We are all busy considering not just the short-term impact of additional costs and loss of income from the current global pandemic on our overall financial health, but also rapidly assessing what the medium-term is likely to look like.
Being able to describe what judgments and assumptions we are making in simple terms becomes ever more important and when they alter, as more information becomes available, so too does being able to justify why they have changed.
Previously, we would have been able to rely more on trend information to help shape our thinking, but these unprecedented times have meant that those trends may no longer be as relevant as they were before.
Our activities and service delivery has also rapidly changed, thanks to a need to transform at pace over the last couple of months, responding to emerging risks and issues as they arise. There will be much of this transformation that we want to hold on to.
Whereas we previously may have taken some time to build a business case and assess the financial consequences of a change, we now have to adapt the way in which we make the case for making some of that transformation more permanent.
The ability of our teams to have a more flexible approach to assess the benefits will be crucial in ensuring we make sound decisions for our longer-term sustainability.
Just as we have pulled services apart and built them back together in different ways to respond to the most pressing needs in our community, we need to think in those terms when judging the financial consequences of doing this long-term.
Identifying those skills within our teams will be imperative to ensuring the decisions made now will stand us in good stead as we continue to respond to the changes we are yet to face.
Adele Taylor is director of resources at Windsor & Maidenhead RLBC
