S2, E8 (Week 01, TSLT blog 03)

Happy New Year everyone! It’s been a quiet-ish first week back with some colleague not quite back in the (remote or physical) office yet. In our conversations and catch-ups over the week it’s been clear that 2024 is going to be a busy year!

Welcome to our first blog of the 2024! We hope that you had a fantastic break over the Christmas holiday and that you’ve returning recharged, refreshed, and revitalised!

This week has been about:

• Objectives setting We are talking about our goals for 2024, and have started thinking about objectives for ourselves and with our teams.
• Firewall replacement project We are all set to replace our on-premises firewalls in County Hall and Goodman House this weekend.
• Network There’s been a lot going on around our network: we’ve had our regular NGN portfolio board, met with DUCL to review the recent audit findings and progress service improvement actions, and Rafik Allana (the new Network Programme Manager) has started with us.
• Enterprise service management (ESM) The project timelines remain challenging, and it’s been great to see colleagues working well together to continue preparations and work.
• Strategic risk review We had a good session with Chris Hewitt reviewing the Strategic Risks that we escalate to CLT, one relating to cyber and the other to disaster recovery. We’ve revised the risk wording and control measures for the cyber risk which will need to be agreed by CLT. We’ll be meeting with colleagues more widely on the disaster recovery risk.

Looking to next week our focus and priorities are going to be:

• Network Programme today (5 January) is the response deadline to our procurement notice for a consultant partner to provide expert input and support to our new Network Service procurement. Members of the evaluation panel will be setting time aside to evaluate responses over the coming days.
• Oracle Next week we are meeting with HR and Finance colleagues to review and agree a consolidated response to internal audit findings. We are also expecting to meet with Oracle to discuss strategic opportunities and how they can better support ECC.
• Wider TSLT The wider TS leadership team monthly meeting is on Monday where WTSLT will be discussing the case for change and meeting as GRC (governance, risk, and control).
• All TS meeting We are looking forward to and preparing for our meeting on 18 January 😊
• Recruitment preparing for some interim recruitment to support roadmap activities.

Welcome back, we hope you settle back into the rhythm of things quickly (it can be hard after the Christmas break!) and are really looking forward to catching up face-to-face in a couple of weeks!