Happy Birthday - Fortnotes - early august 2023

This fortnote title reflects the celebration of my son's birthday, as well as me being 12 months into my CTO role at SCW. Time flies when you're having fun.

Who did I speak with?

I have had a couple of chats with Sally at NHSE in the last couple of weeks. There are a few things we're looking at together:

• benchmarking OLAs/SLAs/KPIs - looking to see how folks are operating and identify common standards. For organisations not getting the funding support they need, this is a great opportunity to justify proper investment.
• Service Desk Best practice - we've arranged a visit for Sally and the team to come and see our service desk, and learn about what we do. The team are super excited about this
• Service Transition - Sally has kindly offered us a peer to peer meeting, so we can learn from the way things are done nationally, as we look to embed service transition more firmly

Internally, Emma, Steve, Simon and I also spoke with the MD and CFO as part of our quarterly directorate performance review. As you would expect, there was some constructive challenge, but there were also some personal highlights:

• We've increased our SLA achievement from 91.8% to 96.9% in the last 12 months. This has coincided with some improvements in reporting and governance changes
• Anecdotal feedback from Rod about the consistency of the service, and how this has improved in recent years - this is thanks to lots of hard work on our teams
• Acknowledgement of the people work we're doing as part of mission 2, which has led to massive improvements across appraisals and statman training. I also had to add that we were the top directorate for responses on the pulse survey - reflecting our collective agreement that we use the survey as a way to improve life at SCW.

Steve and Emma did an excellent job on the day, I'm very glad to have them both on the team.

What did I enjoy?

I met up with Deborah in real life for the first time in a while and we had half a day to review where we are and where we want to be on GP Payments. Deborah has done an incredible job since joining us and I was really plesaed with some of the new ideas she has that we can look to progress. It coincided with our quarterly satisfaction scoring from our NHSE colleagues - with a clean sweep of top marks. I feel really lucky to have such a great team across the whole CSU collab working on this.

We were also asked to respond to a query linked to some of the challenges ambulance services have faced within their supply chain, this was a real team effort and I was pleased that the effort we put in was recognised.

What was hard?

It's fair to say that the reality of the RCA challenge is hitting everyone at the moment, and when life is challenging for our partners it naturally becomes tough for us. We've been doing a lot in the background to make sure we're looking at where we can do our bit, which included a workshop on Monday to ensure we're joined up and have a clear way to prioritise the areas with the most potential.

I also had to be a little more agricultural in how I dealt with one of our suppliers this week. There was a misalignment of what I think is a big strategic risk, and what they thought was an inconvenience. I think we understand each other better now, but I would have preferred not to have needed to re-iterate what our team had already said.

What did I learn?

A couple of papers landed from our Service Delivery team in the past couple of weeks, which were really insightful:

• the first was an analysis of our P1 incident performance, and some of the underlying blockers to getting this to where we want it. Fresh off the back of his SDI award nomination, Matt did a great job presenting his findings and we've agreed to some follow on actions.
• the second was a proposal I'd asked for regarding our "pump prime" approach on our service desk. We do a great job of supporting people to progress from this team, and we want to acknowledge this buy adding some extra capacity into the team so we can support smoother transitions into other areas of the team. We have consistently carried a few vacancies, and the pump prime approach addresses that. Again, the paper was really well considered and didn't leave me opportunity to ask any tricky questions!

Finally, I reviewed a paper that came through to me for early sight on our people mission - Mark had gathered some really useful stuff from people on reward and recognition. There are some things in there we could do quite easily, that could make quite a big difference to people. I'm looking forward to a broader discussion on that, as there are things I wouldn't have thought of.