Springtime salutations!
Professionally speaking we’re careering, at what feels like breakneck speed, towards the end of calender Q1. On a more personal level though the advent of Spring; longer days and a touch more warmth will be most welcomed – it’s felt like a looooooong winter.
As a subscriber to “Positive Quote of the Day” (a daily email with a small but perfectly formed dose of ‘get yourself into gear’ related content from thinkers and famous folks), one of the recent editions featured a piece of particularly pertinent and pleasingly laconic (lesson to be learned there) philosophy. Namely;
“think out your work, and work out your think”
As well as the simple exercise of passing this forward; as a ‘do it all now’ and ‘attack a task immediately and until it’s done’ kinda human, the whole stepping back and applying some thought and planning to a project struck a personal chord. Indeed, an idea worthy of emulating. Pause and consider approach, structure and execution seemed both sensible and something that should be embraced, perhaps even embody a whole new ‘work lifestyle concept’
Cue some pondering (go me) on how best to implement and exemplify this new approach, an order courtesy of Viking (incidentally, quite what marauding scandi folks have to do with staplers escapes me) and presto a week or so later a whiteboard is now nailed on my office wall replete with markers, magnets and other paraphernalia. My peripheral vision is now occupied by many poorly executed boxes, lines and squiggles. Mostly incomprehensible and – on reflection – all only apposite to the moment of frantic commitment.
Progress? – well, it’s a start!
Anyway, before I go and draw some more colourful boxes and lines, some actually useful content delivered in the usual calm, considered and structured format:
Updates:
Starting at the top, some recent changes to Central Government to note:
The creation of two new Departments:
Department for Science, Innovation and Technology
Department for Energy Security and Net Zero
And the Merger of:
Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Department for International Trade
Creating the Department for Business and Trade
We’ve also recently seen some changes to the devolved Scottish Government departments. In all cases our organisation types and data structures have been updated on the database to reflect the changes as well – of course – as the political and senior civil service posts associated.
Speaking of changes, April will see four new Unitary Authorities come into operation (currently in shadow form following the 2022 local elections), these are:
Cumberland Council
Westmorland & Furness Council
North Yorkshire Council
Somerset Council
These will replace the Counties and Districts for their areas – as ever, we’ll supply a table to show the transfers in the next edition of this newsletter. This will also include the summary of the May local elections which will be happening between now and then and – as ever – we’ll be reflecting the changes in as close to real time as possible.
To better cover the structure of Colleges and Universities and links between them, we have started building out the group relationships for these institutions and have added a number of new Group Organisations covered under a new organisation type of ‘College/University Group’ – these will automatically be included for those with full F/HE subscriptions.
Our much covered ICS/B updates continue and we have also added a new organisation type for Primary Care Networks (PCN’s) – our intention (providing this model continues to develop and receive funding) will be to transition the PCN Directors from their current homes in the database under GP Surgeries to their own organisations in order to provide the headroom for additional posts and specific PCN data. Underpinning the data are links between GP Practices, PCN’s and Integrated Care Boards.
Outside of these noteworthy changes, the usual ongoing updates are reflected in the following table reflecting the number of changes made on the database in the past 90 days:
New:
We’ve been busy as ever and quite a few new things to report:
Our New Events calendar is live
(it’s free to add events, so all you lovely folks that organise things, get yourself over there)
Also free (there’s a theme today) our new Supplier Registration page is now available
This segways very nicely with telling you about our new Suppliers Search and deeper supplier profiles, including Social Media Links. All also available via the link above.
In fact, we now have an updates page for our new platform, which can be seen here. This is updated monthly and will keep pace with the new and shiny changes and additions as they are made. Might be worth a bookmark(!?).
Interesting:
Both new and – hopefully – interesting, we have also completed the initial version of our new ‘Analysis’ tab on the Oscar platform, which includes some initial live data visualisations and reports, which so far includes:
Political – analysing Party Political coverage, Gender and Local Government
Education – reporting on OFSTED results and MAT’s
Again, they are all free, so please have a look and play here
That’s probably more than enough for now, so until June we wish you some sunshine and dry days. As ever, if we can help with anything, please do get in touch.
James and team at Oscar
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