My theme for this blog is connecting with our customers, citizens and communities. This is vital for any organisation, be it in the public or private sector. Organisations which don't connect become irrelevant. Irrelevant organisation fail.
This week started with a full meeting of the Extended Leadership Team (ELT) - the corporate and service directors. We had a morning focusing on the new Corporate Plan which we will be drafting and developing with elected members over the autumn. This plan will describe our priorities for the next four years and what we will be working on to turn the our vision and goals into tangible outcomes for the people and communities in Wiltshire.
We are seeking to move away from the traditional service based approach to this work - that is each service coming up with hundreds of priorities and initiatives. This traditional complexity causes many problems - not least that we end up working on hundreds of separate initiatives rather than focusing on doing a few things very well. We are seeking to structure the plans not around services but around themes that relate to the people we are here to serve. These themes might be; Myself, My family, My community, My place. If we start thinking about delivering outcomes within these themes we stand a much better chance of connecting with our customers, citizens and communities moving forward. More on this to come.
I met with some elected members from the Warminster area board plus Ian Brown, Head of Service Amenity & Countryside and Heather Abernethy the town clerk to discuss and agree a way forward on some priority areas for the town. This was exciting as it demonstrated to me the potential power of the area boards to get things done quickly by connecting us with our communities to make a difference.
I'm spending all day today out on the road with the Wiltshire Employment Support Team - Samantha Buchanan and Graham Logan, part of the Department of Community Services. This service enables people with learning difficulties amongst others to seek, obtain and maintain work - a real demonstration that we are involved with lives not just services. I'll tell you all about what I learn next week.
Have a good weekend and talk again soon.
Carlton
Friday, 31 July 2009
Friday, 24 July 2009
Friday 24 July 2009
Well two weeks on holiday certainly flies by. Back yesterday and thankfully not too many emails thanks to Jane and my service directors who had everything under control. I had a great holiday at home and spent the whole time watching test matches, playing cricket with my two young sons, fishing, and building amazing structures out of Lego, interspersed with several trips to various toy shops! The perfect antidote to a hectic six months in local government and no airports!
I'm spending all day today with Sue Redmond, Corporate Director for Department of Community Services (DCS) and our teams examining our method for business transformation. We are looking at the work she has led in DCS adult social care - the FOCUS programme with our partners Charteris - and also the work we have led in house with Deborah Farrow's team - particularly in highways, revenues & benefits and numerous other services.
We will be comparing and contrasting the method of change to explore the two similar approaches to identify how we learn and improve our work in this critical area. This will be vitally important as we move forward as an organisation because as local government funding becomes constrained we will be under pressure to do more for less. That is to maintain and indeed develop better more customer focused services at reduced cost. This sounds impossible but it's not.
In all of our lean or systems thinking interventions, we have improved performance (by more than 100% in adult care) whilst reducing our costs. This is achieved by designing the service around the customer and their requirements from us. This is a fundamental change of thinking for local government that tends to (but not always) design its services around the professional delivering those services. This always results in higher costs as customers requiring a service have to navigate their way through complex procedures and policies before getting the support they need. We will need to take this approach on every one of our services over the next three years.
If you don't believe any of this here's a challenge for you. Spend a couple of hours in the Customer Contact Centre as I do on a regular basis. Listen to the customer calls coming in and find our how many you think might be avoidable - that is the customer is calling us for a second (or more) time, or calling because they don't understand a letter we have written to them, or that we've missed a bin collection for them. You discover that we have levels of avoidable contact of 30-90% in all of our services. Think of the improvement in customer satisfaction if we could eliminate this. Think of the cost we could save too. We should all spend more time listening to customers... there's the challenge for all of us.
Thanks for reading. It's great to be back!
Carlton
I'm spending all day today with Sue Redmond, Corporate Director for Department of Community Services (DCS) and our teams examining our method for business transformation. We are looking at the work she has led in DCS adult social care - the FOCUS programme with our partners Charteris - and also the work we have led in house with Deborah Farrow's team - particularly in highways, revenues & benefits and numerous other services.
We will be comparing and contrasting the method of change to explore the two similar approaches to identify how we learn and improve our work in this critical area. This will be vitally important as we move forward as an organisation because as local government funding becomes constrained we will be under pressure to do more for less. That is to maintain and indeed develop better more customer focused services at reduced cost. This sounds impossible but it's not.
In all of our lean or systems thinking interventions, we have improved performance (by more than 100% in adult care) whilst reducing our costs. This is achieved by designing the service around the customer and their requirements from us. This is a fundamental change of thinking for local government that tends to (but not always) design its services around the professional delivering those services. This always results in higher costs as customers requiring a service have to navigate their way through complex procedures and policies before getting the support they need. We will need to take this approach on every one of our services over the next three years.
If you don't believe any of this here's a challenge for you. Spend a couple of hours in the Customer Contact Centre as I do on a regular basis. Listen to the customer calls coming in and find our how many you think might be avoidable - that is the customer is calling us for a second (or more) time, or calling because they don't understand a letter we have written to them, or that we've missed a bin collection for them. You discover that we have levels of avoidable contact of 30-90% in all of our services. Think of the improvement in customer satisfaction if we could eliminate this. Think of the cost we could save too. We should all spend more time listening to customers... there's the challenge for all of us.
