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Clare: Hello and welcome to Making Tech Better, Made Tech’s fortnightly podcast bringing you content from all over the world, on how to improve your software delivery. For us, that means empowering your teams to collaborate compassionately on creating high-quality software that delivers value quickly, to the people that really matter, the users.
My name is Clare Sudbery, and my pronouns are, ‘she’ and ‘her’. I’ve been a software engineer for 21 years. I do a lot of speaking and writing on the topic of software delivery and I’m a Lead Engineer with Made Tech.
Now, public services are under more stress than ever before. What with cuts and austerity, and on top of all of that, Covid, there’s pressure to modernise and keep becoming ever more efficient. Handled correctly, digital services can really help with that. So, I was really interested to catch up with Kit Collingwood on the 23rd of January. She’s the Assistant Director of Digital and Customer Services for the Royal Borough of Greenwich. We got to talk about the digital strategy that she has just published, which is all about improving software delivery for Greenwich Council. You’ll hear about all of the ways that Greenwich plan to make their infrastructure modern and interoperable, via things like elastic scale in the cloud.
The thing that really stood out for me, was Kit’s focus on the lives of the people that live in Greenwich. After all, these are the people that really matter.
Clare: Hello Kit.
Kit: Hi.
Clare: I am going to ask you about the digital strategy, but first tell us a bit about your career thus far. How have you ended up where you are?
Kit: Well, in a nutshell, I was a civil servant for ten years. I worked for the Ministry of Justice, I was a policy maker and I worked on some operational stuff and some legislative stuff. After a few years, I was getting a feeling of emptiness about my civil service experience. I wanted to do something different. I applied for a job in a digital transformation programme, this was in 2012. It was a Delivery Manager job. On the first day, my boss quit. She was Head of the transformation programme. I asked for her job, cheeky thing that I was, and they were silly enough to give it to me. So, I became head of a transformation programme without having any idea how the internet works. That was Autumn 2012 and I just haven’t looked back. I just fell in love with digital.
I’ve done various Head of Data, Programme Director jobs in the public sector ever since. I did a short stint in a consultancy in 2020 and then the job at Royal Borough of Greenwich came up, which is where I live. I live in the Borough, not a long walk from the office. I’d always said if that job ever came up, CDO at Greenwich, I was going to grab onto it and go for it like a madwoman. I did, and I was lucky enough to get it. So that’s how I’ve ended up here.
Clare: Fantastic, yes. I’m glad you just said Greenwich. One of my questions was going to be, do I have to keep calling it Royal Borough of Greenwich or can I just say Greenwich?
Kit: You can call it RBG. There are two RBGs in my life, Ruth Bader-Ginsberg, and the Royal Borough of Greenwich. I love them both equally.
Clare: Fantastic. I’m guessing that you, like me, would have been very sad when Ruth Bader-Ginsberg died.
Kit: Yes. I was saddest that she never got to see the Orange Menace being hustled out of office, and the beginning of something brighter. That’s doubly sad, but we do have hope now, that her spirit will carry on.
Clare: Absolutely, amazing, inspirational woman. So, my simple starter question that I ask everybody is, who, in this industry, are you inspired by?
Kit: I’ll go cheesy first, and say my partner, Kylie. She’s Head of Product at the Citizen’s Advice. I’m not from a product background, although obviously, I appreciate product thinking and I do that in everything I do. She’s probably the most talented product person I have ever observed. Her passion and dedication to what she does inspire me all the time.
It’s unusual for me to cite a straight white man, but I’ve got to say Dave Rogers, who I worked with at the Ministry of Justice for a couple of years. His mind doesn’t work like anybody else’s I know. He taught me so many of the valuable things I know about technology. Technology isn’t my specialism, in terms of deep experience. I don’t code. I learned a lot from him in the time I worked with him. He’s extremely kind and high empathy. He taught me a lot, personally as well as professionally.
Then I would probably put Cassie Robinson in that as well. She hasn’t worked exclusively in tech, far from it. She’s sort of an indefinable person, but her brain is just a marvel, really. The way she thinks around problems. To say that she is a lateral thinker would be underplaying it, I think. She just thinks like nobody else I know, and her creative powers are something to behold.
Clare: Fantastic.
Kit: It’s the triangulation of those three, I think.
