Weeknotes S01E19

Personal Reflections and Managing Myself

These weeknotes have been probably the most difficulty to write, when I started out doing these I promised myself that they would be genuinely open and honest reflections, and this weeks been a tough one. In a week which on the surface should have been a high, with some big steps forward on a lot of our services (NHS Jobs, Overseas Health, ML/AI in medicines and Contact Centre Transformation and some great ways of working and ideas for making stuff better) I found myself ending the week feeling lower than I have for a very long time.

Some personal learning and takeaways for me this week are

Sent this out on twitter and say it again to all those in gov making change happen and trying to turn the tanker, keep going.

Here are the results

This did provoke a very good conversation with the organisation psychologist (yes that’s a real thing) who ran this assessment. There were some elements to this which I probably had blind spots to but in the main and when aligned to the 360 feedback from colleagues which accompanies this I recognise my high risk strengths and manage them.

It also turns out I’m working in the ‘right’ space, I like to work on things which I can change and make a difference with, I am motivated by doing new things, changing the norm and limit testing (mischief), however and again reflecting on the earlier points my passion (excitable) for making a change and getting stuff done can turn to frustration, I recognise this and manage this.

In terms of the 360 feedback, I got this which honestly lit me up.

So any future employers out there if you want someone who won’t change things and challenge and cause a bit of tension I’m not the person for you, and your not the people for me.

We also had our quarterly showcase session this week, we take this opportunity to share with the department and business partners what each team has been up to and also some of what we do and how we do.

Some great sessions this time round on What a User Researcher Does, Agile Governance (thanks to the excellent Kevin Murray of Valtech), Data Analysis and why its important to recognise data bias and also a session on Security where we all planned how to rob a cash machine.

These have been in beta for the past two quarters but now we have a rhythm and sorted teething problems we are opening these sessions up to a wider audience, including GDS colleagues, if you are interested in coming along please do shout out.

This week I also took part in a Leadership Team on the road session, we introduced these sessions following feedback that as a team we could be out and about more, we have offices on each coast of the UK so we couldn’t be more geographically spread. Bizarrely however I only had the 5 miles to travel to Newcastle city centre.

The session was great, having worked in the organisation for 17 years and starting my career in this building I got to see some familiar faces who I had not seen for a long while.

As we regularly conduct show and tells and blog I wasn’t sure if people should have much discussion but it was great to engage and a lot of the questions were not specifically work related. Another reminder that people want to connect on a personal level not just work.

Also had a mid point show and tell with Microsoft this week on the innovation work we are doing with the team to Use different techniques to extract data from Prescription forms, with the intention of increasing data and accuracy and reducing the amount of manual work required. Really impressed with the progress being made and the potential being shown so far. We have 6 weeks left of this initial run and are progressing the same work with AWS in parallel so looking forward to that show and tell next week to compare.

Starting to now look and how we ensure any solution can integrate with our existing systems or where changes may be needed.

Managed my first run of the year this week, due to a combination of laziness and injury I’ve not managed a run since I completed the Great North Run (GNR) last September, this is worrying as I am intending on doing the GNR again this year, so I have 11 weeks of training, and the 5k I managed was hard to say the least.

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