Friday

This week has been fascinating at the national level watching the political parties forming a coalition government. Clearly we expect now to have an emergency budget in around 50 days, so it will be interesting to see how the detailed policies for public sector spending emerge. Finance and CLT have been working on these likely plans for a number of months in our Medium Term Financial Plan, so I'm not expecting any big surprises. I have almost caught up on the nights sleep that I missed last Thursday after a long night at the count.

Yesterday we celebrated the final SAP Payroll rollout for schools over in the East Wing with speeches, lunch and cakes. It was a good opportunity to thank the staff involved, all of whom have put a tremendous amount of personal effort into ensuring a successful SAP launch. Our success here has been recognised recently with two awards - one national and one international. In the latter, we came third behind Asda and BP. Not a bad effort for Wiltshire in my book!

Earlier this week CLT spent a day at Urchfont developing the detail that will go in to the Business Plan that we are developing for member approval in September. The Business Plan will be the blue print of how we will run and develop the organisation to achieve the aims and objectives specified by members in the Corporate Plan. The Corporate Plan is due for debate and approval at Council next week. If you haven't had a chance to read this - and I urge you to as it describes what the council will be doing over the next 4 years - it's on the intranet. It's important that we all understand what is expected of us over the coming years.

Later today I shall be meeting up with the Housing team in Bradley Road. We'll be considering how we can help with the service transformation journey that they have started by deploying systems thinking or lean in critical areas of their business. More on this in future blogs.

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend and talk again next week.

Carlton