Now that we are close to completing the initial G Suite migration (with over 3,000 people moved over and just a couple of hundred of people left to do) we’re pushing ahead with the work on information and document management, and at the start of the week Anita, Sarah, Tom and I went through the analysis of audit tool requirements. This will be an important part of helping us to move our information management approach from the current model which is based on having highly structured file management that is standardised across the Council towards an approach which allows services to tailor their arrangements to better fit their needs and equips our team with tools that will help them guide and support services in managing their information effectively.

And on Friday Anita and I met with Sonia, the Council’s Head of Policy and Partnerships, to look at ways that her team can take advantage of the G Suite tools for their work. This was a very encouraging discussion and there are lots of ways that having access to more flexible technology will make it easier for them to share ideas and develop strategic plans together with partners. It was great to hear how much progress Sonia’s teams have already made and we identified some useful areas that they can explore next.

As Cate and Matthew were both off last week Henry had to put up with more of my chit chat than normal. We had a useful catch up to go through the recent feedback from the Mayor and Councillor Nicholson on the connectivity strategy that we’re developing and we also looked through some of the other areas of work that the Platform teams are prioritising.

Lucy and I caught up with Sarah, director of children and families, on Monday and checked in on our work together with her services. This was a positive discussion and Lucy also gave me a quick walk through the Discovery exercise that’s been taking place to look at how data might help with contextual safeguarding. I was particularly interested to hear how this is helping the teams involved think through the sorts of questions that data can help answer – I’ve often found that reports and data can accumulate over time and the purpose for producing all the data gets lost, so it’s good to see that this work is starting out by considering user needs.

As we’ve committed to support the Local Digital Declaration I was interested to join the Slack chat that Rishi Sunak, the Minister responsible, held on Tuesday. I thought that it was positive to have direct discussion between a Minister and the practitioners whose work will be impacted by an initiative that they’re promoting and highlights from the discussion were captured in this blog from the MHCLG team: https://mhclgdigital.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/24/using-slack-to-askrishi/. I asked whether this would become a regular thing and the response to that was positive.

Now that the school holidays are upon us there’s a bit more juggling to be done with childcare. That took a fun form on Wednesday with a day off and a trip to the theatre.

Back at work, Thursday included the Finance & Corporate Resources Directorate Management Team, where we discussed workforce planning across the directorate and wider Council (with particular focus on how we can plan recruitment effectively and market the excellent opportunities that Hackney offers), and also the Corporate Resilience Forum, where we were pleased to see that the work to update BCP plans across the Council is pretty much complete and test exercises are well under way.

Friday brought with it an interesting conversation with Mark Gannon at Sheffield City Council. Mark’s currently bringing their IT back in house from an outsourced service (which reminded me how fortunate we are that Hackney has already done this some time ago) and is also looking at how the Council can help lead wider digital change across the City. It sounded like there might be some useful opportunities to share ideas and learn from each others’ experience so we’ll be following that up.

Later on Friday I caught up with the work on our device refresh, which should see kit for our user research arriving soon as well as an initial batch of Hangouts Meet equipment which we can use to test out the benefits of extending video meeting capabilities across the Council. We’re going to start with our floor, some other locations in the HSC and Town Hall and also some of our remote sites where we expect to find opportunities to help teams based at those sites save time and be more closely connected with colleagues in the core campus.

My team intros this week were brought by the letter L. On Monday I caught up with Lindsay (who’s joined Hackney as our Infrastructure Manager) and on Friday I finished up my week with a chat with Liz (who’s moved to ICT from the Strategy, Policy & Economic Development division to be our Data & Insight Manager). It was interesting to get their thoughts on how we’re developing as a service, in particular how we connect up across teams, and I was pleased to hear that they’ve both had a positive experience so far.

Something I’ve learned

Liz and I also discussed the use of tools like Twitter as part of working in the open. I’ll confess to having initially been sceptical about the value of social media and it took a lot of persuasion (and coercion…!) from my boss to get me to sign up to Twitter back in 2009. But I’m pleased that I did and I’ve made lots of really valuable connections through Twitter since I joined. (I have, however, ditched Facebook – mostly because I find it annoying, but they do also seem to have stretched the ‘creepy’ boundary a bit too far in my view…)

A highlight of my schedule is getting the opportunity to meet new members of our team. This week I caught up with Rahma Mohamed (who’s new to Hackney and has joined as a Service Designer) and Lucy (who’s joined us from Hackney’s Planning service and is now Relationship Manager leading on our links with adults’ and children’s social care) and it was great to hear about the work they’re doing and their reflections on joining the HackIT team. We’ve had lots of new starters following our recent recruitment campaign and I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone.

