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