We need to come together to deliver as an organisation to deliver these important outcomes. Staff throughout the council have the expertise and insight to best take this change forward, and to make sure it is a success, so inevitably we need the right people to be actively involved in the change.  

The annual plan process will be used to identify the resources required to deliver across the remit of change for the council and impacts on capacity will be a factor considered as we prioritise the work ahead.  

It is undoubtably going to be tough in the short term to achieve everything that we need to deliver, but the work we do over the next few years will create better outcomes that support the future of MVDC. 

The Evolve 2026 people strategy has a significant focus on the learning and development. We recognise that as things change, we will need to make sure staff impacted by the change are given appropriate training to feel confident to work through changes in systems.  

 This is critical to the recovery of our service performance – we can reasonably expect this to drop temporarily whilst we get used to any new system or change to system. We are considering ways to rethink the training approach. There could be opportunities to improve our understanding of existing systems by tapping into our own expertise, more on this to follow soon. 

No. The programme is not considering redundancies as one of our objectives. We are committed to minimising the need for redundancies and will instead work closely with SLT to utilise natural attrition where potential staff reductions are identified.  

 One of our pillars of Evolve 2026 is our people strategy, and a key part of this is to ensure that the right training is in place as we identify the new skills the council may need in the future. Staff will be given the opportunity to use a future focused L&D offer to maximise options to develop within the council, even where the way we work may be different to what we do today. 

We are developing our customer engagement strategy for project delivery, and we consider that all customers should be considered which includes local businesses. We want to ensure the ongoing success of local business and their views on working with us will help inform how we transform services for the future. 

The members will play a key role in transformation projects that have an impact on front line service delivery, policies or budgetary implications. They will also be required to approve any capital investment that is required to deliver the projects, for example the introduction of a new technology.  

There will be times when members will want us to just get on and deliver changes – for example those that are about our back-office functions and systems. Generally, these will be things that we can do ourselves to make us a more effective, higher performing organisation – via “organisational change” projects with internal performance improvement impacts.  

As noted above, as members will want to be consulted on things with external impacts, and/or reputational and investment related issues, this is where the formal governance (Member Reference Group, Cabinet, Scrutiny etc) will be engaged.  

For the Member Reference Group – we see that meeting periodically to create early engagement on project development where there is an external impact, so we can get input on relevant design questions, as well as identifying any additional risks and impacts.  

The portfolio holder for the transformation programme is Councillor Bridget Kendrick.  Councillor Keira Vyvyan-Robinson is the digital transformation lead, and Councillor Paul Kennedy is the customer services lead, so all will be kept regularly informed of progress and we would expect them to be in the reference group.  

The members signed off the budget for the introduction of a fixed term transformation team to drive forward our improvement plans and are fully supporting the need for us to focus on improving services and meeting our savings target.  

 The savings target is a significant challenge and will require us to come together collectively as an organisation to meet the transformation objectives. We are confident that the process we are following will give robust detail of the changes we will propose to our members, so they are best placed to make the decisions needed for our council.  

Yes, we have already started with some pilot processes in allotments, waste and debt management. We are also working with our BMT leads to score the other process improvements that have been identified so we know what we will prioritise to work on next. In addition, we have been busy working on the “shift left” approach by practising continuous improvement on E-Form implementation including new forms to sign up for the garden waste service and report damaged street signs. The Council has been practising improvements implementation for a while, but by formalising our CI approach we will practice it in a structured and collaborative way. 

We will create a CI champions network, aligned to a CI forum. One of the inputs to this forum will be a form on Molly for raising change ideas and where you will see updates on progress at each stage of review. 

 As always, please continue to raise any concerns with your line manager in the first instance. There will be regular all staff Evolve 2026 days that will provide further opportunity for you to raise questions you may have on transformation and the transformation team is always happy to have a chat.  

 And of course, the staff hub is a great way to discuss ideas and they will also have an active role in the forum. 

This is useful feedback. We think it is important that the person submitting the idea can be contacted. This is because often an idea will need clarification or expanding and so being able to open that conversation and keeping the idea owner informed is an essential part of its development. We will see whether the idea owner can be anonymised on the web view, but still identifiable within in the database. We will keep you informed. The main aim is to show that all ideas matter, so we want to embed a culture where people can bring honest reflections and suggestions without feeling there will be a negative reaction. 

Customer feedback is very important to us – we learn lots from complaints and positive feedback in terms of insight about our services as we look to amend our processes and systems. However, we are not planning to introduce a new citizen portal.  

Where a change that we are proposing has impact to end users we may choose to consult with our customers so we can build confidence on how this will impact them. In addition, we would look to test with our customers where there is a change to how we do things, for example when we introduce a high impact online form.  There is also an ongoing option for feedback via our existing website form. 

That is an interesting question. We have over 100 ideas for process improvement, and we are looking to engage BMT to help us score these. It may be that BMT can use team meetings to talk through the process improvement ideas that are associated with your team.  

We will use scoring to prioritise the sequence of the process reviews we do, and when we are able to move your processes forward our CI practitioner will work with you to scope what you would want to improve in your process. 

Sadly not, this is not our material and so cannot put it on our intranet. However, we have purchased a few copies for you to borrow, so if you are keen to be part of the book club get in touch and we can explain how you can easily access one if you don’t want to buy a copy to keep for yourself. 

 The examples were only meant as an illustrative way of expressing the outcome of not changing our approach, in a way that everyone could relate to. Whilst as a statutory organisation we will have certain rules that we need to abide by, it does not mean that we cannot look at ways to make how we work better. It will be important as we change to make sure that we still meet the requirements of legislation and so using the team’s expertise will be an essential part of how we design.

Absolutely, it is important that everyone who has a role in making something happen in a process is included in what we develop for the future. It is often the points of cross over in processes that can have the most difficulties so creating open environments to jointly work together on solutions can create the best results. 

Yes, this is a controlled room booking, and can be found in our outlook calendars as ‘Innovation Space’. If you make a meeting request the transformation team can let you know if it is available. The room will work best for meetings that need a creative thinking space, so consider ways to use this room that makes the most of its potential. If you do use the room, please be mindful of our neighbours as the Reigate Road annex is shared with external organisations.

Forever! Continuous improvement by its nature is a practice that we will need to incorporate in our everyday work as an instinctive way of working. Whilst we will focus on process improvements needed today, we will continue to find opportunities to improve on new processes, and/or new problems over the years.  

 Operational excellence is a continuous and iterative approach, so we need to make sure everyone in MVDC feels confident to own and support the CI culture within their area. The good news is that we already have a strong history of process improvement here in MVDC, so formalising our CI practices will mean we will continue to maximise success through this way of working.