On Sunday 13 October I’m running the Royal Parks Half Marathon with a group of people from the school trust that I’m part of. We’re raising money for Lambeth & Southwark Mind, who work to promote positive mental health. All donations very gratefully received! https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-display/showROFundraiserPage?userUrl=CommunitasTrustRunners&isTeam=true

A lot of my week was taken up with clearing through email and other bits and bobs that had come in while I was on leave. I was pleased that I’d planned in a decent amount of desk time so that I could get this done and I finished the week feeling fairly calm and up to speed. It’s taken me quite a long time to learn that it’s useful to treat returning from a holiday as something that’s worth planning for properly.

Mobile phones

We’re getting into the detail of the arrangements for implementing the new approach for mobile phones that I shared earlier in the summer (https://bytherye.com/2019/07/24/weeknote-w-c-15-july-mobiles-robots-and-focus/). One important aspect is how we apply this to service areas where staff are mostly mobile (eg people working in parks and repairs). We’ve a reasonable idea about how we think this will work and have had some useful detailed feedback from colleagues in some of those services. We will be using to help make sure we get the specifics right and have agreed that we’ll set up a session to work through that and co-design it together.

Money

I had a good follow up meeting with colleagues in finance this week to move forward with the work that we’ve been doing to reprofile some of our investment funding. 

Historically, Hackney ICT has operated on a fairly typical model where investments have been largely capital in nature – investing in new infrastructure (servers, network switches etc) and major systems implementations. But as technology changes and the Council’s digital maturity develops, the nature of the investments that we need to make is changing too. Key drivers for this are:

• Growing use of cloud services, where the Council ‘rents’ computing capacity and software rather than buying those as ‘assets’, increasing agility and the ability to deliver improvements at pace, and reducing risk. This means that costs shift from capital purchases to revenue subscriptions.
• A greater need to invest in ongoing digital transformation to help Hackney take maximum advantage of the potential for technology, data and digital service design to improve services and realise efficiencies through smarter service delivery. This means that costs shift from ‘one and done’ capital implementation projects to the ongoing skills and capacity needed to deliver continuous and accelerating improvement across services.

Our strategy also means that some of our work is creating ‘intangible assets’ (software built on open source platforms) rather than the traditional proprietary systems that are familiar to finance colleagues.

I’ve been encouraged by the constructive approach that our finance colleagues have taken in working through this together. We’ve now agreed most of the budget lines that need to be set up and those should be in place shortly.

We’re not home and dry quite yet though, and there is further work to do looking at budget pressures due to increases in costs from some of our software vendors and reviewing our charging for print. Once we’ve got those done we will hopefully be in a position to confirm that we are on track with our budget management for the year.

I also…

• Had a good catch up with Liz and Matthew looking at how we can make sure that we are maximising the visibility of the excellent work that the Data & Insight team are doing.
• Caught up with a colleague from another council who I have mentoring sessions with. I was really pleased to see that they’ve started blogging some of their ideas following an earlier conversation we had (https://thelocalanalyst.blog/).
• Looked at our intranet content with Paul and discussed how we might use the shift to our new intranet platform as an opportunity to simplify that. (And how we can use user research to make sure we’re providing useful guidance that meets people’s needs.)
• Enjoyed the show and tell that the GOV.UK PaaS team gave on Thursday. I was particularly impressed with the breadth of ground that the team covered – from technical details to the wider strategic business model – which helped provide a good understanding of what the service can offer.
• Had positive catch ups with Kim (our Group Director for Neighbourhoods & Housing, who’s leaving soon to move to be Chief Exec at Lewisham) and Kay (our Director of Customer Services). Kim’s been clearing out old files and has found a bundle of old Hackney booklets, including ‘How to get the most out of ICT’. She’s promised to share that with me when she leaves!
• Wrapped up the week with a good catch up on the Spacebank project with Philippa and Richard. The team are learning loads from the work that they’re doing with the Community Halls team and the earlier user research is also proving valuable in assessing options for the next steps in taking the prototype work forward.

I was also really pleased to hear that Richard has linked up with our colleagues in Croydon to do some collaborative user research work (https://croydon.digital/2019/08/30/croydon-teams-up-with-4-other-councils-on-user-research/). It’s great to see connections like this being made and the User Research library that we developed last year (https://research.localgov.digital/) being used to good effect.

Something I’ve learned

Kindles don’t do very well if you run them through a cycle of the washing machine 😢

Today’s my first day back after a relaxing couple of weeks in France. As with last year’s holiday, I resolved to switch off from work properly so I turned off notifications for my work apps and removed my work mailbox from my phone while I was away. It’s great to have a strong team back in the office and to know that they will have everything in hand without feeling that I need to check in while I’m away. (Cate’s weeknote here illustrates how well the team came together to respond to a major network issue: https://weeknot.es/s3-ep6-that-was-the-week-that-was-nt-8759c1da689e).

I also tried to leave my phone in our room during the day to reduce the temptation to get lost in grazing Twitter, the news, and basically trying to read all of the Internet. I wasn’t totally successful in that, in fact I was pretty rubbish for the first couple of days, but I did get better as the break went on.

A benefit of our children being a bit older now is that they spent most of their days playing in the pool with their cousins, so there was lots of time for reading and other selfish indulgences. I used some of the time to get in some runs because I’ve realised it’s less than two months to the Royal Parks Half Marathon that I’m doing in October and I need to get back up to distance. I also tried to improve my rather poor swimming technique (with limited success) and made time to reacquaint myself with a guitar, which was good fun (the holiday hit was ‘Postman Pat’, which my younger nephews and niece did great dancing to!).

