ONS Digital

While nothing is actually finished (and really never will be) the Beta team essentially held a ‘final’ retrospective this week. Some of the core, long term team are moving on as commercial arrangements come to a close and for those remaining it seemed like a good point to take stock and, if I’m honest, for us all to take a breath and relax for a moment.

I tend to personally facilitate our retrospectives — I’m not sure if this is really the best way of handling things but the many headed monster that is my role means I am often slightly divorced from the day-to-day and I find it helpful to take a proactive role in at least something!

It was a pretty straightforward format –

• 5 minute intro
• 10 minutes for everyone to write some Post-Its about ‘things we could have done better/differently’ (not sure I was clear)
• 30 minutes of discussing what was written down. We went round the table asking team members to read out one of their Post-Its then other members could add theirs to that suggestion if they felt it was a similar theme. We discussed as we went along and then picked two significant themes for further discussion.
• 10 minutes for everyone to write some Post-Its about ‘things we did well/were proud of’
• 30 minutes in the same format as above.
• 20 minutes collaborating on a timeline of the Beta year (Feb to Feb) discussing how the team felt month by month and giving a red/amber/green score for morale basically! It was also an opportunity just to acknowledge all that had been done over that time (our week notes in Slack were a great reminder for this!)

There were some clear themes in the ‘things we could have done better’ department though interestingly they were often seen as initially things that were positives but evolved into issues.

Here are a few of the ones that stood out;

Better integration with the wider ONS digital/technology community

Initially our isolation was a plus. We were able to move fast and make technology decisions uncoupled from legacy issues and while over time we did integrate and communicate more it wasn’t enough and at crunch time we would have benefited from closer relations and people having a wider understanding of our work. In the last few weeks of the project this ended up happening — with colleagues co-locating with us and it has been brilliant.

Some activities need specialists

This is both on a technical and organisational stand point. We could have seriously benefited from an embedded security/assurance expert throughout the project — it was something we discussed early and thought we had covered off in a different way but there needs to be a much closer relationship from early on. The same with Operations.

Elsewhere the hiring burden was extensive and again in different circumstances we would have had someone in the team for whom this was a significant focus. It is such an important aspect of making this work sustainable and we always made it a priority but there are only so many hours in a week so other things suffered.

Lack of a Plan B

Generally speaking we didn’t really build in or plan adequately for any contingencies. It was all a bit all or nothing which amped up the stress at times and pushed the idea of agile working to the edge. We always shared a common understanding of the end goals but not always the path to get there and there were almost certainly occasions we could have made use of alternative routes.

Engagement with our own team and wider contributors

We didn’t get some important people involved in the decision making early enough with led to needing to make changes down the road that could have been easily avoided with some earlier engagement and while I’m not sure there was much more we could have done on the face of it widespread internal engagement really didn’t happen until late on. How to address this in the future remains a bit of a mystery but it needs doing.