A major theme for my diary this week was information governance and security. I was pleased to hear that we are continuing to make good progress with our work to make sure that our systems are up to date (including patching and decommissioning out of date systems) and training our users in their data protection responsibilities. I spent some time looking through the arrangements for sharing data across health and social care so that we can work together and provide more effective care services. And I was also very encouraged to see the progress that’s been made with the development of our information asset register and I learned something new – I didn’t realise that local authorities are responsible for licencing stage hypnotism performances, but I now know that we do under the terms of the 1952 Hypnotism Act!

Cate D, Dawn, Henry Lewis and I caught up mid-week to check in on our Health and Safety arrangements, making sure that we have these in hand following our move into the Hackney Service Centre in the spring. We’ve had a good number of volunteers come forward to be fire marshals and first aiders (thank you to the people who’ve volunteered for that) and are making sure that the required training has been organised. We’re also going to be checking to make sure that everyone has complete their workspace assessments so that we know that we’ve identified anyone who might need additional adjustments to make sure that the workspace is comfortable and safe for them.

On Thursday I had my regular catch up with Kay, our director of customer services. Our team have been working hard to support Kay’s service and we reflected on some significant successes, including the infrastructure upgrades for the systems they rely on that were delivered in the spring and real success in the way that we’ve worked together to design and implement a new service approach in response to the Homelessness Reduction Act (Hackney were one of the first authorities to be ready for this, ahead of the statutory schedule, and soundings from other boroughs suggest that the service we’ve designed together with our partners FutureGov is working very effectively when compared to the experience others have had). Looking forward we spent some time discussing ways we can make it easier for residents to access Council services that require authentication and work to make it easier for residents to manage payments for the money that they owe the Council.

I try to make sure I’m making some time each week to learn about new ideas and this week had a number of interesting discussions. These included meeting Patric and Tim from Linkd, a lifestyle brand loyalty startup based in Hackney whose approach got me thinking about the directory of services work we’re doing; Katie and Kris from Amazon Web Services for a broad ranging conversation covering digital platforms, skills and culture; Amy from Public to hear about their Govstart programme which is helping new digital start ups develop public service offerings; and Matt from Stamp to take a look at how his ‘CIO Priorities’ cards might provide a different lens to look at the work we’re doing and help test the way we’re joining these up and identify gaps / tensions.

(The cards are based on common priorities that Matt’s distilled from conversations with CIOs across the public and private sectors. We looked at how these might map to the themes we’re using to shape our work at Hackney and also picked out ones that aren’t aligned with things we want to focus on – the ones at the bottom right. It’s not a perfect fit but I thought it prompted some interesting things to think about in terms of how the themes and our team structures link up.)

The week wrapped up with check ins with Temple, Henry and Michael to keep up to speed with our end-user device refresh work (we’re starting some user research to help us understand what sorts of device will work best for different working styles – thank you to Richard for offering to help with shape that!) and with Steve and Cate to bring me up to speed with Steve’s review of our contracts and purchasing processes (which is helping us identify new areas where we can drive out savings and also opportunities to simplify some of our internal processes).

Something I’ve learned this week

On Tuesday I learned that falling over while running is much more painful in your mid-40s than it was when I was a child and have spent the rest of the week bandaged up and hobbling a bit. And on Wednesday I was reminded how useful it is to be able to use Hangouts Meet video calls to join meetings so that I could give myself an extra day at home to help the mending process without missing out on any important discussions.

The week began with the quarterly ‘Hackney Digital’ meeting that Stephen Haynes (Director of Strategy, Policy and Economic Development) and I have with the Mayor and Cllr Nicholson, where we focussed on looking through the latest updates for the connectivity strategy review that Henry Lewis is leading. We had a very constructive discussion looking at the priorities that Henry’s recommending following the extensive engagement with other services and telecommunications providers that he led earlier this year and got some helpful steers for the next steps.

Later in the morning I joined the Housing Transformation Board which covers a wide range of improvements across the housing service, including the work we are doing with housing colleagues to help improve services to tenants and leaseholders. There have been several senior management changes in housing over the last couple of months and Matthew Cain, Jasmeen, Nic and other members of our team have been working hard to help new colleagues get a good understanding of the ‘app’ based approach we’re taking and build confidence in the direction we’ve set. The highlight of the meeting for me was hearing another senior colleague in housing strongly advocating the progress that has been made and the direction of travel – a real endorsement of the hard work that’s going into building a real partnership ethos between our teams.

