View from the Chair Nov 2019
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Welcome to this month’s View from the Chair.
October’s Board meeting dedicated more time towards the Company future. The Board discussion focused on the Company half year performance review, the Board’s view of Company Risk and a ‘Deep Dive’ into the developing Business Strategy as we continue to move the Board’s focus to more strategic matters.
The half year performance indicators demonstrate ongoing improvement and outline a realistic forecast for the future as we continue to develop the Company Dashboard and Key Performance Indicators.
Jean reported a significant improvement to our activity recording process, which is improving efficiency across the centres. This is in addition to the reduction in paperwork that has happened following the work of the Quality Team.
This ongoing review of streamlining the administration will enable us to spend more time with the people we support. Improving the administration process is the first step towards IT enablement, and the company will be looking at digital options to make further improvements as part of the Business Strategy.
Our Finance Manager Sue Gormley has been working with our managers to support them with their budgets. We have been working to empower our management team to make spending decisions for their services at a local level, speeding up decision making and giving local centres more control.
We also spent time on an in-depth discussion on potential Company Risks following the PESTLE model. This method provides a framework to consider, Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal risks and will provide an ongoing framework, enabling the Board to identify the challenges we face as a company, which we will consider in the new Business Strategy.
The final session was a ‘Deep Dive’ on the Business Strategy, concentrating on developing our Strategic Guiding Principals, which we believe are based around, People, Quality, Choice, Social Value and Economic Value.
Following the good progress Jean has made in developing this strategy, the Board had a very rich discussion and further iterations will be developed by Jean and the Board. We also discussed the key themes the Company will need to action to implement the Company Strategy and will share more about this as we firm up our plans.
At Board we also discussed the problems we are encountering with the provision of new transport and the constraints we now face with the alignment to European law as the Company is owned by Wirral Council. We are now informed we must comply with European OJEU process, which inevitably will add in delay to the procurement process. This will have an impact on timescale for us to implement the roll out of the new vehicles, which we had hoped would have commenced this month. However, Jean and the Senior Leadership Team are working hard to complete the process as soon as possible. We are keen to get a more flexible transport set up in place to enhance the activities we offer people we support.
Mike Naden – Chair of the Board
25 November 2019