Yesterday we had our first performance meeting under the new management arrangements. Bringing the management and leadership teams together every fortnight hadn’t delivered what we, or at least I had hoped for. The meetings had lacked focus and purpose and so it was time to try something new. We need to keep trying until we get this right though I’m not certain we ever will.
Clarity has been an issue for us. Understanding what each of us is up to is a key part of improving that clarity and so the first meeting was spent with each of us giving an over view of the projects, in the main, that we had on our plates. Some of the managers had more daily delivery (the new business as usual) to do than others and this was reflected in their summaries.
We had pulled all of the information onto a single set of spreadsheets. For the first time since the mega board days, where we tried to represent all of our project work on a single, massive sheet of paper, we can now have a single view of what we have in front of us. It is not complete and again I am not certain that it ever will be but we cannot get away from the fact that it is enormous. We have so much work to get through.
We are entering, or are already in and unprecedented period of demand for our services. Change is everywhere and we are caught in the perfect storm of increasing demand and a significant squeeze on our resources.
The choices ahead of us are stark. Take on more resource, which is not going to happen; muddle along as best we can, which isn’t going to get us anywhere; or ensure we prioritise as well as we can so that the organisation’s ICT resources are applied to what is most important. That is what we must continue to do and having everything in one place is a great help.
I am very encouraged by the enthusiasm of the team for what we have to do. There are some significant overlaps and areas in which we can help each other. This raised some questions about whether the projects are in the right place and it is issues like these that such a session can help with.
It wasn’t the most exciting of meetings yet, for me it served a worthwhile purpose. Perhaps next time we will focus more on the daily delivery aspects.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 
Not an easy task Phil.
Sometimes it’s Better to streamline the priorities and allow people to reduce the amount of parallel major programmes which eat into everyone’s valuable time. They will all end up taking longer and costing more if the organisation is in constant context switching mode within shared services.
It’s easy to say yes to new things yet harder to kill off good initiatives with promise. Looking at which projects will result in regretted spend by further investing in non-strategic systems or processes is a good way to help visualise where the money will be wasted which can never be zero unfortunately.
Thanks, you are right it is not easy and I guess this is a constant issue in our business. It is a matter of getting the right balance between must do, shoudl do and could do.