Clare: Yes. And actually, Dave is already on my list of people that I would like to interview for the podcast, so that makes me even more keen.
Kit: I think that’s a good shout.
Clare: And we will put links, if we have them, to all of these people, in the description. If people want to find out more about them.
I read your blog post about the Greenwich digital strategy. There were a few times that I really noticed your focus on people. I know that you joined RBG in January, and then nine weeks later, Covid hit, and you had to pivot. One of the things that you said in your blog post was that you appreciated people’s entire lived experiences as a result of that. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
Kit: Yes, it’s been a year-long exercise in humility, really, leading this through the pandemic. I’m lucky enough in Greenwich to have the widest portfolio I’ve ever had. I own Digital Data Technology and Customer Services. Customer Services is the rest of the whole front door of this organisation.
I was naïve. I didn’t know how many people went hungry in this borough; how many people relied on our help to get them through when Covid hit. I didn’t realise how precarious so many lives were. I think if I’d have thought about it, I would have described it in intellectual terms, but to observe it and to have to build services that try and identify people who need to be fed, and kids who need to be fed, and people who need essential medicines. The fact that those are also often the same people, this clustered need.
I’d never worked on services that were to do with real life or death stuff before. I’ve worked on Universal Credit and that gets pretty close, but preventing homelessness, food, shelter, medicine, it was closer than I’d ever been to that experience. My perspective has really shifted on our duty to serve those people more wisely, with the technology.
Clare: Fantastic, yes. And so initially, the plan was to be working on the digital strategy and that was made much more difficult by Covid hitting but eventually you did manage to get to that. I know that one of the workstreams in the strategy is to make your infrastructure modern and interoperable.
You also said that Royal Greenwich had not historically been at the leading edge of digital among the local authorities. Making infrastructure modern and interoperable sounds deceptively simple but I know that it isn’t. How do you do that?
Kit: Yes, it’s probably the hardest part of what we’ll have to face. I’m seeking technology that never fails people. I can always see – this might sound strange – I can always see the emotion behind technology. What people see as simple infrastructure projects, if your service uptime falls and people are getting outages and they are trying to offer services that are essential to people, that brings frustration and sadness. I don’t want technology that makes people sad. That’s one of the outcomes.
Then I suppose that another outcome that I’m seeking there is something about data control. I want systems to be enough within our control that we can work with the data that we get. We sit on tons of it, as all public sector organisations do. Modernity means something like control over what we do with our data. What that means is some real basics, like a huge, concerted effort to get into the cloud. We are still, abortively, physically on prem. We’re going to invest in shifting that more quickly.
Clare: Yes, that’s a lot. You can have ambitious plans, but how can you start to get some confidence in them actually being realised? How do you move into the cloud and build those APIs?
Kit: Well, I’m very good at thinking at the extremes. I’m really good at thinking really big and really small and I chunk my way towards the middle. That seems to be my working approach to almost everything I do. The big picture is setting the ambition, which is the strategy, and the small bit is that I just want to move one thing. We’re in talks with the biggest cloud providers and we will work with them to do some migration and re-engineering of existing services and we will try it. It’s only Agile, there’s no magic to it. I just like to get one thing done.
I don’t know if you run or if you do any kind of difficult endeavour like that, but if you are trying to train for a 10k or whatever, if you do one run, you feel like there’s the momentum there. I don’t really care what the first thing is but doing one thing has exponential gains for how people feel about how achievable these things are.
Clare: Yes.
Kit: I think the only other ingredient to that is not aiming for purity. There is no greenfield technology in the public sector, that I know of. Almost no public sector agencies get the privilege of greenfield tech. I don’t aim for things to be 100% perfect. I just want to do one thing, and then maybe we will do two and we will just crack on that way.
Clare: Yes, okay. Another of your workstreams is talking about building digital capability, building the digital skills of your people, which is another really common challenge within the public sector. How do you plan to address that?
Kit: Well, the bit that I didn’t publish when we published this strategy was the investment plan that underpins it, and then the people plan that underpins it. If I describe that people plan; at the moment, the team that I have, there’s no digital team. So, we are currently incapable of delivering that strategy, which is a motivation.
