week note 49/8
By: Helen Timms
Tags: Success, Culture Change, Service Design, Change Management, Retrospectives

weeknote #49/8 my reflections from the service design team at Dorset Council

4 things to celebrate!

Wowzer! Last week whizzed by again, with some really positive stuff coming out of it. One success in particular highlighted to senior managers a missed opportunity with regards to staffing — this has now been addressed and I hope the result will provide more support and the sharing of best practice, mentoring and generally create a team spirit which will also assist with a drive to recruit new staff — showing that carers ARE valued and what they do is a valued even more. (*see footnote). This can be attributed to the constant culture change we in the service design team continue to seek out and turn in to another success story.

Another possible opportunity I identified whilst carrying out the Addressing the Digital Divide user research arose from the fact that we don’t capture digital capability of vulnerable residents anywhere and therefore it’s harder to identify them in order to help them access signposting and pathways that will help them in their current situation whether that be social isolation, access to healthcare or simply finding a better household utilities deal. So many equalities if you’re not online.

By intervening early and by supporting people living real lives, in often difficult and chaotic circumstances, we can save money for the Council and feel proud that we’ve helped them achieve their newly founded goals. The result from this is that DCR are looking at including a digital rating in My DCR and it’s on their pipeline for further consideration and inclusion and a feasibility study is being done at high level for the same in Mosaic social care case management system, this will help the council to achieve its target of designing with data too.

The third good thing last week was that the Councillor Register of Interests form is almost ready to launch for Alpha testing and despite the arrival of the new platform, won’t be held up. Talks with senior managers and the DAPTC have been really encouraging, Neil Wedge the DAPTC CEO is really behind the e-form and how that will help all Councillors to be more accountable for this information.

I saw that there could be an opportunity for the Digital Champions to assist here too, so that clerks could direct less tech savvy councillors to get support and learn the skills required to do the job, may even mean more online council meetings longer term which would be good for democracy while we still find a way to operate safely during the pandemic and encouraging councillors to work in an open and transparent way.

I just wanted to add following on from my post in the Digital and Change Team site, in that it was great to see Lisa and Neil being interviewed on Corporate Services Employee Show by Aiden Dunn, I thought they both did brilliantly! Neil made the comment that he was proud to be up there with councils such as Camden, Greenwich and Bristol leading the way by having a team called ‘Service Design’ It’s something I’ve been really aware of since starting in my new role back in January, lots of other council’s don’t and are asking almost daily in Slack about how we go about evidencing the benefits and change the culture to achieve a better way of delivering services that people actually want to use because they are simple, quick, stress free and accessible in the right channels.

* The Reith Lecture with Michael Carney on 2nd December available on BBC Sounds app talked about value and how we assess value both shape our values and constrain our choices. Dr Carney argues that society has come to embody Oscar Wilde’s aphorism; “Knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing”.