Tuesday 15 May 2012

Next week we celebrate the Olympic torch coming into Wiltshire for the first time – Tuesday 22nd and 23rd. It returns later in July. This is a great opportunity for us to celebrate and I would like to encourage you all to get out of the office and watch the torch and other celebrations in our communities – they will be with us for only a short time, at some locations for less than 15 minutes so please feel free to all join in. Times and locations will be shared by our Communications team later this week. We also need volunteers to help marshal these events, so could I thank those of you that have already volunteered and encourage more of you to get involved next week – we need all the help we can get please.



Last Friday I spent the day at our Parsonage Way depot with the highways and street scene team. The team have implemented a radical redesign of their service using systems thinking principles. The bottom line is that the team have improved their already impressive performance by almost 100% whist delivering significant revenue savings back to our communities. The day was so impressive, with a team that really understood their customer purpose, characteristics of demand and flow of work through the system. It was capped off with great community engagement, especially with the Parish Councils.


We have over 200 people now trained in this method and we need to develop this approach and encourage our service teams to experiment and deliver continuous improvement for our customers. There is a lot of national debate about the future role of public service in times of national austerity. I feel this misses the point. We need to be in the business of delivering what our customers, citizens, clients, users and communities need whilst improving performance and reducing cost. Let’s focus on doing that together...


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Thanks for reading - talk again in a week or so.




Carlton