Friday 26 November 2010

Another busy week and it's really starting to feel like winter now.

This week the Corporate Leadership Team met with Cabinet members to continue work on the Business Plan. We now understand that we will receive our grant settlement detail on December 9, which is when we can start to firm up plans for the 2011-12 budget and just how much we will need to save to set a balanced budget - which is a legal responsibility that we have. At present we are still assuming that the nearly 30% reduction in government grant will be heavily front-loaded into year one, that is next year.

Our work on procurement savings continues quickly. We are coming to the end of the opportunity assessment (OA) phase of the work - essentially the time when we have the detailed negotiation plans for each contract in terms of how we will deliver the £9 million that we need for the 11-12 budget. The teams have been working very hard on this and I thank them all for their efforts.

I met with the Resources reference group this week - 30 front line DOR staff members for a general question and answer session on all things connected to budget, Comprehensive Spending Review, cuts, redundancies and the like. It was good to see so many positive people, despite the tough things we're having to do at the moment. We must do more of these over the coming months to enhance our communication. If you would like to join this group then please contact Jane Gray.

Finally I have had a lot of positive feedback from the DOR Team Day last week in Devizes. Nearly 600 people attended. I particularly enjoyed the green/red card voting on specific questions led by Laurie Bell and her team. I thought the fact that 90%+ of DOR would like to see a cut in their terms and conditions if it meant less job losses was a powerful message to us as leaders. If you have any suggestions for how we can improve this event then please let me know.

Thanks for reading and speak again next week.

Carlton

The impact of the business plan and what it means for DoR

Andrew has spoken about the Business Plan; the cost pressures we face, particularly with a need to protect the most vulnerable in our society, the savings we need to deliver from people or staff, procurement, our lean systems work; the investment that members wish to make in improving some of our services. So what does this mean for DOR – a mix of front line and support services?

The financial settlement for Wiltshire is not yet published – we’re expecting that late this year – so what follows is my best assessment as to what will happen.

In terms of cost reduction, I am planning on delivering real cash savings back to the business of at least 12% in 11-12 – that’s the next financial year. This will be tough to deliver but is vital to balance out budget next year. You’ll remember that we are legally obliged to balance our budget.

Now we do essentially two things with all of our money; we pay our staff and we buy goods and services. These two categories of spend will be impacted about equally. What this means is that we will be getting smaller – as an organisation and as a team in terms of numbers of staff employed and the services which we deliver.

Because we moved to unitary status, I have no doubt that we are in a better place than other organisations facing this challenge. This fact doesn’t make the task easier though – it’s still tough to do, as evidenced by the 560 managers we put at risk last week, including 90 from our team here today. Last week was one of the most difficult of my career but the professionalism and dignity of all those involved was incredible; reassuring and inspiring.

Because this is tough, it would be easy for us all to become trapped in a spiral of fear, worry, and anxiety about our individual situations. In my experience, from both the private and the public sector, those organisations that remain “stuck” in this place are going to be in big trouble. They become increasing more irrelevant as the world moves on around them – whilst they focus on themselves. We are not going to become irrelevant!

We have to remain focused on the future, the opportunities that it presents and above all on our customers – the people of Wiltshire, represented by their elected members. So what about that future then?

In DOR, we have and continue to invest heavily to improve our services; making them better performing at lower cost. These investments include; work place transformation, new work-anywhere ICT (both beautifully demonstrated when I was in Bourne Hill last week by the teams moving into that building), the Business Management Programme – SAP, our national-leading work on lean systems thinking, our transition to unitary and our work with communities and Area Boards. Our ability to deliver major change programmes on time, on quality and on cost is giving us a deserved national reputation.

All of this work gives us a solid base on which to continue to build a strong future; and our mission will be to exploit this investment to maximise our performance to our customers whilst occupying a smaller financial foot print. So what might this mean specifically?

- Communication and public engagement: I am astounded by the development of social networking and we must seize this opportunity to use it for community engagement; both the communities we serve and the internal communities and teams we work in.

This is ably demonstrated by one local government organisation I know where their citizens are writing Wiki-plans – a role normally performed my professionals within the organisation. This shows the power of social networking and how it can be harnessed to deliver better community engagement. You can do the same thing internally too.

