Thursday 15 December

Well here we are at (almost) Christmas and what a year it’s been too. I’d like to thank all staff in all services for the tremendous effort that they have put in during the year to achieve such outstanding results. Our Business Plan approved at the start of the year set us some challenging goals and objectives, and it makes me very proud that we have delivered on these so well despite some big challenges, not least the economic situation of the country.

This will be my last blog of 2011 and I want to wish you all, with your families a very happy Christmas and peaceful New Year. Enjoy the holidays. For those of you working over the break to provide critical services to our communities, thank you very much.

For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion and comment you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand
Thanks for reading and we’ll talk again in 2012.

Carlton

Wednesday 30 November

Wow things are moving at a pace – my feet don’t seem to be touching the ground much at the moment...

Last Friday we held the first two manager forums in Salisbury. About 120 managers attended from right across the organisation and county. It was great to meet everybody, describe who we are and what we’re each about and for us to set out why we have adopted such a radical leadership model. We then talked about the cross cutting themes by which we will manage the organisation, the key deliverables in our first 90 days, the changes that we will all experience from the transformation programme including campuses and finally 2012 – a year of celebration, with the Olympics and Diamond Jubilee. Both very important events for Wiltshire. We concluded with over an hour of questions and answers which is always good – it gets us all thinking and hopefully understanding.

There was a buzz about the events that I haven’t sensed for a while in Wiltshire and all managers fed back that they supported the new model and thematic working. I found this very encouraging. The next two sessions are on Monday in Chippenham, so I look forward to seeing some of you then. The events for all 5,000 staff start in mid-January.

Yesterday I met up with front line staff. It’s always good to catch up with what’s happening, brief staff on some of the larger issues such as the budget and campuses and find out what the “word on the street” is. We plan to expand these type of informal meetings from the new year and hold them weekly in each of the hubs. I’m looking forward to that.

Speaking about the budget we had an excellent informal session with Cabinet last week. It was the first real test for the three Corporate Directors. We took a balanced proposal to members almost two months ahead of where we were last year. The finance teams have done a great job – thank you all for that – and at the end of the discussion we were still just about balanced. We’re now working on the delivery plans associated with our proposals.

That’s probably enough for now. I’m in London for three days next week so we’ll talk again early the following week.

For daily updates, discussion, opinion and comment you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand
Thanks for reading.

Carlton

18 November 2011

It’s Children in Need day today – always fun and exciting and a somewhat unpredictable prospect. I hope you all have a good day and that we raise a lot of money for children and young people, both in the UK and across the world. A couple of events to note if I may. Mark Stone will be having his head shaved in the chamber at 10am so long as we have more than £250 raised. At the last count it was way past this, so bring him on...

I shall be drawing the raffle in the East Wing at 12 noon. We have more than 70 prizes up for grabs so if you haven’t bought a ticket yet, please do so – It’s such a good cause.

You will have seen the council operating model or structure chart published yesterday. It was important to get this agreed with Cabinet and published quickly – I noticed last night that it’s even on our web site.

The important thing to say is that the three corporate directors will be focussing much less on structure in the future. We won’t be using it to manage the business per se, but of course it is important for line management reasons such as objectives and appraisals, etc. The important point to consider are the cross cutting themes. The full list is still under development but will include:

• Culture, behaviour, leadership
• Business plan
• Communities
• Transformation
• Planning peer review action plan delivery
• Highways and amenities commissioning
• Economic development
• Health
• Promoting democracy
• Vulnerable families and safeguarding
• Organisational performance

We will lead the organisation through these themes – because these are the issues that matter to our communities, customers and our elected members. This will also ensure we start to break down the boundaries that pop up between professional groups and departments. I’d like to encourage you to feedback on this concept, because we need your views and opinions. Please email any of the corporate directors.

For daily updates, opinion and all sorts of things, you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand

Thanks for reading, and talk again next week.

Carlton

11 November 2011

First off, my apologies for not blogging for a couple of weeks. It’s been busy and I thought it best to let the dust settle after the appointment process last week. That said, I’m hugely excited to have come through that process and have spent the last week or so working with my two fellow corporate directors – Sue and Carolyn - on our plans to take the organisation forward and to deliver for our elected members. We have agreed the new council structure with Cabinet and will be sharing this with ELT and the organisation from Monday.

We want to work in a different way. Rather than a departmental focus, we have identified a number of cross cutting themes which are important to our customers, communities and members. Our focus, and that of the service directors who make up ELT – the extended leadership team - will be to work across the organisation on these themes to ensure we deliver quickly. This will also enable us to embed the new values, behaviours and culture that many of you have been involved in developing over the last few months. More of this next week.

Today I shall be working with Sue and Carolyn on our operating model for the organisation and most importantly on the critical success factors for our first 90 days in our new roles. This is an important period for the organisation as we seek to capitalise on the new leadership arrangements in place and ensure we are on track to achieve our objectives.

This week’s full council meeting was a marathon ten hour session in the City Hall Salisbury. There were some very interesting subjects debated and it was good to see members of the public and business communities attending too.

For daily updates, opinion and all sorts of things, you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand. 98 followers and counting... It’s a great way to keep in touch real time.

Talk again next week.

Carlton

Friday 28 October 2011

Half term has been a busy week for some of us! Late last week I was at Newport Council in South Wales leading a peer review of their IT service. This was a good opportunity for me and the team to see how others work and balance the performance needs and financial constraints they have. We learned a lot that we can use within our organisation as well as helping the Newport team with ideas about how they can develop their good service further.

Monday started with two interviews for BBC Wiltshire radio on our consultancy spend. Although this spend accounts for around 1% of our budget, it quite rightly receives regular scrutiny from our elected members and people and organisations outside of the council. We use consultants to provide services which we are not able to provide as part of the set up of the normal organisation. For example our highways and bridges are designed by consultants because we don’t do enough of this to warrant employing our own experts including the capital plant required.

Mid-week I spent most of one day working with two young managers as their coach. They had completed their personality profiles and we were exploring how these could be used to develop their self understanding and as well as their role as managers. Growing the next generation of leaders is something I am passionate about and prioritise.

I met up with one of our customers yesterday in Shurnhold. He was very cross about a whole range of our services, across all departments. I listened carefully and tried to explain some of the issues that he and we faced. It was a good learning opportunity for me and gave me a number of ideas about how we can sharpen up our services in some areas.

Finally, the week ends with my preparation for next weeks’ selection process which is on Tuesday. Fingers crossed.

For daily updates, opinion and all sorts of things, you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand

Talk again next week.

Carlton

Tuesday 18 October 2011

My apologies for blogging a little late this week. I was out of the office late last week at Microsoft’s HQ in Reading. The building was very impressive – as you might expect – show casing how thoughtful building design coupled with new technology linked to a change in people’s behaviour (some call this culture) can deliver a modern, flexible, productive yet low cost operation. Exciting as this is the direction that we’re moving in quickly with the hub elements of the transformation programme. We discussed and agreed some radical actions around how we get many of our applications into the “Cloud” and how we deliver tangible service benefits to our external customers quickly over the coming months. Watch this space.

