5 minutes with… Lee Murray
Lee is currently the Head of Product and Delivery in the Chief Data Office within the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. He has been working within digital government since 2017 and is based just south of Birmingham.
Why did you choose a career in delivery or project management?
In all honesty, I kind of fell into it by accident more than chose it which I think is fairly common! After I finished university, I did a PhD and during that undertook an internship in Parliament working for the science and technology office. That experience made me interested in the public sector, and after a brief spell doing science policy I got offered a place on the Digital, Data and Technology part of the Fast Stream not really knowing what the sector entailed but with the desire to do more applied things than policy.
I had a couple of postings on the scheme which were in the product and delivery space, which gave me some great experience of working in agile delivery teams. I enjoyed the problem solving, the collaboration and the feeling of providing something that was useful for people. In some ways it was like working back in the lab, but instead of ploughing on solo with your own experiments for 4 years, you were trying to solve problems using a group of people with different skills.
What advice would you give someone starting out in the industry?
I felt incredibly fortunate in my first Fast Stream posting to spend lots of time with two great Delivery Managers in Ash Harbison and David Thomas at Defra. I personally learn well by observing people and teams, and working with two extremely skilled delivery managers and thus close to a couple of high performing teams fairly early on in my career was invaluable in seeing what good could look like.
People obviously learn in different ways, but if observation is helpful for you too, ask and find the most high performing agile team with experienced delivery people in your organisation and observe how they run over several sprints. I think it can be hard for people new to delivery to see what good in a team looks like without seeing a team operating like that in a regular rhythm.
Have you ever worked on a particularly difficult project? Why was it rubbish/tough/hard?
A few! Like lots of people, I find it hard to motivate myself to work on projects that are devoid of any benefit. I was involved with some of the early stages of the setup of an arms length body, which was rubbish to work on because it felt like an excellent example of a solution looking for a problem.
Creating new arms length bodies or agencies to outsource a problem central Government has failed to solve feels like the ultimate sloping of an organisation’s collective shoulders to let somebody else out there deal with it, whilst also being wasteful.
It was also hard because I was the only Civil Servant from a digital background working on it at that point and trying with help from a delivery partner to do things inside our control and nudge it to be something more useful, but this always felt quite fruitless.
What do you think are the most important skills for a delivery or project manager to have?
Calmness. I’ll admit I don’t always find this the easiest, but I’ve got better with it over time and I have learned how important it is, both for the team and also my own sanity. It is also necessary for another key skill which is being able to build relationships. Delivery people are always going to be getting involved in helping smooth discussions or paths to getting things done with a cross section of professions in the public sector. These can have very different priorities to the most efficient or effective delivery path because it is what the organisation has asked them to do to the best of their ability, and is thus completely understandable from their perspective. To help their teams, delivery people have to be able to build rapport, understanding and have the relationships to push back where suggestions are unhelpful for delivery and most importantly to gain enough trust from colleagues to find compromises where needed.
I also value understanding what good software development processes look like from a delivery perspective if working with that type of team. Delivery people should not be telling technical colleagues on how to do something, but should be trying to encourage a workflow that enables iterative releases and be able to spot where ways of working would discourage this. We have a fantastic team in MHCLG that I’ve never worked with directly that own the Energy Performance of Buildings Register - so can claim no credit - but who set up their ways of working and deployment processes to enable a development approach that could handle releasing regularly to their codebase. That has always been a benchmark to me that showed how development teams should aspire to work and delivery managers should at least give an opinionated challenge on any suggestions to push teams to larger, riskier and slower patterns of deployment.
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing delivery and project managers today?
With the pressure to realise efficiencies and show evidence for value for money quickly, that can quite easily encourage delivery teams earlier down the funnel to solutionising around something that sounds like it offers certain savings in places. I am supportive of attempts to make Government delivery leaner and more efficient, but helping different parts of an organisation understand if they are working within a domain that is more simple, complicated, or complex (yes, I’m watering down Cynefin here) is critical for that team set up to help understand how it should be approaching the problem.
There are plenty of unnecessary or overblown discoveries happening in Government but there are also plenty of spaces where more nuanced problem exploration and prototyping of different possible solutions should be at the forefront and are being overlooked in the thirst for efficiency. I’ve seen user centred design activities occasionally blamed in those instances for not delivering value more quickly, even when the domain is complex and when more evidence has been gathered that technology won’t solve the problem without associated changes elsewhere in perhaps policy, operational process or even culture.
Delivery people should help the team and organisation find the right approach for that problem space from the outset and look to encourage speedier delivery in simpler domains, but also protect the space for exploration and uncertainty in complex areas.
What projects would you have loved to have been involved in?
Something from the early days of GDS, or one of the classic exemplars would be quite high on my list having started doing digital Government a few years after these days. From outside Government and back towards my science days, I’ve found it quite amazing with the development and success of AlphaFold to predict protein structures from sequence data, which is critical for things like drug and vaccine discovery efforts. It has truly revolutionised structural biology in the last 10 years and won a Nobel prize recently.
From a similar domain, the Human Genome Project and more recently the 100,000 Genomes Project would also be high on the list, for its scale and how much of an impact it has had on advancing scientific research.
This post is from the ‘5 minutes with’ series of articles from people in the delivery management and project management space.
