Week 34: plans are worthless, but planning is essential
I’m working on a digital maturity reassessment for Ontario One Call, and getting ready to start the next phase of work with GovTech Barbados.
Ontario One Call
Last year, two Public Digital colleagues and I did a digital maturity assessment of Ontario One Call. They’ve asked us to come back and review their progress. It’s a short, tightly scoped engagement: five interviews, a survey and some document review. We plan to rely heavily on AI to help with the legwork.
Over the last two weeks, we’ve designed the discussion guide and survey by giving Gemini the framework and the results from last time and asking it to generate questions to reassess the organisation. I took these, compared them with the previous results, added and removed a few questions, and we were good to go.
We started this week with two interviews. One thing we keep coming back to is scope. Digital maturity isn’t just about the IT, digital or tech team, or whatever you want to call it. If you’re a digital business, internet-era ways of working apply to the whole business.
It’s been lovely chatting with some friendly people I haven’t seen for a long time.
GovTech Barbados
Although the official engagement doesn’t start until next week, we’ve already started planning for next week and the week after, when we’ll be in Barbados. The CEO of GovTech is really excited, as is the rest of the team. I’ve got a million things in my head and a growing to-do list.
I keep reminding myself of Eisenhower’s line, “plans are worthless, but planning is essential”, knowing that on the last two visits to Barbados, everything changed day by day.
Outside of work
My elderly parents visited me, which was challenging in lots of different ways.
I hope you’re having a lovely bank holiday Monday, or just a normal weekend if it’s not a holiday where you are.