Digital Government Excellence. Siim Sikkut

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out management meeting overviews after these meetings. Basically, the whole department was invited for a short overview meeting where I told what we had decided so that everybody heard the same story.

      There had been all-department meetings that had been optional, and I made them mandatory. You could only miss if you were ill. I did not allow the use of laptops in these meetings anymore, because I had heard that previously they used the laptops during the meeting to joke on what was being told and to not take part. I also started doing Maija's morning coffees: a regular meet where anybody was allowed to come in and ask whatever questions they wanted.

      The morning meetings were popular at first, but less so later because I was telling everything already in other meetings—so there was no need to ask again. The two-hour monthly meetings that were mandatory for everyone worked really well. I wanted everybody there to hear the same message from me or from my unit heads, or we had somebody visit. I wanted everybody to be informed. Some people disliked that I made these meetings mandatory, but I had learned from my previous working places that there is no other way. I have had people who worked for me in the past and then left come up later to say that my monthly meetings were the best.

      For some people, this all was still not enough. So, I started to write a message to the whole team every now and then. About every three weeks I would send a note on how things looked to me, what things were on my agenda, what things were going on. Some people liked to read more than to listen, and it was important to reach everyone, especially as the team grew twofold in size. I always tried to figure out three main points I wanted to say out in the note: informing them about some progress or change and that they should be prepared for it, giving thanks to somebody, and some intro and outro on the side, and that was the note.

      We used the Kanban tools. We had targets on the board at all times, and weekly we looked through them in the management group as well as in the unit meetings. We focused on how things were moving forward, what the schedules were, were we meeting the targets, and if we needed to make critical changes. This way I had very clear targets in my mind all the time, once we had agreed what we wanted to take forward.

      We had one common Kanban board for the whole department. It was important because then everybody was able to see where we were heading and how things were going. At a monthly meeting after every quarter, we went through all the big programs or targets we had for the department and highlighted in traffic light mode of red-yellow-green how things stood. If anything was in red, meaning late or not doing well, there was explanation also in the notes on the board. When we had success and big things were green, we celebrated. I took quarterly review practice with me from the private sector.

      Of course, politicians do come and say that something needs to be done additionally. Then you do have a prioritization issue because if you do not have enough persons, you do have to see what formerly planned things you will just have to do later. Well, it can also happen that you deprioritize and then two months later the minister comes and asks where is the thing that was promised earlier? I did then honestly always say that we had to prioritize. I usually had taken such cases to the political level before, giving them options and asking what we should prioritize if we had to choose. Kanban was also a useful tool to talk prioritization and resourcing through on a management team level within the department, such as when borrowing and moving people from unit to unit.

      The Kanban board had a column for proposals that we had not decided yet if we would move forward or not. The proposals were on the level of initiatives that had already had some work in them, but we also included raw ideas as well.

      I tried to bring in the “yes, we can” culture. I wanted people to think that we could achieve all that we wanted to achieve.

      Also, I wanted us to have the customer focus. I started to talk about customers, and the team told me that we did not have customers, because we were the Ministry of Finance! It took some hard talks with the team, but then the 2015 Prime Minister Sipilä's government came in and talked the same way. And nobody spoke against it anymore.

      It was important to me that everybody in the team would have their opinion, and that everyone could challenge each other for delivery—until you are not arguing against the person, but on the substance. That was something that the team was not used to. They were even a bit afraid of me or thinking that everything the boss said had to be the truth. I told my team that I expected them to challenge me, too. I dislike if people just say “yes” and “yes” and do not really think so. People did pick it up nicely. I even received some emails that started by the line “Since you asked us to challenge you… .”

      I also always said that it was important to have fun at work. We started doing the team's own strategy meetings as overnight stays or retreats so that we would also have fun and dance or party a bit. Because people had so much fun after a day of hard working, they were always waiting for the next time.

      I had initially about thirty persons, mostly long-term civil servants. They were often more used to making studies than delivering things. The expectation from outside was that even with the X-Road money, there would be no outcome. We were not seen as an influencer or deliverers.

      For X-Road delivery, we recruited about ten more persons temporarily, and we looked for a little bit new type of staff member with good delivery skills. Then ten more persons with new competences came to deliver the 2019 government program, to work on AI, and so on. When I joined, I had in my department only one lawyer and we had already two or three laws to take care of. So that needed to change. When I left, we had about ten lawyers. We also got in some people who were looking at new things such as AI, the information policy, and so on.

      We changed our way of working so that we reorganized the agencies under the ministry to deliver things. We at the ministry focused on strategy, political work, money, laws. However, if you are starting new initiatives such as mobile ID, you also have to be able to figure out the high-level technical solutions to understand how it combines together with other things in the architecture. These sorts of things we kept in our own hands, so some sort of technical understanding we also still had to have, even with agencies taking care of delivery.

      I have been always good at finding good people. We got on the team people who were knowledgeable, able to deliver, saw the big picture. People wanted to join our department, even temporarily—because they had a feeling that this way, they would be able to influence and make a change in Finland.

      That is because the word gets around. You work on the culture and atmosphere of the department, and if it changes, people start to notice and talk about it. Like the word went around that not only did we deliver, but it was also fun to work there on the team with our strategy sessions and other social events.

      What I have always done is to have the last interview. I call it more a discussion even because it is not formal. I meet everybody before they join or before we sign them on, so I can understand what sort of person we would get. I am trying to see for myself how they fit on the team. We need people of different types; they are not supposed to

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