Week notes 89

It’s been a while: more than a year since my last week notes. The numbering is carrying on, so this is the 89th entry in my week notes.

There’s been a lot going on this week.

I’ve spent a lot of time making further changes to the ‘delivery strategy’ document that we’re working on. We’re writing it to bring all our priorities for this year together into one place, and provide context for the transformation plans being prepared by agencies with high-volume services. So far, I’ve had chance to test it out with quite a few people inside the DTO, and we’ve had lots of feedback from the rest of government too. Our deadlines are jumping around a bit at the moment, but once it’s finalised we’ll be able to share it publicly.

Across the organisation, we’ve had a couple of conversations on what the words ‘services’, ‘transitions’, and ‘activities’ actually mean. There’s definitely a high-level understanding but it will be great for us to agree on the same terminology, put into words what they are, and work out the relationship between them.

I had a very short stop in Perth: on Wednesday I spoke at the FST Government Western Australia conference on the Australian Government’s digital transformation, and the work programmes that are underway. Despite being a five hour flight away (and a three hour time difference), Perth is a lovely place, and it’s a shame I couldn’t stay a bit longer.

On Thursday, the Malaysian Government’s Niran Noor dropped by our Sydney office. Leisa and I joined and had a great chat about the characteristics of government digital teams across the world, and a few of the prerequisites for other governments starting their own digital transformation journey.

Throughout the week, Ping and I have been spending time working on a set of new slides that people can use when talking about the DTO. Of course, the slides aren’t the difficult bit: we’ve really been giving a lot of thought to how we tell the story of the DTO and what we’re doing.

This weekend, I took the train up to the Blue Mountains, which is about 60 miles west of Sydney. It’s an incredible place - the views are astonishing. I got to see Orphan Rocker, the infamous unfinished roller coaster on the edge of a cliff (there’s a great write-up on the whole thing here). Later on, I met up with Lindsay, who is a brilliant tour guide and showed me around Blackheath.