Jack Hughes

I currently offer project support on high-profile projects being accomplished within the council. For instance UA92 back in 2018, UA92 was a new university in development in Old Trafford, Manchester. a number of my job roles consisted of generating project plans for the team, creating key milestone documents, and manipulating timelines to make certain cut-off dates were met. I was additionally accountable for the invoices that came into our department to ensure they were processed via our SAP finance system in a timely manner to make certain payment was processed on time to the vendor.

Additionally to this, I have been a part of a joint organisation integration amongst GMP (Greater Manchester Police) and Trafford Council. Human resources of both businesses joined collectively to shape GMSS (greater Manchester Shared services). I frequently worked over at Greater Manchester Police to liaise with their HR to ensure the project ran smoothly. A number of my key responsibilities throughout this project had been to produce online forms for the organisation to use. For example, a new starter form, a leavers form, sickness absence forms, and so forth. I used Microsoft Visio to produce process maps on the new procedures for forms. I undertook a variety of testing of the new GMSS HR system before the 'go live' date to raise any faults and ensure it is operating to the high quality it is able to. On top of this, I also create board reports to present to senior members of staff and service directors to provide updates on how the live projects are progressing.

At the start of 2022, I took on a project which entailed a review of services within the Council. I was responsible for liaising with the service managers and finding out the issues that needed addressing and seeing what we are able to do to enhance the service. I then set up a number of workshops and lunch and learn sessions over an eight-week duration to make the team work collaboratively again which wasn't taking place before. I used a website tool called Miro, this is an interactive whiteboard so the entire team could share thoughts at the same time on the issues I presented to them. Once I wrapped up this project I fed back to the senior manager of the service who had nothing but positive things to say about how a great deal has changed. Any major issues that had been noted meant that I had to then escalate them and raise those with the director of the service who will have then taken the responsibility to sort those out.

I ended 2022 on a brief project in which the purpose was to assist a service to enhance their website to increase website traffic in hope of extra clients. At the time that I took this on the website wasn't the finest. I undertook a benchmarking exercise which meant reaching out to numerous councils throughout the country and finding out some background information. For example, how much website traffic they get on average in a month, how much it cost to construct the website, and so forth. I managed to construct a portfolio of websites that I thought appeared desirable and presented those to the service to see if they approved of any. as soon as we came to an agreement on which one they preferred the most, it gave me an image of what to base the new one off. I liaised with a number of web editors to get an estimated fee for the new website and provide website analytics each month. I then handed this over to the service and they carried the rest of the project on their own to add personal tweaks to their new website and make certain it is up to their high standard.

At present, I am a part of a project team providing project support on a cost-saving exercise. I was sent a list from our procurement team of contracts owned by different services within the council that are due to expire within 18 months. I liaised with the owners of the contracts and determined if they had to be renewed and if so, why did they need to be. As of now, we're operating alongside procurement and a few external stakeholders from different councils to create a process on how to work through this project in an effective manner. As this has a very tight timescale I'm working under pressure to ensure I hit the tight deadlines that have been set. The purpose of this is to save the council money over the million-pound mark which can then be reinvested into something better for the business or the community.