Thanks for reading. It's great to be back!
Carlton
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Wednesday 8 July 2009
Another early blog this week as today is my last day in the office for a couple of weeks. Although I shall only be at home, I'm really looking forward to spending some time with family, friends and just doing those things that I'm too tired to do after a days work. I particularly want to catch some large carp with my eldest son...
So it's been a week of getting things in order. I have completed three out of my six appraisals which are due at this time of year. I take these very seriously as all staff need to have regular feedback on their performance and I certainly need feedback from my team on my performance. It's always a good way to learn together - although we tend to do this throughout the year rather than just in the formal appraisal process. I encourage all managers to complete this process over the next few weeks, and if you haven't had an appraisal then do please ask for one - you are allowed to!
We are in the middle of the new Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) interviews this week. These will happen on an annual basis to allow the Audit Commission to assess how effective we are in leading our communities and delivering improved service performance coupled with better value for money. I had my interview with Bridget Downton from the Audit Commission on Monday. She was exploring areas of performance management, how we handle major change and transformation programmes and actions around areas such as our People Strategy and benefits realisation for our transformation work. It will be interesting to understand how we are perceived by our external inspectors having just been through such radical change over the past 6 months.
Thanks for reading and we'll talk again in a couple of weeks.
Carlton
So it's been a week of getting things in order. I have completed three out of my six appraisals which are due at this time of year. I take these very seriously as all staff need to have regular feedback on their performance and I certainly need feedback from my team on my performance. It's always a good way to learn together - although we tend to do this throughout the year rather than just in the formal appraisal process. I encourage all managers to complete this process over the next few weeks, and if you haven't had an appraisal then do please ask for one - you are allowed to!
We are in the middle of the new Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) interviews this week. These will happen on an annual basis to allow the Audit Commission to assess how effective we are in leading our communities and delivering improved service performance coupled with better value for money. I had my interview with Bridget Downton from the Audit Commission on Monday. She was exploring areas of performance management, how we handle major change and transformation programmes and actions around areas such as our People Strategy and benefits realisation for our transformation work. It will be interesting to understand how we are perceived by our external inspectors having just been through such radical change over the past 6 months.
Thanks for reading and we'll talk again in a couple of weeks.
Carlton
Friday, 3 July 2009
Thursday 2 July 2009
Another early blog this week as I will be in Taunton tomorrow meeting with colleagues from across the South West at the Regional Improvement & Efficiency Programme meeting (RIEP). There are RIEP's in each region of the country and they are responsible for delivery of the efficiency and improvement agenda across the country. They have substantial funds available for local authorities to use to develop new innovative solutions to the challenges that we face. I represent Wiltshire on the Executive Board.
It is the first formal meeting of the Warminster Area Board tonight which I shall be attending. This is the new local forum whereby communities and individuals can discuss issues that they face and take decisions around how service delivery can be improved in their area to better address the issues they have. They also have funding to allocate to priority projects that their communities wish to see delivered. I'm looking forward to this as it represents the way in which we can get closer to the people we serve and also presents an opportunity for us to innovate in the way we deliver local services.
The Planning or Development Control (DC) team finished the first part of their lean review this week. We had an excellent presentation by the team outlining the current DC system, what works well and what currently isn't working well for customers. The redesign experiment starts immediately with huge opportunities to not only stream line the way we do business but to also drive up performance for our customers - a real win-win. This should reduce costs too as doing the right thing for customers first time always saves money.
We started the first round of Member meetings this week; a Corporate Leadership Team (CLT) presentation on the Challenges Ahead - part of the new member induction programme, the first Audit Committee and first Overview & Scrutiny meeting. It was good to start engaging with members on the agenda to which they have just been elected and interesting to see many new ideas and opinions about how we should be improving what we do. More of that anon.
Thanks for reading and talk again next week.
Carlton
It is the first formal meeting of the Warminster Area Board tonight which I shall be attending. This is the new local forum whereby communities and individuals can discuss issues that they face and take decisions around how service delivery can be improved in their area to better address the issues they have. They also have funding to allocate to priority projects that their communities wish to see delivered. I'm looking forward to this as it represents the way in which we can get closer to the people we serve and also presents an opportunity for us to innovate in the way we deliver local services.
The Planning or Development Control (DC) team finished the first part of their lean review this week. We had an excellent presentation by the team outlining the current DC system, what works well and what currently isn't working well for customers. The redesign experiment starts immediately with huge opportunities to not only stream line the way we do business but to also drive up performance for our customers - a real win-win. This should reduce costs too as doing the right thing for customers first time always saves money.
We started the first round of Member meetings this week; a Corporate Leadership Team (CLT) presentation on the Challenges Ahead - part of the new member induction programme, the first Audit Committee and first Overview & Scrutiny meeting. It was good to start engaging with members on the agenda to which they have just been elected and interesting to see many new ideas and opinions about how we should be improving what we do. More of that anon.
Thanks for reading and talk again next week.
Carlton
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