We do have a small technology team, it’s about 35 people, very capable of working with our existing technology. I have to build a digital data and technology directorate from scratch, starting now. That’s the scale of it. That team size will, broadly speaking, treble. Then the only other thing that we are putting on top is proper professional development for those people. Because local government doesn’t have, as central government did when I worked there, the DDAP (Digital, Data and Technology Profession) really well defined in there to support people. It doesn’t exist, so we’ll create that together as a group of CDOs.
Clare: Actually, that brings us onto – this is a really ambitious strategy. You want to modernise your infrastructure; you want to build digital capability, but you also want to keep the council on a sustainable financial footing. How do you do that?
Kit: Carefully, is the answer. The challenges for councils obviously go far wider than technology. We in RBG have to actively try and balance our books. We’ve seen other boroughs who are bankrupt, really. They are in really dire financial straits and having to bring in external management and all sorts. We have got exceptional financial stewardship where we are and we’re doing okay, but we’re never going to be doing well because of a decade or more of cuts.
That’s the scale of the challenge, and the way that we meet that challenge is not purely digital, obviously. We are, as everybody is, looking at everything from estates to the rising cost of social care, which is not within our control.
The thing that I think digital can do it to help transform the organisation in such a way that the overall running cost is a lot lower for the future. You’re absolutely right, doing all of this stuff is really expensive. There is an investment envelope there which we’ve agreed, which is big. The way that I’ve projected that is for that investment envelope to broadly speaking, pay for itself within four years, within the lifetime of the strategy.
What we will come out with after those four years, is an organisation which can run a lot more efficiently. If I just name some of the ways that can happen; online services allowing residents to do more things themselves. That can mean a lot of things, but for example, transactional services that happen without human intervention. Reducing [Unclear 00:13:00] on our various front door channels and services, things like really great notification patterns can help to do that. People understand what’s going on, they don’t need to check back in with us. There are contract costs which we can reduce through the way of approaching the market that I just talked about. Some elements of our infrastructure costs can also reduce. Things like, if you move from prem to a cloud-hosted service, if that cloud-hosted service has got elastic scaling, then you’re only paying for the infrastructure you use. That’s a classic way of making infrastructure savings.
Then one of the big bits is in productivity in the back office. If we make all of our services more efficient through a combination of service design and improved technology, then people can do far more with the same workforce. Where those services with increased demand are happening, we shouldn’t need to hire more people to do that. We should be able to help through technology for that to be a sustainable workflow. So, there’s a real portfolio of stuff and we need to make sure we don’t overspend. So yes, I am extremely aware of the need to spend wisely, and that’s fully what we intend to do.
Clare: Yes, okay, fantastic. Another thing that I wanted to talk about, actually, is that one of my bug bears is a tendency for people to think that AI is going to be the solution to all their problems. I loved what you said in your blog post about not focusing on show-off technology and futuristic promises. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
Kit: Unfortunately, you have tapped into one of my bug bears as well. I don’t know if that sounded as angry as I felt when I wrote it. As I’m sure you have been, I’ve just been dismayed by the commercial ridiculous branding and selling of AI into the public sector. And blockchain, blockchain technologies. I think it’s pretty shameful. I object on multiple levels. I object on its applicability. How applicable are those technologies to the vast majority of public sector experience? They are absolutely not.
There are some amazing – the use of AI in cancer diagnosis is awe inspiring. The combination of that and nano robotics is incredible. And maybe a bit of distributed ledger for some financial stuff. But really, it’s ridiculous. There’s readiness to make these technologies work, particularly AI, predictive analytics, and machine learning stuff. You need a great big sexy data presence; clean data that you can access all the time. And skills on top of it that you can afford. How many public sector organisations have got the infrastructure, the skills, and the leadership to sift their way through those technologies? Absolutely not.
The real reason I strongly object is the ethical angle to it. I know of a public sector organisation which was giving out completely terrible laptops to its staff. Terrible, terrible laptops, it took seven minutes to log on. But they were funding an AI dojo or something, taking money and feeding these carbon hungry technologies. There’s a lot of storage, the skills are expensive, it’s expensive to get these experiments of the ground.
I just think how dare you, how dare you leave your staff with these terrible tools to use, when they are doing very, very important national tasks. And you’ve got people over there living it up with their AI. So no, I think there are replications but the moral obligation we all have is to fix the basics, and bring ourselves up to speed, and then we can thing about the future.
