2020 10 16 — Weeknotes

2.39 — annual missions launched!!

I attended a number of the sessions at the Solace conference this week, such a wide range of subjects, trying to narrow down what I wanted to attend was difficult, as well as fitting it into the diary. But some amazing and inspiring sessions this week.

We formally launched our Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) this week with the team for the next year. It has certainly been a learning experience getting them to this point, it has made me appreciate just how difficult it is to write a meaningful and engaging objective.

What are OKRs

Objectives and Key Results is the name given to a set of principles and practices which help an organisation achieve its goals.

They help us to be really clear on what matters most.

They then — crucially — help us understand what our contribution needs to be so we can make a difference.

Why are we using them?

We want to use OKRs to help us through this period of significant change and transformation by giving us a very clear and inclusive way of delivering results.

We want to ensure we are all working towards the same shared goals, driven by a strong sense of purpose.

Our Missions for the next 12 months are:

I think this is really exciting way of prioritising and sharing what we are doing, with clear key results against each of the missions and then a set of quarterly missions with clear key results as well. I’ve not included the key results but I think you get the idea of the things that we are trying to do. The key results enable us to monitor our successes.

We have also set up the routines and schedules around the missions to ensure the owners of them are able to drive the change that we need to deliver. All very exciting — and with thanks to There Be Giants that got us here — the challenge will be to continue to have the excitement and drive for all of them.

We are also progressing our team reshaping this week and have a number of posts that we have made available to the team this week to apply for. Feels really good to finally get to this point as it has been a long time getting here — all the role profiles have been rewritten, shape and structure has been updated, budgets have been reviewed, ways of working changing… The final element is to ensure that we have the capacity to deliver all the projects against the Digital Strategy and recovery. We have some interview training next week as well to help colleagues in the process.

I have spent a lot of time this week on the leisure transfer arrangements as well, we have two weeks before officially the council takes over the Leisure services, so as you can imagine there is a lot to do. It will obviously take longer than the two weeks to get the necessary network connections and so on, installed, it but we have interim arrangements that ensure that there is minimum impact to our residents. Lots to do over the next few months.

On Wednesday I watched the LOTI dragons den sessions as part of the DigiLeaders Week and was really impressed to hear the range of projects that colleagues had done as part of the response, certainly took a few things away to have a think about. We then had a session with Eddie and colleagues on the new Data Protection Impact Assessment system — and I think we were all really impressed — so looking forward to exploring this.

Finally, the plans for the Digital Festival are really coming together, aiming to educate, bring people together and even have some fun. We launch this next week across the council. There will be sessions for Digital & IT, the whole council and even into the community of Hounslow. When I have more details I will share!

Tune of the Week: Joel Corry x MNEK — Head & Heart [Official Video]