Weeknotes are a quick recap of the important things a team has done each week, what we’ve learned, and what’s the plan for next week. They also help us work in the open. (And sometimes weeknotes evolve into monthnotes.)
We have several workstreams running in parallel.
Things really feel like they are coming together. But looking back at a month ago it’s fun to see how optimistic we were about what could be achieved. We’re still heading in that direction but research takes time, and having visions in your head is one thing, making them real so everyone can see them is a harder task. And we’re in the middle of it.
Will and Kay have been interviewing many people from across Sport England from The Movement Fund (Andrew, Ben, Phil, Mark), the Relationship Framework Implementation (Greg, Jo, Julie, Sophia, Amy), the Resource Hub (Jenny, Simon, Caitlin, Eleanor) and the Transformation Team (Steve, Cassie, Simon, Cara, Sian) to understand the teams’ 12 month plans and 4 year visions that will inform the overarching Service Transformation Plan.
The progress Sport England has made on its transformation journey means that pulling together the Service Transformation Plan has been a joyful and - at times - cathartic experience.
We met with Nick Pontefract and had a really fruitful discussion about the emerging plan. We’ll be catching up weekly in the run up to an ELT session - hopefully in early April - where we’ll present the 4 year vision, 4 year roadmap, 12 month plan and written report. The ELT session we mentioned last weeknote didn’t happen, which was a good thing in hindsight. We want to get out of the abstract and what we plan to do and into the specifics: “This is a plan. These are the constraints and tradeoffs. Do we all agree?”
Will has been meeting with Andrew Spiers, Phil Jones, Ben Barber and Mark Skinner. We’re exploring options for an eligibility checker that routes applicants to other funds where appropriate (e.g. London applications get routed to Go! London) and gracefully screens out inappropriate applications (e.g. from commercial organisations) long before colleagues in the Investment Management Team have to assess them.
The next step: Will is making playable prototypes for the eligibility checker which will fit between (1) the work the team are doing on the service start page for The Movement Fund and (2) the application form for The Movement Fund in GMS. The prototypes will inform a brief for Cyberduck to build this using Drupal Web Forms.
Will and Kay have also been talking to The Movement Fund about 12 month plans and the 4 year vision to feed into the Service Transformation Plan - as The Movement Fund is one of the three exemplar services that drive the plan. The other two: RFI and Resource Hub. These three service areas span Sport England’s activity: high vs low volume, smaller vs bigger grants, deeper vs limited (or no) partnerships, and grants vs information.
In the last 2 weeks, we finished up research and conversations, and wrote a lot. Our deliverable evolved from a report containing answers into a tool and an approach. We believe that in order to create and embed shared language and understanding, we cannot simply impose it from the outside. It needs to be more of a practice. Continuous conversations rather than a project. So we very deliberately designed our diagrams to be re-drawable. Shared language gets formed one whiteboard at a time.
We had some good feedback from Ben Wilson and separately a good show and tell. We heard that the work has valuable insight, and makes sense when we talk about it face to face. But there were worries about how it might land with other teams across Sport England. So we conclude: the work is useful but it doesn’t yet speak for itself yet. We’re going to act on that.