'Top 5' Business Critical Areas
The 'Top 5' business critical areas for the Council are:
- Regenerating North Solihull
- Putting Solihull People First (Transforming Adult Social Care)
- Integrated Delivery of Children's Services
- New Ways of Working
- Going Lean
Regenerating North Solihull
A 20 year regeneration programme that aims to close the gap of inequality between North Solihull and the remainder of the Borough. The programme is about more than physical infrastructure and takes an holistic or 'total place' approach to regeneration creating sustainable communities for the future including:
- the creation of high quality, distinctive places
- a strong sense of neighbourhood cohesion, pride and a safe environment
- healthy living opportunities
- life time neighbourhoods with a choice of housing provision and tenure
- a network of village centres providing a focal point for commercial, retail, social and community infrastructure and co-location of service providers
- new and improved connections between communities with greater accessibility
- a green infrastructure network with high quality green space and recreation facilities
- new high quality education and training facilities
- a range of socio-economic programmes to support local residents and businesses
- an entrepreneurial culture
Putting Solihull People First (Transforming Adult Social Care)
This is all about transforming Adult Social Care within Solihull to:
- Create a new, high quality care system which is fair, accessible and responsive to the individual needs of those who use services and their carers
- Develop a service that is characterised by person centred planning and self directed support defining individually tailored care packages with personal budgets for everyone eligible for publicly funded adult social care support
Integrated Delivery of Children's Services
To improve outcomes and life chances for children and young people in Solihull we need to deliver seamless universal, targeted and specialist Children’s Services. Our approach is defined by the ‘IW10’ – ten key characteristics of integrated working in Solihull, and delivered with our partners through the Integrated Working Programme.
The desired benefits of the Integrated Working Programme are:
- Earlier intervention for vulnerable children and young people, reducing the demand for specialist services
- Increased availability and accessibility of local services, opportunities and information for children, young people and families
The Integrated Working Programme includes projects to deliver:
Local commissioning and multi-agency working in ‘natural communities’
- Children’s centres, and extended services in schools
- Shared arrangements for workforce planning and development
- Common processes to identify, assess and support vulnerable children and young people
- High quality information services for children, young people, parents and carers
- Integrated youth services
- Integrated services for disabled children and their families
New Ways of Working
In order to maximise the use of our fixed assets and to minimise the cost and expenditure on buildings we need to develop new and flexible ways of working. This also will bring benefits to staff and customers who will benefit from better working environments and improved service efficiency. New ways of working include:
- Occupancy Standards
- Flexible Working
- Home Working
- Co-Location
- Better organised workspace
- Community use of assets
Going Lean
In order to achieve the twin goals of doing more for less the whole organisation needs to adopt and implement the principles of lean. At its most basic this is about the elimination of waste and focusing on activities that add value to the customer. To achieve this all staff will be responsible for improving processes and the customer experience, whilst at the same time rigorously challenging the non-value added activities. Managers will need to support staff in understanding and implementing these principles.