I’m delighted to share that I’ll imminently be joining the Government Digital Service as the manager for their most excellent Delivery Team. I’m hugely excited about working with this astonishingly talented group of people, some of whom I already know and others I am keen to meet, as they work on transforming the UK government’s digital presence & offerings. After Martha Lane Fox called for “revolution not evolution” in government’s digital services, this new department has been growing quickly and delivering in spades, with an approach more akin to a start-up than the traditional image of government IT.

It was not an easy decision to leave Procter & Gamble, where I have been an Information Decision Solutions manager for the last 10 years. It’s a brilliant company (recently named #1 for leadership development by Chief Executive magazine) that afforded me wonderful opportunities to develop as a professional and an individual, as well as granting many lasting friendships with colleagues I both like and respect.

I started at P&G whilst I was still at university and worked up through a variety of roles, from Systems Analyst to Product Manager, then Project & Programme Manager and more recently Engineering Manager type roles in various business domains. I also had the privilege to get involved in a number of organisational development activities, founding the company’s LGBT employee network in the UK which was recognised as a Star Performer Network Group by Stonewall in recent years, leading recruitment in the South West and redesigning our internal management “colleges” to be exciting experiences rather than “death by PowerPoint”.

For a long time I managed to maintain both my corporate and geek/web interests and activities in parallel, participating in BarCamps, Refreshes & SxSWi when I could and even writing a book on geek project management for SitePoint. In recent years my travel schedule at P&G has meant this became harder & harder and frankly I missed the digital side of things.

The prospect of being able to marry both worlds together in the same job really is geek manager heaven. I can’t wait to start!

“If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.” – Lord Kelvin

My recent experience using The Eatery got me thinking about how much having the right measures helps you track and influence performance. Data is awesome and measures are great — nothing focuses the mind more than a graphical representation of how broken something is.

Unfortunately mistakes are often made:

• Picking what CAN be measured, rather than what SHOULD be measured. For example, airlines are reputed to determine an “on time” departure based on whether the plane left the stand on time — not when it actually took off. As a customer who has spent a lot of time sitting on the runway, this is pretty annoying!
• Focusing exclusively on the measure, rather than what it tells you about performance. We’ve all seen a team get obsessed about getting a particular measure to “green” or “100%”, often not really thinking about what the impact will be of doing so. Sometimes it’s fine to have 87% — and the incremental work to get to 100% is time & effort better spent on something else.
• Losing track of the bigger picture. My personal peeve here is measuring whether everyone in the organisation has an annual review (because that’s something easy to measure) rather than whether they actually make a difference — the folks over at Sonar 6 have covered this in one of their colour papers on performance management very effectively.

All this can lead to what one of my colleagues refers to as the Watermelon Phenomenon — when something is green on the outside, but bright red on the inside. Effectively, your measures are telling you everything is fantastic, but your users/customers/employees are telling you it is B R O K E N.

So, what to do?

1. Think about what REALLY tells you whether your business/process/organisation is healthy. Is it sales? Is it customer service? Retention rates? Happiness? How on earth do you measure HAPPINESS? Don’t worry about that right now. Just think about what you think are your key indicators of success/health, in an ideal world.
2. Now, what could show you AFTER the fact how you are doing? These are called “outcome measures” or “blackbox measures” and are typically hard numbers — sales, profit, retention, etc. The disadvantage is they are often broad and reported after the fact — but they are still important.
3. Then, think about what your early warning measures might be. In people management, how many people you are attracting (recruitment) and keeping happy & engaged (retaining) are your outcome measures … but how do you tell BEFORE someone goes as far as leaving that you have a problem? Is it an employee health survey, the team’s feelings about their manager, how much your competitors are paying? Working this out and then finding a way to measure it without losing track of the end result, is probably the hardest challenge.

What’s the worst measure you’ve ever seen, in terms of the behaviour it drove?

Through a combination of holiday and time off to let my repeatedly dislocating shoulder heal, I was out most of October. So when November 1 dawned I had over 4000 emails in my inbox. Yes, you read that right, 4000. And my work inbox isn’t like my personal — there’s almost no spam, no newsletters. So virtually every one of those 4000+ emails was really for me.