Clare: The important thing is the application, isn’t it? Because the problem is, if you say I want AI because I want AI, that’s completely meaningless, you want it because it sounds good. You should want it because it’s going to solve a real problem in an efficient and effective way, not just because it is.
Kit: Exactly. You and I have heard of the really big consultancy firms selling those kinds of possibilities into some very important people in the public sector. Shame on them and shame on the people who pay lots of money to use it, when they haven’t fixed the real technology basics in their organisation to keep their staff happy. It’s pretty – I think of everything in terms of nursing posts, the number of nursing posts that could have been funded by this ridiculous experiment is ridiculous. It’s a bit of wise spending, but also a bit of common sense, I think.
Clare: Yes, absolutely. Let’s talk about people again. You’ve talked about being human driven in your blog post and improving lives. How does all of this set about starting to improve the lives of the people in Greenwich?
Kit: That’s a lovely question. I’ve spoken publicly about my regard for empathy in the public sector, and how I think it’s an essential skill, I’ve spoken about that before. I don’t mean empathy as a woolly term though; I mean empathy as a series of actions. It’s a cultural value which I talk about in my team and which we’ll be building on. What it means is; taking the time to understand real need and breaking down your assumptions through that need, things like understanding the nuance of privilege. Then understanding what that looks like in daily life, user research and also the gathering of quantitative data and using that to guide how we go.
The answer to your question is, the way those approaches will improve the lives of people, we will start to build online services for them. Their experience with interacting with the council should become smoother, quicker, less hassle, more joined up. If they need us for a couple of things, we hope that they will be able to talk to us once. So, the experience with the services themselves will be better.
We will be offering different services, so we fully intend to use technology to help communities engage with each other. I hope that will make them a bit more cohesive with each other in local and hyper-local ways. We are also going to have a full programme of digital inclusion and accessibility as well. I think it would be too simplistic to say we’re going to build all of these online services and be fine. We’re going to do a spectrum of activities in the middle. Everything from doing pilots with different types of technology; assistive technology for physically vulnerable and elderly people, to piloting giving people devices and seeing what happens. We’re thinking about flooding areas with wi-fi and seeing what increasing the bandwidth might do for people. There’s a lot of those kinds of interventions.
One of the other things we’ll be doing – but I’m not quite sure in what guise yet – is how do we get technology as community assets? What does our physical estate look like in different parts of our borough, and what technology might we implement in those places to help people share technology differently? You can imagine, home-schooling for kids without devices is a classic one, and one where I always think that we could do more. I wish we had enough money for every kid in the borough and we don’t. It’s just one of these little tragedies, and there are many, that we see every day. It’s awful but we do what we can. How might we get shared assets that benefit a group of people?
It’s a really complex picture, but again, coming back to my approach, let’s just do one thing. It’s so easy to overthink the scale of the challenge and it’s easy to be emotionally overwhelmed. I’ve cried more at work in the last year than I ever have before, and that’s nothing to do with my job. It’s a dream job, it’s my absolute dream, but it’s crying that comes from observing people’s pain up close. If we were just alleviating just a tiny bit, it would be good. That would be good.
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Clare: While I’ve got your attention, let me tell you a bit about Made Tech. After 21 years in the industry, I am pretty choosy about who I’ll work for, but there’s lots to love about Made Tech. We’re software delivery experts with high technical standards. We work exclusively with the public sector. We have an open-source employee handbook on GitHub, which I love. We have unlimited annual leave. What I love most about Made Tech is the people. There is a real passion to make a difference and they really care for each other.
Our Twitter handle is Made Tech, M-A-D-E-T-E-C-H. If you go to madetech.com/resources/books, you’ll find that we have a couple of free books available; Modernising Legacy Applications in the Public Sector, and Building High Performance Agile Teams. We are currently recruiting in London, Bristol, South Wales, and the North of England via our Manchester Office. You can find out more about that if you go to madetech.com/careers.
If you join our mailing list, you’ll get extra podcast content as well as finding out more about Made Tech. You’ll find a link in the description.
Okay, we’re going to return to the interview with Kit now. Just to recap, before the break we were talking about improving lives, and the fact that Kit has cried more at work in the last year than she ever has before.
Clare: You kind of touched on it, one of the things I wanted to ask about was digital exclusion. Often the people with the most complex needs are also the people that don’t necessarily have access to devices or to the internet. How do you handle that?
