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Director’s weeknote

Another busy week but one that’s had me smiling quite a lot!

New Luton.gov.uk website is live!

Well done to Jayvik Patel and the team for getting this done in record time and not compromising on the quality. As Jayvik said in his post, this work hasn’t just been about a website, but about bringing a truly agile and user-centred design approach into DDaT which has delivered high quality results. Look forward to hearing the feedback!

Overall

It feels like things are finally starting to come together – the new SMT is working well and we have plans in place for all the things we are asked for. I am confident in a couple of years we will have not only caught up on the technology front, but leading the way.

Thank you to everyone who completed my 360 review

It was heartening to see that, overwhelmingly, all of you are:

excited about the journey we are on
feel it’s the right thing to do
feeling the positive changes in culture and ways of working in DDaT.

There are some suggestions for improvement, mainly around communication and upskilling, that I’ll be looking at with SMT to think of ways to address.

DDaT office environment

I spent a day on health and safety training this week, which got me thinking about our office environment and:

whether we have the necessary assessments in place
the importance of keeping the lights on etc

Again, something I’ll pick up with the managers.

Better collaboration

Outside of DDaT responsibilities, I’ve been working with directors on how we can tighten up and better collaborate as an SMLG group (directors and above) by:

working with strategy and transformation on the various change initiatives that have sprung up and how we can co-ordinate these
supporting Finance and Performance on how we can better align these two going forward
working with strategy on monitoring the ‘levers for change’ he went through at our away day

Service Desk weeknotes

This week the main trends on the Service Desk are listed here.

Egress email issues: users have raised tickets and called about being unable to send emails after Egress permissions were reset.
Move to new Citrix 365: a noticeable number of users have contacted us about moving over to the new Citrix 365 environment.
File pathways and Outlook: as the old Citrix core has been taken offline, users have needed file pathways and Outlook PSTs or mailboxes re‑adding.

Website replacement – final weekly status update

The new Luton Council website is live. See status details on this ‘we are live’ blog post.

OneDrive user adoption – weekly status update

📌 Project overview

The OneDrive project remains in the user adoption and optimisation phase. Over the past seven days, activity focused on:

adoption operations
user guidance
governance clarification
preparation for adoption ownership transition

✅ Key achievements this week

Adoption support continued

Ongoing responses to user queries relating to personal file storage and migration from network drives.
Reinforcement of guidance on appropriate use of OneDrive vs SharePoint.

Weekly adoption reporting produced

The latest OneDrive usage report was generated and reviewed as part of the weekly cadence.
Metrics were refreshed for this reporting cycle and incorporated into internal tracking.

Follow‑up activity continued to identify:
services dependent on external file sharing
current large‑file sharing use cases
ownership of historic decisions

Change adoption manager transition preparation

Planning activity continued to support the upcoming handover of OneDrive adoption responsibilities.

Adoption snapshot

OneDrive usage remains strong across the organisation. Over the past week:

active file viewing and editing increased by 0.2%, showing continued day‑to‑day use
file syncing activity fell by 3.9%
internal file sharing remained broadly flat (‑0.1%), which is likely due to a higher number of staff taking annual leave ahead of the end of March, alongside the upcoming Easter break.

Overall, non‑user activity continues to decline, reinforcing the ongoing move away from legacy storage and toward OneDrive as the standard way of working.

Image showing graph of growth in adoption in stats, as listed above.

Housing systems replacement project

The project status remains red.

Work is going on to explore procuring and implementing SharePoint EDMS as the alternative to D360 EDMS. This will take time and cost.
We currently have 23 major category issues.
Abritas to CX interface was handed over for testing but there are still issues to resolve.
The CRM email issue not yet fully resolved. Needs further support from Civica.

Rework is required on some configuration and build on CX due to reorganisation in Housing. This is being progressed.

There are 106 day 1 reports:

all but one have been specified and built
60% have been tested and signed off
37% of the remaining are with users for testing

Abritas UAT on the back-end processes is progressing. There are 14 issues, 8 of which have been addressed but require further testing, and 6 are still are open.

Work on Training, Business Readiness and Early Life Support (ELS) for CX Housing is progressing. Trainees will not be booked until we are clear on a go-live date. The Operation Transition Board is meeting regularly to plan business readiness and ELS .

The Totalmobile implementation is progressing. Totalmobile are currently working on the planned and capital works processes and building interfaces to CX.

The Travis Perkins interface has been completed.
The Asset (ALM) module is being developed.
Manifest work on interfaces is progressing.
The Voicescape interface will require a fresh implementation project for VoiceScape.
Testing of interface between K2 and Totalmobile is being tested.
Interface for Asbestos information interface to CX and Totalmobile is being developed.
The property and person data load from CX to Totalmobile has been built.
SAVA implementation is complete as a standalone module and is live, but it will be integrated with Totalmobile as part of the project.
86% of customer data has been cleansed.
8% of property data is progressing. There are significant number of duplicate records to clean.

Data governance purview pilot – weekly status report

Project summary

Team is working through the pilot with limited time because of BAU activities
Follow up with Phoenix 1 April – will go through pilot and actions so far
Volunteer for first service for the rollout – Abigail Coupe, Senior Administrator for School Improvement, Education
Project team reviewing Purview HLD and LLD design
Further Purview core capabilities workshop scheduled for March
Report and next steps being put together by project team
DG team meeting each Monday for the pilot
Requirements/outcomes being reviewed
Pilot timelines have been agreed
Pilot Preparation Dec/Jan/Feb
Build Dec/Jan
Pilot Jan/Feb/Mar