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