A quick weeknote on the work that we are doing to develop our digital strategy and delivery plan. This is to let you know what we’ve been up to but not necessarily a weekly note! More an intent to keep you posted on a regular basis.
Good things
- An initial first draft of our delivery plan (which will provide the detail on deliverables and metrics for the digital strategy) is completed. We had a good session with all the theme owners to start to look at how we structure this in a more consolidated way to provide the narrative and thread back to ‘how we will achieve this’ statements in the strategy.
- In addition to having a public facing web based version, we have started work on the word document to accompany this for the internal audience, which will give more of the strategic narrative and importance of the digital strategy both to how we do things differently across the Council as well as meeting our commitments that we signed up to as part of the Local Digital Declaration back in 2018. This will include a summary of the priority themes, areas of focus and key actions for 2022.
- We had a good session with the News Ways of Working programme to look at a shared view to ‘what agile means to us’. Some of the common touch points were our ability and culture to respond quickly to changes and deliver value; the need to take our leaders on the digital journey; recognise that ‘good enough is good enough’. Some of the barriers were trying to do too much, too slowly and not very well with stretched resources and lack of visibility of what others are doing elsewhere. The graphic below highlights some of the ideas for next steps, which includes developing the Playbooks to share the methodology more widely; and taking a different approach to recruitment of internal staff across the Council into agile roles.
- We have continued to have conversations with directorate service leads – this week in planning, school admissions and environmental services to identify challenges that would benefit from a citizen centered design approach. We are currently looking at our approach and methodology to how we might do this as short discovery / design sprints and possibility of creating a physical space to bring multi-disciplinary teams together to do this more creatively.
What’s next
- We will be prioritising our short list of Discovery challenges from above, that we think would most benefit from a design sprint to demonstrate value and impact.
- We have a follow up session planned with all theme owners to review the links and dependencies across the different focus areas for the themes. We will also be looking at the metrics.
- We have further sessions planned at the Directorate Management Teams meetings and next week we will be attending Children’s Services to get feedback on what we are doing.
- An innovation workshop is planned with housing on 26 November to explore opportunities for digital transformation and we will be starting to put together a future’s station of innovation exemplars in prep for this to spark thinking on the art of the possible.
Strategy Delivery Team:
Nicola Bryant (Delivery Manager); Sarah Greenaway (Content Designer); James Gregory (Product Manager); Hannah Pinnock (Agile Coach, Strategist); Jasvir Sandhu (Comms); Surita Solanki (Delivery); Gill Terry (Comms);
For further information contact: [email protected]