Just short of two years ago I accepted the role of Director of Delivery at Difrent, a big move for me as I’d only worked in the Public Sector, but a good opportunity to see how things worked on the other side of the commercial table; and a great opportunity to work with some fantastic people (Honestly, Rach Murphy herself is a powerhouse who can teach the world a thing or two and always worth making time for) outside of the public sector, and learn new skills.
The services we were delivering at Difrent we’re very similar to those I’d been working on before, and I worked with many familiar faces; but still the challenges were new. Working at a start up that was beginning to scale up was a very different environment to working in a large established Government Department. Not just delivering great services that meet user needs, but also building up business processes; scaling up teams; winning new business.
And then there was the pandemic.
Because of it’s strong background in Health, Difrent was on the front line when it came to stepping up and supporting the COVID-19 response working with the NHSBSA; NHSX and DHSC. I always thought that my time on Universal Credit was the most fast pacing and demanding time of my life; which it turns out was nothing compared to being asked to stand up 6 teams of experts within 72 hours at the start of the first wave to support various urgent pandemic related services.
Alongside supporting and delivering high priority COVID-19 related services in unprecedented timescales (we successfully helped delivery of the Home Testing service in under a month) we also had to keep delivering our existing products and services; helping Skills for Care go Live with their Adult Workforce Data Set service, continuing delivery of NHS Jobs, helping the Planning Inspectorate pass their Beta Assessment for their Appeals service and delivering the wholesale business transformation for the British Psychological Society; whilst also picking up and delivering a whole host of other projects and services that we continued to win.
Because of the pandemic, a lot of new teams were beginning to work with Digital Service Standards, and having to go through Service Standard Assessments for the first time; and an increasing amount of my time began being demanded by clients to support them understand and adhere to the service standards. I’ve always joked about my perfect record for passing Assessments (while being clear, that not passing the first time isn’t failure, it just means you have more to learn!) working with one client to turn around their service in under 3 weeks from complete un-adherence to the standards to passing a Beta assessment has got to be a personal best!
The last year has been full on, with long weeks and even longer days. I’m so proud of everything DIfrent has achieved in the last 18 months; but I also recognised the time is right for me to move on and focus more on the bits of my role I am most passionate about.
And what is that? Being hands on and working with clients to solve problems. Having the time to work with teams to understand the issues they’re facing and how to go about fixing them. Seeing the positive changes being made and thinking of ways to keep iterating and improving on what we’ve done. Investing in and building that cultural and organisation change up over time. Whilst at the same time having a proper work life balance again; having time to give attention to my family and friends; rediscovering the things I enjoy doing outside of work and having time and energy to do them. As lockdown begins to end, it’s time for me to have a new start.
And so, from next week I’m moving on to work with Kainos, I’m really excited about this new opportunity. Going into a larger organisation means there will be more peers to share that load; bigger problems to solve for clients, bigger teams to work with, all with the benefit of the organisational processes etc in place already that we will need to deliver large projects; which will allow me to focus on working with clients fully and ensuring I’m delivering real value to them, and getting real value myself from my work.