Also on Monday, I had catch ups with Cate McLaurin, Henry Lewis and Matthew Cain to check in on progress. We have 1:1s every two weeks and alternate between more formal reviews of objectives and a less formal discussion about how work is progressing. I find this helpful as it makes sure we’re taking a rounded view and have time to keep each other up to date.

I think the way we do this is a good fit for the approach that we’re looking to develop across the whole Council for appraisals and performance management. On Wednesday Molly from the Organisation Development team and I presented an update on this thinking to the Senior Manager Network meeting, which seemed to be well received. Our proposal is to switch away from annual objectives and twice yearly appraisal meetings (which can often feel like a form filling exercise and is rarely a good fit for the way that people actually work) towards more frequent ‘check ins’ where managers and their reports get together to look at priorities, progress and development opportunities with a greater focus on having a good quality conversation, rather than complex rating systems. The next step is to trial this as a ‘beta’ with a range of service teams ahead of adopting it across the Council. (We also know that some service areas such as social care have specific performance review needs for their professions so we’ll be taking those into account.)

At the end of Wednesday afternoon Cate McLaurin and I met up with Cllr Williams, our Cabinet Member for Employment, Skills and Human Resources, to talk through our plans for our apprentice programme. We had a very positive discussion and it was great to hear about the progress Cate has made with taking on the lead role for this since she started a few weeks ago.

Wednesday ended with the termly full governing body meeting at the school where I’m a governor. I find this a very rewarding responsibility which gives me valuable insight into how the education system works and a good opportunity to get first hand experience of public service delivery on the ‘front line’. I’m taking on the role of chair of governors next year which I’m expecting will be an interesting challenge.

Thursday was all about GDPR, as a group of us spent the day in in-depth training about the new Data Protection Act. I was reassured to find that the work on this over the last year has given me a fairly good understanding, but there were some useful details that I hadn’t picked up before so the day was a valuable way to develop my knowledge.

Over lunch I managed to fit in a quick chat with Sarah and Tom to talk through the work to roll out the new Digital Action Plans for officers and similar data protection training for Members focusing on their roles and data responsibilities. Being able to demonstrate that all of our users have had good quality training will be an important part of our overall data protection work, and we are making this genuinely mandatory by advising users that we will suspend their IT access if they don’t complete the training.

The week wrapped up with a meetup event for G Suite users across central and local government, hosted by Google. This was a good opportunity to catch up with colleagues, compare notes and provide feedback to Google on areas that we’re keen to see them focus on.

Something I’ve learned this week

I’ve been reflecting on the importance of setting goals to help with focus. I’m currently finding it harder to motivate myself to get out twice a week for 5k runs than I did for 10k and 21k runs when I was getting ready for the Hackney Half a couple of months ago. I think this applies to work too and while I’m not a fan of over focusing on targets (which I think can often be at the expense of keeping our sights on the bigger picture that we need to work towards) I do think it is helpful to use objectives to focus the mind and make sure that quick progress is made. I’m going to be asking myself whether I’m prioritising the right things and giving them enough focus.

The week began with a visit from Paul Brewer and colleagues from Adur and Worthing who borrowed our workshop room for the day. It was good to welcome them to HackIT Towers and I enjoyed comparing notes when we caught up at lunchtime. It’s interesting that while there are some differences in the technology approaches we’re taking for our digital service delivery (Adur and Worthing are taking a ‘low code’ platform approach, whereas we’re doing more in-house development), there are also many areas where our approaches are very similar. It was great to hear about the successes they’re having through using design led approaches to rethink services and put users first, and we also had a very good discussion about the work we’re each doing to assess our digital architectures and make sure that we’re considering longer term sustainability as well as the delivery of rapid change and improvement.

I caught up with Ajman, our Director of Housing, this week. He’s keen to make sure that he’s got a good understanding of the work that our teams are doing together to support improvements across the housing service and the benefits that this will provide for residents. I’m pleased that he shares our view that simply switching from one traditional housing system to another won’t improve much at all, but it also emphasised to me the importance of the work that Jasmine, Matthew, Nic and the rest of our team working with housing are doing to help new colleagues understand the approach we’re taking. Taking an Agile and design led approach is different from the ‘Prince 2’ driven approaches used in many councils and it’s essential that we help colleagues grow their confidence in the direction we’re taking together.

