2020 09 18 — weeknotes

2.35 — where has that year gone

I cannot believe where that year has gone. This week saw the anniversary of me joining Hounslow and what a year!

First off this week…

This week was the first back after being off last week, sitting in a field in Devon, in the campervan with a lemonade or two. Monday was very much in at the deep end! It saw the Borough Recovery Conference that was attended by Councillors, MPs, partners and colleagues — I ‘volunteered’ to be the host of the session and to drive things on the day, was a mammoth undertaking in a relatively short period of time to get sorted! It was a huge team effort to get it finalised and apart from a video that was really trying to derail things for me, the whole thing went really well.

The video worked better at the end of the conference and it was a great way to close the session, seeing the way the community and the council responded to the pandemic was nothing short of amazing — heartwarming to see it all come together. If you want to have a look at the video you can see it here. I enjoyed and very much needed the beer I had that evening. I was told after the event, that I looked cool calm and collected — which certainly what I wasn’t feeling on the day.

It was also one of the first times that I really missed the pre-covid world. At the debrief after someone said, well if this was the real world we’d be celebrating the success in the pub right now — a screen of faces wasn’t the same.

We had a number of meetings this week on moving our outcomes based reviews forwards, this has been a mammoth piece of working linking up the outcomes, reviewing the various projects, one Hounslow programme of work and getting it to a place of being able to delivery a range of things moving forwards — really exciting!

Have also spent a bit of time this week preparing for the Socitm Share National event next week — we have some great speakers and some amazing panel sessions over the theme of ethical use of emerging technologies and data — have a look and sign up here: https://socitm.net/events/share-national-london/

We were going to have an afternoon this week with the management team to have a face to face meeting but the new rule of 6 put paid to that, given that there are 7 of us!

Thursday was the September Digital Strategy Board. We gave an overview of all the things going on, starting with the priority projects, then to start to think about the next 12 months. Lots going on!

Friday was the next All Member workshop for LOTI — have to admit that I have gotten a bit behind on engaging with them on the various projects and ensuring that we are engaged at Hounslow. So was great to be in the LOTI zone where I was able to get things back up to speed, making sure we have the right people going to the Digital Inclusion and Assistive Technology — going to be some great sessions on these topics over the next few weeks.

Well what a year!

I really can’t work out whether it feels like it has flown past or whether it feels like this should be the 10 year anniversary.

When I stop and reflect on the last year, I am really proud of what I and the team have achieved in this time. Putting the response to Covid to one side for the moment — we are changing the way we are doing things at Hounslow. We have launched our Hounslow.Digital blog site — which is the front end of a massive change in the way we are working, genuinely working in the open.

We have co-designed and published a Digital Strategy for the Council, which was approved by Cabinet after 6 months of me being there.

We have started to bring the IT team together on a journey to being a genuine Digital team, we got everyone together back in November last year at the Hounslow Arts Centre and we started to work as a team as to what was frustrating them, how we needed to be different moving forwards and have turned that into our reshaping exercise.

We have started the reshaping of the team, adopting the new Council values and ways of working including, Agile and Service Design embedded in everything we do. The reshaping will give us the additional resources that we need to deliver against the Digital strategy, we have rewritten all the job descriptions to make them more meaningful, relevant and maybe even fun.

We have created a governance structure for Technology that works and is starting to get stuff done- my favourite quote on this was that the new ways of doing things was a breath of fresh air!

We are taking a number of steps to #fixtheplumbing — changed passwords that needed changing every 5 minutes to one that doesn’t expire — and actually improves the security. The device refresh project continues to gather momentum and improves the experience that staff has.

We continue to build upon the expertise and skills in the team and the move to Hounslow House and the massive amount of work that took place to achieve that.

We have progressed a number of key projects for the upgrade / change of legacy systems. Several of these have been hanging around for years and we are starting to unlock some of these and gently move forwards, but we are doing them the right way, introducing service design and user research where we can. Loads to do!

I have been voted in as a Socitm Vice President and hosting a national conference on the Ethics of emerging technologies and data!

Then the pandemic! Wow — what a response. We were the first of the council departments to be sent to work at home, and here we stay. We supported staff to work at home, ensuring that the infrastructure worked and staff were given the technology and support they needed.

We launched a community hub to provide services to the vulnerable in the community — we had 22.5k people on the shielding list at that time and getting the infrastructure and processes set up for that was huge.

We have run Council meetings totally remotely and supported Councillors in being able to do so.

I have found myself chairing / MC’ing a number of Council events starting with the Hounslow Leadership Group Meetings, then the conference. I’ve almost starting to enjoy these although my stress levels don’t get any lower!

We have achieved so much but this really is the tip of the iceberg, I will have certainly forgotten a huge number of key achievements, there is so much that we have to do, that I want to do, that we will do as we emerge from the pandemic as a different but stronger team.

Tune of the week: Heather Small — Proud (Video)