Kit: Delicately and passionately, I think. Again, it’s very humbling. Gone are the days of digital by default. It’s easy to look back on things that we did before in the previous years, and feel changed, but Covid has changed everything. It’s changed everything about digital technology and data. It’s changed a lot about how I feel about humanity and politics and economics and a load of other stuff as well.
I think the pragmatic answer to your question is, I think we’ll take everything that we’ve learned about the ways that people can be digitally excluded. I’ve learned more about that. I’ve learned about the different national demographics that we have in our borough, people from different backgrounds. I’ve learned about the language diversity and I’ve learned a lot from our public health and community engagement teams, about the different ways that you help different communities of people. Faith groups, who rely a lot on the physical congregation. Travelling communities, who are completely different, and need to be engaged with in a way that respects their community leadership. I think I would have – in my very naïve days – thought that the provision of technology was enough. I feel really silly that I felt that way, but you can’t go back in time, you can only build on what you’ve learned.
I think what that looks like is engaging case by case with different communities of people. So, we will build on universal services, we will do all the basics. All of our common services; council tax, welfare, benefits, housing, health, and social care. All of those services will be built in a way that you and I would understand as being good. Then we’re going to be operating far more actively than I ever could have anticipated, in this grey space between virtual and physical interaction. I think that’s where I’ll concentrate a lot of my intellectual efforts. The hope being that you can reach people with that combination of devices, bandwidth, training and learning, reduction of fear in contacting public sector agencies. A lot of people are scared. Then this augmented help; how might people that we work with go into and work with those communities to help them access service provision? How might we strip out the complexity of that.
It’s not a simple answer. To me it looks more like a series of interventions that we see where we go. We measure them and we change them as we need to. It’s more of an approach than an answer if that makes sense.
Clare: Yes, that does make sense. You live in the Borough of Greenwich yourself.
Kit: I do.
Clare: How important is that sense of belonging, in accountability?
Kit: It just makes me want to cry with happiness that I live where I work. I don’t think you are getting at this, but just for the record, having two kids, one at nursery and one at school, and a physical workspace and my home all within walkable difference is a bit of a game changer for work/life balance. I think that the accountability point is very real. One of the reasons that I am passionate about local government and I am now where I feel that I firmly belong professionally, is because this is an inescapable reality. I live in one of the most deprived wards in the borough. You can see poverty just outside the door. I have a very, very small part to play in alleviating it, but maybe I have a part to play in that. There’s nothing you could get that is much more motivating than that.
We have a community centre at the bottom of this hill that I live on. It has – as many of them have – been considered for closure. What would that mean for this local community? How could technology be put into that if it does remain? If the finances allow and it remains, what could technology do to help this?
There are other aspects of that as well. Greenwich is, as all London boroughs are, diverse, diverse in terms of life chances. Also, it has some really beautiful – it’s got the Royal Park and other open green spaces. There are people even in the borough that don’t go to those places. It’s something to do with heightened awareness. It’s something to do with the realities literally outside your front window, this kind of inescapable reality. It’s also this huge inspiration.
If I give you an example, somebody graffitied some anti-Semitic remarks on a wall in this borough last year. Somebody called and reported it to my team. We’ve got an overnight team, an out of ours team. They took the call and they got up off their seats and they went out with paint and painted over it before the police could even react.
Clare: Wow, that’s community action, isn’t it? That’s people actually caring about the environment that they live in.
Kit: Yes. It still gives me shivers. To say that I am proud of it is not really – I don’t know, there’s some kind of unspeakable quality about the accountability that you get from doing it. Because if you didn’t go and get off your bum and go and do it, it’s going to stay there. It means a lot.
Clare: So, Kit, how on earth do you go about writing a digital strategy?
Kit: Well, I’m no pro at writing digital strategies, so I don’t know if I went about it the right way. I think what I wanted was a strategy that we could fail against. I find so many strategies are airy-fairy think pieces that you could never really pass or fail. I wanted something that had enough specificity in it that we could potentially fail to do it, and therefore be accountable for something. That accountability is so important. I really wanted something that was – you’ll see if you really read it that it closely resembles a shopping list. That’s because having combined what I would consider the basic ambition of transformation with internal demand, with things that people felt were needed, it suggested some distinct workstreams. That’s why it’s streamed that way.
