My work at Luton is done

I’m just finishing up my work with Luton Council. It’s been a great experience, and I feel I’ve learned a load along the way, whilst really helping catalyse the shift there to a modern digital service.

I worked for between 2 and 3 days a week over a period of around 18 months. In the early days a lot of that time was spent supporting Atika directly, attending lots of meetings, and being an ally that she knew would always have her back as she navigated some tricky waters.

Over time, as that side of things settled down, and her new management team took shape, I was able to step back and focus on getting some projects done.

Atika says:

Dave has been an absolute godsend for me personally whilst at Luton. Having someone with Dave’s breadth of experience in other councils to be a sounding board for me when I stepped into the new role, and working together to overcome the challenges was priceless. Dave worked well with my wider management team and the rest of the organisation to truly showcase digital ways of working. It’s safe to say without Dave’s input, we would not be the highly regarded DDaT service at Luton we are today.

The big things I delivered for Luton were:

• Doing the bulk of the work developing a new strategic digital framework (a strategy in all but name), which i am genuinely pretty proud of and which got some great feedback from senior stakeholders at the Council
• Supporting to create a new target operating model and practical governance and processes to deliver against this framework
• Jump-started the moribund project to replace the tired old Sharepoint website with a new LocalGovDrupal based one. This project had been hanging around for over 5 years – with a bit of energy, some inspired recruitment and procurement, we got the new site out in not much more than 6 months.
• Established the Digital Luton blog and a culture of sharing and openness, including support a team member to become the blog product owner
• Helped build a change champions network to support the cultural shift from IT to digital, backed with a programme of bitesize learning sessions introducing key digital concepts like user centred service design, agile delivery, and the importance of being data-informed
• Developed the Local Government Digital Standard and lined up some projects to apply it to within Luton, and got Atika’s permission (wasn’t difficult, to be fair) to open it up to other councils. This will set the barometer for the long term, ensuring that only the best digital work will be considered good enough for Luton.

There’s a whole load of other, smaller stuff of course, but those are the big ones.

If this sounds like the sorts of things you could do with some help with, please let me know! It doesn’t have to be for as many days, or for as long as this particularly assignment – am happy to fit into whatever constraints you may have. Well, within reason.