2020 05 01 — Weeknotes
2.17 — May already — how did that happen?
May here already and probably the fastest week ever in the history — just appears to have flown past!
We started the week with the final of our Amazon data workshops and had a really great interactive session — using virtual post it notes which worked well!! What this showed to me, was that you can hold workshop style sessions all virtually. These sessions have been really interesting, challenging us to think about how we want to use the data in the council and giving us food for thought with the technology that is out there. The final session was a brain dump of all the things we want to do. A few actions coming from this to move it forwards but you can see the amount of things that we are aspiring to do — from fixing the plumbing to changing the way the council works!
This week we had the second of our Digital Design Authority meetings — this is the cross council meeting to implement the Digital Strategy, to govern the decisions for digital and ensure we deliver joined up across the council. We had a number of key business cases being taken to the group for approval. Before those Simon Klee gave a run through of the new portfolio of work for all digital projects in the council. The team have put a lot of work into reviewing the projects and refining ideas into programmes of work.
One of the reasons this group is starting to work is that it isn’t about tech and it isn’t about the digital team, it’s about the community and the outcomes. On Wednesday we had Vicky our AD, Community Enforcement and Regulatory Services, presenting the business case for the changes to Community Enforcement & Regulatory Services — Digital Review, she started the update before handing over to the digital team to talk about the service design, data and next steps — a real team effort and a significant change in approach for the council in digital work.
This new way of working was described to us by colleagues outside of Digital & IT as a “breath of fresh air” — we must be starting to do something right!
I also presented the business case for what we are calling Digital Community Experience. We don’t have a CRM at the moment in Hounslow and what started out a few months ago as thinking whether we need to have one, has turned into something different now. We have seen an amazing community response over the past couple of months and we need to ensure that we empower more of that in the future and make the digital experience streamlined and easy to use.
We have had a number of discussions this week again about the recovery phase, we are still very much in the response phase but it is important for us as a council to be thinking about what happens next. For us this is a really good time to re-imagine the #1Hounslow programme of work for transformation. A lot of the thinking for me this week has been thinking about reviewing and aligning the recovery, digital strategy and 1Hounslow…. Brain definitely starting to hurt…
Had lots of interaction with the team this week, which is good and had our all staff show and tell on Wednesday following the managers meeting on Tuesday — as what is becoming the norm we started with a bit of a quiz!! It is really important to have some ‘normality’ and ‘distraction’ when we get together, whilst not underplaying anything — but important for the team’s collective mental health.
Thursday we had our weekly live Q&A session with the Chief Executive, this week joined by the Leader, Cllr Steve Curran. It was really good to hear the political and community aspects of the pandemic from him. He spoke a lot about the economic impact of all this and particularly as Heathrow is on the doorstep, the impact that this is going to have in the Borough. I was also very pleased that the technology worked for both of them :-).
Tune of the week: You know, by now, I like a mashup, for the current situation this just fits perfectly….. Dua Lipa BBC News Remix by Ben H
