Day 152 – 8 September 2014
I was a bit stiff this morning when I got up, not from taking part in the Great North Run but putting up a shed instead. It was a thing of beauty though more difficult to erect than it looked. As for running, I’m not built for speed though I did take part in the first ever half marathon from Newcastle to South Shields. I didn’t do any training and paid the price for it. There is a life lesson in itself.
Customers were on the menu this morning. We started with a meeting internal to ICT Services, to finalise plans for Customer Service Week and to agree what next for the ServCheck results. I’m feeling a little happier about these now because a) we asked when we could have not bothered b) people responded when they might not have engaged and c) there was a lot of variance in the figures and so we have a lot to talk about.
Next up was the Customer Relationship management board. We’ve had the same number of respondents to the CRM soft market test as I did for my Big Data. Never mind the seven habits of effective people, bring on the nineteen respondents of a soft market exercise. This one is rolling along nicely. By the way, I’ve had to set some time aside to read the responses and have colour coded the appointments as olive (I’m running out of colours).
Over lunch was a meeting about web-casting. With the change in legislation to allow members of the public the legal right to film and broadcast council meetings the need for this has disappeared to some extent. Our focus is now on making it as easy as possible for the public to do their thing if they wish.
Paul, the Chief Internal Auditor & Corporate Fraud Manager, was my latest tier 4 manager and one from Resources. He has another fantastic job title. His service looks after internal audit, the bulk of the role, risk, insurance and the fraud reduction team.
Corporate fraud, working with partners, use information contained within our data sets to expose and prevent fraud. They have been successful in recovering money to such an extent that other local organisations are interested in their services.
He talked about the golden triangle, or axis of evil as he referred it to, of risk, audit and fraud prevention. Identifying risks leads to the audit plan which leads to the opportunity to prevent fraud. I thought of them as the antibodies of our organisation, flowing around our policies and processes helping to avoid infection. It worked for me.
Paul started at sixteen in Finance and like many of us wants to make change, add value, and enable the Council to be as good as it can be.
Learning points for today: Chemistry jokes aren’t very funny; it’s amazing what can be done that can’t be done; something, I suspect a badger, is living under County Hall which could scupper our accommodation plans and; the rooms we moved out of to go to Meadowfield are filled with empty desks.
Today’s enjoyment rating 9/10 – encouraging progress.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 