I had a good meeting with the property team last week also. We reviewed the initial thinking around moving to a new operating model for the service, encompassing all of the elements of the transformation programme. The service needs to be designed around the needs of its customers – both external and internal as well as striking the right balance between commissioning services from others and providing direct services where it represents best value to Wiltshire. This is exciting and innovative – the team are doing a great job.

Today I shall be in Browfort all day. I have a short meeting with one of the Corporate Directors from B&NES first thing to explore opportunities for sharing some services. Very initial discussions with no specific services in mind yet. Value will be the key determinant; if we can improve performance whilst reducing costs it’s sensible to share. If we can’t we won’t.

Cabinet starts at 10am with a full agenda and then we’re straight into informal meetings with Cabinet for the rest of the day around capital assets and general discussions around the business plan and budget for next year and key council contracts. I always enjoys these meetings with politicians – it’s why I came into local government from the private sector!

For daily updates, news, views and opinions you can follow me on Twitter, @drcarltonbrand. 65 followers now so please join us... it’s a great way to keep in touch and communicate.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week.

Carlton

7 October 2011

Lots going on this week including many communications events. We held the regular Departmental reference group with front line staff to talk through what’s happening in key areas and how we plan to achieve our objectives and budget for next year. If anybody would like to attend these then please contact Jane or me for future dates. Always a good opportunity for some frank Q&A too...

We held the Departmental Leadership Team (DLT) meeting for all managers. Again we took stock of where we are, the major corporate issues that we need to engage with as well as an update from all the service directors. The ICT team also gave us a presentation on the new Lync2010 and Sharepoint2010 systems. We’re using SharePoint now to manage all of our projects and programmes in real time on the system. It works brilliantly and if you haven’t seen it please contact Karen Perrett’s team for more information and a demo.

I have been using Lync2010 now for 24hrs and it’s already made a big impression on me. It’s great for instant messaging and video calling so will be a key enabler to underpin new ways of working in the refurbished buildings that we occupy. Please familiarise yourself with this system and start using it. If you’re a team leader or manager it’s important that we demonstrate visible leadership by using this technology to show case how it enables flexible, lower cost working by eliminating some travel.

Cabinet made their decision yesterday about the senior management restructure. Two of the five senior posts will be deleted – the CEO post and one corporate director. This will put Wiltshire Council at the leading edge of local government organisations in terms of its leadership model. We’re been at the leading edge of so much recently so this is a real plus in my opinion (LGR, Community Area Boards, Political Team of the Year, our work on systems thinking, work place transformation, campuses, the list goes on...).

Well done to the property and legal teams who have delivered seven community asset transfers (CATs) up to the end of September. This is great progress and shows that we’re delivering on our objectives to transfer assets to our communities quickly.

Finally we had a good session at Cabinet Liaison yesterday afternoon. We got through a lot of business and planned key objectives over the coming weeks and months. The team is working very well together and we’re right on track to deliver our business and financial plans.

For daily updates, opinion and discussion you can follow me on Twitter, @drcarltonbrand.

Talk again next week.

Carlton

Friday 30 September

This week has been packed! On Monday we held our Autumn Team Day for all staff in the department. We use these twice yearly events to review where we are including what we’ve achieved and learned together; assess the issues we face at the moment, and describe and agree the priorities for the next six months. There has been a lot going on in the organisation over the past few months so it was important to get the the whole team together. We try to inject a little fun into the presentations and exercises as well as addressing the business issues that it is important to discuss. Everybody seemed to enjoy the day and we have had some really positive feedback from staff on the importance of these events.

Wednesday was the Audit Committee where members approved the final accounts for 2010-11. These were unqualified and finance also had to comply with the new international standards for accounting reporting. They have done a fantastic job achieving these outcomes this year. Well done to the team.

On Thursday, Cabinet and CLT met with their counterparts from Buckinghamshire CC. The purpose was to exchange information and views on what we’re both doing and to pick up ideas from each other in terms of how we might develop our thinking and delivery in different ways. The Bucks transformation programme is very similar to ours and I was interested to hear how they are using SAP to automate their performance appraisal process on line for all employees. The Bucks way of commissioning their economic development work from a board comprising many private sector business partners was innovative too. We’ll be exploring how we might achieve some of the benefits that they are seeing from this approach.

Also published this week is the report to Cabinet on the senior management restructure. Cabinet will make a decision on this next week, October 6. This is well worth a read and can be found at the link below. I think this is an excellent report; innovative, bold and deliverable in my opinion and sets us up very well for the next few years as we deliver our business plan together.

Thanks for reading and we’ll catch up again next week.

For daily updates, views and opinions, you can now follow me on Twitter, @drcarltonbrand

Have a good weekend in the sun.

Carlton

Here we are on Friday again and this week has been excellent. It’s always good to finish the week on a high.

The DTR team met for half a day yesterday to define how we will balance our budget next year and deliver the £5million reduction that we need to contribute to the overall corporate position and investment in front line services. We now have a plan for how we will achieve this and the service directors and I are working on the implications for our customers, communities, the business, politicians and of course our reputation. I am so pleased that we have retained our services in house and are able to do this – redirecting spend into our priorities and front line services. If we had contracted these services out, or if we were in a shared service arrangement, then these savings at these levels would be unavailable to our communities and the rest of the business.

I chaired the Shaping the Future Board earlier in the week where we reviewed the work on our new values and behaviours. This is a great piece of work and will help us to change the culture of the organisation over time in line with the aspirations described in our Business Plan. There has been a huge amount of staff engagement in developing this and I thank you all for getting involved and for setting out the behaviours that will help make Wiltshire Council a really great place to work in. This will be rolled out and communicated progressively through the autumn but will also feature as part of our team away day on Monday.

I spent some time coaching and mentoring two young managers in the team this week. I love this aspect of my job – developing others, and frankly it is the most important part of any senior leaders role. Growing managers and leaders is something that great organisations do and I would encourage others to make the time to do this. The return on investment is massive!

Finally, we have our autumn team day on Monday in Devizes. This is a chance for the whole team to get together; to review where we are, what’s happening, to celebrate successes and talk about our objectives for the next six months. Always enjoyable and challenging, I look forward to seeing you all on Monday. Sharpen your pencils for those tricky questions...

For daily updates, comment and opinion on all sorts of things, you can follow me on Twitter, @drcarltonbrand.

Have a good weekend and speak again next week.
Carlton

16 September 2011

Well who was it that said a week is a long time in politics – Harold Wilson I think. He was right! It’s been a busy couple of weeks in Wiltshire since we last spoke.

We’ve been working hard on preparing the key elements of next year’s budget – Michael is leading this and has set out clearly what is expected from each service area in terms of savings next year. The council’s 4-year Financial Plan clearly sets out the need for us to save £36 million next year. For Resources and Transformation this means we’re now generating ideas and proposals to evaluate over the next few weeks to enable us to balance our budget for 2012-13. More detail on this over the next few weeks.

I attended the Resources Select Committee yesterday, at Monkton Park, where they were scrutinising the Transformation Programme. I presented a paper and current status of our work which then led to an hour of questions and answers about the detail. Always a robust affair, it was great as it challenged our thinking and will help in developing how we can better achieve our objectives.

