2020 05 29 — Weeknotes
2.21 — the one with the chamber of secrets…
I have been getting back into more of a rhythm over the last couple of weeks which has been good. For obvious reasons the weeknotes have recently been rather short, so this week is playing catch up a bit for the past few as there continues to be lots going on and lots of important progress.
In no particular order…
We had another good — Digital Design Authority this week — the group is there to ensure that we have the right governance in the council for digital projects. But working across the business so everyone has input and not just us. This week we approved some service design for our schools admissions project and to go out for our digital community experience discovery — the aim of this is to help the council ensure that we build a stronger relationship with the community post covid-19 and that we have the tools to be able to do this. Very exciting times ahead. With thanks to Franco for ensuring that we continue to pull this together and make such striking progress. This really is a new way of working for the council and by ensuring that we have the business presenting the business cases we have really got everyone buying into what we are trying to do…
Over the last couple of weeks we have had a number of LOTI meetings. On 19 May we had the all member workshop — really good to hear what has been going on and even during the response phase, councils have been doing so much! I have to say that I have struggled to keep up and ensure that we have been inputting into the programme of work, with everything else going on. Eddie and I had a good catch up a few days after the workshop and pulled together a bit of a plan to ensure we get more than just me being actively engaged in some of the work. Will ensure that we are able to continue to input as a council into the programmes of work.
We had some feedback from an organisation in London that visited the Hounslow.Digital site and saw what we had done for the Hounslow Leadership Group and repeated something similar for one of their workshops — was good to get some feedback — “Just wanted to say thank you for sharing your blog on it — it was extremely useful.”.
We have even had Microsoft directing other Local Authorities to the Hounslow Digital Blog for the way in which we ran the Hounslow Leadership Group last month #proud!
Good to know that people actually are reading it and even better than they are finding it useful. Communications for IT often the last thing to think about but we have started to embed comms as part of our weekly planning meetings to ensure that we are really embedding it across the work we are doing.
As the route to recovery starts, and returning to something approaching normal we have been thinking a lot about what that looks like. Preparing Hounslow House for colleagues coming back to work but ensuring it is done in a safe way. Also to challenge what this looks like and ensuring that we don’t go back to old analogue ways. We had requests for multiple printers in the week to ensure social distancing — but we have to think creatively about these things not just apply old thinking to the current problems or we will create future problems — we have some more time to think about this next week.
I think the stress was getting to the team during one meeting…
Just to add to the fun…We have had a couple of major issues over the last couple of weeks as well — a crisis within a crisis — never good! Wednesday evening, 20 May, the virgin media connection we have failed alongside 1,000 other businesses (apparently)… What made it especially joyous was the fact that our connection didn’t fail over to the back up line. So the website and remote access was unavailable from about 8pm on the Wednesday evening until about 10am the next day when the backup connection was sorted by virgin. The team were amazing and got the website back up and running very quickly Wednesday evening, but not a great evening! Disruption for the start of the day in the middle of everything else.
Once the backup line was up and running we were all ok, virgin didn’t resolve the primary line until 9pm Thursday evening, so not great. Will be picking this up with them over the next couple of weeks. But the team was excellent, and we got lots of positive feedback on the communications we were putting out. It also forced colleagues to start to use office.com a bit more — I’ll consider major outages as part of the migration plan :-)
I was invited to be on a panel on Tuesday for the Hounslow Chamber of Commence (not the Chamber of Secrets — which is what I have called it accidentally on more than one occasion this week). They have been running weekly online seminars for local businesses on a range of topics — which is a great idea to support the local economy. The topic was Cyber Security and doing business online and I was able to give an update on the work of the Council and the Digital Strategy. Was a really good conversation and made some useful contacts that we can start to work with in the Borough.
As is life wasn’t fun enough I have thrown my hat into the ring to be SOCITM’s next Vice President, voting open for another week, so will wait and see but if you are a member of SOCITM please can you take some time out to vote for me. More info the Socitm.net website or you should have received an email.
Enjoy the sunshine!
Tune of the week: Katrina & The Waves — Walking On Sunshine (Official Video) and you know how much I like a remix: Walking on Sunshine (feat. Katty B) (The Factory Team Remix)