Underneath each of those streams I wanted a closed structure. Each stream has got a bit of a blurb and then it’s got a list and some measurables. I’m sure that a lot of people will think it’s a road map more than it is a strategy, but it’s like that for a reason. It’s like that because I want it to mean something and to be something that can be followed, not just as a woolly ambition.
The third thing, which is really important, is I really wanted it to breathe, I wanted it to iterate. The approach that we’ll take to that is that the why will remain. The mission is not going to change. The how will remain. We will continue to be open; we will continue to be Agile and work across boroughs and all that. But I anticipate that the what will shift. If you think about technology from four years ago, which is the life cycle of this strategy, we wouldn’t all be using only those technologies and have learned nothing in the meantime. I’m going to iterate it with people and then republish it every six months, with the constant of the why and the how, and with some tweaks to the what.
We’ll see how that goes. That’s the whole idea of it being a breathing thing, and it being a tool for accountability. I think it has to shift in that way. Evidence-based iteration is a good thing, in my view. As long as you don’t lose sight of the strategy of that horizon that you’ve described. I think the idea of either refusing to gather evidence that disagrees with you is terrible leadership. Refusing to stand behind decisions to change when you’ve gained that power of the humility of learning, I think that would be insane as well. It’s also a great way of wasting money; doing things which have proven to be terrible ideas. So, hopefully with a bit of humility and some wise spending, we should be able to kind of tack through that series of decisions relatively unscathed.
Clare: Yes, okay. So, we’ve been talking for a while now. I think I’m going to move things on. I’m going to ask you what I ask everybody. Can you tell me one thing that is true about you, and one thing that’s untrue?
Kit: I’m crazy about Sudoku and I am crazy about craft beer.
Clare: How long have you been playing Sudoku?
Kit: Since it started appearing in the printed press. Late 1990s, early millennium, I think. Something like that.
Clare: And how often do you do it?
Kit: I do them every day and I entered the British Championships a few times.
Clare: Woah! Okay.
Kit: I got to the final, I came fifth in one of those finals, which is very exciting.
Clare: Wow.
Kit: Yes, I’m very passionate about Sudoku.
Clare: Okay. What about craft beer? Have you entered any craft beer competitions?
Kit: Unless you count drinking competitions, no. I’m very picky, I only like IPA.
Clare: Do you have any particular types of IPA? What is it that you like about IPA?
Kit: It’s very fruity, very hoppy, and quite light, although the strength of them does vary. I’m into a lot of New England IPAs at the moment, but any of them will do as long as they are not fruit flavoured. I don’t like raspberry IPA. People put different flavours in them that I don’t approve of.
Clare: Yes. I’m a big beer drinker myself, I will always prefer beer, but the sours, no, I don’t get it. That doesn’t taste like beer to me.
Kit: Yes, that goes too far.
Clare: Yes. Okay, so let’s end on a high. What’s the best thing that has happened to you in the last month or so? It could be either work-related or non-work related.
Kit: I’ll go non-work related and I’ll sneak it in there. I’ll say Christmas morning, it’s just about within the last month. It had been a bit of a year. An absolute dream year professionally, but with a lot of tragedy in it as well. To get a proper break and to have the kids come down on Christmas morning. We’d done Santa’s footprints in icing sugar and all of that. Yes, it felt like being in another world for a day. That was a wonderful thing, making some good memories there.
Clare: Okay, so where can people find you, and do you have anything coming up that you would like to plug?
Kit: Oh yeah! So, people can find me on Twitter, I’m @kitterati, K-I-T-T-E-R-A-T-I on Twitter and I’m there a lot. If you @ me on that, I will definitely see it.
Shameless plug, well, one shameless plug is to donate to your food bank. That’s because that’s not going away anytime soon. My own shameless plug is I’m hiring. As I said earlier on, Head of Technology, Head of Delivery, Head of Data and Head of Products are all upcoming roles. They will make or break this whole strategy. If you’re interested in anything that I’ve said and you fit the bill for one of those roles, watch this space. They will be on the RBG careers site, and all over social media. If you belong to an underrepresented group, I doubly welcome your application, so please go for it, even if you think you are not qualified because you never know what could happen.
Clare: Fantastic, that’s exciting. It’s an exciting position to be in, isn’t it, to be building a team?