Reading list

A shorter list than last year:

• Sapiens: this is an overview of how human societies have developed over the ages which gave some interesting food for thought. I reminded myself that this sort of whistlestop tour only ever really touches the surface of the topic and it’s important not to take too much of it as definitive information without doing some wider reading.
• The Stranger’s Child: this was my dalliance with non-fiction for the holiday, and made good on a nearly year old commitment to Polly (our Director of Comms) who suggested a book swap last summer – I think she read the one I leant her much sooner. It was an interesting read about the interwoven stories and relationships around a family which starts from before WW1 and runs through to the early 2000s. I enjoyed the way that the story developed and makes the reader do a bit of thinking to join the pieces together. But I also thought that the main narrative hook of a poem written by one of the key characters in 1913 was a bit overworked, which made the story a bit repetitive in parts.
• This America: The Case For The Nation: I decided to read this after hearing a conversation with the author on the Talking Politics podcast. The book discusses the competing claims for the notion of ‘the Nation’ in the United States since the Republic was founded, and the tensions between different groups over the years. Lack of tolerance is by no means a monopoly of any one country and the book is a reminder of both the best and worst in human nature. Which led me to…
• Southern Horrors Lynch Law In All Its Phases: a short book written in the 1890s which makes for genuinely grim reading. The only positive is that it serves as a reminder of how much we have progressed since then, but it’s important not to take that progress for granted nor assume that such things are the preserve of any one group of people or time.
• The People vs Tech: I’ve been meaning to read this for a while. I liked the author’s framing of the challenges that technology and the exponential growth in data captured about our lives present for democracy and society, and it’s good to see the growing consciousness of the importance of these issues in our national debate (although this book provides a more balanced and thoughtful analysis than many of the over-excited newspaper headlines). I suspect that the ‘solutions’ offered in the epilogue might be easier to propose than to actually implement but it felt like a useful contribution to the topic.
• Good work: the Taylor review of modern working practices: not strictly a book, but as it runs to over 100 pages I think it counts. This is something else that I’ve been meaning to read for quite a while (it was published two years ago) but it still felt like a useful read. The report is a wide-ranging review of employment practices and different forms of work (including self-employment and ‘gig’ style employment) and looks at the roles that businesses, workers, Government and unions have in achieving worthwhile and rewarding work as part of a successful and flexible employment market. This was another time where I finished with the feeling that I needed to read more widely as it challenged some of my preconceptions and I’d like to test that in greater depth.

Reflecting on what I want to focus on now I’m back

On our journey out I read Matthew’s note about the things he’s been learning on his leadership course: https://link.medium.com/qzSMP7gJ0Y. I really liked that and on the journey home I did a bit of thinking about what I want to focus on when I’m back. I’ve grouped that into three areas of emphasis:

• Something organisational – how can I help to make sure that we make the most of the opportunity that the new Customer Services board presents to further raise our ambitions across the Council?
• Something specific to HackIT – how can I make sure that I am delegating effectively, in particular making sure that I’m successfully distinguishing between areas of our work where I ‘have views’ and want to contribute, but am not the direct lead, and those areas where I need to be more clearly taking a lead role? This is important so that I don’t unintentionally slow work down and also to help me focus my attention.
• Something specific to me – this is my annual commitment to be better at focus and not find that time slips away jumping between things on my list / in my mailbox (I previously described this as ‘more quality, less grazing’).

My first challenge will be getting through my mailbox and seeing if I can emerge from the day with a clear direction for the rest of the week!

Something I’ve learned

For our holidays this year we joined what seems to be a growing (and positive) trend of giving air travel a miss and took the train to France. I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was. 

The check in process at St Pancras was less faffy than our recent airport experiences, and the journeys were nice and quick (and compared well when you consider the time spent in check in queues and waiting for the gate to be called). We also took the opportunity to break the outward journey with a couple of days in central Paris which was good fun. I think we’ll definitely be doing that again.

(As a top tip, seat61.com was an excellent resource for planning the journey by rail. This included a helpful pointer to the low cost upgrades to first class that are available for the TGV, which gave us loads of comfortable legroom. A nice reminder that the Internet can be a positive place to find information that helps you do things better!)

The Customer Services board gets started

On Monday we had the first meeting of our new Member led Customer Services board. As I mentioned last week, this is an exciting opportunity for us to bring together work across the Council and deliver further improvements to the services we provide for our residents.

For the first meeting we had planned to do some thinking about what we mean by great customer services and explore that in more depth with the Cabinet Members and other senior leaders in the group. I was a bit nervous about this because while Matthew had done most of the ground work and had designed the session (and I think he’s better at that than I am), diaries meant that the meeting took place while he was on leave so I took on the facilitation role. In groups like this I’m naturally more comfortable discussing my thoughts, rather than facilitating the discussion itself, but Matthew had done lots of prep for the meeting (including running through the workshop design with me so I was well prepared) which helped me feel more confident in what I needed to do.

I was really pleased with the discussion. Everyone was well engaged and I could see the benefit of the pre-meets that Matthew held with everyone over the previous weeks. There was a real appetite to think beyond ‘channel shift’ and look at ways that we could redesign services to make things simpler and more accessible for residents.

We’ve agreed that we’ll follow up next month by looking at some areas where we might focus to explore what could be possible as experiments to help us explore user needs and test out new thinking.

