Friday 19 June 2009

My blog is a little late today as I've spent the morning and lunch time in Devizes - firstly at Braeside attending the member induction session on scrutiny and then visiting some of the Resources teams located at Browfort.

The scrutiny induction was excellent. This is a very important aspect of the governance of the new council and works with the executive (the cabinet) to ensure our plans, objectives and delivery of services is working well. I am keen to use scrutiny this year to conduct more policy work ahead of formal decision making by the cabinet. We have many potential areas in Resources where we can make this a reality and I'll share these with the wider team over the next few weeks. The scrutiny work in support of BMP and shared services paid dividends with go-live in April where we were able to avoid many of the pitfalls that other organisations had experienced.

I then met up with the registration team. It was good to catch up with what's happening in the service (marriages and civil partnerships are on the up this year despite the recession - a good sign) as well as being a good opportunity to talk about how the team are affected by the recent major changes in terms of One Council, SAP and shared services.

I then spent some time meeting with the customer services team and spent an hour with Fiona listening to calls coming into the contact centre. I always enjoy this as our customer teams are so passionate and expert at what they do. Today was no exception. I would encourage any staff who haven't experienced this to do so - it's a real eye-opener. I find this important to do on a regular basis as it always identifies areas for improvement in our services. Today I learned that our contact directory and it's accuracy really slows down the team when trying to put calls through to the right services. I shall follow this up with the team next week.

Have a great weekend and talk again next week.

Carlton