Big news on Wednesday was the announcement of the Local Digital Declaration, setting out a cross-sector commitment to collaborative working to deliver better digital services for residents and businesses across the country. I’m pleased that we have had the opportunity to contribute to the shaping of the Declaration and also that our Mayor personally set out Hackney’s commitment to support it. I blogged about our support for the Declaration on our HackIT blog here: https://blogs.hackney.gov.uk/hackit/in-support-of-the-local-digital-declaration (includes the Mayor’s video message).

Also on Wednesday, we had our latest strategic service overview meeting where Andy gave us a summary of the work in progress with colleagues in Public Realm. These services touch on the lives of every resident in the borough and I was pleased to hear how the working relationship is developing and how we’re working together to identify and deliver improvements. Looking forward, I’m particularly interested in ways that we might work with colleagues in libraries to continue to improve the digital support we offer to residents. Libraries have their origins in the mid-19th century as a means of supporting education and social improvement, and it’s interesting to think about how this purpose is evolving in the 21st century.

One area that every ICT service I’ve ever worked with has struggled to do well is effective asset management, and mid-week I caught up with Michael and Henry to talk through our work on that here at Hackney. As we prepare our plans to refresh our ageing PCs and laptops this is an important area of focus for us and is an area where making services more user focused can also help improve our administration of assets by simplifying processes and improving the way we manage data. I’m pleased that we are linking this with work to look at ways that we can further improve the support we provide for our users. Our bookable 1:1 advice sessions have been a big success and I’m keen to see us explore ways that we can build on the topic based ‘stand up’ briefings we’re currently running to support users as part of the G Suite roll out and support our team in developing their technical confidence with the devices we provide to our users.

After lots of hard work it looks like our ‘WiFi-4-All’ wifi service is beginning to behave better. Further investigation and some updates made last week had resulted in a much faster service by the end of the week and I’m hoping that puts us on a good footing moving forward. Thank you to Lindsay, Keith and the others who’ve been working on this.

Thursday was a day away from the office as I met up with people from several other London councils for a workshop to develop thinking for the London Office of Technology and Innovation (‘LOTI’) that Theo Blackwell, London’s Chief Digital Officer, is leading. It was a long day, but we covered a lot of ground and worked in groups to dig into some of the proposed areas that LOTI might focus on in more detail. The way this is developing fits nicely with the Local Digital Declaration — with the emphasis on purposeful collaboration to explore opportunities for innovation, which I think it more likely to deliver valuable results and move at a faster pace than a more formal shared service approach. It was also good to have our Mayor dash back from the LGA conference to join part of the day — showing his support as the incoming digital lead for London Councils.

Training and development was another area of focus last week. As well as our forthcoming apprenticeship programme we are also looking at ways that we can make sure we get the most out of the training and development strategy that we agreed through our recent restructure. As part of that Cate McLaurin and I met with Emily from the Organisational Development team to discuss ways that we might be able to use Apprenticeship Levy funding as part of supporting development opportunities for our existing team. There are some potential ways we could do this that would fit well with the priorities we’ve agreed and we’ll be doing more work over the summer to explore those further.

Finally, a theme for Friday was connecting in with colleagues across other areas of the Council (I think that Hackney does this rather well). I met up with a colleague from the Resident Sustainment Team in Housing as part of the ‘Let’s Network Hackney’ programme and learned more about how her team are using the new tools we’ve been providing to spend more time with residents and get access to the information they need more quickly. And Matthew Cain and I took time with colleagues in the Strategy, Policy and Economic Development division hearing about work they’re doing to encourage work shadowing in their teams and talking about ways that we might participate in that to help further develop the links across our services.

Something I’ve learned this week

I’ve got a number of favourite tools that I like to use to organise myself and make sure I’m getting the right things done (although sometimes it can feel like that’s mostly about tracking the things that I haven’t got done and carrying them forward for another day….). This week I was trying to pull together the objectives we’ve agreed to prioritise at our recent management team away day. What I’ve learned is that simply because I prefer a certain set of tools that doesn’t mean that others prefer them too (and if this is genuinely going to be a shared work plan then I need to take account of other people’s needs and preferences as well). I am going to need to give more thought to how best to do this. I thought that I’d figured out a good way to do it using Trello, but on further examination that was going to end up messy and I want to make sure it’s easy to check and update progress, not a chore.

