Friday 7 September

Well don’t the weeks just fly by? This week has had a real feel of a new school term about it which I like. Full of energy and ideas. It’s been a week of meeting with and working with lots of elected members which I always enjoy. It’s why I joined local government.


Yesterday I attended the Overview and Scrutiny Management Committee. They revised, discussed and shaped two important pieces of work; our Information Services strategy for the next few years and our quarterly performance assessment for the whole organisation. There are always great questions and suggestions for how we can further develop our approach to the services we provide and the organisation we run. Well done to both officer teams too – IS and the performance teams. Both papers were well received and well scrutinised.

Scrutiny is very important to me personally and to how we run our organisation and make it more effective. We must remember to engage with it early and use the considerable skill and knowledge we have there to shape and develop our policies with our communities and their elected representatives.

Budget scrutiny followed and there we went into great detail about our financial reporting processes and the status of the revenue budget at the end of the first quarter.

Today I am attending the Audit Committee where members will discuss and approve the final accounts for the year 2011-12. We are the first council in the south west to have our accounts ready for approval this year so well done to the finance teams for achieving this. It’s great to see our investment in SAP paying off so well too.

Later today I shall be meeting with a junior member of staff for some coaching. It’s important that we develop and grow the leaders of tomorrow; one of the most important roles for managers I believe. I’d be very interested to hear your views on this and how we do more of it?

For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.

Thanks for reading. Talk again in a week or so.

Carlton