Day 34 – 19 February 2014
Last night I decided that I’m going to try and go paperless. I’ve been agile for some time and am obsessed with being more personally efficient yet I still hang onto the vestiges of the old way of doing things. I carry a day-book around with me in which I scratch and scrawl items of interest and things to do and this morning I had twenty two bits of paper reports to do something with. But no more, from today I am going to try and do without.
I’ll still read books and magazines and I might write my shopping list on a scrap of paper when at home but at work I’m going to be all electronic. If anyone should lead the way in being paperless then it should be the Head of ICT Services.
This is what I have done. I have set up a ‘Today’ folder in Explorer and within that I have set up a folder for each day for the rest of the week. I will put all documents for meetings into each folder but as it happens I have only one or two for today. I’ve also created a word document for each day which will act like my day-book. I’ve also set up a ‘To Do’ task.
When I am in a meeting I am going to keep notes on my daily word document and annotate any of the reports if appropriate. I am then going to transfer actions to my ‘To Do’ list, send notes to those who should see them and then discard the stuff I have not used. At the end of the day I’ll file everything where it should go. I’ll set these up on a weekly basis as part of my end of week preparations.
As for the paper I’m still carrying around, I’ve transferred all the actions from my day-book into my ‘To Do’ task and I’m going to work through the reports. Let’s see how I get on.
My first meeting was supposed to be an informal SMT, after all it is Management Wednesday but I was asked to go to Corporate Overview and Scrutiny to give an update on progress with the ICT Strategy. It’s fast approaching its first birthday and so will need to be refreshed with next year’s plans. I did my presentation which was followed by a string of interesting questions, all of which I was able to answer. It was a good chance to get some of the wider ICT issues and opportunities out in front of the councillors.
When I got back to SMT there was some great discussion around optimisation and understanding the flow of work through our service. There were lots of maps showing where jobs were raised and the distance travelled and this led to lots of questions about why we do things the way we do and what could we do to improve the service. There are so many answers to our problems lying in our data just waiting to be found and at least we are looking now. Some changes had also been made to the way GIS calls were logged through the service desk which should make it easier.
Not all change occurs in big chunks. Much will take place in small differences that add up to create something innovative. I was reminded of Dave Brailsford, General Manger of the British cycling’s Team Sky who refers to this as ‘the aggregation of marginal gains’ and has used this technique to achieve unprecedented success in both track and road cycling.
Brailsford said, “It means taking the 1% from everything you do; finding a 1% margin for improvement in everything you do. That’s what we try to do from the mechanics upwards. If a mechanic sticks a tyre on, and someone comes along and says it could be done better, it’s not an insult – it’s because we are always striving for improvement, for those 1% gains, in absolutely every single thing we do.”
We are moving towards one service working. Bob has finished the Virginia Mason book and after a little discussion Neil is going to read it.
After lunch was a Digital Durham Joint Programme Team and then the 121 with Steve rearranged from Monday.
Learning points for today: You can always do better, you just need to keep trying; Lee’s going to stick with the Christmas mug all year; The other Lee has the same tie as Bob and; The hypocentre of our business is near the Cock of the North.
Today’s enjoyment rating 9/10 – Really good progress in some key areas.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 