A year (and a bit) on from GDPR

Wednesday’s meeting of our quarterly Information Governance Group included a recap on the work we’ve been doing across the Council to respond to the General Data Protection Regulation which came into effect last May. It felt appropriate to mark Sarah’s last IGG meeting before she moves to Barts Health by reflecting on lots of really positive progress and clear plans for future work. I was particularly pleased to hear another senior manager remark that Hackney’s GDPR work has felt calm and purposeful – a real endorsement for the hard work that the team have done to make sure that we approach GDPR as an opportunity to strengthen our information management practices, not just a compliance burden.

Other highlights from last week were:

• I had a couple of useful calls with colleagues at other councils. The first was a good opportunity to compare notes on how we can unlock ourselves from vendor dependency (or whether there are some circumstances where that might be too tricky). In my view it’s important that we take this challenge on, but it’s also important to be honest about where it’s hard to do. And the second call was an initial conversation about opportunities for the other council to share the work we’ve been doing for housing services. That was very encouraging and we’ll be following that up to see how we might be able to help make that happen.
• A useful update from the team who’ve been looking at options to simplify sign ons for our users. I was pleased that they’ve taken the time to do thorough user research as part of evaluating the options, and also that their conclusion has emphasised the importance of simplicity for the user experience and technical set up.
• Henry and I caught up to discuss the plans for refresh of the IT kit that our Members use. Much of their current equipment is reaching the end of its useful life and it’s important that we are giving them the tools they need to represent our residents effectively.
• I finished my week with a visit from officers and Councillors from another London borough who wanted to find out more about the work we’re doing here at Hackney. It was good to reflect on how much has been achieved over the last few years (building on the strong foundations that were already in place) and rewarding to know that our work is having a positive impact beyond Hackney.

I’m going to be pausing the weeknotes now and will start again at the beginning of September. I’ll give some thought to whether this merits the declaration of a new season and new format…!

Something I’m reflecting on

I’ve finally finished the finance work I needed to do. It was easier than I had convinced myself it would be. I need to remember that because it’s nearly always the case…

The summer holidays are upon us and I had a slightly shorter week so that I could take my share of the childcare responsibilities. There’s still lots I want to get done before we’re too far into August…

Preparing for our new Member led customer services board

I spent some time last week with Matthew preparing for the new Member led customer services board which has its first meeting this week. I’m excited about this because it’s designed to be cross-cutting, bringing together senior officers and Members from across a wide range of portfolios, and is an opportunity to look at how we can work together to use data, digital service design and technology to deliver further improvements for our residents, as well as reducing the cost of services.

Matthew has held pre-meets with each of the attendees to talk through their hopes for the group and reflect on the significant achievements that Hackney has already delivered over previous years. These provide a solid foundation for future improvements and I think it’s going to be exciting to see what can be achieved in the next stage of our journey.

Designing our software licencing to fit our future direction

A significant area of our spending as a service relates to software licencing, and making sure that we have designed our licencing to fit the Council’s strategic direction can be very complex. Many of our legacy systems have their origins in desktop computing and the licencing models can be a poor fit for a world where users are mainly using web and mobile devices, and information flows between systems to deliver more joined up services for our residents.

On Wednesday we had a really useful session with colleagues from the Crown Commercial Service who talked us through some of the tricks that software vendors use and ways that they can help us secure the best value and flexibility from our licencing. This was a good example of how local and central government can work together to get best value for money for taxpayers.

Other highlights from last week were:

• Henry and I met up with the coach that he’s been working with recently. This was a very positive conversation and I found it particularly valuable to talk through the ways that Henry and I work together and how we can get the best from one another.
• Andy, Matthew and I met up with colleagues from the Council’s Regeneration team to discuss how we can help them move away from eDOCS as quickly as possible. They’re seeing lots of benefits from adopting G Suite and are keen to bring their historic information together in one place so that they can work collaboratively across their teams. Following this we’ve shared a proposed approach to move this forward which we hope will be of benefit to them as well as helping us to refine the approach we take for engaging with other service areas.
• We had a catch up looking at progress with developing new ‘How to HackIT’ guides. We had fewer guides ready to publish than we had in previous months but I’m expecting that one for the procurement collection will be published this week and there are a couple of others which will hopefully be ready soon. We also unpicked the commissioning and procurement lifecycle to identify the guides that we’d like to produce to help teams who need to buy things.
• I attended the third LOTI workshop, which was the first one since the central LOTI team arrived in post. Onyeka from the team did a really good write up here: https://medium.com/@onyeka.onyekwelu/week-2-choosing-projects-creating-systems-c1fd107e3310.
• I had a catch up to look at the work we’re doing to review our salary supplements (ahead of the formal review next April). We’ve made good progress with this and I’m happy with the way it’s shaping up. We’ve agreed an approach with our HR colleagues which will mean that we’re ready in good time, including time to discuss our approach with the wider team. (Ahead of that, I’m happy to discuss any questions you have about this – just drop me a line if you’d like to make time for a chat)
• Soraya gave Matthew and me an excellent update on the work she’s been doing to look at how we recruit and attract people to join our team. She had pulled together some useful insights and identified a few hypotheses which she’ll be exploring in the next stages of this work.

Something I’m reflecting on

I watched ‘The Great Hack’ at the weekend. I thought that this was disappointing viewing because I felt that it struggled to tell what I think is the deeper story about how the internet and social networks are changing society and politics.

The narrative seemed to suggest that a strange dark magic was being used to influence how people vote, but I think this is simply a case of new and more powerful forms of marketing which we’re already very familiar with in the world of commerce. What’s changed from traditional political campaigning is scale in terms of the breadth and depth of information available and the ability to use modern technology to profile people and deliver much more personalized messages than traditional billboard posters, leaflets and broadcast media. There have been similarly dramatic shifts affecting society in the past, and I suspect that each time that has happened the changes felt unfathomable to many people while those who ‘got it’ have been able to harness them to further their goals.