We appear to be stepping boldly into a brave new world where we publish our week notes in the open *, so not wanting to be left behind I’ve popped this up on Medium too.

Highlights from last week

• The week began with welcoming Cate Mclaurin to our team. I’m really pleased to see our new colleagues coming on board to help us crack on with the next stage of the work we’re doing, and I’m very much looking forward to working with Cate and learning from her experience in central government and ACAS.
• Our office became a film studio twice last week. On Tuesday we produced a short set of clips which featured several of our people talking about what it’s like to be part of the HackIT team — we’ll be releasing the video this week to support our apprentice recruitment. And on Friday afternoon the Mayor was filmed in our meet and greet space for a video statement setting out Hackney’s support for digital collaboration across local government. (Watch out for more about this later in the week…!)
• We’ve had lots of interest in our apprenticeship programme, and I’ve had several calls over the last week to share more of the background to that with colleagues elsewhere. I talked through the background (as per my recent blog post: https://blogs.hackney.gov.uk/hackit/delivering-digital-change-for-the-long-term-with-apprenticeships) and shared more details about the roles that we’re recruiting to. So far the feedback has been very positive so I’m now even more aware of the pressure on us to make sure that the programme is a success!
• I’ve also been having follow up conversations with the people who took part in our Mayor’s Digital Advisory panel a few weeks ago. I’m using these to gather their ideas for how we can develop this and use it to help guide our digital direction for Hackney.
• Thursday was our quarterly Divisional Management Team away day, where we set aside time to discuss some of the bigger picture issues and opportunities that we need to think through. I find these very useful sessions and we covered some important topics that we’ll be focusing on over the coming months.
• I have regular catch ups with other directors and at the end of the day on Thursday afternoon Lucy and I caught up with Sarah, our Director of Children’s Services. I was very pleased to hear the positive feedback from Sarah about her teams’ move to our new productivity tools last week and it was particularly encouraging to spend the time discussing how they’ll be able to use these to work in more flexible and collaborative ways. We talked about how we can share learning from the changes we’ve made to our ways of working in ICT and how we might provide topic based support and advice sessions for Sarah’s teams to help them explore new ideas for their service.
• We’re hard at work preparing for the procurement of our new end-user devices and I was pleased to see that we’ve been able to make a significant saving on licencing through good timing and smart procurement. We’ll be doing the work to buy hardware soon, but before we do that we’re making sure that we dig in deeper to understand user needs — particularly to help us figure out where teams’ working styles would make laptops the best option and where flexible desktop access would be the better fit. Designing this through working with users is a really important part of our commitment to follow the Local Government Digital Service Standard: https://localgov.digital/service-standard/point/understand-user-needs.
• Delivering up to date software tools and hardware is only part of the changes that we’re making to help modernise our workplace at Hackney. Equally important is helping colleagues think through how they can best use these to manage their information effectively and this is another area where understanding user needs and learning together is really important. We know that introducing whole organisation level file plans is very difficult and is often a poor fit with the way that services work, so on Friday Anita and I spent time catching up with the Exec Support and Mayor’s Office teams getting up to speed with the good progress that they’re making and helping to identify areas where we can provide additional support.
• I wrapped up the week with a conversation with some colleagues in HR planning ahead to a presentation that we’ll be giving together at next week’s Senior Manager Network meeting. This was a good opportunity to show how we can use video meetings to meet up quickly without all needing to be in the same place at the same time. It worked really well and we were able to agree the way forward in a brief meeting, rather than lots of emails having to go back and forth.

Something I’ve learned this week

I’ve been taking time to check in with people who’ve moved over to our new productivity tools to see how they’re getting on. I find it useful to make sure that I’ve got a good understanding of how changes that we’re delivering are bedding in and have never liked the notion that senior managers shouldn’t make the time to understand detail. While it is important to have a big picture view I think that needs to be connected with the reality ‘on the ground’ too, as otherwise it’s easy to make decisions without understanding the potential implications. I’ve realised that I need to make sure I explain that, as quite a few people have been surprised that I thought it was a useful use of my time to spend half an hour with them looking at how they’re using their email.

All the best,

Rob

* Cate got there first (by many weeks!): https://medium.com/@cate.mclaurin/weeknotes-20-week-1-being-new-being-welcomed-a134aec8ef45 and Matthew’s made the leap this week too: https://medium.com/@mcaino/week-notes-v2-0-969645acac80.