What did I enjoy?
Seeing the First Contact work coming together in a steering group meeting on Monday, followed by show and tell on Wednesday. My senior leadership team colleagues injected the right amount of support and challenge to the team’s work. A common theme as we develop our product-led way of working is that teams sometimes struggle to expose the options they have considered but not chosen to prioritise right now. When this decision-making is opaque, conversations can be easily knocked off course by stakeholders asking why we’re not working on something else, instead of keeping the conversation on the team’s current focus area.
What was hard?
I let my frustration show at the slow pace of articulating our wider strategy in a call with colleagues at the start of the week. As I alluded to in my weeknotes for the week before, I’d been disappointed that patients’ appetite for digital access to urgent care services was entirely missing from the picture painted by submissions to senior leadership. Members of my team have invested a lot of effort in behind-the-scenes conversations with policy colleagues to make the strategy more digitally-savvy, but events have conspired to prevent publication of any of that work so far. I was promised that there is a path to sharing something in the coming months.
I fear we will pay a heavy price for failing to work in the open with digital teams in the room from the outset. People outside our organisation will continue to cherry-pick the small morsels of evidence that do emerge into the public domain – small pilots and locally-led innovations – and stitch together their own narratives about what we are doing. They’ll understandably assume that our minds are closed to the way the world has radically transformed around us, and impose their own prescriptions to meet the public’s expectations around service access.
What expectations did I set?
We’ve just passed the halfway point in the financial year, so I’m revisiting the objectives we set for ourselves back in April, to make sure they’re still the right ones to carry us through to next March. There’s some good work going on to achieve some of those objectives, but it’s not always explicitly linked to them. Meanwhile there are placeholders that we put in at the start of the year in some emergent areas of work. Now it’s time either to confirm the metrics we’re tracking, or to remove them from our reporting for the rest of the year. The first six months was dominated by some painful but necessary foundational steps, such as recruitment and procurement. Those have now set us up well to talk more about the substance of our delivery in the second half.
What do I need to take care of?
I made some calls last week to unpick a situation between two teams where resource constraints had led to testy conversations about shared priorities. Ultimately I didn’t think it was a priorities question, since the path to resolve the problem lay outside both the teams involved. But it left me wondering how to increase trust and mutual respect between our teams, when everyone is feeling the pressure to deliver.
Finally, I received some great but anonymous feedback (thank you whoever you are!) that colleagues would like me to be more visible in the Leeds office. I’m the only member of our Product & Platforms senior leadership team who is regularly based here, so I’m always open to chatting with colleagues from any team about the work they’re doing, the organisational culture, and ways of working across our team of teams. Colleagues be warned! I’m going to make an effort to say hello, even if I don’t know you yet, and I’ll be more curious about who’s working on what in our corner of the 5th floor. If I come over and introduce myself, please do not be alarmed.
Matt Edgar writes here 