Whilst at Monkton Park yesterday, I visited the Elections team. We’re in the middle of the annual canvass at the moment so the whole team were very busy. I also has a quick look at the proposed new parliamentary boundaries. Some big changes in Wiltshire which could move from 5 constituencies to 4.5 – sharing one with North Dorset. Controversial stuff. All comments have to be back to the Electoral Commission by early December.

CLT has met a number of times over the last week. The team is working very well together and driving the organisation forward to deliver the political priorities, policies and actions determined by our elected members in the business Plan. The Extended Leadership Team – including all the Service Directors – met this week also to ensure we were all focused on delivering the objectives that we have agreed and we all agreed that whilst it may be unsettling for some as the organisation decides on its future leadership model, it is business as usual. The Leader of the Council, Jane Scott also attended this session and led a full discussion about our priorities and work over the next few weeks and months and reiterated the need now to deliver the plans we have in place . This was very well received by all attendees.

I’ve got the “Twitter bug”. If you would like more regular blog updates, usually daily and in only 140 characters, you can now follow me on Twitter - @drcarltonbrand. How’s that for good value!

Talk again in a week or so...

Carlton

Wednesday 31 August

Hi all, so here we are on the last day of August. I hope you all enjoyed your holidays and have returned safely. For those of you still to go, have fun.

For some reason I always have a slightly apprehensive feeling at the beginning of a new term. The holidays are over and I know we have to get our heads down to some serious work between now and Christmas. I thought that I would update you on where we are as a team and also some of the key events and tasks that we face over the autumn “term”.

Performance in the team is good. All of our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are where we would expect them to be with no surprises or areas falling short against the plan we had at the beginning of the year. Our budget status is also on target including the savings that we committed to as part of the 11-12 budget – some £4.2 m of savings. I’d like to thank you all for your hard work in achieving both of these elements of performance.

The transformation of ICT is also on track. As those of you in the service will know, we’re coming to the end of the post in-source redesign and restructure over the coming few weeks. This has been an unsettling time for some so it will be good to get back to some degree of certainty as we move forward together. The team are still delivering superior performance and have reduced expenditure by £2m this year. No mean achievement!

Our ambitious transformation programme is running at pace. The business cases for the first three campus (Salisbury, Corsham and Melksham) are being finalised for Cabinet approval later in the autumn; our systems thinking work now extends to at least eight major service areas and is identifying some big opportunities to do things better and with less cost; our ten year asset management plan outlining all our capital expenditure is under development to input into the budget process later this year; we have big staff engagement events planned for the November-January time frame where we want to get out to all 4,500 staff affected by the transformation programme to explain what’s happening, why and what impact the changes will have on our teams and staff; our “shaping the future” work is coming to the point where staff themselves have developed the values and behaviours they expect for all of us moving forward. This will underpin our work on culture development moving forward. Finally you will have seen the building work on County Hall progressing with speed. The first staff will move back into the new part of the building this time next year. These building works save is a significant amount of cost year on year by enabling more people to be located in the building which allows others buildings to be sold. Thanks to all those involved in what is one of the biggest local government transformation programmes in the UK.

Coming up over the next period we have a couple of significant events. Our next Team Day is on 26 September so please put this in the diary. It will be good to get the whole team together to talk about what we’re doing, how it’s going and the challenges we face over the next six months. The other big task of course is setting the 11-12 budget. My best estimate at the moment is that we as a team will need to find further savings of approximately £4.5m next year. This will be a challenge but I know we have the right people to achieve this.

Finally, please feel free to call me or email me or invite me to your team meetings if you wish to talk about any of this, or indeed anything else. I always welcome and appreciate the direct approach...

Talk again in a week or so.

Carlton

Friday 19 August

Hello all. Just to make you smile and think on a Friday afternoon I thought that I would share with you some of my favourite quotes. There are messages within these that I try to use every day as a person, manager and leader. I hope you enjoy them.

• If I had eight hours to chop down a tree I’d spend six hours sharpening my axe. Abraham Lincoln


• Everybody wants to talk, few want to think, and nobody wants to listen. Anonymous


• Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. Steve Jobs


• Madness is valid reasoning from flawed assumptions. John Locke


• The role of the leader is to inspire, enable and support - and then ensure they don't get in the way. Prateous


• In order to win, there should be no fear of losing. Anonymous


• Fortune favours the prepared mind. Louis Pasteur


• There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity. Douglas McArthur


• All good things that exist are the fruits of originality. John Stuart Mill


• Surround yourself with good people, even if they are better than you. David Pretty (my team are certainly better than me!)


• It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. Charles Darwin


• Lead and inspire people. Don’t try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed but people need to be led. Ross Perot


• In times of rapid change, experience is your worst enemy. John Paul Getty


• Many organisations disregard the facts and act instead on belief, ideology and casual benchmarking. Jeffrey Pfeffer


• We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Albert Einstein


• Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. Peter Drucker
  

Talk again in a week or so.

Carlton

Friday 5 August 2011

Hi all - back from my holidays in Devon which were warm and sunny. Whilst laying on my sun bed and de-stressing I thought about those important behaviours that enable people to keep calm and avoid stressing out staff and alienating people. Be good to hear your views on how we do against these criteria:

1. Don't sweat your assets. If you pile tasks on the best staff and let weaker ones do less, star employees get irritated and quit, leaving you with a mediocre team.


2. If you value them, set them free. It is madness to appoint people then second-guess their every decision. Give staff autonomy or they will move to somebody who does.


3. Smooth running wheels still need oil (I'm still an engineer at heart). Don't spend all your time on problem staff. If you fail to support good people, they won't support you.


4. Don't tell tales. If somebody speaks to you in confidence, don't betray them.


5. Avoid muddying the waters. Give your staff a remit and let them deliver on it. Failing to brief properly leads to muddled projects and low morale.


6. If it works, don't fix it. Be careful before you change a system. You need a very good reason to justify altering a process everyone understands.

Paul Collyer would be proud of these - they're based on the Health and Safety Executive's six stress risk factors.

Talk again in a week or so. If you're off on your hols, have a great time and keep safe.

Carlton

Wednesday 13 July 2011

I’m off on my holidays in a couple of days time so this will be my last blog for a couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to a week at home with the boys, fishing and watching / playing cricket and then we’re jet-setting off to Devon for a week. As I lay on my sun bed in the drizzle, I often like to reflect on the principles by which I strive to live, work, manage and lead, so I thought I’d share these with you today. These are originally from Tony Schwartz, slightly adapted by me and I find them a great guide, especially when things get tough.

1. Always challenge certainty, especially your own. When you think you're undeniably right, ask yourself "What might I be missing here?" If we could truly work it all out, what else would there be left to do?

2. Excellence is an unrelenting struggle, but it's also the surest route to enduring satisfaction. Getting there requires practicing deliberately, delaying gratification, and forever challenging your current comfort zone.

3. Emotions are contagious, so it pays to know what you're feeling. Think of the best boss you ever had. How did he or she make you feel? That's the way you want to make others feel.

4. When in doubt, ask yourself, "How would I behave here at my best?" We know instinctively what it means to do the right thing, even when we're inclined to do the opposite. If you find it impossible, in a challenging moment, to envision how you'd behave at your best, try imagining how someone you admire would respond.

