S1 Ep 1: The one where we catch up with what’s going on.
Hi – ICT Operations Manager here, checking in for the first time…Hmmm – I never said I would never write weeknotes 😀 So why am I writing a week-note?
1) Working in the open really does make things better.
2) I really enjoy reading your weeknotes.
3) These notes are going to be our team or even service notes and I’m really proud of the work we’re all doing so:
a) I want to share and shout about the great work that’s going on.
b) I’m keen to create a journal of the work we do.
c) It would be great to share experiences and learnings. I would love to hear about anything that resonates with you, any similar experiences you’ve had or any helpful words of wisdom that will help us recalibrate our thinking 😀.
…And why haven’t I done this before?
1) I don’t have the time?!? Ok, ok, I know that one isn’t going to fly. We have Service Designers, the Web Manager, Business Partners, Service Managers, Councillors and our Chief Exec working in the open – well yep…point taken, and here I am.
2) We do the boring, technical, backstage bit – no razzle, dazzle, glitz and glamour here…Who’s going to be interested in what we’re doing? Well, as I mentioned, “working in the open makes things better”, but I guess we’ll find out if people are interested 😬😬.
Let’s talk Covid – This is a bit of a wild ride isn’t it. One thing I will definitely take from it, is the huge joint effort, with people from every corner of the organisation pulling together. Whether it’s supporting our vulnerable citizens that are shielding, providing tech to children, creating reporting stats for our organisation or facilitating the numerous grants that central government have been provisioning — It has been a huge joint effort and amazing to see.
When reflecting on what has happened and where we are, two things spring to mind. The first is that when there is a clear focus and priority, things happen quickly. I’m a big champion of keeping work in progress to a minimum, which is often very difficult to manage…But, juggling lots of things, generally means lots of things progress, but slowly. Covid gave us the priorities and the workstreams all knew what they were working on was the biggest show in town. This meant things happened at pace.
The second on a more technical level, is that the idea of using patterns and to reuse as much as possible works and has been invaluable. A specific example is in the grants that we’ve paid through the pandemic. We’ve received a lot of really positive feedback around how efficient and simple the process was. A big part of this is due to the talent we have and their hard work to get this up and running as quickly and smoothly as possible. Another side was the fact that we established the process and created a pattern that fed into an existing process, making it a lot quicker to get to market, compared to starting something from scratch. We then also developed this in a way to mean it was expandable and reusable. So, when the next grant was announced and the next, we were simply repeating the pattern and reused what we had.
Collaboration…I’m also a big fan of joining forces and all pulling together – “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. Through the pandemic we’ve also been working with Barnsley and Huntingdon council’s on the Alpha phase of the Income Management System, supported by the MHCLG (https://localgovims.digital). It follows on from the work we’ve been doing with gov.uk Pay (hang on a minute – GaaP? Reuse of a commodity type service? There’s a theme building here 🤔). This is an amazing project to be part of and I’m passionate that it paves the way, along with the Drupal project (and I’m sure others), for similar projects to follow. The ethos continues the theme around patterns and reuse, just on a bigger scale, sharing and reusing something throughout local government and the public sector, rather than just within a single organisation. I’ll write more about this in future, but have a look at what we’ve done so far – it’s great 😀.
Meanwhile…Even with the pandemic and everything it has thrown our way, we’ve still been putting a huge amount of work into rationalising and consolidating our infrastructure and technical footprint. In forming a unitary authority and combining district, borough and county councils, we inherited all of their individual ways of doing things: processes, bank accounts, software, IT data centres and so much more. Consolidation and rationalisation is a key factor in capitalising on the economy of scale that being a unitary authority brings us. This is really complex, but we’ve already done so much…We’ve consolidated our finance applications, migrated to the corporate bank account and harmonised a number of processes in parallel. There’s a number of projects in flight, migrating to single instances of various applications across all of our diverse services, pulling together the data and removing the costs and overheads of having multiple systems running in different domains.
The project to migrate all employees to a single council domain is also well underway. Teams with a mix of people coming from the different legacy councils can really struggle with things being disjointed, so it’s been super important to progress this as quickly as possible. Again, really complicated stuff, and again, the team have been awesome 🤩.