The programme touched briefly on some of the deeper questions about power and the interests behind some of the ways this has been used. But I thought that got lost, which was a shame.

Getting there with mobiles

A few weeks ago I mentioned that Cate and I were reviewing the feedback we’d received from our recent survey to find out from staff how they use corporate mobile phones and their thoughts on our proposed future approach (https://bytherye.com/2019/06/09/weeknote-w-c-3-june-management-team-update-thinking-about-mobiles-and-more/). We’ve now completed this and on Tuesday we took our updated recommendations to the Hackney Management Team.

I was very pleased that these were agreed (with a couple of caveats that we still need to work on as prerequisites before we will be able to launch our proposed approach), but afterwards I decided that I was explaining the goals we’re hoping to achieve in the wrong way. I realised that the way I’ve been describing the proposed change in approach made it sound like we were planning to take something away from our users, which meant that the benefits weren’t coming across clearly enough. Reflecting on that, I’ve boiled this down to five key points which I think are a more effective description of what we propose to do:

• We are going to give our users more choice over the devices they use, by letting them decide whether to use their own device or whether to have a dedicated phone for work purposes.
• We will extend access to everyone, meaning that all staff will be able to benefit from mobile access to their work.
• We will reduce our environmental impact by avoiding buying over 3,000 new phones to refresh the current end-of-life devices, supporting Hackney’s environmental commitments.
• We are going to cut out bureaucracy and make things simpler, by paying a universal allowance through payroll rather than a request and approval process to acquire a phone and the resulting asset management work.
• And we will deliver savings of over £590k over three years.

The new approach will mean that all staff are paid a monthly allowance of £10 which they can either use towards the costs of using their personal phone and call / data plan for their work or to buy a dedicated phone for work purposes. Our approach to security will mean that we can provide secure access to core work apps (inc phone calls, email, calendar, files etc) without needing to make additional changes to our systems. The slides that Cate and I talked through at Thursday’s strategy stand up give more details about the feedback we’ve had from users and how we plan to respond to the points people raised (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pHphy6-ssqyMNFTurQiQ15368G4qtV36Fl8GFSGxKtM).

A visit from the Committee for Standards in Public Life

On Monday, Liz, Matthew and I caught up with members of the Committee for Standards in Public Life (who advise the Prime Minister on ethical standards across the whole of public life in England). This was in the context of the Committee’s review of the implications of Artificial Intelligence for standards in public service (there’s more info about their review here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/ai-and-public-standards).

We had a wide ranging conversation (the committee have deliberately avoided defining AI too narrowly because the term gets used to cover a lot of different aspects of how technology is developing) and my overall impression was that our thinking at Hackney is looking at the right things and is in line with what they are seeing elsewhere. We made it clear that we think that we are still at an early stage of exploring what will be possible with technology and data, and we are approaching this carefully to make sure that we don’t get carried away with what we could do without giving due consideration to what we should do.

We shared some of the key things we’re learning, including:

• The importance of data quality, which is especially complicated in an environment like ours with so many different services and systems.
• How we have chosen to see GDPR as an opportunity to develop the culture of data and privacy awareness across the Council, not just a compliance burden.
• The work we are doing to develop data skills in our team, including our work on apprenticeships, the roles we designed into our team and participation in the GDS / ONS data science accelerator programme.
• And how our ‘Think big, act small’ principle is designed to help us experiment with new ideas and opportunities while also managing risk.

Other highlights from last week were:

• Sarah and I had a useful catch up with Tim (the Chief Exec) and Ian (the boss) about our work on Subject Access Requests and Freedom Of Information requests.
• We had a very positive meeting of the Housing Steering Group looking at progress with our digital services. I was especially pleased with the update from Lindsey in the repairs contact centre, who was reporting significant benefits from the work to make it easier to report and track repairs.
• On Monday evening I joined Dan (Hackney’s Head of HR) for a session with Audit Committee giving them an overview of the work that the Data & Insight team have been doing to provide managers with improved access to people data using the new dashboards they have developed. This was very well received and prompted a good conversation about how the data can be used to make sure that Hackney performs well and is a good place to work.
• I’ve been continuing the work to look at the updates to salary supplements which are due next year. We’ve done some assessment against other councils and benchmarking tools which we’ll be discussing with HR colleagues this week.
• On Wednesday I caught up with our Finance colleagues to check through the latest budget position. We’re now a quarter of the way through the financial year, so it’s important that we’re clear about the actions we need to take to secure a balanced budget position at year end.
• On Thursday afternoon, I caught up with Lucy, Marian, Ross and Tessa to look at how we can assess the benefits of the work we’re doing to join up health and social care. The anecdotal feedback is that social care teams are finding it very valuable to be able to access core health data easily as part of supporting people in need of care and the data suggests that the usage is ahead of our expectations. We’re going to do some more work to develop a more detailed understanding so that we can be sure about the benefits and clear about areas for further improvement.
• And I wrapped up with week with a meeting with senior folk from one of our major suppliers. It was good to report very positive feedback from users and it was also valuable to have an opportunity to be frank about areas where we would like to see improvements.

Something I’m learning

I’m not finishing the follow up work that I need to do on our capital and investment budgets quickly enough, which is annoying me. That’s entirely down to me not making enough time to focus on it, and I’m going to have to knuckle down and finish it this week because it’s important across many areas of our work. I need to keep reminding myself that there are some things which just need to be given the time they need, even if they feel less immediately time critical than other tasks which crop up during the week. Otherwise it’s too easy for time to slip away from me.

