2020 04 09 Weeknotes
2.14 — the one trying to balance everything and some homemade chocolate chip cookies
One of the things we have been very aware of over the past month is to ensure that we have the capacity, resilience and reliability, in the infrastructure, to meet the way that the organisation is currently working. The number of people working at home is higher than it’s ever been and our ways of working have fundamentally changed from a month ago.
- Calls to the service desk have doubled over the last month and calls are taking longer to resolve
- Use of Teams has increased by over 330%
- Use of Skype has increased by over 200%
We have launched new ways of supporting staff during this time as well. We have a Virtual Pod session for Q&A with staff and undertaken a number of Live Pod training sessions as well. A number of areas of staff in the Council has been redeployed into other roles, often from roles that had limited IT involvement — which adds another layer of complexity. So far it’s all gone very well and the organisation is appearing to be adjusting to the new ways of working. Certainly the technology and the team are at the centre of supporting this. We even got a ‘shout out’ of thanks, during Niall’s Live Broadcast this week. Over 500 staff attended his live Q&A session, which should have run for 30 minutes but due to the success and the number of questions continued for nearly an hour. Great to see him using new ways of working at this time.
Again a lot of focus this week has been on the continued refinement of the Community Hub. For me at least it has taken up the majority of the time in discussing progress and the future of the hub. On reading our colleague updates from Niall we have delivered food packages to over 600 people — so actually making a difference to the lives of Hounslow’s residents. I feel really proud that the team are such an integral part of the team.
We went fully live with our Amazon telephony system this week as well for our Hub, this will give us the greater capacity and visability of the calls into the Council for the Hub. Read more about that on Hounslow.Digital.
As well as all the things we have been doing for the hub and the Council’s response to Coronavirus, we have started to review our projects and programmes (and our approach to them) in advance of the next Digital Strategy Board which is next week. We have been reviewing all the projects that are under the Digital Strategy, grouping those similar projects together in wider programmes, starting to try to understand the resources and funding needed to deliver and so on. I will be presenting a version of this on Tuesday and we’ll share wider on Hounslow.Digital. Certainly our list of projects hasn’t had a lot of TLC over the past couple of years it feels. I don’t mean that we haven’t done projects, far from it, lots in fact — the biggest being the move into the new Council Offices. But the various projects were not prioritised, not linked to corporate plan, not joined up — so this piece of work has been invaluable for moving the Council forwards.
For me it isn’t the ‘what the projects are’ that is important, it’s ‘how we do them’. We had started a piece of work to get the number of projects down as it was seen to be out of control (it was). It’s not the numbers its ensuring we are adopting the right approach. We are starting to work in more agile ways and the main projects we have currently we have agreed that we will be doing a digital service design in approach, this will ensure that we absolutely ensure that we put our community at the centre of what we are doing. More important now than ever.
This balance of trying to ensure that we are responding appropriately to the pandemic, keeping the lights on and trying to ensure that we are moving the council forwards is certainly been a challenging one. The Digital Strategy was approved a couple of weeks ago and we have been trying to ensure that we are at least doing the thinking and planning for the delivery of the Strategy. But it has certainly been a personal challenge to get this balance right.
As it’s Easter I have tried to switch off this weekend to get a bit of a break, ready for next week. Some chocolate chip cookies and an allotment patch that looks a bit more like an allotment patch now….
Tune of the Week: Definitely feels like a mashup is needed this week… Perfect for a sunny Easter weekend — David Guetta/Sia vs Proclaimers vs Journey — Titanium 500 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmrg1l0gCWA
