Schools out!

Just a quick one this fortnight, and a little later than planned. I'm just on the way out of the door to have a few days leave - so very much in "demob happy" mode. The joys of planning time off around school are very much new to me this year, but I'm excited to have a "dad and lad" road trip planned for the week.

I've said I'm going to focus on doing these updates based around our strategic missions - so I'll try and keep on track for the most part. We're almost over the line with the full detail of our strategy and I've sent the content off to our graphic design wizards to pull something together that's a bit more visually engaging than I can deliver myself. A huge thanks to my SLT colleagues and Kate Whitehead in our comms team for their wise counsel.

Customer

I met with one of our customers early on last week as part of my orientation, which I really enjoyed as it was an opportunity to connect with people that I had worked with directly in the past. It was great to hear some positives about the quality of the core service delivery and how it has improved since we insourced a couple of years ago. There were a couple of "work ons" which I jumped straight on with our work reception team. The data gave us some useful insights and Steven Aulman got in on the act, contributing some really useful stuff that I wouldn't have thought to do. It has helped us pull together a plan for how we will move things forward quickly. The feedback area linked into a workshop we already had planned for next month - but now needs to be moved due to train strikes.

A couple of weeks back I had a couple of days in the road, one day for our monthly face to face SLT and another for our SCW senior leadership forum. I really enjoyed both days, but a highlight was the overview from Laura Tully's clinical services team. I'm amazed how far we have come in this area and the direct impact the team are having on patient care. I also really enjoyed reconnecting with colleagues that I've not seen in real life for a while.

We also got a response on an investment offer we had made to a client which didn't go the way that we hoped it would. We were a bit surprised at the decision but are keen to go back to the drawing board to see if we can find an alternative way forward.

A highlight of this week was receiving an email from a deputy CIO praising the work our team had done for them in recent months. These are always great to receive and I really appreciated the time that had been taken to provide that feedback.

People

A real challenge over the past few weeks had been onboarding some new members of the team who we have brought in via the tier 2 visa scheme. I am so excited for them to join us and start their new life in the UK, but the paperwork that needs to be processed via the BSA has been really frustrating as the information needed is next to impossible to provide for someone who has just entered the country. I think we managed to find a way forward eventually, so I'm hoping that's sorted soon.

At our SLT meetings I fed back the summary from the "grassroots" engagement work that I did. Some key themes came through and prompted some useful debate. I certainly learned a lot from the process and talking through the points at SLT helped me understand different perspectives. Before I went off on leave today, I emailed every person I had met and provided a summary of what came of their feedback. I met quite a few people, so it took a fair bit of time to do, but it's really important that the action from those conversations is clear.

I finished shortlisting for our portfolio director role today. I am really impressed with the standard of the applications and I'm not sure I would get an interview had I applied! I've had some good conversations with people about the role and the effort to have a conversation with me before applying has been very much appreciated. Having now had the shoe in the other foot I see how this is a "must do", so a learning point for me there if I ever end up applying for other roles.

Sustainability

Whilst writing our strategy I was reminded of the great work the team have done on our green plan dashboard - some staggering progress in our mission to reduce in carbon footprint, as well as some great work building an awesome visualisation.

On a more local level, we're working through implications of the ultra-low emissions zone in Bristol which comes in to place fairly soon. We have a few options identified to make sure there is no adverse impact to any individuals within the team when this takes full effect. We have seen this implemented in other cities and we've been able to find a way to make it work, so I'm sure we'll get this one sorted too.

I managed to drag myself away from my desk for a day this week to join an away day with SCC validating our cloud strategy. It was a good day and there was some valuable discussion in the room. We were missing some key stakeholders that we had hoped to get in the room, so we're going to change tact a little. I've already drafted a presentation that I'm going to use internally, based on a few other papers from the architecture team. It is a really simplified overview with very little technical language in there. I'm hoping it's going to grab people's attention and be memorable, even if it does talk about ice cream more than you might expect.

We have also started to look ahead to our business planning cycle for next financial year. Unsurprisingly, this is a task that many of us find challenging - there is a lot of detail to work through in order to get things right and balance the books so we can do our duty and ensure that we continue to be a self funding organisation. Our corporate systems team recently implemented some changes that I'm hoping will make a huge difference to this process. I'm pleased to see the change land as it's something I've been championing for quite a while.