2020 08 28 Weeknotes
2.33 — the week of speed dating!
A bit delayed this week as I had Friday afternoon off in advance of the Bank Holiday weekend… I know many of you would have been on the edge of your seats 😊…
Started this week with the second of our team coaching sessions with Mary, who has been working with me and my management team. It’s been strange doing something like that remotely, but have to say has worked really well. We have done some team dynamics work using DISC — https://www.discgb.co.uk/everything-disc-workplace. It’s been really interesting to see the similarities and the differences in the team, we are pretty well balanced across the different aspects, which is really positive.
Monday afternoon was another of our OKR sessions with There Be Giants. The week before we all had a nagging doubt that the objectives that we had drafted were not quite right, but couldn’t quite put our finger on why. Barbara and Andy spent some time last week reviewing what we had, reducing / combining from 6 to 3 objectives as well as rewording. We spent some time at the start of the afternoon just updating Lawrence on what we had done. Thanks to him for being able to take what we had done, combine with the previous work, then get us back on track with the next steps and update everything in the time it took us to make a cup of tea! They are now in a much better place to help us move forwards.
Tuesday we also kicked off the Collaboration Programme of work, this is going to include some work on a Google / Microsoft 365 pilot, new telephony system and tools to help the organisation collaborate better, ensuring we have the right customer platform tools and robotic process engineering as well as a range of other projects to make the council more effective and efficient. We had a great brainstorming session to start to define this and turn them into more detailed projects.
I attended a diversity seminar over lunch on Wednesday hosted by Dfrent. It was really interesting to hear the views of the panel including Nadira from Socitm and some really interesting points coming up. I think having a diverse workforce is absolutely essential to create a strong and innovative team, certainly made me think about a number of things as we start to think about recruitment into a number of roles at Hounslow.
Wednesday afternoon we bought the digital and data/performance teams together to talk about the delights of data. The Council has huge aspirations to really maximise the data that we have and use it in much more strategic and innovative ways, safely of course. Getting the insight and intelligence from the data is really important but ensuring that we protect the rights and security of our residents has to be embedded in achieving it. This often creates a tension and the idea was to get the teams together to make sense of some of this and get everyone thinking about the very practical steps that we are going to take over the next few months. It was fantastic, we learnt lots about our colleagues and came away with our themes to progress… Great afternoon…
Thursday was a crazy day! Trying to pull lots together before leave in a week or so, trying to progress as much as possible. Ended up with 14 meetings over the day, lots of them were 30 minute introduction sessions with a range of people. Started at 0800 in the morning and finished just before 1900… I said to colleagues at the end of the day it felt more like I had been speed dating than work…
We published a fantastic update on Hounslow.Digital this week, part of our continued approach to working in the open. We have had a variety of types of posts from technical to cultural but this one I think was really special, the importance of Mental Health. Working is IT is not easy, especially not on a service desk, and especially not during a global pandemic. Nick, our Head of Digital Services, is responsible for the service desk and has done a huge amount of work to support the team’s mental health during this time. He has worked with our organisational development team to run some sessions with MIND as well, these are coming up over the next month. Worth a look at the article he’d wrote: https://t.co/QVf3ozQoLx?amp=1
Tune of the week: Scouting for Girls, She’s so Lovely.. https://youtu.be/7ABNEjPxWEg
