2020 02 14 — Weeknotes
2.6 — the one with Valentine’s Day :-)
Another hectic week but one in which we are really moving forwards…
Monday, met with our economic regeneration manager, also manages the Councils bid process for external funding. Regeneration and town centre planning doesn’t sound like it has a lot to do with digital but it really does, or at least could. We have done a lot in the past with them in bids for fibre connectivity with TfL and the West London Alliance but there is soooo much more we can do. Was a great meeting, and one that we can start to do much more together.
Part of the Digital Strategy is about skills and the community, together with engaging with businesses and regeneration. I met with some colleagues from GSK over a coffee in their very impressive street in their HQ on the Great West Road. The contact was made through Google and was good to chat to them about a what we are doing and what we want to do in Hounslow. The size and scale of their business is clearly different to the Council but there were some significant overlaps with challenges, approaches and some of the core technology. But, especially as some of them were residents as well, a real passion to want to help in the local community. Certainly a lot to think about with them but I hope that we are able to harness some of these skills and ambition in the future.
A back to back day of meetings on Wednesday, I always have mixed views of days like today, it’s good that we get so much scheduled in but not having any time to stop between meetings isn’t good.
We had our first all Digital & IT staff Show and Tell on Wednesday — with a theme of where we are with the strategy. Was really well attended (in person and virtually) and some great questions. Something we are going to do every other week in the future.
The One Hounslow sponsorship Board was on Wednesday. I had 15 minutes to go through the update and present the digital Strategy. There will be a strict time limit they said… We need a Countdown timer I joked back…. Imagine my horror when I got to the room and they presented the bloody Countdown timer. And they used it… Together with the do.do.do.do dah dah dah dah…. Was a really good session and lots of interest, support and challenge for the strategy.
Also met with SOCITM on Wednesday and went through the benefits that we get with our membership, some of which we are using but lots we are not. Will certainly be picking up the learning and development opportunities for staff.
Every other month the top managers in the Council get together for some networking and time together for updates and thinking about how we move things forwards. My first one I attended was in my second week after starting, coincidentally the same time as a major email outage. You can image my delight when Niall made everyone who had just started stand up and introduce themselves! Fast forward three months and part of this session was devoted to digital…. 90 minutes of me running a session with everyone….
Went really well (I think) lots of fun, lots of engagement and lots of creative thinking. Went though some definitions of what we mean by digital, the strategy, the culture and ways of working needed as well as some activities to get the grey matter working over the challenges that we have to face and how we can use digital to solve some of them. Really important to have that vision of the future but the importance of getting the basics right and #FixThePlumbing really came home to me. I presented back some of the results of the Staff Survey and what we are doing about it. I got a round of applause from the Chief Exec when i said we were changing the password policy to make it easier and another from everyone when I said we were making the guest Wi-Fi easier to use!
I think this was an awesome session, really starting to make the Strategy make sense, to be real and getting loads of interest across the Council to do ‘stuff’. Going to be a really interesting few months!
Thursday evening, I went to a Council4.0 event run by Methods, Franco and I went. It was a really good session and focused on the future and the fact that Local Government really needs to think about reforming and major transformation in the internet age. There were three themes: Data; Accessibility and Focus and Leverage… Really interesting sessions. It was also good to catch up with colleagues from Kingston over beer and pizza….
Tune of the week: Lemonheads — Mrs Robinson
