Thanks to Hannah Pinnock for this weeknote:
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
- The last few weeks we have been finalising the delivery plan ready for sign off by Director of IT and Customer Services, Peter Bishop and our CIO, Cheryl Doran next week. We held a workshop with the theme owners last week to nail down some metrics to measure our success and progress. The delivery plan is going to be a live document ongoing, but we’ve tried to ensure it is as meaningful as possible at this stage. We anticipate iterating it on a quarterly basis, as needed to keep it relevant.
- The strategy ‘stakeholder’ word document has now been drafted. As well as including the online strategy themes and statements, it also brings to life the strategic intent of the new digital strategy that helps build the narrative of the changes needed to bring to life our vision for digital transformation in the council. It also includes an overview of the priority actions for 2022 taken from the delivery plan.
- We had a session this week with Victoria James and Ben Unsworth from Essex County Council to learn about the journey they have been on to build digital and design capability in their organization. A key learning was to walk before we can run – we need to start small, build capability in our team and engagement with internal stakeholders, and generate some momentum before we can tackle the really difficult, big challenges.
- We also met with Dave Briggs from SensibleTech to share our ambitions in terms of building digital and human centred design capability and he is going to work with us to establish a ‘Digital Community of Practice’ (we are going to start small with COPs, and build out from there), develop a plan to upskill our senior leaders and members and create a ‘Digital Playbook’, which will be an artefact that will support our teams as they begin to try out these new approaches and tools.
- We delivered an innovation workshop for our Housing colleagues to help spark some creative problem solving for some of our key problems. We took them on a journey to understand the Double Diamond approach, sharing examples of innovations from our Housing colleagues across the UK, and creating space to explore some How Might We questions. The session generated interest and energy and we are excited to support our Housing colleagues in the next steps
What’s next
- We are coming to the end of developing Birmingham’s new digital strategy. What’s left for us to do is get sign off from our senior colleagues, both in IT&D and at a council management level, and that will happen over the coming months.
- In the meantime we are getting started with delivery, in particular mobilising three teams to deliver priority projects under the Customer Service Programme using agile, human centred design approaches.
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]