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