- Major rationalisation of ICT applications and infrastructure

- Exploit the new technology of cloud computing – particularly important in an dispersed geographical area like Wiltshire

- We’re deploying a new revenues and benefits system; serving customers in the home; instant decisions and enabling a redesign of that team around the customer using lean techniques

- New, more relevant ways of assessing and measuring our performance

- New ways to deliver democratic renewal

Some councillors are struggling to balance their professional work with their work as an elected member; this is reducing the pool of people who wish to put themselves forward for election. We need to address this.

We need to develop and exploit our On-line capability, self service for external and internal services with fast, reliable decisions – both external customers and internal customers:

- The web as the Customer access channel of choice for most high volume, low value services
The same thing for our internal customers, especially around HR and Finance

Financial management information down to community area, by service to facilitate Big Society with sound information to enable people to become more engaged in what’s happening on their patch

- We will need to do this for the 4 test bed Area Boards as we take these to the next stage. This will mean a fundamentally different role for Finance professionals

Continuing to drive out efficiencies from our transactional services and exploring how we could share these with others; the voluntary sector, other local public bodies, other local authorities; the private sector.

- We have just started to share vehicle maintenance facilities with Fire & Rescue and I am meeting Andy Goves, the Chief Fire Officer tomorrow to start further work on sharing other support services.

It’s our job to translate this vision into reality; to identify how we will achieve it; to resolve the inevitable conflicts; to deliver for our customers; to innovate; to imagine something else – a better way to work; to make local government relevant to today’s society and the issues it faces. We must set the agenda for the future and deliver it, not live in the past celebrating worthy, but old achievements.

This is all of our jobs. Please discuss this in your teams and work out how your team will contribute to the agenda, and how you individually will contribute. In a smaller organisation, innovation and contribution are going to be the key differentiators between leaders and followers. I want Wiltshire Council and this team to be leading!

Thanks for reading and speak again next week.

Carlton

Friday 12 November

It's been a tough week this week. On Wednesday we made the announcements regarding which managers are at risk of redundancy. Over 550 across the organisation - about 90 in DOR. The service directors and I led five sessions on Wednesday, by service team to explain why we were restructuring, how we had approached it, and the impact on those managers affected. We then spent time explaining the support available for those affected over the next 12 weeks or so of the consultation process. This was difficult news to share as you can imagine but I was impressed by the professionalism and dignity which everybody showed throughout. I want to also thank the HR team for the volume and quality of the work that they have turned round over the last two months in preparation for this week. Unfortunately I have been through this process before in the private sector and our HR team is as good as any I've seen elsewhere. Well done.

The next few months are going to be difficult for all of us; we are all worried about the future and emotions are running high which is exactly what you would expect. To get through this we need to have open conversations about how we feel, what we fear and what support we need to get through this - from all sources. It is up to all of us in the team to provide that support on an ongoing basis.

Earlier this week I was in Salisbury to see how the move into Bourne Hill was going. It was very impressive to see the new building occupied at last. The new ICT kit looked great and early customer satisfaction data back from the movers shows levels of satisfaction with the new kit and how it works at well above 90%. I want to thank all of those involved in making this new building such a success; the Workplace Transformation Programme team, the ICT team and all those other unsung heroes involved in what is looking to be a high quality, professional job.

Just a reminder that we have our Team Day next Wednesday the 17th. If you haven't booked your place then please do so as soon as possible.

Thanks for reading and speak again next week.

Carlton

Friday 5 November

It's been a week or two since I last blogged as I was out for most of last week spending half term with my family. Lots of Scalextric!

It's been busy since the announcement of the Comprehensive Spending Review funding reductions. I seem to have spent most of my time talking with senior colleagues about how we will approach the task and exploring alternative ways of achieving the reductions. I am missing spending time with the teams in the hubs as a result. Wiltshire doesn't know precisely what grant it will receive next year and won't know until mid December at the earliest so it still feels like we have too many unknowns. Having said that we are working on plans for a 12% reduction in service budgets next year as a likely scenario for the budget setting process. This will be tough to achieve as evidenced by the start of the formal management review process this week. You will have also seen further proposals that are being discussed with the unions. We can explore these together more fully at the Team Day later this month.

The DOR Team Day is set for November 17 and I just wanted to remind everybody to sign up for either the morning or afternoon session. The venue is Devizes this time as the Civic Hall in Trowbridge is closed for refurbishment. I hope to see as many of you there as can make it.

Finally there seems to be a rumour circulating amongst some staff that I am leaving the organisation. Wishful thinking on somebody's part I think, as I have no plans to leave. If I find the culprit...

Thanks for reading. Talk again next week.

Carlton