We worked with the Director of Housing, Community Safety and Supported Living to prepare colleagues for a significant change programme, including the recruitment of a new executive team, a new group of senior managers, some 35 people, and recruitment of new Team Leaders. This resulted in several Assessment Centres for the managers and team leaders and we designed and ran the Senior Manager Assessments and trained them to run the Team Leader assessments with Centell acting in the roles of designer and quality control.

Centell continues to facilitate management teams across the Portfolio as well as take on special projects. Currently we are helping to design a new method for selecting Foster Carers based on the Assessment Centre method and this will dramatically cut the waiting time for appointments.

We have also used outdoor learning and we base ourselves at the National Mountain Centre in North Wales for this. Centell has developed a flexible programme with Plas y Brenin that combines indoor and outdoor learning very effectively - based on participant feedback.

We have acted as coach to the two project teams that were restructuring Children's and Adults' services, having trained them in Project Management skills.

Key Achievements

These were:

• New cadres of managers appointed speedily to the restructured service
• Internal colleagues more prepared for change and ready to take on new roles and approaches
• Innovative new approaches to assessment, leading to the Foster Carer project
• Foster Carers appointment time reduced from an average of 9 months to 2, dramatically exceeding government targets