#Weeknotes S1 Ep5 Communication Breakdown!

Hey #Weeknoters…

So it’s been a quiet week this week therefore this is just going to be a bit of a short update (he says…)

I’ve been slightly stressed out from the beginning of the week because it’s my 11-year-old boys first away trip on holiday, he’s gone to Germany and like any parent or certainly any parent with anxiety and I’ve spent a great deal of my week feeling irrationally fearful of impending doom… but he is there having a good time and enjoying himself so i shall absorb my mad irrational panic by running (a lot), drinking wine (a lot) and being occupied by 2 girls, a wife, 3 dogs, 1 cat, 6 chickens, 3 fish and a job!!!

Trying to pick out three things this week has been a little harder than usual because it’s been quite a mundane week; a lot of BAU, or business as usual as we like to turn it in #localgov. However the world of councils are never too dull so here are three things that have been occupying my working world this week.

One…..As you guys will know if you’ve been reading my blog, the two Greater Cambridge Authorities are currently embedded in bringing together a number of council services and sharing resource etc. and I’m responsible for doing that with the strategy and economy part of the planning services.

After approximately 1 billion years, we are really starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel and this week we are finalising a number of key documents and project management scoping work around beginning the journey of actually implementing the service. This is because we have finally got to the stage where 95% the structural work and legal, HR and contractual issues have been finalised and we can start thinking positively about how we can design a planning service that is really fit for the 21st-century.

I’m under no illusion is that this is a real challenge and even though we’ve been through three years hard graft, this is where the real work actually starts, in aligning our processes both democratically and functionally so we have solid foundations to build a new kind of service from. We have to understand how we can cut out waste and redesign our process around all users whilst developing different skill sets and embedding technology that will help facilitate the redeployment of human resource more effectively and in the areas of greatest need. This is not just from the transactional parts of the service but also how we consult and engage with our resident citizens and stakeholders.

Alongside this there’s many other elements which need to be stripped back and started afresh, building on any good assets and good ways of working; these include budget, finance, timekeeping, resource, capital spend, people planning, profile building, investment and many more.

So at the beginning of my week I did manage to get a chance and sit down and really try and pull together some of the discrete projects that I am either the project director or the project manager for. It was really useful going back over some of my notes that I had began to take more recently, and see how I evolved my thoughts throughout the last six months. I have become better at recording and catching key thoughts when I have them, and actually writing this# weeknotes blog is starting to help me reflect and crystallise my thoughts on a weekly basis about some of the things that are emerging as important.

Two….. Leading on from the programming work was a real focused discussion with some of our policy team around comms and how we begin to evolve how we communicate with our residents and citizens. This started from us looking at the emerging local plan process which I began to talk about in my #weeknotes last week here.

This is so important going forward and I think that many planning departments are still consulting and engaging with residents and citizens in the same way as they would’ve done in the early 2000s (or earlier). This is just not acceptable in 2019, as people access information through a variety of different formats, channels and at times suitable to their own lives. It is critical we begin to think about a wider range of strategies and ways of working in which we can engage more effectively to give us a richer view of meaningful opinions and thoughts from wider representation of our community demographics including much more ‘traditionally’ harder to reach groups. This is key, not only in decision-making but also to help our politicians have a more balanced view of what their communities need.

So we have began to assemble a wider comms team with a bit more diversity and background to discuss some of these challenges and some of the opportunities available. Obvious starting points are to properly begin using digital and social media channels and existing groups in a much more innovative way (not just marcomms).

From an internal comms perspective, we have just brought in Microsoft Office 365 across both of our authorities — now I’m not going to comment on how good or not good this is in the grand scale of #tech but it’s certainly an improvement on what we have been using before and will begin to get people used to using slightly more modern apps and tools in their everyday working life (no mean feat in some departments of local government). One of the key apps that we found really useful so far is Teams — this is very similar to Slack but not quite as good!! However it certainly gets people who are not used to working in this way talking and networking and much more effective way internally, and has really helped the comms team share ideas and knowledge in a more informal and agile way. I began sharing some good examples of best practice here; a starter for ten was in the form of the Talk London website. I think they are really leading the way with this and I’m impressed with the way that Theo Blackwell and Smart London have really embedded digital processes and design thinking into how London engages with its its communities and place shaping especially with the vast complexity of multiple stakeholders local authorities and public sector partners which operate within that geography.

I’ll keep you updated in our own (slightly less ambitious) work progress and stuff is going as we develop our thoughts.

The ‘how we communicate things’ theme has really been a key part of my week, I’m a big advocate of communication in all formats, if you get it right early, it usually saves a lot of problems down the line! We are nowhere near getting some structure around this yet, we’ve been really developing this as a key work area things are beginning to move forward with a little more pace now. Watch this space!

Three…..As you know from last weeks blog we are really trying to get a resource plan in place as we move into the implementation of our shared service. This week I was really pleased to interview a number of our senior planners who wish to step into the role of principal planners.

Career pathway progression is important in any line of work; people like to know how they can start at one point and move their way through an organisation at given opportunities to develop, grow and importantly to gain knowledge and experience. In industries such as planning in local authorities where there a real shortage of skills and resources this is even more important in order few to hang onto your best people. As part of our progress in developing the service we are fully committed to growing our career progression matrix so that it enables fluid movement across all of the disciplines within the planning services.

This is critical in order to try and retain good people in whatever capacity they would have interest working and developing multi disciplinary teams with crosscutting skills.

I am really looking forward to announcing the successful candidates for this current set of roles, and then bringing through some new graduate work experience planners and students below to train up…

In previous experiences, this way of working has been a really good way of changing the mentality of the team and bringing around cultural change in a more organic way as when you have some healthy churn through a team whilst retaining a core of experience and knowledge this has lots of positive benefits.

We have struggled with this in recent times and it really needs to be an urgent priority for us to change in order for us to bring a new culture and way of working to our service.

In other news I managed to get out for three runs this week for the first time in a month… This has been really good as running really helps my mental health and also enables me to have a bit of time just to switch my brain off, help me to feel refreshed, and improve my focus.

As I mentioned earlier I have been reading into some of the work the Mayor of London, Future Cities and FutureGov are doing at the moment as I think they are really progressive in utilising technology and design in their thinking about how they can coordinate the voice of London, especially in shaping their communities.

Pods this week….. Really getting into Adam Buxton; a friend of mine has been trying to get me into him for ages and I’ve tried and listened a few times but not really got it… I’m getting there in enjoying some of his interviews now especially this one this week with Frank Skinner, listen out for the jingles if you wanna bit of irreverence to.

Obviously being a cricket fan this week was a really good week too and always great to smash the Aussies looking forward to the World Cup final.

Reading has been a minimal this week but I will get onto some books probably after August.

Have yourselves a cracking weekend!