Happy New Year

Well the start of the New Year gives me the opportunity to re-trace my thoughts for the last one and see what’s changed!



Great Yarmouth by Train

2015 saw me ‘heading East’ to work with many good people at Great Yarmouth Borough Council. It’s the first time that I have explored that part of our country, and I have to say I enjoyed every minute of it. The train journeys from Reading to Norwich usually went well and the bonus was the daily trip across to Great Yarmouth. What a way to start the day!


My time at Great Yarmouth has been spent upgrading the desktop estate to Windows 8.1 and new HP laptops. At the same time, we have replaced an on premise Microsoft Exchange system with a hybrid Office 365 system. Great improvements to reliability and resilience, and a platform that will see the council through its major transformation programme. It’s been a real pleasure working with the people at Great Yarmouth Borough Council and helping them through some challenging times.

My travelling time has not been wasted, and I have used it to brush up my skills and add a few more. I have also reflected on the constant challenge faced by the public sector to do more with less, and can’t help but think that ‘doing more of the same’ will not transform the public sector. In June I published an article that summarised my thoughts on the use of Social Media in local government. I received a number of comments which spurred me on to do more research (and study for, and obtain a Diploma in Social Media and Online Reputation Management) What my research told me was that not many local councils are making good use of Social Media generally, and Twitter specifically. Twitter has attracted me for three reasons. Firstly, my analysis suggests that this is an area in which councils are not maximising potential, secondly, Twitter can become a two-way conversation that taps into the local community, and finally, Tweets are geo-tagged (95% of Twitter users have a smartphone) and this gives insight into what local people are saying about a local council.

Then along came the BDO report A Review of Social Media Usage in UK Local Government and set out some of the great examples of councillors and senior managers using Social Media to significant benefit. I have to say though, that these are not ‘the norm’, most of the feeds that I have visited do not provide much additional benefit to the council’s web site (and who reads these, these days?) And most feeds are mainly about what the council is doing, which seems to me a lot like talking rather than listening.

So this is going to be one focus for me in 2016. I hope to be able to bring my insights to the benefit of my local authority clients in an attempt to ‘turn talking into listening ™ ‘

My other interest for 2015 was the Agile project methodology. Having spent many years managing projects using PRiNCE2 type waterfall approaches (including our own ‘e-mpirical experience ™), Agile came my way so I had a good look. Clearly Agile has an attraction in that it delivers working product quickly and overcomes some of the inertia of creating Functional Requirements Documents that can take many months to complete. But it does require a different discipline and skill set from all involved, not just the project manager. The need to lead a team rather than manage a team also led me to study Neuro Linguistic Programming as it seems to me that Agile and NLP share similar approaches to getting the best out of people. The Ultimate Introduction to NLP: How to build a successful life was a regular companion on my trips to Great Yarmouth. I was also helped by a great coach Sarah Urquhart

For 2016 one of my objectives is to become more involved in the emerging debate about the transparency of parking services, and in particular the income that is raised by the issue of Penalty Charge Notices. I have been studying this for a number of years now and remain firmly of the view that contrary to ‘popular’ media opinion, most local authorities do not operate parking enforcement as a ‘cash cow’ Clearly some London authorities do make a surplus (which is used to fund transport related activity) but they only do so because some people park where they shouldn’t. What is missing from this debate though is truly comparable and transparent reports that show how the money has been spent. After an extensive exercise in 2014 using Freedom of Information requests using What do they know I decided to join up with the British Parking Association and see if we could encourage local authorities to publish information in a standard form. This would allow comparison of local authority performance on a common basis, and hopefully raise awareness of what council tax payers are getting for ‘their money’

This is an ongoing project. Many councils are now publishing an annual ‘Parking Report’ but the style and layout of these varies so much it is difficult to make any meaningful comparison. I hope that with the BPA and its members support we can move towards a common set of standards so that councils can demonstrate how the alleged ‘cash cow’ is spent.

My membership of the BPA will also allow me to explore some of the future developments in parking as the Future of Parking and Intelligent Mobility Group meets for the first time in February. The convergence of smart phones, the Internet of Things and vehicle based technology will be an exciting time and I foresee the next few years will see major change in this area.


So that’s another year done and an exciting one ahead.

 Happy New Year

Tony