Weeknotes — 2019 10 18
Week 4…
Awkward moment of the week. Bumped into Niall (CEX) and Steve (the Leader) on the top floor of the building and had a chat with them about my first few weeks. Niall happened to mention my weeknotes (luckily in a positive manner!), Leader was interested…. “Have you read my blog?”… moment of awkward silence, resulting in note to self to ensure I read it every week from now on….
So I haven’t gone over the whole back catalogue of his Blogs but I have gone back over the last few weeks. The blogs gives a real insight into the Leader’s (and the Council’s) work and shows the huge range of activities that take place and how closely connected he is to Residents…
Hounslow Leader — Cllr Steve Curran — Blog
Sense of achievement moment of the week… Someone asked me for directions in Hounslow House AND I knew where the room was… I consider that progress….
Monday
I attended the Management team meeting for the Executive Director of Environment, Culture and Customer Services. This was a great opportunity to introduce myself to a number of managers covering such a broad range of services across the Council. We had a good conversation about the opportunities of Digital and agreed to meet one on one with some colleagues. This will be one meeting I will go to again in the future as I got free stuff! A badge to back the bid for Borough of Culture 2021, now wearing with pride!
This was followed by the Digital & IT Management team, where we were using the technology to the max as two of the team were working at home! We discussed a range of issues from planning the live broadcast the CEX is doing next week, through budgets and Brexit preparations to LOTI…
Tuesday
An opportunity today to get all the managers from Digital & IT off site to spend some time together for some getting to know each other, some reflection and some planning. We went to the Hounslow Arts Centre so that we were off site and had some creative space (as lovely as the meeting rooms are in Hounslow House) -as you can see from the photos it really was a creative space!
We did a Retrospective on the last 6 months and went through the victories and challenges that the team have had. Spoke about the opportunities for change across the Council and how Digital & IT can enable them. We also started to plan how we can be more #digital as a team.
We also completed an online Team Health Monitor — by answering a number of questions about how the team was doing with: trust; communication; team working and so on with a thumbs up / sideways / down… I was very impressed with the levels of trust and honesty in the room. This exercise gave us some areas that we need to start to think about as a team.
Thursday
We have a number of external consultants working with the Council to assist with the various changes, transformation projects and so on across the Council through the #1Hounslow Programme — I have had a number of really good conversations with them this week, and really starting to shape my thinking on how we move some of the Digital Transformation forwards across the Council.
Friday
First opportunity to really test the remote working today as working from home, although have managed to work a fair amount on the train on the commute, so if it can cope with 4G and the joys of Southern trains it can deal with Crawley broadband…
In other news I have been trying to find an elusive Orange Twirl but as yet still not managed to find one…. The search continues…
Another random tune of the week — listening to Throwback Thursday recommended playlist on Spotify and Hanson — MMMBop appeared!
I think I better leave it there……
