Its been a couple of weeks since I wrote an update about work, mainly because there hasn’t been much to report!
I’m still plugging away at the Functional Area Management Plan, trying to establish performance reports for each of the Work Streams so the Executive Steering Committee can fulfil their ‘oversight and monitoring’ role (they can’t oversee if there is no MI to monitor!). Its stalled a bit in recent weeks because the other Directors have been busy trying to get their strategy documents cleared by the other Government Departments & the Ministers but hopefully I’ll get it completed in the next couple of weeks.
Next I’m probably going to be looking after some of the grants programs. There is a Public Domain Improvement Program where the Office of the Commonwealth Games is providing funding to City of Gold Coast to improve things like cycle lanes & footpaths, and then they might be developing a Community Engagement Program where small grants will be given to non-profit organisations to support the delivery of a lasting legacy from the games. Knowing a thing or two about grants (esp the importance of monitoring plans, spend and performance) I’m planning ahead and looking at how we can use the project information system to capture all the information (Mark – you should check it out – its called DAPTIV – just google it & have a look – its exactly what we needed!).
I’ve also been asked to do some work on the small business strategy – I even get to design the logo (well in reality I’ll probably just be filling in the forms to get the logo approved rather than getting the crayons out myself)
This week I also met with the Director from the Queensland Public Service Commission. She was really nice and gave me loads of info around the types of development opportunities they run across the Government Departments. I was also able to tell her about some of the development programmes the CS run in the UK too and give her some contacts in CSHR to follow up on. Finally I’ve also met my mentor who works for the Department for Transport in a contract management role so he seems like he’ll be a good contact to learn from too.