5. If you do what you love, the money may or may not follow, but you'll love what you do. It's magical thinking to assume you'll be rewarded with riches for following your heart. What it will give you is a richer life. If material riches don't follow, and you decide they're important, there's always time for Plan B.

6. You need less than you think you do. All your life, you've been led to believe that more is better, and that whatever you have isn't enough. It's a prescription for disappointment. Instead ask yourself this: How much of what you already have truly adds value in your life? What could you do without?

7. Accept yourself exactly as you are but never stop trying to learn and grow. One without the other just doesn't work. The first, by itself, leads to complacency, the second to self-flagellation. The paradoxical trick is to embrace these opposites, using self-acceptance as an antidote to fear and as a cushion in the face of setbacks.

8. Meaning isn't something you discover, it's something you create, one step at a time. Meaning is derived from finding a way to express your unique skills and passion in the service of something larger than yourself. Figuring out how best to contribute is a lifelong challenge, reborn every day.

9. You can't change what you don't notice and not noticing won't make it go away. Each of us has an infinite capacity for self-deception. To avoid pain, we rationalize, minimize, deny, and go numb. The antidote is the willingness to look at yourself with unsparing honesty, and to hold yourself accountable to the person you want to be.

10. When in doubt, take responsibility. It's called being an adult.

Speak again in a couple of weeks.

Carlton

Thursday 30 June 2011

It’s been a week of travelling around the county for me meeting teams in the department. On Tuesday I was in Salisbury – Milford Street with the customer services team and then Bourne Hill with the registrars and a number of other teams. Today was Shurnhold with the transformation and rroperty teams and then over to the East Wing with the payroll team in shared services. I always enjoy these opportunities to talk with staff face to face about the challenges we face and how we’re going to meet them. I always learn something new about how we can improve the effectiveness of our business.

The Salisbury team had numerous ideas for improving things in the face to face contact centre. Ideas about capacity, queuing, improvements to the Civica payment systems as well as ideas around improving communications internally with other services. I’ve shared these with my management team and we’ll work on these together. I was struck with the positive “can do” attitude of everybody I met. Thank you for this.

At Shurnhold it was good to see the police integrated with the transformation team. We are working closely together to develop our campus and hub proposals to include facilities to share between both organisations. More on this anon...

The payroll team wanted to know more about the new transformation and resources team, and we worked together to explore some of the business challenges ahead that we face, particularly from a shared services payroll perspective. We then discussed some of the issues emerging from the staff survey and planned how we might engage staff to address these together.

If you would like me to visit your team for chat about anything then please do get in touch and I’ll come along.

Thanks for reading and speak again soon.
Carlton

14 June 2011

I want to talk about work today – or more specifically how much of it we have to do in our teams. We’re a high performing team – because of all of you – and as with all high performing teams we can always analyse our current situation and learn together to improve things.

Our working lives in local government generally and specifically for us at Wiltshire Council are tough for all at the moment. We have less people in our teams and the work to be done remains largely the same. This means fewer people are having to work harder to meet our business objectives. The result of this is that we’re getting tired and we’re struggling sometimes to meet our customers' needs. I want to acknowledge that this is a fact of life – right across the public sector – and ask you to talk about this in your teams. Be open, acknowledge this and don’t hide or ignore it.

Whilst we work at this level of intensity, we will make the occasional mistake. I would ask you all to tell us when it goes wrong and we’ll support you to address the issue and ensure we minimise it happening again.

Unfortunately this trend is going to continue. The speed of change in the public sector is a reality and I think it will, and needs to increase. We have to find new and innovative ways of delivering increased value for our customers in more cost-effective ways. The way to thrive (and survive) in this new world of change is to embrace it and seek to influence it by engaging with it and driving it ourselves. This means all of us, not just managers and leaders.

The first step on this journey is to be honest about how work is at the moment; how we feel about it and start to discuss what we might do to make it work better for all of us. We need your ideas to improve things; what could we do better? What could we stop doing because it adds little or no value? How might we do something differently to achieve the objectives we seek?. It would be good at this point to also reflect on the results of the staff survey. What actions do we need to put in place in response to the survey to make our work better for our staff and therefore more effective for our customers? I encourage you to be bold and innovative here – let your imaginations run...

Please discuss these questions with your colleagues; take them into your team meetings and come up with a list of ten things, however small, that would improve the way your work works for you and your customers.

Please share these ideas with me and your Service Directors so that we can focus on helping to implement them quickly. That way we’ll thrive as a team...

Thanks for reading.

Carlton

Good morning everybody on this bright and sunny day. I’m looking forward to going to see the first day of the second test against Sri Lanka tomorrow at Lords, although I haven’t quite recovered from our victory on Monday at Cardiff. Exciting times for us cricket lovers...

I visited Google at their central London Office on Tuesday. I wanted so see some of their latest office applications in practice and discuss the opportunities that technology like this could offer us in Wiltshire. The latest generation of email and applications such as spreadsheets and word processors can all be based on the web which means we don’t have to pay for expensive software on every personal computer. The opportunities for us are huge. If we adopted such technology, we could dramatically reduce the costs of ICT provision to the organisation – freeing up money for use on other front line priorities in the Business Plan. Watch this space...

Today I met with the managers of our new team – Transformation & Resources at our monthly Departmental Leadership Team (DLT) Meeting. I took the team through the set up and management planning arrangements for the new team. We covered the following areas for the new team: purpose, vision, objectives, people, structure, governance, budget, methods and models and communications. I have asked that managers to share this information with you and discuss it in your team meetings. This is important because I want all our staff to have the opportunity to shape this moving forward. If you want me to come along to your team meetings to share this with you then please just ask.

The biggest challenge we face as a new team is to explore the alternative delivery models that we might pursue in the future. This is more complex than the traditional in-house or out-source alternatives. The government are keen that we look at other models based around social enterprise principles such as mutual’s (for example, the John Lewis Partnership which is not owned by shareholders, but is owned by its employees). We will be getting into these and other options over the coming months to evaluate the potential benefits or otherwise for the citizens of Wiltshire.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week.
Carlton

Friday 20 May 2011

I hope you will have seen the communication on the Electric Wire today outlining some changes of roles and responsibilities of senior management. These are designed to ensure we maximise delivery of our ambitious Business Plan over the next two years. The key changes are as follows:

• The two statutory officers, legal and finance (incl. procurement) together with their teams are moving from resources to work to the chief executive. This creates capacity for:

• A new team leading on all corporate programmes and transformation, specifically our work on systems thinking and Campuses And Operational Development (CAOD), all asset management and technology. The new team, called transformation and resources comes into effect immediately. It will have three service directors: business services (shared services, customer services, ICT and property); HR & OD; and transformation (programmes, systems thinking, CAOD, asset management, technology)
• Housing will transfer to community services to maximise the opportunities and synergies with adult care
• Performance will be combined with policy and partnerships to ensure we integrate these roles and will move to Carolyn Godfrey.

These changes are important and will ensure we are focused on delivering the key elements of the Business Plan. Business transformation through people, systems and organisation is my passion, so these changes are very exciting for me personally. I’m looking forward to getting stuck into this agenda over the coming years.

