intervene
ɪntəˈviːn/
verb

take part in something so as to prevent or alter a result or course of events

This is my word of the week. I feel like Robert McCalls younger, weaker and dumber brother — ‘The Intervener’.

My role is crystallising around a particular remit and it is something new to me — I’ve informally helped out other teams and projects over the years but now I’m essentially being tasked with doing that as my job rather than on the side of my own project/team. It is actually an important distinction and takes a bit of a cognitive realignment (as I wrote about last week) but I am really starting to see the value I can offer and the ways I can help different teams.

This week I helped out with an interesting workshop delving in to the draft digital lifecycle from the Digital Transformation programme with some participants from the agile delivery teams. I loved how much they were talking about getting the ‘team’ right and wanting to be able to spend more time cultivating team culture and performance. Given my own interests this was brilliant to observe.

I wrote a job description (with help from the team) for what we are calling Digital Capability Partners (I’m actually not a fan of ‘partner’ in this context but got outvoted!) which is about bringing in more people to sort of build on the work I’m doing and Sarah is now getting involved in. I think ‘Sally’s Little Helpers’ is a better title 🙂 I also got a bunch of procurement stuff finished up — felt good to get things written down.

I had a bunch of calls and conversations again — with staff across Defra (mainly EA this time) and GDS. I’m getting much better at tuning in to the tele-cons — practice makes perfect I guess.

Had a trip to Cirencester (what a lovely place!) to meet the Equine Register team. Really good meeting — a lot to cover and not all of it straightforward but having passionate, sensible people in a room together with common objectives and you can get things done. Getting to and from Cirencester represents an interesting challenge though (however compared to Mikes trip from York I had a walk in the park!)

More widely in the team it felt like things accelerated this week — the pace felt like it picked up. Cards have been closing, ideas have been pinging around. Significant things got signed off and circulated. It feels like we may have reached a significant point. Could be a false dawn but I don’t think so.

Anyway another good week — I’ll leave you with this. If good services are verbs maybe I ‘Intervene as a Service’…