Week beginning 1 November

A lot of this week was about how much you need to really want something to make it happen. I realised that this week’s note is much easier to write than last week’s poor effort. I’d always prefer to have weeks that are good or bad – never those that just ‘happen’

We managed to haul over the line two things that were complicated and important (a contract issue and an organisational change proposal), and had now become urgent. Rob’s taught me something about diligent unpicking of issues and I’d like to think that I bring the impatience necessary to force an issue. 

I also had an exit interview with Rich where we reflected on how we’d both changed, and how the team has changed, over the three years or so that he’s been in Hackney. The focus that we’ve had over the last 18 months has been necessary and beneficial in many ways but has come at the cost of the audacity of the previous period. I did once wake up on a Saturday morning, design a project and publish a tender for an idea that I had. Now I dream of document migration projects.

We’ve talked about transitioning from start-up to scale-up to try and capture the journey we need to make. But it’s now blindingly obvious to me that, even though most of the team won’t have worked in a start-up, the concept is obvious and the idea exciting. But what on earth is a scale-up, and where’s the benefit of that? It makes more sense as ‘manager needs’ rather than ‘user needs’. There are benefits; in terms of making simple tasks easier, needing fewer conversations and providing more tools to enable teams to focus energies on higher value tasks. But we’ve not explained that or spelt out examples of where we’ve achieved it. (I can be rude about this because the concept was my idea). 

I used the energy from being in the office this week to come up with ideas of how to improve the customer experience. I’ve been wondering what the Hackney version of the Timpson promise might look like. It’s so simple that it would be easy to do ineffectively. But done well it could be a powerful contract between residents, customer services and the wider organisation.

We also did a retrospective on a complex case in order to understand how we could design a more systematic way of identifying emerging problems, earlier. Here to Help is teaching us that there’s a category of problems which aren’t severe enough to justify intervention from any one one service but when we look at all the contact that someone has had with the council we can see a clear case to work together, across our services, to provide early support. 

I was also surprised and delighted by a couple of things the team had done. The facilities team have produced a realtime dashboard showing availability in the service centre, our main building. It’s a tool to help staff feel confident in planning their week. And there was a brilliant post from one of our customer services advisors on their experience of paying council tax to another local authority, with some practical tips for the team on how to ‘be the guide’ and ‘make things simple’ – two of our key behaviours. 

Next week, in fact the next two weeks, are finally feeling ‘lighter’ in terms of diary obligations. I’m hoping to use the extra time to give some real focus to some things that could do with a bit of a push – mostly projects at an early stage that need to get going, and those at a later stage that need to finish well.