The new leadership team has already had a number of planning sessions with our Cabinet and portfolio holders to agree the set up of the new team, objectives, and how we will run the programmes and activities. Service directors will share these plans with you all over the coming weeks. The important aspect to communicate now is that we shall run a single, co-ordinated transformation programme. This will ensure all activity is joined up and focused on the key political objectives in the Business Plan.

The new programme office will have a key role. We have well over 300 projects and programmes underway across the organisation at present and these need to be brought together in a coherent way to ensure we maximise success, minimise risk and ensure a return on our investment. This is an exciting time for the authority as we strive to improve outcomes for customers across the organisation. A co-ordinated programme will enable us to achieve this in a way which reduces duplication and maximises outcomes.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week.

Carlton

Thursday 5 May

First off my apologies for not blogging for a while. I took the opportunity to take some time off between Easter and this week. I waited for my invitation to the wedding but it never came so I spent a whole day watching it on telly with the family. And tremendous it was too.

This week has been dominated by the AV referendum for me. I am performing my usual duties as deputy returning officer (counting officer for a referendum) so it’s been a week of planning, checking, rehearsing and getting ready for a very late night tonight and a long day tomorrow. In my patch we will be taking in 87 ballot boxes tonight. These will be sorted ahead of an early start tomorrow when we will start the verification (counting the number of ballot papers in each box against the number of votes cast) before we start the count for real tomorrow afternoon at 4pm. It should be a fun couple of days...

I chaired the Procurement Programme Board yesterday. We’re making excellent progress towards meeting our Business Plan financial targets. We set ourselves a first year target of saving £9 million and to date we have opportunity assessments totalling nearly £13 million. We’re now firmly in the delivery phase to ensure we get the cash in month-by-month to support our budget position.

Thanks for reading and we’ll talk again next week.
Carlton

Friday 15 April

Hello all. At our recent team day, we had so many questions that I only had time to answer about 75% of them. I promised answers to the others in my blog so here we go. Thanks for reading and speak again next week. Carlton

1. Why haven’t we got a Financial Director on CLT? It makes like extra hard for us finance bods.

The Finance Director has sat on CLT for the last six months, along with the Solicitor to the Council, HR Director and Communications Director. 2. Why do we need to go through the service desk to get added / removed from email meeting lists? What a waste of their time. Let us do it ourselves!

Good point. This is being changed to make the owner of the list the person who can change the list rather that ICT.

3. By Blocking facebook and other entertainment websites at work – it is like saying do you don’t trust all of your staff to be responsible. Please respond to this accusation.

Accusations shouldn’t be part of our culture or behaviour. We blocked Facebook and other social networking sites purely because their use by staff was slowing down other critical applications such as Carefirst. This is because our ICT infrastructure has insufficient bandwidth to cope with the download demand. As soon as this infrastructure is upgraded as part of the Work Place Transformation programme, we will reinstate use of these sites. For the record, I am a big supporter of social media and their use in the business for sharing information and communication in general. I don’t see their use as entertainment at work however!

4. IT – 1/ received new laptop – none of the applications ‘ programmes were installed (taken a while to sort) 2/ new phones / windows 7 onsite training would be good support

Thanks and if you could speak with Karen Perrett she will investigate and rectify. We have issued over 700 new laptops and the vast majority have had no issues so it would be good to learn from this example to improve the service.

5. Staff are not coping well with the uncertainty of their future and the changes that are happening. What is being done to help cope with the stress they are experiencing (aside from the coping with uncertain times workshops)

I recognise that some but not all staff are struggling to cope with this and I think I addressed it fully in my opening speech. As well as the two HR workshops, which I encourage people to attend, I urge everybody to keep an eye out for their colleagues – help each other and support each other and above all discuss your concerns within your teams and with your managers. If there are questions or rumours that you have please let me know and I can answer them for you.

6. Can something be done to stop disproportionate working at home on Fridays?

Team leaders and managers are responsible for agreeing with staff if and when they can work from home and also specifying work objectives to be met. This should be balanced across the working week to ensure service continuity, access and communication is optimised. The question seems to infer that when some people work from home they are unavailable to contact. This should never be the case. When working from home, calls should be able to be put through as if that person was in the office. 7. As there is no training budget how can personnel progress in their working career? Plus if staff cannot progress won’t they leave?

There is a full departmental training budget and this is an area that we have not cut as part of the budget challenges we face. Individuals will have developed their own learning and development plans in discussion with their managers as part of their appraisals and these should be used to identify specific training requirements which can then be actioned. 8. Is it true that to raise extra funds for Wiltshire council Barry is being sponsored to run the London marathon (backwards)?

Not as far as I am aware, but that’s a great idea. 9. In view of recent redundancies with more to come it is evident that managers left do not have the necessary guidance or experience to manage and lead their teams. What plans are there to ensure managers are ‘fit to manage’? This is a bit of a sweeping statement – we have some fine and talented managers and leaders across the organisation. For all managers we have the “Management Matters” suite of training and development modules to support their ongoing development and expertise in this area.

10. At a time when many are being made redundant, why do Wiltshire council allow others to get paid but not work full time and also break ‘the rules’ into the bargain?

As a good employer we offer flexible working patterns and part-time working patterns to suit the business needs of the council and individual staff. We are legally obliged to offer such schemes under employment and equalities law. We don’t knowingly allow anybody to break the rules so if you have a specific example in mind please contact your manager or Service Director to raise the issue.

11. A question about the increased workloads to staff by restructuring and redundancies, also lack of skills and experience of staff left to continue the work, leading to increased pressures and stress.

This is a real issue and one for teams and their managers to discuss openly and then address. Workload and staff capacity need to be balanced to ensure levels of pressure on individuals remain manageable and healthy. I would also encourage teams to review their work and processes to simplify and improve what they do. I still see some things happening and ask myself “why do we do that or why don’t we do it in a better or simpler way” This is an opportunity to challenge what we do and the way we do it to tackle the point raised in this question.

12. Now that the reality of redundancies may have hit home to the ostriches, have the unions been re-approached about altering terms and conditions?

The unions and the organisation are engaged in an ongoing dialogue around all staff terms and conditions. Up to this point the unions have been unwilling to consider any changes to staff terms and condition to make budget savings.

13. Re county hall change – was it not a PR disaster with the amount of perfectly good chairs / desks / cupboards thrown into skips – could it not have gone to a charity or be used somewhere else?

There was a lot of spin around this as you might expect when the press are involved. The vast majority of furniture was old, broken in some way and generally not fit for purpose. Such furniture was scrapped. Some other furniture in better shape was passed to other individuals and organisations.

14. “Employees are not entitled to take ‘smoking breaks’ during normal working hours. Employees may smoke in their own lunch breaks . . . . . . .”Can you please advise why this non-productive ‘pastime’ is allowed to continue. If we all went outside 4 or 5 times a day a lot less work would be done?

A tricky question to answer. Some smokers need our help to give up – and some don’t - rather than punishment and attack. Our HR policies in this area are clear and should be followed.