Kit: It’s a dream. It is an absolute – I’ve never done it to this scale, with this kind of gravity of mission, and the financial pressures too. It’s new for me to design an entire directorate from scratch. I’ve built product teams from scratch, and multiples of product teams, but not the whole thing, not absolutely the whole thing. It’s a scale of challenge, I didn’t know how hard that would be, but I can already smell how rewarding it’s going to be.
Clare: Lovely, I love that. It’s been wonderful to talk to you, Kit. Thank you so much for giving me your time. It’s been really interesting to hear all of the different things that you have to say, so thank you.
Kit: Thanks very much.
Clare: It’s a pleasure.
Kit: They were the best podcast questions I have ever been asked. They were so – just thinking through your questions has actually changed my perspective on what we’re doing. It was just so thought provoking, so thanks very much for that.
Clare: Yay! Thank you. I’m really enjoying making this podcast.
Kit: Thank you ever so much for your time. That was really insightful.
Clare: Thank you.
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Clare: I’m so glad I got to talk to Kit. To help you digest everything that you’ve heard, I’m now going to try and summarise what I think the key takeaways are. We talked about Covid, and how that helped Kit to appreciate people’s entire lived experiences. We talked about how to make infrastructure modern and interoperable by aiming for consistent uptime, by the organisation having control of its own data, and by moving into the cloud from data centres.
In terms of moving into the cloud, we talked about thinking really big and really small, taking one thing at a time, and not aiming for purity. We talked about building digital capability. We talked about Kit’s plans to build a new team, and she is recruiting, so if you are interested please do look for details.
We talked about how to keep the council on a sustainable financial footing after decades of cuts, by aiming to make the Digital Department pay for itself and run more efficiently, by switching to online services for the citizens, by allowing residents to do more things themselves. We talked about how we can help with funding by having elastic scale in the cloud; by reducing contract costs and by having more efficient office work.
We talked about avoiding show-off technology like unnecessary AI. We talked about how to improve the lives of people in Greenwich by having empathy. And we talked about how Kit’s empathy has actually led to her crying at work, but how that also brings her closer to the people that she is serving.
We talked about improving services, we talked about digital inclusion and accessibility for all. We talked about doing one thing at a time. We talked about the fact that Kit lives in Greenwich means she really cares about her local community.
Finally, we talked about how you write a digital strategy by using evidence-based iteration.
Because Made Tech specialises in working with the public sector, we really care about making the world a better place. So, every episode, we’re going to have suggestions on how to make life better. For this episode, that suggestion has already come from Kit, which is to donate to your local food bank. Now more than ever, people are really struggling to put food on the table. You can really make a difference.
Every other episode, this last short segment will be devoted to Hack of the Month, where one of my colleagues, and in the future our listeners too, will share a life or a work hack. This episode, our top tip comes from Tess Barnes, who is a senior engineer here at Made Tech.
Tess: Hello, one of my tips is to colour code your goal activities. All of us have one or many goals that we want to achieve. If, like me, you like to work on your goals in parallel, it can be tricky to balance where you place your effort. I keep my goals and goal-related activities written up on Trello, but any card system works, and you can even use post-it notes.
I choose activities to work towards a goal and choose a colour for them to match their associated goal. The colour-coding makes it really easy to see where my progress is and helps to show if one goal is more dominant than another. This might be purposeful, or it might have unexpectedly drifted into dominance. I can check in to see if there’s a goal with very few activities, and that might be because I’m stuck on defining it and I need to give it some more thought. Or perhaps it might be because it’s really close to being achieved, and that’s pretty exciting.
It’s a really simple tip, just to colour code things, but I find it really useful.
And that’s the end of another episode. You can find me on Twitter, @claresudbery, which might not be spelled the way that you think. There’s no ‘I’ in Clare, and ‘Sudbery’ is spelled the same way as surgery, with E-R-Y at the end.
You can find the podcast on Twitter @makingtechbett2. That’s; making, T-E-C-H-B-E-T-T-2. You can say hello, give us your feedback, give us any contributions you have for future episodes, or just have a chat with us.
Thank you to Rose for editing and thanks to Richard Murray for the music. You will find a link in the description. Also in the description is a link for subscribing for extra content. We will be releasing new episodes every fortnight. Thank you for listening and goodbye.
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