The week is running away from me, so this is a briefer weeknote than normal to make sure I keep on track.

Learning from the housing neighbourhoods team

I took some time last Monday morning to get out and about with a colleague from the De Beauvoir and Queensbridge neighbourhood housing office. I find opportunities like this really valuable as it helps me get a better understanding of the work that the users we support do.

We took a walking visit around one of the estates he’s responsible for, starting out by discussing potential placement for additional secure cycle storage with a colleague from the asset management team (there’s growing demand for cycle hangers across the borough, including residents of our estates). And we also talked about areas where there might be opportunities for us to help with the use of data to help our colleagues better understand assets and demand across our estates.

It was very encouraging to hear how positive the team are about the work we’ve been doing with housing colleagues to provide better digital tools for staff. The app for tenancy visits is proving very valuable and the team are looking forward to further processes being added to this and also the ability to report and follow up repairs while they are on the move. Our work on connectivity is also meeting a real need, with current providers being very variable in the service they provide to our tenants and leaseholders.

I also heard that the work that’s taken place to integrate waste and cleaning services for housing estates as part of the services provided for the rest of the borough has gone very well – with very positive comments about the quality of service that housing receive from the Hackney waste service. And it was interesting to discuss how AirBnb has impacted on estates, with some leaseholders letting out their properties to short term guests.

Other highlights from last week were:

• I caught up with a colleague at another London council to share experiences from our work in Hackney and discuss ways we might learn from their work too.
• I popped to Regent Street for a preview event at Microsoft’s new store, which opened the following day. It’s an interesting development that they’ve clearly put a lot of effort into, with a big push on their offer to consumers as well as their traditional business market. I got to try out one of their Hololens augmented reality headsets, which is a concept that I think has a lot of potential. Although the live demo gremlins showed up and it took quite a bit of faffing to get it to work!
• I joined other colleagues to discuss work across central and local government to improve the UK’s cyber resilience. It was positive to see that we’re in a good position in terms of the work we’ve been doing at Hackney to make sure our systems and data are secure.
• And the week wrapped up with a sporting theme with the annual Hackney rounders tournament on Thursday (we lost, but recovered our pride by winning our last game) and the Shoreditch 10k on Sunday (where I was chuffed to crack the 50 minute barrier and get a personal best time).

Something I’m learning

I’ve been thinking about hippos. I’m mulling over how we make sure that we continue to Trust the Team and also how we tie that in with making decisions in the right way, by the right people (linking with the governance principles that Cate set out (https://blogs.hackney.gov.uk/hackit/governance-so-good-people-prefer-to-use-it). I think that’s one for a blog post, so watch this space!

Bureaucracy Hack

Wednesday saw the first OneTeamGov Bureaucracy Hack take place at the Tomlinson Centre. I was pleased to have the opportunity to join the event and meet up with a wide range of public servants from across central and local government (and also some folk from the supplier community) who wanted to look for ways that we can make it easier to get things done within our organisations.

I joined the team looking at business cases and the difficulties that have to be overcome when developing those (both in general and also specifically in an Agile environment). It was interesting to hear the challenges that are experienced across the group, and it helped remind me that local government can be relatively simple compared to central government, where teams need to consider approval by other parts of government such as the Treasury and GDS when they’re developing business cases.

I have to confess that I was one of the people who were only able to stay for the morning, but we resolved to make sure that we had completed a thing before the break at lunch and we managed to pull together this prototype guide for how to publish business cases in the open: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GC6kBBL_I6-dFJBIxveVtN_5dfHzYdxJJMLoONtPw84/edit?usp=sharing. The hypothesis for this is that by making it easier to discover other business cases, teams across government will have an improved prospect of success and the quality of business cases (and the process of reviewing them for approval) will improve. It’s definitely a bit rough around the edges still, but it was an enjoyable, fast paced piece of work and I was pleased to learn about some new resources, such as the Open Contracting Data Standard and some helpful myth busting advice on dealing with commercial confidentiality (http://mythbusting.open-contracting.org).

Communicating data protection

On Thursday, Sarah mentioned some concerns about services not being sufficiently aware of the need to report potential data breaches to us immediately (there are strict timelines we need to stick to if any breaches need to be reported to the ICO). We’ve made great progress with the Data Awareness Training that we’ve been rolling out but it’s important to be thinking about ongoing communication and awareness raising too.

I was impressed by the speed at which this developed from identifying a need for action to an impressive set of communications messages, produced collaboratively with input from comms and other colleagues in our team. Sarah’s produced a set of business card sized reminders, supported by stickers that we’ll be putting on all of our ‘Grab n Go’ Chromebooks, which set out clear and simple messages with links to supporting guidance. You can see the full set here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1EAdly–_l8XVLg6_uQWA8uV_FkwQFV5t.

The business cards will be distributed at the Leaders’ Conference events which are starting this week. A big thank you to Colin, Tony and the team in the Print Unit for their speedy help – the proofs were back in under a couple of hours of sending them the images for printing!

Other highlights from last week were:.