15. If domestic recycling is so important, how come business is not? My local pub, who pay high business rates, would have to pay extra for a glass recycling bin (so they don’t) Their bottles – lots – go into general waste

An interesting question. I shall talk to my friends in the waste service and see what the experts say.

16. Senior managers / corporate team are not as visible as you seem to think. Perhaps an area for improvement?

I definitely agree. All managers need to be more visible. I’d like to engage staff to see what they mean by visibility though. Speaking personally, I don’t have an office, I sit open plan and I spend less that 10% of the week sitting at my desk. At all other times I’m out and about with the teams and the 1100 staff who work in our team. I still feel somewhat invisible though and I’m sure others agree. So I’d like to understand what staff mean by visible leadership, and then we can work together to try and deliver that.

Monday 4 April 2011

The Leader of the Council, Cllr Jane Scott and Andrew Kerr, CEO have outlined the major elements of the Business Plan for the next four years; investing in key front line services; protecting services for our communities and the vulnerable and making savings to fund both of these activities. Our team has a key role to play in delivering all aspects of this vision. As we set off on the next phase of our journey, I want to share with you my new mission for our team. This mission statement is very important to me as the leader of this team, and I want to explain to you all what it means to me. The reason that it is important is that I hear a lot of poorly thought out assumptions being made about what others call “back office” services. I hate that phrase as for me it makes us sound like a second rate service that adds little value to our communities and citizens. The fact of the matter is that we are as much part of the front line as any other service – the front line would grind to a halt without us – just see what happens when the ICT goes down at a leisure centre. I don’t want this poor thinking, based in flimsy evidence to dictate what happens to this team or our council over the next few years. If I look at those public sector organisations that are struggling at the moment, they tend to be those that have believed some of the direction and incentives from central government, the private sector and the numerous audit bodies and who have outsourced, or shared or separated support services from other work. Our systems thinking work shows that this is often a road to poorer service and higher costs. The in-sourcing of ICT is evidence that outsourcing doesn’t always work. That’s why this mission is important to me. Some of this comes from my head and some from my heart. Either way our task over the next few years is to deliver it. There are three parts, and the words in red are key for me: DOR Mission 1. Our team is recognised as the best Resources team across all sectors. 2. Everything we do is focused on our customers. We are high performing, low cost and we use Systems Thinking to continuously learn and improve our work – developing innovative and creative solutions. Our management are highly visible and skilled in leading our teams and supporting the organisation to shape and deliver their services. We communicate openly and well, throughout the organisation. We enjoy our work and create a culture where we have fun together and deliver success. Over the next few weeks, I would like you to meet in your teams and discuss it. Ask yourself some key questions: What does it mean to your team? How will you fulfil these objectives? What do your customers want – both internal and external? How will you know who is the best? How will you become the best? Your service directors and heads of service will be developing this with you over the next few weeks so that each service is clear about how this mission will be delivered for the people of Wiltshire by our team. Thanks for reading and talk again next week.

Carlton

Monday 4 April 2011

The Leader of the Council, Cllr Jane Scott and Andrew Kerr, CEO have outlined the major elements of the Business Plan for the next four years; investing in key front line services; protecting services for our communities and the vulnerable and making savings to fund both of these activities. Our team has a key role to play in delivering all aspects of this vision. As we set off on the next phase of our journey, I want to share with you my new mission for our team. This mission statement is very important to me as the leader of this team, and I want to explain to you all what it means to me. The reason that it is important is that I hear a lot of poorly thought out assumptions being made about what others call “back office” services. I hate that phrase as for me it makes us sound like a second rate service that adds little value to our communities and citizens. The fact of the matter is that we are as much part of the front line as any other service – the front line would grind to a halt without us – just see what happens when the ICT goes own at a leisure centre. I don’t want this poor thinking, based in flimsy evidence to dictate what happens to this team or our council over the next few years. If I look at those public sector organisations that are struggling at the moment, they tend to be those that have believed some of the direction and incentives from central government, the private sector and the numerous audit bodies and who have outsourced, or shared or separated support services from other work. Our systems thinking work shows that this is often a road to poorer service and higher costs. The in-sourcing of ICT is evidence that outsourcing doesn’t always work. That’s why this mission is important to me. Some of this comes from my head and some from my heart. Either way our task over the next few years is to deliver it. There are three parts, and the words in red are key for me: Department of Resources (DOR) mission Our team is recognised as the best DOR team across all sectors. Everything we do is focused on our customers. We are high performing, low cost and we use Systems Thinking to continuously learn and improve our work – developing innovative and creative solutions. Our management are highly visible and skilled in leading our teams and supporting the organisation to shape and deliver their services. We communicate openly and well, throughout the organisation. We enjoy our work and create a culture where we have fun together and deliver success. Over the next few weeks, I would like you to meet in your teams and discuss it. Ask yourself some key questions: What does it mean to your team? How will you fulfil these objectives? What do your customers want – both internal and external? How will you know who is the best? How will you become the best? Your Service Directors and Heads of Service will be developing this with you over the next few weeks so that each service is clear about how this mission will be delivered for the people of Wiltshire by our team. Thanks for reading and talk again next week. Carlton

Tuesday 29 March 2011

First off my apologies for missing my blog for the last two Fridays. I was in London last Friday with six other unitary directors doing some learning around our respective budgets and business plan situations. The week before that I was in Exeter undergoing my election training ahead of the Alternative Vote Referendum being held on May 5. Busy times... Today I was at Urchfont all day with Cabinet and the other members of CLT. We spent our time together planning the detail of how we will deliver the Business Plan: the transformation programmes emerging as well as the investment programmes to be delivered. Once we had defined those programmes we then identified the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that we will use to measure our progress and the overall end results. This was challenging as we have to develop KPIs that measure the results experienced by our communities and citizens AND relevant internal measures ensuring progress within the organisation. Once these discussions are finished over the next few weeks, I’ll share these plans with you so that you all know how we will be managing this work. We have our spring team day on Friday of this week. I’m preparing my speech, which I always find a little nerve racking. It’s worth remembering the ten ways to present with panache (and confidence). These are borrowed from this months’ Management Today and annotated with my comments and thoughts: 1. Know your audience (yes all 1100 of them) 2. Keep slides to a minimum (I have 2. But I might ditch one of them... ) 3. Make eye contact (important but scary) 4. Stick to the point (no waffling) 5. Keep it brief (always) 6. Think about tone 7. Share your own experience (tell your own stories) 8. Vary the pace 9. Remember: practice makes perfect 10. Relax – but not too much Oh god please let me remember at least three of these on Friday! I look forward to seeing as many of you as can make it. Talk again next week. I shall Blog on Friday as I am taking next week off on holiday. Plenty of fishing methinks. Carlton

Friday 11 March

As we reach the end of the financial year, I thought I would share with you some of the achievements and highlights that you as a team have delivered this year. I want to thank you personally for your effort, tenacity and resolve in delivering such a formidable set of achievements for our customers during what is a tricky year for people like us who work in the public sector.

This year has been a year of delivery, performance improvement and cost reduction for the department after the successful launch of Wiltshire Council and the Business Management Programme the previous year.

