Friday 25 September 2009

I spent a great morning with the Highways team at Chippenham last Friday - with Graeme, Steve and Nigel. They have been using systems thinking, or lean as it's sometimes called, to understand and redesign their pot hole repair service. This is a major priority for our customers and elected members alike. They showed me their current performance measures where they are now more than 100% more effective than before. They also told me about the positive effect on team morale because of the elimination of the large back log in work that they had - a back log that sometimes stretched right through the summer after a hard winter. It was very impressive stuff and a real reminder of how effective this approach is in driving up performance whilst reducing cost...

Scrutiny met this week to start to develop their forward work programme for Resources. As I have said before it is important to engage in high quality scrutiny to help the executive develop policy with us and to improve our implementation plans for that policy. Key areas for scrutiny over the next year or so will focus on customer access, HR and ICT amongst several others.

We held some meetings with partners from NHS Wiltshire and the Police this week to explore the budget situation over the next few years. We set out to start to identify areas where we can work more closely together to reduce cost whilst improving services and quality. It was surprising how close we were with our assumptions in terms of public spending contraction in the County moving forward, and also in terms of where the opportunities might be to collaborate on future work. This will be an important piece of work with some big rewards if together we can pull them off.

Have a great weekend and talk again next week.

Carlton