Weeknote - WC 26th February 2024 - Three Cs

This week has been mainly driven by three things; consultation, collaboration and cover!

Who did I speak with?

I had the pleasure of catching up with the CTOs from the other 3 CSUs in England this week. With the news of the appointment of a new Managing Director to take accountability for all four organisations, as well as the evolving challenges of the clients we work with, we wanted to have some time together to look at plans and where we can support each other. We're lucky to have built a fantastic relationship, despite having historically been in quite active competition organisationally!

I also spoke with NHSE colleagues as part of our national GP Payments governance meetings. Having benefited from the wonderful support of Deborah, I've not attended these meetings for a while. It was a good opportunity to reflect on the evolution of the relationships as things have changed and what that means for risk and delivery. I'm very pleased with the way things have gone. The fact that this has been achieved whilst NHSE colleagues have been through such a challenging period of consultation is very impressive.

I also enjoyed having some one to ones with our GP Payments team, as part of cover arrangements that have been put in place whilst a member of the team is out of the office. I'm super proud of the way that the team has stepped up to support through this period.

On the theme of support from NHSE, in the past couple of weeks I've really appreciated support from Sam Robinson and the team on some issues with a HSCN provider. The ability for NHSE to leverage some relationships to mitigate the issues that the network provider had managing their own third party relationships was super helpful. I'm sure Sam might think twice about picking up the call next time I ask for a favour though!

What did I enjoy?

Travelling to meet the other CTOs this week gave me a chance to spend some time planning and prioritising whilst on the train. I might make an early start on a Monday for planning part of my routine - it really set me up for the week. Consistency is key, and this is an area where I've not met my own expectations. That has been evidenced by the lack of weeknotes!

The other thing I did since I last weeknoted was provide another session as part of the latest CHCIO cohort of colleagues. The conversation was so much fun and I hope that by talking about the syllabus through the form of my career journey made the content a little lighter. Big thanks to Jan Hoogewerf for giving me the call up once more.

What has been hard?

Colleagues have received outcome letters following our management of change process in the last week. This kind of process is difficult from just about every angle:

• it's unsettling for everyone for the period of consultation whilst things are up in the air
• it's worrying for people when they're notified that they are more directly impacted
• it's demanding for the people in the central teams that have to make the process run as effectively as possible, respond to queries, co-ordinate lots of information from across the organisation
• it's hard for colleagues that have to pick up the additional work that falls out of it, like interviewing for ringfenced competition posts

The positive I have taken away from the circumstances is that I have observed genuine kindness and support between colleagues on a number of occasions. It have really appreciated when colleagues have checked in with me over these past few weeks.

What did I learn?

I learned a huge amount from discussion with my CTO peers, where we ran through target architecture, current challenges and priorities. There is a fair amount of complexity and diversity in what we have at SCW, so thinking about that pan CSU was super insightful - albeit a little terrifying.

I also added a little more again to my knowledge on how to get the most out of your apprenticeship levy - something that's going to get more important for us all as the funding situation gets more challenging next year.