Welcome to the first entry in the ReGS Programme Blog.
As I am new to the team at Barnsley I’m still coming to terms with a blur of introductions, faces, names, and an appetite for change from the people I’ve met. This first blog is a good opportunity to start at the beginning.
The point of this blog is to give a flavour of the project as it grows and evolves over the next few months. As you’ll hopefully have read from the rest of the site, ReGS is not just about technology (although that’s an important part of it) but about making tools work effectively in a local authority environment; supporting the improvement of service delivery; and ensuring that the organisation is flexible enough to accommodate new ways of working.
Although I don’t want to try to predict the future, my hopes for this blog are that it will be a means to share learning and hopefully provoke feedback on the issues we encounter as ReGS develops.
Readers of this blog can contact the team anytime by emailing: ReGS@barnsley.gov.uk
Background Information
For further background on the project, why not have a look at the ReGS Project Briefing, which you can download at the bottom of this blog.
ReGS Launch in Barnsley
A little while before I started at Barnsley, the Regulatory Services staff here all got together at a 'launch event' based, I’m told at the local football ground. The day began with a presentation describing the background to the benefits of mobile working, and the thinking from senior management on the benefits it would offer. After lunch, the staff attending split into four groups for a workshop session addressing three key questions for staff:
- What concerns/issues do you have regarding mobile / flexible working?
- What advantages are there of mobile / flexible working?
- What can management do / give you to help do your job better?
After the workshop, the groups got back together for open and honest feedback on the perceived positive and negative aspects of our approach. Fortunately for me, they were good enough to record much of the feedback from the event, giving me a ready made issues log.
Launch Feedback
You can read through the initial feedback, and a brief response to it in the feedback document, which you can download at the bottom of this blog. As I’m sure you’ll agree there are some clear themes here, not least the importance of effective communication, as well as some more surprising comments.
Recent Developments
Last Monday (9 October 2006), we began our pilot of the remote worker dashboard with the Pollution Control team, who’ve been getting used to their PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) for the last couple of weeks.
The training went well, despite VPN problems meaning that we’ve not yet been able to access our locally hosted version of the dashboard. Kirona (our solution provider) are letting us access the development system for the time being, so we can actually trial the user experience of the dashboard.
All being well, the trial will let us demonstrate the ease of use of the PDAs in the field, and better understand the issues (from both a practical and performance management point of view) of logging activity in a different way. Once the team have used the dashboard for a fortnight or so, we’re planning to review the activity coding structures, and address any issues that have arisen.
Meanwhile, we’ve got Kirona’s development team coming to visit to examine the detail of the eScript for food hygiene assessments, and the small matter of the project budget to address.
What’s next? Next month looks like a busy one! Not least in developing the food hygiene e-script, but we’ll be attending the Nomad Regional Autumn events where you can visit us on the ReGS stand, and enter our competition to win a state of the art Tablet PC package (which we are delighted to have secured with Motion and Box) by participating in a hands on demo of the eScripting solutions we’re developing with Kirona.
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