The Workplace Transformation Programme has delivered Bourne Hill on time and below budget; the new library in Pewsey was opened; a new facility for young people and adults with learning difficulties was opened; 500 staff were relocated to Shurnhold in Melksham and we delivered plans for two new children's homes in the county. We have also become the first council in the country to take over a PFI (Private Finance Initiative) deal from the private sector, saving our taxpayers over £400,000 per year.

Information Communication Technology underpins the operation of the whole council and all of its 350 plus services. We in-sourced this service from the private sector to deliver improved performance for our customers (the first time fix rate is up from 30% to 60%) and reduce our costs by over £2 million. Work continues to develop the service for the needs of a 21st century organisation as evidenced by the roll out of 700 new Windows enabled laptops for front line staff to work flexibly to better serve our customers.

Our housing benefits service underwent external inspection by the Audit Commission. It showed a fair performing service with promising prospects for improvement - equal to the best of the new unitary councils created in 2009. We implement a single all-new benefits system later this year to further improve the service.

Our website has recently been externally audited. It has improved from 2 to 3 star and is now in the top 25% of council sites in the country. We also lauched HR Direct, our successful new web portal for first point of contact to the HR service.

Our work behind the scenes on better procurement - a fundamental part of our new Business Plan - is starting to deliver. First year savings of up to £11 million have been identified and these are now being re-procured to deliver the cost reduction required in our 2011-12 budget.

Improvement work using Systems Thinking methodology from the private sector manufacuting industry continues to drive up performance and reduce cost. Customer Services demand (our customers contacting the council) has been reduced by 30% as we identify and eliminate avoidable contact.

We received a clean bill of health from our external auditors for the accounts for the first year of the new council.

Just a selection of our success this year. Thanks for reading and talk again next week.

Carlton

Friday 4 March

I'm still a little gloomy today after England's ODI defeat by Ireland in the World Cup this week. I guess I'll get over it...

This week CLT met with Cabinet for a full day to discuss and agree how we will deliver the newly approved Business Plan. There are some fifty plus programmes and projects in the plan which we need to think about in three ways I think; transformation (change), transitional and transactional. CLT will need to focus on the transformational change elements - maybe ten programmes whilst departments develop their plans to deliver the latter sets.

On top of these programmes, there are some 17 ICT projets underway at the moment. These are essentail as we enable the services and the wider organisation to meet their business objectives. These projects break down into the following categories: infrastructure (ensuring our network and PCs are state of the art and able to run our latest applications); Applications (the desk programmes you all use to underpin your role and services); information management (our data and it's findability - if that's a word, it's lifecycle and who has access to it) and SAP development. All of these projects and the wider development of ICT will be captured in the Technology Plan which is due to be agreed at CLT in early April.

The next DOR Team Day is almost upon us again - 1 April. I'd like to encourage as many of you as possible to sign up please. We will be communicating the key elements of the Business Plan and its impact on DOR staff over the next few ears, as well as presenting the results of the staff survey and how you can all get involved with developing the actions that will come out of that survey. Finance will be presenting the change underway in their service too. It should be a good session for the whole team.

Thanks for reading and speak again next week.

Carlton

24 February 2011

I'm writing a day earlier than usual as I'm taking a day off tomorrow for half term with the boys. I've been getting my fishing tackle ready recently for the warmer weather so who knows - tomorrow might be the day!

On Tuesday the council set its budget for 2011-12. It was a marathon debate, lasting nearly seven hours (council actually lasted over twelve hours with all the other items on the agenda). I'm pleased to say that the business plan and budget were both approved without amendment. I want to encourage all staff to read the business plan. It's very readable and gives a very clear direction of travel for the organisation and how it will fulfil its vision and objectives over the the next four years. We're certainly in for a lot of change, but I think this is a good thing and means that we will be ready for everthing that we have to deal with. No 'head in the sand' or 'wait until it arrives' for us. We're ready.

My thoughts on the business plan and budget were reinforced on Wednesday. I spent the day in Birmingham chairing a round table event with other Directors of Resources and Business Transformation Directors. I don't do a lot of this so it was good to meet up with people who face similar challenges to our own and to be able to discuss and explore how we're all approaching common themes. For me it was a good acid test for how well our plans, programmes and actions on the ground stand up to other high performing organisations. I concluded that they stood up well, although there is always room for learning and improvement. Which is what we'll be doing...

Today I spent part of the morning in Salisbury at Bourne Hill. I met with the revenues and benefits teams, some planners and staff from registration. It was good to see them operating in the new building with their new ICT kit. I'm jealous that I'm not based there. The contrast with the East Wing was striking when I got back and went over to payroll. It served to remind me how important the refurbishment of County Hall is and how important it is to deliver that programme on time.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week.

Carlton

Thursday 17 February

A very short blog today as I’m out on holiday tomorrow for the day. I wanted to thank all those of you who have completed the staff survey so far. In DOR, we have had a return of 74% which is very impressive. This is split as follows:
· Finance 49%
· SST 68%
· HR & OD 100%
· ICT and Business Transformation 75%
· Legal & Democratic 60%

The closing date is tomorrow and I want to encourage those that haven’t yet taken part to please do so. This is your opportunity to give us feedback on all sorts of aspects of our organisation. We can then use this feedback to learn and continuously improve the way we lead and manage the business over the coming year.

Thanks for reading and speak again next week.

Carlton

Friday 11 February 2011

Yesterday we had the first formal part of the budget process relating to the 2011-12 budget. Scrutiny reviewed the draft Business Plan and Financial Plan including the budget proposals for the next financial year. Key proposals in the budget are to reduce service budgets by an average of 12% next year. In Resources we have gone beyond this and our effective budget could be reduced by 15% if members approve the package on February 22 at Council. This will have an impact on the number of staff we employ, so I thought that I would use my blog this week to reiterate the message that Andrew gave yesterday about the timing and process that we will use to consult with staff on these proposals.

The 90 day formal consultation for the redundancies needed to deliver these savings will start week commencing 28 February 2011.

During this week collective consultation meetings with staff identified as being at risk of redundancy will take place.
The trade unions have been made aware of these arrangements and are being consulted at a department level in advance of these meetings taking place.
Managers responsible for managing this redundancy process and consultation will be briefed on the process next week. Letters inviting staff affected to collective consultation meetings will be given to managers at that briefing. If you are one of those members of staff who has been identified as “at risk” of redundancy you will receive a letter by the end of next week.
The letter will outline the reason your post, and therefore you, have been identified as “at risk” of redundancy. In advance of this, it may be useful to run through how the selection pool of “at risk” positions will be determined: -
· The redundancy policy includes a two stage approach to redundancy - voluntary and compulsory. This gives us the opportunity to seek a voluntary solution to redundancy. Volunteers will be sought from a selection pool of staff placed at risk of redundancy that is wider than those whose posts are deleted from structures.
· The posts that will be placed in the selection pool will include those that are;
o Deleted from new structures, or reduced to a lower number within those structures, or;
o Posts that have substantially changed as a result of other elements of the restructure – for example the addition or deletion of duties, or;
o Posts within the affected service area which are a grade above or below any post which is likely to be removed or substantially changed.
· These posts are included because if the post holder's volunteer for redundancy these posts may provide suitable alternative employment for an employee whose post has been deleted.
Those staff identified as being at risk of redundancy will be invited to attend a collective consultation meeting during week commencing 28 February. Details of the meeting will be included in the letter which will be handed out next week. At the meeting structure charts will be available. You will only be able to attend this meeting if you have been invited, or if you are the department union representative.

