Weeknotes 21: getting to know you, learning more

Which works both ways — I’m getting to know more about Hackney, my colleagues, our stakeholders, and the culture. And people are getting to know me in return.

Learn more

I’m finding hard to sift through everything that I’ve read, discussed, seen, thought about this week in order to write sensible weeknotes in a Mon-Fri format, so I’m going to stick to the 5 things that happened (NB waaay more than 5 things happened) format for now.

So this week:

1. I met some of the suppliers who are currently working on projects with us, including a joint show and tell at our Florfield Depot site, on housing repairs. It was great to see other team’s show and tells, and find out more about what the teams are doing. Nic, Susan, Sachin and Dennis from the delivery team have all been really helpful in bringing me up to speed with each project, and I’m starting to form a mental map which is helping.
2. I learnt more about public realm* and what’s happening in that service from a useful and informative update from Andy, the business relationship manager.

3. The apprentice video we made with Thaddeus and Maariyah from the comms team made last week went out on twitter and facebook:

Why working at Hackney is great (and yes I am an extra loitering in the background)

I’m hoping it will attract lots of good candidates for the ICT roles from across the borough.

4. I met Alex for a coffee to talk about apprenticeships more widely and the overall ambition and vision for making best use of apprenticeship opportunities at Hackney. The same topic came up when I met colleagues from Adult Social Care and from Strategy, Policy and Economic Development. There’s a clear focus on attracting and developing talent across the council, which is great.

5. I went to another show and tell — this time about the user research library We are Snook are delivering with us. They’ve built a prototype which we’ll be testing over the next few weeks, and then feeding back on. It’s another really interesting and innovative project which I’m looking forward to seeing progress.

Pokemon wave

What I read this week:

Rob Miller published a blog post — affirming our support of the Local Digital Declaration

In support of the Local Digital Declaration

This — from GDS, was useful reading too:

Measuring the benefits of your service

I’m half way through The Art of Business Value by Mark Schwartz, and enjoying the fact that it’s challenging my thinking.

*being new to local government meant I wasn’t sure what this was, but now I know that it covers, amongst many other things, parks and libraries.