Five months at the CCG!

16^th-27^th November 2015 

The end of November marks five months of me being a member of the CCG team! These past five months feel like the fastest months of my life! The amount of work that I have managed to do in this time is incredible and the experiences I have had so far have been extremely beneficial to me and my personal development.

I have been taking on a lot more responsibility within the Project Management Office (PMO) at the CCG these past couple of weeks which has been really interesting for me. I have been working on putting together an Action Log template for the newly formed Programme Executive Group (PEG) which will be replacing the previously existing group at the CCG, the Caring Together Project Management Group (CT PMG). This newly formed group is a result of changes in Governance structure within the Caring Together Programme.

Also a fairly large project I have been involved with regarding the PMO is the creation of a Programme Plan for both the CCG plan on a page programmes of work and also the Caring Together Programme. It became clear to me that the CCG was previously lacking an overarching Programme plan for all of the programmes of work and the projects that subsequently sit underneath them. The idea of this plan is to identify all of the interdependencies between the different projects and the key milestones and deliverables within each of them. This then allows resources from within the PMO team to track on one document where projects are up to and for the resources to be allocated to certain projects in time for when they are required.
I am very pleased to say that I have only received positive feedback about the document from the members of staff that have seen the documents, which is really nice to hear as it was my first project for the PMO team.

During the past few weeks I attended the annual iNetwork Conference: Delivering through Devolution. This event consisted of presentations from expert speakers who had already started along the journey of devolution through seminar talks and panel discussions. There were also innovation hubs where groups could share their own experiences and discuss key components for successful reform.
By listening to the expert speakers it helped me to understand the concept of devolution in more detail and how it could be an excellent step forward in the right direction for Cheshire if they choose to embark on this in the future. I believe that the best way for successful reform is to learn from others and Manchester is a particularly good example of this. It is all about making sure that there are strong foundations already existing to build upon; economic performance and excellent partnerships.

I also attended the November HealthVoice meeting last week held by the CCG which I found very beneficial. This group is made up of people with an interest in the healthcare services within Eastern Cheshire and several members are part of the patient participation groups within the GP practices. At this group members of both the CCG and other partners present pieces of work/projects that they have been working on and provide the group with an update as to how they are progressing and also to answer any questions the group has around the particular subjects. It was very interesting to see the different opinions and perspectives within the group and how passionate the representatives at the group were.