S2, E11 (Week 04, TSLT blog 06)

Christmas and its excesses are almost forgotten (I must keep doing my steps and exercises!), and the days feel longer too. More than that, we’ve had a few ☀️ days, dare we start to think about season change?

Highlights and reflections on the week just gone, and key decisions we’ve taken:

• The recruitment process for the 10k Interns has finished and the calibre of candidates was high. We have made offers to 3 graduates who will be spending 6 weeks with us over the summer. For those wanting more information, this is the foundation: link
• The business case to release funds for the platforms for data programme was submitted to the S151 officer and monitoring officer. It will now progress through the internal governance processes before being submitted for Member approval in April 🤞
• We met with ECL colleagues this week to better understand some of the operational challenges that they are facing. It was a very productive meeting and we were able to identify several shared problems that we are already working on — or planning to work on — together.
• The end user device pilot work continues to ramp up, with the first pilot devices scheduled to go out to users in the week starting 5 February. Thanks to everyone across TS who has helped us to overcome hurdles and get to this point.
• TSLT have been agreeing and reaffirming our objectives to the end of the financial year and thinking about the process we’ll be working through shortly to agree and set our objectives for 2024/25. It’s complicated with the Whole Council Transformation programme — and transition state 2 specifically — shaping up.
• Recruitment has taken a chunk of time this week, preparing for and carrying out interviews. We’ve had some strong applications for the interim solutions architect role and are feeling confident!
• Ed met with the shared services board (the Chief Executives, and some directors) from Braintree, Colchester and Epping Forest districts to talk about the work that they’re doing around their shared services and share some of his experiences from shared services in London.
• V1.0 of the technology roadmap will be published in the second week of February, and we are reviewing the work that needs to happen as part of that. The budget forecasts and resource plan are both key elements that we need to sign-off. That’s going to be a focus for the next couple of weeks.

Looking to next week:

• We have some decisions to take around the contact centre project, which is in the final stages of delivery.
• We’ll be exploring options to procure our enterprise service management tool in a way that allows other authorities to use our contract (🤞 that will be possible!).
• We’ll be kicking off the cyber governance and risk management audit with our internal auditors (Mazars).
• We’ll be publishing the slides and questions and answers from our all staff session on 18 January, and hopefully confirming the dates for our co-design sessions.
• Ed will be sharing more open-door slots.

Hope you all have a great weekend 😊