5.17 — weeknotes — President’s Conference — shadowing — awards — nearly time for a holiday….
Final preparations being made for President’s conference next week so have had a number of meetings around that. Will of course thank the team next week but a massive team effort to get some amazing speakers, some great sessions, amazing networking and pulling all the logistics together for such an event is an incredible achievement. Almost too late to sign up…but I am sure we can squeeze you in…
Am equally nervous and excited about next week, really want it to be a success with lots of practical take-aways for colleagues. But also know that it will be amazing and over too quickly — we have some great entertainment for the Tuesday evening as well. My other ‘worry’ now is keeping everyone in the building as the weather looks set to be very sunny next week. Luckily the content really is too good to miss!
On Tuesday of this week, I was shadowed for the day by Emily from Civica. She is trying to reconnect and understand the current challenges of Local Government more, so a day shadowing me was suggested by Niall, my CEX. I wanted it to be a genuinely useful day so picked a day that had a number of good meetings! We attended our Senior Leadership Team, RPA Board, Socitm meeting and Digital Delivery Group and well as time to chat, meet people and generally think about what working in local government means.
I have to say, after originally being a bit apprehensive, what if we didn’t have anything to talk about etc… I found the day genuinely rewarding and interesting myself. It was really good to think about the current challenges that we have, to think about the breadth of the work we are doing across the council and how we are impacting the communities. When Emily and I met, I gave a tour of the building and took her up to the 6th floor where you can really see the whole Borough and get a sense of the communities that we serve. Makes the whole thing real!
Attendance at SLT I think gave an insight into the wide range of services, thinking, challenges and the context of working in a political environment, and it also made me reflect that challenges that we have cannot be solved by Local Government itself — we need to operate in a different way with our partners. External shadowing isn’t something I think we have done before at Hounslow but certainly something that I would encourage others to do — and I think the start of working together in a different way as we move forwards. Just wanted to thank Emily for making it such a fun / interesting day…
Wednesday brought the Digital Transformation Team together in Hounslow House for a session on the delivery plan / digital strategy and some of the improvements that we are making in terms of processes and governance — all to make it easier to deliver. A mixture of PowerPoint and some group work and time to think and improve what we have in place. I enjoyed the drawings of Hounslow robots!!
Thursday evening was the LGC Awards dinner and whilst we were not up for any awards it was really nice to be there and reconnect with a few colleagues from across the country that I hadn’t seen for a while and meet new people as well — really enjoyable evening.
Tune of the Week: This popped up on an old playlist earlier this week, not heard for years, but seems totally appropriate — The Presidents of the United States of America — Lump (Version A) (Official HD Music Video)