• A useful update on the ‘Beyond eDOCS’ work. We focused most of the session on work for an MVP for HR documents and will be catching up on progress in a couple of weeks time.
• I joined the Hackney Management Team (HMT) / Cabinet meeting to look at the budget setting process for next year. An important part of that will be the Member led Customer Services board that we are helping to set up, and Matthew shared some very positive updates from the pre-meets he’s been having ahead of the first meeting which is due to take place soon. We’re hoping that we can use this as a lever to further develop ambition for using technology and data as part of designing services for our residents.
• On Tuesday I joined HMT to provide an update on the work that Liz and the Data & Insight team have been doing, as part of a broader conversation about how we are using data to understand and lead change in the Council. I was very pleased to see the recognition of the contribution that the team’s work is having, especially when one person expressed surprise at the breadth of work included in the update – apparently, the support that Liz and team have been providing felt so responsive that they’d thought the team was working exclusively for their service areas!
• I had a helpful follow up with colleagues in finance on the work we’ve been doing to make arrangements for investment funding (I’ve mentioned previously that we need to shift some of this from capital to revenue). I think I’m clear about what needs doing now and hopefully this will be completed soon.
• And on Thursday, Matthew and I met with Cara and Eoin, who are Strategic Business Managers supporting HMT, to discuss ways that we can collaborate more closely. We identified that there’s real potential for us to work together to help services maximise the benefits that they get from cross-cutting work such as the workplace technology improvements we’ve been delivering. And we also agreed to set up a Hangout group along with our Relationship Management team to help provide rapid answers to questions that come up in management team meetings.

Something I’m learning

I’ve realised that I use something a bit like the Amazon ‘start with the press release’ technique in my personal life as a technique for strengthening my resolve when I’m committing to doing something that I might otherwise be too lazy to see through.

This week I used this to encourage myself to run into work on Thursday morning (just over 10k). I actually found it an enjoyable way to start the day and am pleased with the progress I’ve made since my initial wheezy jogs around my local park just over two years ago.

It was also nice to have this view to mark the halfway point!

Thinking about skills

Skills development was one of the main themes of my week. We’re getting positive signs of good progress with the work to develop digital apprenticeships across the core LOTI councils, with several councils moving forward to set up new apprenticeships later this year. This includes my former colleagues at Kingston and Sutton who have published job ads for seven new digital apprenticeships, which is great news! https://www.kingston-sutton-digital-jobs.co.uk/apprenticeships

On Thursday evening, I went to an event at the Royal Society for the launch of a report they have produced looking at the market for data science skills (https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/dynamics-of-data-science/). This provides useful information about this rapidly growing area of the technology market, and I was really interested to learn about the work that’s being done to create new higher level apprenticeships to encourage more people into this field.

And at the end of the week I also had a brilliant conversation with someone who organises a programme of events which are designed to encourage young people to explore opportunities to learn more about technology and data and consider this for their future careers. We suggested some ways that we might link this in with LOTI apprentices and will be following that up later in the summer.

Taking time to listen

On Tuesday we held a ‘deep dive’ session to look in detail at one of the areas of work that’s become more tricky over recent months. It’s an interesting scenario where changes in service management mean that some of the decisions that were made earlier on in the work are now being revisited, which could mean a need for rework of the development that we’ve done. It felt that the discussions about this had become a bit entrenched, so we got together with people from across the teams involved to talk through the issues in more depth and look at how we can agree a way forward.

I was pleased with the way that this went and it was very helpful to have the operational teams and their senior managers together in the room with us at the same time. It was also obvious that the time that the team have been putting in to developing effective relationships is bearing fruit. Because of this we were able to agree high level priorities and guiding principles for the aspects that will need to be looked at in a bit more detail to agree the way forward. There will be some follow up needed, but overall it felt like a positive meeting which demonstrated the value of getting together to talk an issue through, rather than just relying on email, reports and periodic project update meetings.

Other highlights from last week were:

• We started the week with a very useful conversation with colleagues from the Council’s communications team. As our work develops in scale and impact it’s really important that we are linking in with comms effectively so that we can make sure that residents are provided with the right information about how Hackney is using technology and data to support service change. We agreed some practical steps that we can take, including sharing our forward plans of work and using the Amazon ‘start with the press release’ approach to make sure that projects’ objectives are explained clearly from the start (and making sure that these are kept up to date as projects iterate through delivery).
• Steve took us through the work he’s been doing to help us develop our commissioning approach to our contract management, making sure that we are managing our contracts and services proactively and identifying opportunities for different approaches. Steve also delivered an excellent strategy stand up on Thursday, sharing the work that the Contracts team are doing to embrace agile approaches and new routes for procurement such as the Digital Marketplace.
• On Tuesday Liz took me through an excellent update on the work that the Data & Analytics team have been doing. This covered a wide range of topics, including providing managers with better access to people data; supporting the waste teams with insight into recycling and waste demand; important work on property and customer data; new tools for children’s social care to help them protect vulnerable children; and analysis to make it easier to understand patterns in housing needs. Later in the week I joined a catch up with Tim (our Chief Exec) and shared some of this – it was great to show how our team are helping the Council to design and deliver services through better use of data.
• I did some more follow up work with colleagues in finance on the investment plans that we’ve been developing. We’re now happy that these are in sufficiently good shape to take them to the director of finance, which we’re planning to do later this week.
• On Wednesday I took part in filming for the video that’s being prepared for the forthcoming Hackney Leaders’ conference, based on conversations with managers across the Council about their experience from their careers and development into leadership roles. I remembered one of the managers from early in my career who gave me the opportunity to take on the management of one of our company’s largest shops – knowing that someone had the belief that I could do the job well is something that continues to inspire me and I know that I need to remember to do the same for people that work with me.
• On Friday Ian (the boss) and I caught up with the Mayor for our regular 221 meeting. It was good to report continued positive feedback from users on the service that we’re providing, especially the device upgrades that we’re rolling out (we’re now about 40% of the way through this), and also the projects that we’re helping to deliver across the Council.
• I wrapped up the week with a mentoring conversation with a colleague from another London council. This was our first meeting so we talked through their career experience, their thoughts on the direction that they’d like to take and spent a bit of time discussing ways to develop their personal profile. I enjoy this sort of thing and always try to make sure that I’m seeing it as an opportunity to learn as well as to share from my own experience.

