Our people
Our people are the most important part of this strategy. Without them we simply would not be able to deliver services to our residents, businesses, elected members, staff and visitors.
- Continue to evolve the council’s DDaT capabilities
- Develop the skills our workforce needs for a digital world and address skills gaps within our council, recognising that competencies and confidence won’t be the same across the workforce
- Continue to review roles and career pathways to support the DDaT profession
- Alignment with the Future of Work Strategy
- Further transform the Digital Services Service Desk operation to improve incident, change, problem and asset management
- Ensure full engagement with relevant programmes including Swansea Bay City Deal and Shared Prosperity Fund
- Optimise employee engagement and well-being by actively monitoring sickness levels, reviewing health and safety, mental health
- Ensuring appropriate DDaT training for the organisation - creation of centres of excellence to support innovation and promote and share good practice – building on the Digital Partners initiative
- Delivery of service design exemplars across the council to showcase digital transformation, automation and efficiencies across the council
- Carry out user research and receive continuous feedback from staff to understand what they need
- Develop and publish a clear delivery roadmap, including priority, resource and milestones, to deliver major projects
- Baseline and develop digital operations Service Level Agreements for service users – managing end user expectations
- Empower managers to ensure their teams take ownership of projects and work-streams, so that we run a tighter, stream-lined service
- Further develop the employee experience platform
- Implement a Digital Services wide Policy, Process, Procedure, and Guides (PPPG) repository that is centrally controlled
- Promote the NPT Digital Services Manual, and contribute to the development of the national standards via the Centre for Digital Public Services
- Quickly identify and respond to changing service needs
- Enable employees to have a good work-life balance and well-being
- Reflect the make-up of our population, strengthening our connection to our communities
- Increase our ability to innovate by being a truly diverse and inclusive organisation
- Use employee insight to drive highly effective strategies that enable people to fulfil their potential
- Deliver efficient public services that are good value for money
- Create an attractive employer brand for DDaT that enables us to recruit and retain a highly capable workforce
- Provide digital services that are accessible to all
- To have a digitally skilled workforce which helps fulfil the council's strategic goals
- Improve awareness of how digital can enhance all council services – productivity, shape policy, etc.
- Create digital career paths to ensure we have the right skills to deliver person-centred designed solutions that provide efficient reliable services
- Foster a flexible environment where all staff have the tools, techniques, and authority to adapt to the changing needs of our residents, businesses, elected members, and visitors
- Trust and believe in our colleagues and through our Strategic Workforce Plan we will make sure they are trained, supported and authorised to do the things that matter
- Implement distributed leadership and decentralised roles/responsibilities
- Encourage experimentation and learning from failure (safe place to fail), sharing lessons, encouraging “joy in work and learning” and an overall contribution to quality of life
- Build multidisciplinary teams and empowering staff to contribute to drive improvements in all areas
- Upskill the workforce digital competence levels e.g. embracing innovation and transformation
- Work in the open to share success and failure with wider public sector organisations.
Our Strategic Workforce Plan sets out why a talented and focussed workforce is critical for bringing the strategic priorities to life, and ensures the organisation delivers on its well-being objectives. It clearly outlines how we aim to help all our employees be the best they can be.
To deliver the change required, we have recently undertaken the largest restructure of the IT Division since the authority was formed in 1996. This was not just about changing branding, from an IT Division to the Digital Services Division – but requires a massive cultural shift across the entire organisation.
To ensure we have the right people with the right skills, we need to be clear on the delivery priorities for the organisation and ensure we have an organisational structure that can deliver. With the new DDaT profession clearly set out, we are now developing existing staff skills and capabilities through appraisals and training, whilst identifying gaps and actively recruiting new team members.
However, our people goes much further than the DDaT professionals. We recognise the need to drive a cultural shift around DDaT across the whole organisation, which will require strong leadership across all management layers. We aim to raise awareness and generate commitment by continually demonstrating the value of DDaT to service design to support areas including policy design and using data to make informed decisions.
