How the hell did it get to 13 weeks working for Dorset? Wow, that flew by. And we’ve actually been living down here a full month now.
Weirdly this week I was stopped while out walking in the street here in TeenyTinyTiddletown and greeted with “are you Neil?” which turned out to be a local twitter follower! Something maybe you’d expect at UKGovCamp (more on that later) but in a village in rural Dorset?!
Lots to cover this week….
This may seem like a trite, throwaway headline but I did want to reflect on my feelings after attending a Council Leadership Team (CLT) meeting this week to talk about web accessibility.
Over the years at other councils I’ve attended many leadership teams of varying quality (one involved the ChExec openly shouting at a Head of Service) but I’ve never been as impressed as I was with Dorset’s.
Firstly the subject; as a team I’ve been in awe of my passionate, dedicated content designers in their approach to pushing web accessibility and also disappointed that the challenges (and attitudes sometimes) have been considerable. So it was brilliant to have the support of the awesome Lisa Trickey and Debs Smart to push this up the ladder to help enlist the support of senior managers.
I’d put together a presentation to accompany a short report, and deliberately included suggestions from the team as well as the full text of an email they’d received from a colleague which illustrated the efforts involved and the culture that still exists in some places that we need to overcome.
Having been through the same process in another council I was prepared for reactions like “it’s too much work”, “where will the money come from” or “we’ll have the lawyers take a look”. What I actually got were insightful and encouraging reactions to the issue and intelligent questions that made me think about my suggested strategy. Not ‘what does the law say’ but ‘we should focus less on compliance and more on helping people’. A recognition that some problems are nationally felt, but that it shouldn’t stop us tackling them.
It was great to go back to the team and not just say we’d been listened to but that they’d understood and agreed with us. That is leadership and great management. I sometimes have to pinch myself that I get to work here.
My team generally likes to throw me a new challenge every day (secretly I love it!) and this week it was how would we make the May elections accessible online? This was a great chance to build on the CLT backing for a new approach and strike up a relationship with a service that tends to default to PDF as a sector, though it was good to see both HTML election notices and results in place for previous years, and use of my beloved Democracy Club’s services.
I did a bit of opinion gathering to see what the Great and Good might be doing, but with limited impact…
Nevertheless, the democratic team responded brilliantly, talking to their supplier and thinking about how we could ensure everything went out as HTML when the time comes. Also, some upgrades from our supplier are expected in March ahead of the May election date. Not a bad start.
A big week for our Customer Platform project as the Digital Avengers Assemble’d to talk through our plans. Big on the agenda for me was a proposal from Placecube on our CMS migration options and a discussion on this. I’d put in a good few hours pulling apart what we currently have and trying to quantify it, and this was nicely reflected in some calculations of how long it might take for each option.
On Thursday I also heard a run-through of our customer service approach and how it would use digital (and the platform capabilities). While there’s still a tendency to focus on the tech a little it was great to see key principles like customer preference and assisted digital showing themselves. It’s going to make lots of sense fitting the platform to this vision rather than starting with the tech and saying “so what shall we do with it?”
I also ran through our CMS requirements list with Placecube to confirm what the priorities were, clarify any questions and downgrade some requirements as either delivered or not important (I’m embracing the new URL structure like a boss). I did some thinking out loud about how we capture location data to help us personalise the user experience, and also how we could adapt the Digital Place Guides to a new webdocs template that uses the best of the GOV.UK and Brighton & Hove’s approaches
Oh GovCamp, how I’ve missed you! And because GovCamp is the people that organise it and take part, what I really mean is I’ve missed the annual get-together of our digital tribe. As the ever-inspiring Annie Heath has been quoted: “our professional body is each other”.
It’s fascinating to me how an event that is all about the people could adapt so well to being remotely delivered. It’s a bit like the difference between photography and the naked eye; some things you can do better with one than the other, but the two are not quite the same.
The ‘better’ includes:
The ‘not quite the same’ includes:
Rather than squeeze it in here I’ll post separately about my ’21 experience and my take-aways. It was funny looking back at my previous post on attending to see what had changed. Did localgov really not have access to Notify back then?
Alongside all this excitement other stuff happened along the way, so here’s a quick list: