Worcester source: How a rural council keeps things connected in a crisis

Chris Middleton hears how Worcestershire County Council’s Geoff Hedges isn’t hedging his IT bets during lockdown in rural England

Every IT professional knows that the gaps between theory, specification and practice can be significant. What systems are designed to do, and what they are actually capable of delivering, can be very different things.

Months of lockdown have brought this home to many organisations; but when they are in the public sector, delivering services to millions of local taxpayers, any gaps risk having consequences.

Geoff Hedges is Digital Transformation Manager at Worcestershire County Council, after an interim spell as Acting Head of IT and Digital. A department of up to 90 employees supports over 3,000 council staff, roughly 90 percent of whom - "the high two thousands" - have been working from home.

This has been the picture for every local authority, of course. But unlike many, Worcestershire had already built into its infrastructure the capacity for 100 percent of staff working remotely if they had to. But foresight and reality don't always touch elbows.

Geoff Hedges, Digital Transformation Manager, Worcestershire County Council

Hedges explains: "Initially, we thought the system that we already had - coincidentally - could scale up sufficiently to cope with the demand. We had two VPN [virtual private network] servers, which had been load balanced up to 3,000 connections each. Given our staff numbers, that seemed appropriate for the number of people we expected to be working from home at any time.

"But we discovered when we took one of those servers offline for routine maintenance that people started to experience speed-related issues. The remaining server was not coping with the level of demand that was being put through it at all.

"We've added additional capacity to the system so that we can continue to maintain quality of service."

Despite its theoretical capacity for large-scale remote working, Worcestershire has never actively pursued it as a strategy. Rather, it seems to have made a wise bet on a possible future, then waited to see if people walked towards it of their own accord.

"Was there a policy of it being mandated? Not specifically," he says. "There were various incentives to encourage home working, but that was primarily around parking limitations. We encouraged people to work from home a day or two a week to relieve the pressure on parking."

Since then, the coronavirus has parked that future on council lawns and forced them to deal with it. So now that lockdowns are easing - at least for the moment - does Worcestershire plan to hang onto these new ways of working for the long term?

"Yeah. There are a lot of conversations going on at the moment in the Council around what we want our future workforce to be like, how and where they work. No firm decisions have been made, but there is a strong feeling that we will be encouraged to work, for the majority of our time, from a remote location.

"The situation has flipped: we previously encouraged people to work maybe one or two days a week from home, but now we may encourage people to come into the office on just one or two days.

"We're looking at capacity because we expect it to be a longer-term arrangement. Moving forward, it's even more important that we get resilience within our platforms; then we can effectively maintain them on a longer-term basis without degradation."

This echoes the message from other public sector IT leaders during lockdown: councils are being absorbed back into the community, working among citizens rather than apart from them in large civic centres - though some public-facing services still need to be based in public buildings.

Hedges tells a familiar technology tale, too: Skype for Business not scaling into the world of mass remote working; rollouts of Windows 10 laptops that support Teams and lock into the VPNs; and a temporary use of popular apps, such as Zoom - which will be phased out. That's been the picture elsewhere, as well.

The difference in scale has certainly been extraordinary, he says. "We saw an average of 30 videoconferences a week on our Skype platform before COVID-19, but we've been seeing about a thousand a week since we started working remotely. We hammered our Skype system, and it would have been a very complex and lengthy project to add capacity to that."

With the UK's creaking broadband infrastructure under such massive pressure - and 5G apparently stuck on a slow boat back to China - it's no surprise that some rural council workers have been issued with 4G dongles.

So what does Hedges believe have been the advantages of the crisis? Has it proved the concept of remote working at scale?

"There's a general feeling of increased productivity. The work/life balance is inherently easier as well, as people are spending a lot less time commuting."

But these are just the internal issues. The crisis is also transforming how the Council reaches out to its citizens.

"We've done a huge amount in Worcestershire with our volunteering work, helping residents in the county by linking them with volunteers who can help them.

"We've created a digital solution that enables people to register to help, or say that they need help, with a matching exercise to bring these groups together. That could be using the voluntary sector, such as Age UK, but it could be individuals from across the county who pick up prescriptions or drop off food parcels. So we've almost stumbled across new ways of providing key services to our residents."

Gauging feedback from citizens is out of scope for most council IT teams; it's more likely to be the remit of communications or specialist outreach teams (which are themselves working from home, via soft phones). Does Worcestershire have a core way of measuring sentiment?

"We do have sentiment analysis software for our social media content, but it's not robust for a long-term issue, such as COVID," says Hedges. "However, we are planning a Residents Viewpoint Survey, which will go out in September. As far as I know, that'll be the first significant piece of work that we've done on resident feedback."

Worcestershire is also carrying out an internal review, to gauge workers' views on long-term home working. On a national scale, the crisis has arguably impacted more on extroverts (who are largely motivated by their interactions with others) than on people who are more independent and self-reliant (Editor's note: Our sales team has been going slowly crazy since March).

Not everyone can cope without the social elements of office life; some miss their colleagues, friends and real-world teams. Hedges explains that the Council may introduce more social gatherings to compensate, and could use different public spaces - including cafes and bars - so that people can still meet and collaborate in the real world.

The crisis has also made the Council reconsider some hardware choices. "One challenge that has come to light is the device choice that people made for their previous working style," says Hedges.

"With workers that were out in the field more, particularly with social care teams visiting people's homes, they very much favoured tablet devices. But now that a lot of that contact is paused, those devices are less than fit for purpose when you are sitting at your dining table.

"So one of the challenges is making sure that people have the appropriate kit. Another is getting that kit to people generally, who have been at home just working with a laptop screen, so we've been issuing additional screens, keyboards and mice."

What the crisis has given in some respects, it has taken away in others. Either way, rural councils find themselves exploring a whole new landscape. The secret is finding ways to enjoy the view, while still reaching out to people and keeping them connected.