Your persona
Your responses indicate you’re pretty comfortable with the main ideas behind digital strategy and digital working in practice. How are you engaging with your government, department, or team’s digital objectives? Perhaps you’re instrumental in shaping what’s happening or focused on promoting a culture that embraces flexibility and adaptability.
This might form part of your agile approaches — were you more or less familiar with agile ways of working or the agile mindset? Exploring how to embed agile into your team’s work while leveraging the best tools or technologies to support communication and collaboration will contribute positively to both what is produced and how people work together, thereby enhancing your leadership skills and your department's ability to adapt and excel in an evolving digital landscape.
Build your skills and knowledge
Deep Dive into Government Digital Strategy: Go beyond familiarity and critically analyse your government's digital strategy. You could start by assessing its alignment with current digital trends from both the public and private sectors.
Explore advanced benefits of agile, such as increased customer satisfaction, competitive advantage, and enhanced innovation. Would this provide a compelling reason to become more agile?
Delve deeper into the agile mindset, understanding the psychology behind agile principles and how it impacts team dynamics and problem-solving. Then, look for appropriate opportunities to facilitate agile ceremonies such as sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives.
Consider barriers to agile working. What’s within your gift to overcome? This could involve working with stakeholders to change processes, provide resources, or remove other barriers.
Develop a holistic digital transformation strategy that encourages team collaboration and addresses broader organisational change, digital adoption, and cultural shifts.
Enhance your ability to evaluate emerging digital tools and technologies by involving cross-functional teams in the assessment process. Develop criteria for selection and adoption.
Explore what digital leadership looks like that is appropriate for your context. Are you fully in the office, hybrid, or often remote or working from home? What can you do to support excellence across your context?
Create a community of practice
Think carefully about your network or who you work with. Can you identify anyone who might be a source of information or inspiration for further developing your knowledge, skills and abilities in this area? An informal chat about their work could help bring the context to life.
Establish a digital working community of practice within your department. This is a great way to bring together people from different teams who are interested in digital working. The community of practice can meet regularly to share knowledge, discuss challenges, and collaborate on projects - perhaps even developing and implementing digital working guidelines, which should be regularly reviewed and updated.
Digital Strategy and Working is a common Q&A topic on Apolitical. If you feel you can support the community, consider responding to what’s been posted. My department is too risk-averse, how can I get buy-in for my projects or policy ideas? Is the kind of thread you might be inspired by.
Keep exploring
Apolitical hosts events with thought leaders discussing a variety of topics, including many focusing on digital work and strategy. Keep an eye out for what’s upcoming, and in the meantime, you can catch up on recordings from past events, such as: How to Lead Digital Transformation in the Public Service.
You might feel ready to dive into a piece of structured learning. Our Mindsets for a Digital Future: Developing Yourself course could be an excellent place to start.
Take some time to explore Apolitical’s community articles, and consider engaging with the article creator by using the comment function. Digital Transformation in the Public Sector could be a good place to start.
If you’re looking for inspiration for structured skill development, take a look at our Learning Plans where we have stitched together disparate educational resources into rich, diverse, cohesive and enlightening learning journeys.
What's next?
Not sure if this is the right persona for you? This diagnostic and its suggested outcome have been designed for illustrative purposes and may not reflect your level of awareness or competency.
Find a guide to the statements covered plus the scenario questions here: Digital Self-Assessment and Scenario Summaries.
Explore the other personae using the links below:
Leadership:Digital Explorer, Digital Consolidator, Digital Trailblazer
Non-Leadership:Digital Explorer, Digital Consolidator, Digital Trailblazer
⬅️ Government Skills Impact Tracker | Digital and Data Skills Hub ➡️