For those staff at risk of redundancy they will have the opportunity to attend an individual consultation meeting with their service director, or head of service. Any feedback they may have, including alternative suggestions to deliver equivalent savings, can be given at those meetings.

If you want to make comments, or make alternative suggestions about the proposed changes to structures - feedback will need to be provided by no later than 18 March 2011, to enable any changes to the structure charts to be made and consulted upon meaningfully within the consultation process timelines.

Whilst this news may cause concern, I am not anticipating significant numbers of redundancies. The vacancy management policy that has been in place since June 2010 means that a number of vacancies have been held and can now be deleted to deliver some of the savings needed.

You will be aware of the numbers of redundancies taking place in other large local authorities, which in many cases are in excess of 1,000, and in some cases 2,000. We are not in the same position - careful planning and the ability to deliver savings in other areas means we are better placed to meet the financial pressures we face. This means the number of redundancies that may be needed will be significantly lower than those planned in other local authorities.

Carlton

Friday 4 January 2011

Morning all – February already which means the cricket season is nearly here. I wish. Shame about our ODI performance down under though. I spent Christmas sledging my Auntie who lives down under, I guess it’s her turn now.

I’ve just completed the staff survey on line. You may well ask why we are bothering to survey staff in the middle of budget cuts and at a time when we are asking for volunteers to take redundancy? I believe that this is absolutely the right time to survey staff. We need to understand what’s going well, what’s not and how we can work together as a team to improve the latter. I shan’t be waving my magic wand when we get the results in a few weeks, but I do promise that we will work together to address the issues arising. Could you all please take the survey today – it’s on our intranet. While you’re there, take a look at HR Direct also – it’s a great, cutting edge web-based service that stands up to anything I’ve seen elsewhere.

On Tuesday, I had the privilege of visiting South Tyneside Council. I spent the day with their Corporate Leadership Team discussing new and innovative approaches to the issues we face jointly; better procurement and being more commercially minded, using Systems Thinking to improve service performance whilst reducing cost and some of the wider issues around management and leadership during tough times. It was great to spend time with like-minded and passionate colleagues who are trying to make a real difference to their community. Just like Wiltshire.

Finally for this week, here’s something for all you team leaders, supervisors, and managers to consider. Ten ways to reinvigorate your team on a wet and windy February morning:

1. Listen to them
2. Be honest and transparent
3. Tell good-news stories
4. Engage staff in decision making
5. Set ambitious targets...
6. ... but make sure they’re achievable
7. Give rewards for a job well done...
8. ... and hold bad performers to account
9. Take the team to the pub
10. Think glass half full

Thanks for reading and speak again next week.

Carlton

Friday 28 January

Another very busy week as we strive to finalise the budget and business plan which are due to be published early next week. I was in Browfort all day on Tuesday; initially at Cabinet and then at an extended Cabinet-Liaison meeting working on the budget and business plan detail. We are still receiving significant new information and changes in grant assumptions from central government which are difficult to assess this late in the process and cause delay and uncertainty. The Finance teams are doing a great job coping with these.

The ICT team continue to improve the performance of the new in-sourced service. Our first time fix rate has steadily improved again this week and I am pleased to announce that the team have been jointly awarded “Team of the Month” in our staff awards as a result of their incredible performance. This is well deserved and I would like to thank the whole team for all of their hard work and commitment to delivering such a great performance. I would also like to thank our customers who have been so helpful through such a tricky period of change for the team.

I have been interviewing for the Finance Heads of Service this week with Michael Hudson and others. I always enjoy these as it is probably the most important part of the leadership role, although I’m sure the candidates wouldn’t agree! Well done to the successful managers; Caroline Bee - Head of Procurement & Finance, Andy Brown - Head of Finance and Matthew Tiller - Chief Accountant. Now the difficult work starts...

We have agreed the date and broad content for our next Resources Team Day. The date is April 1 and we will hold it again in Devizes (no jokes about the date please – I did try and change it but the venue and some speakers couldn’t be co-ordinated). We’ll focus on the outcomes of the budget and business plans and what this means for DOR over the next few years. Please put the date in your diaries now.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week.
Carlton

Friday 21 January

This is the first full week of running our complete ICT service end-to-end and I must say we’re quietly pleased with the way the first seven days have gone. Our first-time fix rate (how many calls we can fix at the first point of contact from our customers) is well above the level that Steria handed over to us on January 13. I spent some time at Bradley Road on Monday with the team, and it’s fair to say they’ve done a brilliant job. It will take us some time for the service to settle down and I thank our customers for their patience over those calls that do take us some time to fix or if the line is engaged when they call. We’re still learning about how many people we need on the helpdesk at peak times.

Yesterday I attended the Resources Scrutiny Select Committee with around 12 elected members. There were two major items on the agenda; a review of where we are with our HR plans especially the status of the management review and a series of presentations on our procurement work, especially the status of the £9 million we plan to save in 2011-12. Both reviews went well with some robust questioning and scrutiny from all sides.

Talking about HR, our new HR Direct web facility will be going live on January 31. I had the opportunity to review and test the new site in the test environment yesterday and I have to say it looks brilliant; very easy to use and intuitive too. When I see functionality like this it reminds me that some areas of Wiltshire Council really are becoming cutting edge in our industry. Well done to all involved.

England have just bowled out Australia for 230 in the second ODI, so fingers crossed for the next four hours!

Thanks for reading and talk again next week.
Carlton

Friday 14 January 2011

Hi everybody and a Happy New Year to you all. I hope you had a good break over the Christmas period and I also hope that you can still remember it! 2011 seems to have started with all the pace that 2010 finished.

It’s been a momentous week this week for the team. At 12.01 this morning, we took our ICT contract back in house and so from today the whole of the ICT service is delivered by the Wiltshire team. I’d like to thank the forty or so people who pulled an “all-nighter” last night to ensure this happened on time, and as smoothly as possible. Performance reports that I have so far received are all positive, but I would ask you for your patience as and when some of the bugs do occur while we sort these out. This programme has been technically very difficult, including an enormous amount of knowledge transfer required as our team have had to learn so much about parts of the system that we haven’t delivered for well over ten years. Well done to the whole ICT team – great job.

The second momentous event of the week has been the take-over of the Monkton Park PFI building. This is an innovative first in local government where I believe that we are the first local authority to take over a PFI deal. This has been delivered by property, legal and workplace transformation colleagues including much negotiation with the banks over the Christmas period to pull it off. This deal gives us complete control of the building and importantly saves us around £300,000 per year – money that our elected members can now re-focus to their front line service priorities.

Finally for this week, work on the 11-12 budget continues apace. The final budget will be published in the next couple of weeks so we’re now into the minutiae of detail around specific proposals and how these are presented. I’m pleased to say that we’re just about balanced. Well done to the finance team. This week and next week we are consulting the public and businesses on their budget priorities so that these can be reflected in the final submission. More on this next week.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week