A four-day week, the sun came out, I went to a ball, there were ups and downs, and some difficult but important conversations.
Tuesday
I cycled into the office for the first time in ages, and was glad of a relatively meeting-free day. I had blocked out time at the start of the week because I could see a tunnel of back-to-back Teams calls all day Thursday and Friday morning. I needed to make sure that I and others were well prepared for those calls.
First, I needed to make sure that senior leaders had considered my escalation about my team’s capacity to work on some important initiatives this year. During the design phase of our new organisation, we highlighted that getting things done in the NHS requires truly multidisciplinary collaboration between digital, data, and clinical specialists. If any one of those roles is missing, it slows down the rest of the team. Now I am seeing the consequences where the multidisciplinary model has not yet been implemented, and instead prioritisation is still done in separate functional silos. I spent time at the start of the week, making sure I was clear on my team’s ask of leaders in each area, about which specific roles we need in order to be sure of meeting our commitments to make things better for patients and frontline staff.
In parallel, I wanted one of my teams to be ready for an important steering group meeting and a ministerial briefing where they would be sharing the outcome of their recent discovery work. The first phase wrapped up back at the end of March, but we struggled to get a summary of the work in a good shape to share with stakeholders. This led to a disruptive rush to accommodate people’s feedback, and going into the steering group with less clarity and alignment than I had hoped for. I knew the team had done some great work, but now we really needed something to show for it.
I also scribbled a sticky note to remind me that I owe a senior person a note about the ways we can use AI in my area. There definitely are some, but I don’t have time to finish that today.
Wednesday
The second cycle-to-work of the week. I’m getting back into the groove now.
The working day started with a monthly catch-up call for everyone in the Digital Urgent & Emergency Care (UEC) portfolio. Mandy introduced a series of rapid-fire roadmap updates from our product cluster leads. One of my objectives is to get into a good quarterly planning rhythm where everyone involved in our work is clear on our shared priorities and roadmaps on a rolling 3-month basis. I can see the format we ran on Wednesday morning becoming an important part of that iterative cycle.
The rest of the day was spent nudging along the preparations for the Thursday and Friday calls. I identified a confusion with another sub-directorate about internal finance flows, which I suspect underlies one of the issues we are now facing with recruitment. Frustratingly I have so far been unable to get hold of the financial assumptions that drove the other sub-directorate’s decision-making.
Thursday
The day of back-to-back meetings!
We had a painful but necessary discussion at the steering group which flushed out quite divergent expectations of the discovery findings among my colleagues. The varying perspectives are all valid, but we need to align as a leadership team so that our teams can get on with the next phase of the work. Although it was a hard conversation, it was a credit to everyone involved that we had the psychological safety to surface these differences, and recognise the difficult position they put the team in. We had optimistically pencilled in 30 minutes for this item, but ended up using the full hour, and at the end of that we were not quite where I had wanted to be in terms of an agreement to mobilise for the next phase.
I jumped straight from that call into our weekly portfolio leadership team meeting, which we’d agreed to dedicate to a team charter session. We’re still a relatively new leadership team, drawn from two of the three organisations which merged to become the new NHS England last year. Previously we all agreed that we needed to devote more time to developing our shared ways of working, and this was one of the means to do that. Debbie and Laura did a great job of getting everyone’s input onto a virtual whiteboard, even though not everyone could access the board, which is symptomatic of our on-going integration pains. In a perfect illustration of why it’s so important to assume good intent, one colleague present had not realised that some of the team have still to be set up on the new single IT platform, which apparently will make these frustrations a thing of the past very soon.
The next call was my chance to set out the urgent vacancy gap my team is facing, alongside some other teams, who are also reporting challenges to delivery. I came away with a feeling that the issue had been heard. While I didn’t see an immediate commitment to resolution from those in the room, there was an action agreed which ought to flush out how the siloed recruitment prioritisation processes have operated, and how they got tangled up in the confused financial situation.
Then context-switching back to the piece of work I started the day on, this time a good call with colleagues from the Digital Primary Care area. We talked about how to align three groups – our product management community, our core senior leadership team, and our wider policy and operational partners in the new NHS England. We need to keep up the pace of communication with all of them, rather than waiting for perfect clarity with any one of those groups before engaging the others.
In the evening, I talked through next steps on the phone with Helen as I walked along the canal to the Royal Armouries for the Leeds Digital Charity Ball. I enjoyed catching up with old friends and meeting new people, and all in aid of the Leeds Community Foundation and the amazing digital inclusion work they support in our city.
Friday
A final review of the slides for the ministerial briefing. We had some good news to share about the progress since we integrated 111 online with the NHS App, and I wanted the stats in the slides to be clear and easily explainable.
In the briefing itself, I felt the storyline flowed well – much better than it had in the steering group the day before. It’s only through relentless re-telling of our stories that we get better at them, and wear the rough edges smooth. My colleague Brin, who has thought a lot about storytelling as a strategic skill, suggested we all do some training together to sharpen up our narrative skills. He’s right, we should do that.
By 2:30pm the last of my meetings was done, and I was able to get on top of my email inbox. There’s still a sticky note on my laptop reminding me that I need to do something about AI. But that will have to wait for next week.
Matt Edgar writes here 