So on November 1, I felt a bit like this:

Rather than resorting to a simple panic attack and a paper bag, I pulled out Getting Things Done and reminded myself that processing is powerful. Rather than viewing the “inbox of doom” (as it was becoming known ) as an insurmountable mountain of “stuff to do”, I started looking at it one by one.

For each item, I chose whether to action it (if not: file immediately in the right place, if so, put immediately in @action folder), put it in @maybe-someday, @read-later or @waiting-for (e.g. if a conversation/topic had moved along but the next action was with someone else). Surprisingly, this really didn’t take that long. Within a couple of days I had processed the insurmountable 4000+ down to ~500 I had to actually do something with!

Best of all, I was back at Inbox Zero. And I’ve gotten back down to zero every day since.

Having nothing in your inbox, even if you have 514 in your @action folder, is curiously calming. Knowing that you know exactly what needs to be done, that it is held in a safe place, that you no longer need to frantically make notes in sharpie on napkins at lunchtime because “OH SHIT I JUST REMEMBERED” is … serene.

I can highly recommend it

Further Reading

For anyone wanting an introduction to GTD, LifeDev’s GTD Cheatsheets are a nice clean resource; Gina Trapani’s Simplified GTD is fabulous too.

I was delighted to be named Young IT Professional of the Year yesterday in the UK IT Industry Awards. Hosted by BCS (The Chartered Institute for IT) and Computing, the awards “provide a platform for the entire profession to celebrate best practice, innovation and excellence”.

To be honest I am much prouder that my team at P&G, the Application Management group, were finalists for IT Department of the Year only a year into our existence as a team!

I didn’t get to attend the awards dinner as I was gallivanting around New Zealand on sabbatical, but my awesome team were there and accepted the award on my behalf. The judge’s comments were reported over a crackling mobile phone connection to the North Island of NZ as “An outstanding individual who has made major contributions within her company and to the wider IT community. The judges were blown away by her submission!”

Other coverage: UK IT Industry Awards 2010: and the winners are…, BCS announces winners of UK IT Industry Awards 2010. UPDATE: nice story from University of Bath Computer Science department.

In any job, it’s easy to get caught up in urgent day-to-day matters — “fire fighting” as many describe it. One of the most useful tools I’ve found for breaking the cycle of always working on what is most urgent rather than most important is this prioritization grid.

Grid used for prioritization of tasks & deliverables, plotting by importance and urgency

The grid helps you divide your tasks & deliverables into four categories:

1. Urgent & Important (fire fighting) – these are the everyday priorities, things that have either come up urgently or important things that you didn’t get to until they became urgent.
2. Urgent & Not Important (distraction) — these are the easiest things to move on to once the fire fighting is done, but hardly the most productive. Everyone has their tasks that fall into this category. For me, it’s checking my email or voicemail rather than making a choice to work on something more important.
3. Not Urgent But Important (quality time — aka fire prevention) — the things that are important. Part of your strategic vision. The kind of things that mean you have left a positive mark on a place after working there. Shouldn’t you be investing more time here?
4. Not Urgent, Not Important (time wasting) — ever noticed the guy in your office who seems to spend time arranging his desk rather than doing any work? Or putting new colour labels on files that were already perfectly workable? My best friend avoided revision for our final exams in school by deciding he simply HAD to learn Linux right then in that fortnight when revising should have been top priority…

The point isn’t to never do tasks in certain categories, just to become much more conscious of the choices you’re making. I’ve been using this grid for years now and I can certainly not claim that I never do tasks that are not urgent & not important — but now I make a conscious decision about whether to take on the next big important thing, or whether to spend the 5 mins before lunch sorting through my expense reports.

Try it for a week and see if it makes a difference for you!

I was delighted and honoured to write an article for this year’s 24ways advent calendar. The topic is Project Management, with a bit of a festive analogy used to impart some top tips for keeping projects on track.

Go on over, check it out and let me know what you think!

Are you a web designer or developer? If so, head on over and fill in the State of the Web 2008 survey that the fine folks over at Web Directions have started.

Not only will you be helping us all understand the state of our industry, but you also get the chance to win some cool freebies for participating — more details here.