications outside of our virtual desktop environment — making it easier to use them and reducing the strain on the virtual desktop itself. It’s taught us a lot about how to use what have creatively to make things better for our users.
Mal and I joined an online information session hosted by Cllr Williams and Alex who leads our Hackney apprenticeship programme, along with other services who are also recruiting this summer. I’m hoping it was a useful sessions for prospective applicants — it’s really hard when you can’t see who you’re talking to, but there were some really good questions via sli.do. We’ve got two more sessions next week — one to focus specifically on our digital apprenticeships and one to focus on women in STEM, as we want to encourage more women to apply for our roles.
Several projects have hit blockers and problems over the last couple of weeks — we’re all working hard to solve them, but it’s still frustrating and disheartening when things don’t work out, or we can’t progress them quickly. And there seems to be several at once so I’m trying to work out if there’s a pattern/some learning to take from it, so that we can change our approach in the future. It’s all too easy to focus on problems one at a time and not step back to see if there’s an underlying cause.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time reviewing where we got to with our missions, objectives and key results before the covid crisis hit, and pulling all that work into a shape that I think can help us over the next few months. Matthew, Henry, Rob and I are having a final look at them together next week, so that we feel confident they’re taking us in the right direction and are realistic. We won’t get this right first time — this is hard to do, and we need to re-engage the wider team in the detail after all the hard work earlier this year.
I also spent some time on Friday listening to the presentations from two of UCL IIPP projects — one of which is with Hackney. They were both super impressive (setting a high bar for us next year)and it was great to reconnect with UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose staff and my fellow students. It’ll be strange going back in October with a whole new set of full time students.
Darren, Ian and Philippa pulled together content for our teams on leading, facilitating and collaborating remotely — it’s excellent, typically HackIT, and full of useful suggestions and links.
This week was the last week of our business continuity planning (BCP) as we’re moving into a new phase of planning sustainable services over the next 6–9 months where we expect to still have most people working at home, with some socially distanced office working. This means thinking about desk set ups, our printers**, postal services, telephony and also how we make sure that we’re continuing to collaborate well, and make decisions in a way that includes people whether they’re at home or in the office. So we’re standing down the BCP team and reorganising our daily stand ups with a slightly different group of people who will help us plan and deliver over the next few months. We ended the week with a retro led by Jay, which asked us to reflect on what brought us joy, what we’d throw out, and what we’d recycle.
Working from home during a crisis — some thoughts
I’ve been working differently over the last two weeks— prompted by feedback from my family, and reflection on how I was feeling.
I realised that I don’t have great working from home patterns or habits— I’ve never really worked at home much before, always preferring to separate work from home life. So I’ve had to learn how to do this well — and it’s taken me a few weeks to understand what works and what doesn’t for me. For instance, I like routine, but I don’t like things to be the same every day, and they have been.
So now I’m planning each day in a different way — whether that’s starting early with some yoga***, and then finishing with a walk, or taking a bike ride at lunchtime.
I’ve also made an effort to take a lunch break, properly, something I found really hard at home in the first few weeks. I felt inexplicably guilty each time I wasn’t fully focussed on work, rather than accepting that the day will be a blend because the space is the same — and I’m also a parent, daughter, sister, partner. I can’t switch those things off in the same way when I’m at home — and that’s ok.
What did I read this week?
This on purpose-driven innovation:
This wonderful piece about change from Rebecca Solnit
change begins on the margins and in the shadows and grows toward the center, that the center is a place of arrival and rarely one of real generation
*I ran out of steam.
**they’re one more hard surface to clean
***the best yoga teacher in the world IMHO. She now has a website and I can absolutely recommend her online classes:
