Local Government Digital Transformation Fund Update

Since our last blog in September, kick off meetings have been held with each of the 5 successful council project teams. From these conversations, it was clear there would be a need for digital roles that were not available within the councils themselves. After a few discussions within WLGA, it was agreed that the Centre for Digital Public Services (CDPS), would step in and assist with the procurement of the required contractors as we needed to get the ball rolling quickly due to the tight time scales.

We have also refined the document for submitting spend reports and the final report that will need to be sent to WLGA in March. This document has been put together to act as a monthly spend report that the councils can use to submit invoices for payment to WLGA, but also is the same document that will be submitted as their final report in March. We have done this to try and reduce the time and effort for the councils and will be reviewing this approach in the retro session in March.

The team also received a request for the Schools Management Information System Project to be added to this year’s transformation fund, this is a project which work started on just over a year ago. Due to projected under spend of the transformation fund, the project has been passed through the commissioning model and the transformation fund panel, which has resulted in the project also being awarded spend from this year’s pot.

The WLGA Digital team continues to have monthly catch ups with the council project leads along with advising and assisting around these meetings. The contractors will be starting work in the new year in readiness for accelerated delivery through January to March 2023.

Huge thanks to the team at CDPS for the quick turnaround of proposed costs for contingency labour for each project and sharing the required documents with both the councils and WLGA to manage the spend.

Further updates will be shared with our mailing list, along with the promotion of show and tells for each project within the fund. If you’d like to sign up for the mailing list, you can here: https://localgovernmentdigital.wales/contact-us-and-subscribe/