Something I’m learning

Speaking with some of the other attendees at the Royal Society event I went to on Thursday reminded me how much I have to learn about data science and data analytics. As I said earlier in this note, this is an area where I think we have a huge amount to contribute, but as I talked with people who are much more expert than me I was acutely aware that my current level of understanding isn’t deep enough for my liking. I decided it was ok to ask for an explanation when people used terms I didn’t recognise and am resolved to spend some time learning more about this important field.

Reflections on getting to three years in

On Thursday I completed my third year with Hackney, it’s amazing how fast the time has passed. * I’m enormously proud of how much we’ve accomplished in that time, building on a strong legacy from previous years’ work at Hackney which provided solid foundations in terms of infrastructure that worked, a real commitment to our residents and users across the team, and a long-standing focus on the importance of data.

Some of the things I’m particularly proud of from the last three years include:

• The work we’ve done to develop our team: reducing vacancies and hiring great new people into the team, developing new skills and capabilities and launching a sector leading apprenticeship programme
• Some of the most exciting work that I’ve seen in either the retail or local government sectors, where use of modern digital technology, user research, service design and APIs is helping us to develop dramatically better digital services and reduce our dependency on legacy local government systems
• The modernisation of our workplace technology, providing users with fast, easy to use tools, devices, wifi and meeting room technology – helping them to work together from any device, anywhere, any time
• Good progress with continuing to modernise our applications, infrastructure, security and commissioning – setting a strong direction for future developments
• Big steps forward in getting the most from our information assets, including a growing number of examples that show how data and analytics can support service design and delivery across the Council and great work to embed the principles of GDPR across the Council
• Continued improvements in the service we provide for our users, especially the introduction of services such as bookable appointments which have received really positive feedback from users
• Increasingly effective partnership working with other Council services and external partners, getting us closer to strategic conversations where we can make a real difference
• And I’m also really pleased that our work isn’t just benefitting Hackney – by working in the open across our teams we are getting really useful input from peers in other organisations and also helping other organisations to deliver change

There’s much more that we still need to do and our work won’t ever be ‘done’. But I think we should all feel proud of the contribution we’re making to Hackney and the wider community of public servants who are looking to make the most of data and technology for the benefit of citizens.

With this in mind, the timing of the Quarter 2 retro which Matthew led on Thursday was really good. It was great to see people from across our team come together to look at the progress that we’ve made over the previous three months. David pulled together a slide deck that summarises the highlights from the retro and if you’ve not skimmed through those yet I strongly recommend you grab a cup of tea / coffee / non-caffeinated beverage of choice and take a look: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Z4bu46wT44Jtv6S7twC4r4FcwuU2oxU2CxYMoQf48mE/edit?usp=sharing. There are lots of examples of the important work we’re helping to deliver and I also really liked the honest reflection about areas where we need to improve.

Thursday also saw the show & tell for the end of the discovery phase of the DevOps project. This is a really important next step in how we work as a team. I liked Roo’s description of us as being ‘like a start up’ and the openness that had come out through the discovery work. But along with the energy and team ethos that comes with this, there are also tensions between pace and coordination which we need to work on. I thought that the hypotheses that the team put forward looked like good ones for us to focus on and I’m looking forward to seeing how these develop. What strikes me as particularly important is that every set of standards we put in place must also contain a clear way to change them (often) in future so they we don’t lose sight of the importance of remaining adaptive as our context and technology changes.

* Although Matthew pointed out that the Empire State Building was constructed in thirteen and a half months, which puts things in context…

Delivery DMT

On Monday last week, we had our monthly delivery focused DMT (divisional management team) meeting. We use these to look at the bigger picture strategic topics that we need to prioritise, with particular emphasis on cross-cutting pieces of work which depend on the contribution of more than one part of our team.

We agreed that we’d made sufficient progress on a few of the things that we’d prioritised the month before to move them off our list. This included recruitment (reflecting our recent recruitment event and some work that Matthew has planned), the refresh of the ‘HackIT Manifesto’ (Henry has set up workshops to get input from across the team), and the work on applying digital design to improve the user experience of Hackney’s support services (we agreed a way forward for this at our recent away day). We don’t wait until things are ‘done’ before we move them off the DMT list, our goal is to make sure that we’re confident that we’ve set up an approach that brings the right people together to move things forward in the right direction.

Areas we want to focus on this month are:

• Continuing the work to make sure that our finances are in good order
• The set up of the new Member led Customer Services board
• Work on telephony, including getting agreement to the new model for mobile telephony that we’re developing and a tidy up of landline set up to help reduce costs
• The actions that will be prioritised following the end of the discovery phase for the DevOps work

Other highlights from last week were:

• We published another four ‘How To HackIT’ guides covering a wide range of topics (you can find the growing collection of guides here: http://hackit.org.uk/how-we-work/how-to-hackit). I’m liking the momentum that we’re developing with this and it’s becoming a useful tool to help align ways of working across our team. I’m also encouraged to see a positive response to these from people elsewhere, which suggests that other colleagues will find them useful too.
• The updates at our monthly ICT Security Group meeting showed continued good progress with our work to keep information secure. I was particularly pleased with the work to simplify secure email and the results of the latest phishing test, which suggests significant improvement (I was also amused by how hard the team had had to work to get the test phishing email past Google’s built in security protections).
• I took a half day on Tuesday for a visit to one of the primary schools in the small Multi-Academy Trust that I’m a Trustee for. It was a great visit and I loved talking to the children at the school and hearing what they thought of their experiences there. They were friendly, welcoming and full of interesting ideas. I’m learning loads from my governor and Trustee roles and it’s definitely something I would recommend if the opportunity comes up.
• Henry and I met with our Cabinet Member for Housing on Wednesday to discuss how we will engage with tenants and leaseholders as part of the connectivity work that Henry’s leading. This was a productive conversation and we got a good steer for how we will develop this.
• Marian and I met with colleagues from Corporate Procurement to discuss ways that we can help them adapt to using the G Suite tools. We were able to show them some features that they weren’t aware of and discussed some of the concerns they had collated from across their team. The next step will be an exercise to map the main processes across their work so that we can recommend ways that they can get the most out of the improvements that G Suite and other modern productivity technologies can offer.
• On Thursday evening, a group of us went to the Digital Leaders 100 awards, where Hackney had been nominated as Digital Council of the Year. We didn’t win, but we were in competition with several councils who have long standing records as leaders in digital transformation (Leeds were the deserving winners) and I’m really proud that we were nominated and shortlisted among a group of such inspiring peers.
• On Friday afternoon, I joined the Infrastructure team to look at work they’re doing to review some of our security controls for end-user devices. I was really pleased to see that they are approaching this with a focus on user needs, not simply as a technical exercise – it was a really positive example of how understanding user needs is for all of us, not just a ‘digital’ thing.

Something I’m learning

Online ordering is a great way to save time travelling to shops and to avoid the faff of dragging children around while trying to make buying decisions. I did, however, wonder whether I’d actually made any net saving as I trudged around at the weekend taking back all the returns from my over-zealous panic shopping. I guess that return on investment calculations apply just as much in the personal realm as they do at work!

Well, that was a full on week! Lots of good stuff, but I definitely needed to remind myself to pause and breathe on a few occasions.

LOTI launches!

The biggest news this week was the launch of the London Office of Technology and Innovation (‘LOTI’), of which Hackney is a founding member. This is the result of a lot of work by colleagues at the Greater London Assembly and London Councils, supported by 15 boroughs who have committed their time and some funding to get LOTI off the ground.

On Monday evening, Cate and I went to the Bloomberg offices in the City along with our Mayor and Ian (the boss) for the official launch event. There was real energy in the room and it was good to see Hackney at the forefront of many of the initiatives that LOTI will be focusing on. I was sufficiently excited about all this to write up a short blog when I got home, with some thoughts about why I think LOTI could be a really important development for London: https://bytherye.com/2019/06/10/why-im-excited-about-the-launch-of-loti/.

Hackney Tech Week fringe

Last week was London Tech Week, and we held a series of events in Hackney to link in with that. The first was actually run by FutureGov, not the Council, and was held in Hackney Town Hall. This brought together over 200 thinkers and doers from a wide range of organisations to explore ways that we can reimagine local government for the 21st century. I enjoyed meeting lots of new people, as well as old friends in local government digital, and was also really impressed by the work that our digital design team did in their day long design sprint looking at ways that we can support community led action.

On Tuesday we hosted the launch of the very first LOTI project, where colleagues from across the LOTI boroughs came together to look at what we need to do to grow a pan-London digital apprenticeship programme, with a working target of 100 digital apprenticeships across the LOTI boroughs by September 2020. I was particularly impressed by the excellent presentation that Darrell, Erdem, Micah and Nana gave about their experience of starting apprenticeships with Hackney and also Mal’s talk sharing a manager’s perspective.

And on Thursday, Matthew and Cate hosted a breakfast event for SMEs who are interested in working with local government on digital innovation projects. Increasing the share of work that we commission through SMEs is another important part of the way we are working in HackIT and Matthew’s blog here shares some of the things that we learned from the conversation: https://blogs.hackney.gov.uk/hackit/working-in-partnership-with-suppliers.

Other highlights from last week were:

• Joining Ian for a meeting with Cabinet members to discuss the approach we’ve suggested for bringing them closer to the Council’s work to design digital services for our residents and businesses. We had a good discussion and hopefully we’ll have this up and running soon, linking together work across services and using that to help accelerate pace.
• An excellent walk through the Spacebank prototype with Philippa and Richard. We talked through the things we’ve learned from the team’s user research and how that’s reflected in the prototype. The team held their service assessment on Friday and it’s reassuring to hear that went well, reflecting the team’s hard work to move this forward.
• On Wednesday we had our quarterly DMT Away Day, where we discussed a range of strategic topics, including checking in on the actions from our finance review, engaging with services who are exploring ideas for new technologies and services, and the next steps in the work we’re doing to modernise Hackney’s workplace technology.
• On Thursday morning, Henry and I joined the Mayor and other Cabinet members for our quarterly meeting to catch up on the work to improve digital connectivity in Hackney. We discussed the work that Henry and team have been doing to design the approach for engaging with residents to develop the thinking together with them and also the areas of social value that we will be looking to maximise through the work (eg improved connectivity for social housing, new business opportunities and support for digital skills).
• And I also worked with Cate to move our finance work forward, with a strategy stand up to help the team understand more about how our finances are managed and a workshop with cost centre managers to dig into the way we manage recharges so that we can do these efficiently and effectively.

Something I’m learning

Unlike the previous week, where I felt that I’d managed to keep lots of time for focused work, last week was almost the exact opposite. As a result, I felt that I was falling short on a number of the areas of work that I wanted to move forward. There are inevitably trade offs like this, and I think it’s important to recognise that focusing on one of set of priorities will mean that other things will pause. But I think the things I prioritised were the right ones and I’ve kept a bit more clear time in my diary next week so that I can try to catch up.