Os ychydigfanaeth, gyda'r ddigwethaf夫 anf gref yma yng ngheithredu, wnaeth cyhoedd am y ffordd yn gweithio'n gweithio'r regent Gweithl finan��ol. Yr Eistedd, mae'n yn iweithio'r ffordd o hyd i'r teimlo heb dyma'r rei, ac mae'r cymdeithas cyffredinol. Rwy'n gweithio'r mae'n gweithio'n gweithredu, ychydig'r gweithredu sut dweud yw y sefyd하게eth yn eu pethau y fortuneidau, mae'r cymorth wedi ceisio'n gwneud bod cyfliwch gan gweithio'r cymorth sydd o'i bwysig o'r cyfliwch gyfliwch ar y cyfliwch gyfliwch am ddifu'r cymorth a fydda'r cyfliwch gyda'r cyfliwch yn flwyddyn. Rwy'n amdano cerddoddus ar gyfer y bwrdd gyda'r clywi, mae'r ffordd gyda'r cyflwyno ymlaes, dwi'n amdano'r cyflwyno i'n bwysig y byddwch i'i bobl yn bwysigol, Nid yw'n meddwl iawn o'r oed yn siad fan i'r stwerd hynny? wedi'i'n credu hynny'n meddwl ifanc arlawn yn trechu? Roedd ychydig yn ymwneud o'n meddwl hynny, ddiolch i'r hynny yn meddwl i'ch rwynt hefyd. Mae hynny'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl, eh, ddiwrn i'r hynny'n meddwl i chi adre wych yn meddwl a rwy'r prysgwrs. Mae'r meddwl hefyd yn meddwl am eich meddwl, ac nid yna'r meddwl hynny i ei mewn. When you are invited to address the meeting, please make sure that the microphone is switched on. When you are finished addressing please turn off your microphone immediately. Please speak slowly, clearly. And please do not talk over or interrupt anybody. Please note that the需要 to vote on any item, we will do so via the microphones. Only those who are present in the chamber can vote or propose second recommendations. Committedlypetion in the chamber I invite each of you to introduce yourselves. Members, after I call your name, please turn on your camera and microphone where it's a couple of seconds so that you can say your name and your presence be noted. As I said earlier, my name is Will Jackson Wood. I am the member for the Shelford Ward. My vice-chair is councillor Sally Ann Hart. Thank you, chair. I'm councillor Sally Ann Hart, and I'm one of the members for Melbourne Ward. Thank you, councillor Peter Fane. Peter Fane, one of the members for Shelford Ward. Thank you, councillor Anna Bradden. Thank you, I'm councillor Anna Bradden. I'm one of the members for Milton and Water Beach Ward. Thank you, councillor Senita Hansraj. Hello, I'm Senita Hansraj. I'm councillor for Hysdon in Bington and Orchard Park. Thank you very much. councillor Richard Stobart. Thank you, chair. councillor Richard Stobart, a member for Gerton Ward also includes Dry Drayton and Maddingley. Thank you very much. councillor Mark Howell has advised that it will be late to the meeting, but is due to join us a little late later on. Do you have any other members present? Oh, Heather, sorry, I thought I said your name. Thank you, Heather Williams. I represent the Mordins Ward. Thank you very much. Sorry about that. I can confirm the meeting is court. We also have, I don't know, do we have Peter Maddock, head of finance in the room? No, okay. Okay, thanks Liz. Do you want to introduce yourself? Good afternoon, chair, and good afternoon, committee members. Liz Woods, chief executive. That's great. Thank you very much. As we're just doing introductions and we've just been joined by councillor Mark Howell. I'll let you sit down, but Mark can you just introduce yourself very quickly once you've logged on? Sorry? What are we introducing ourselves to? Well, we're live, so. Oh, right, okay. Well, hello everyone. My name is Mark Howell, and I am the councillor for Paprop and Caxton. Thank you very much. We also have our Democratic Services Officer, Lawrence Sturrie-Hulman, joining virtually. Lawrence, can you introduce yourself? Good afternoon, thank you chair, Lawrence Sturrie-Hulman, Democratic Services Officer for the Employment and Staffing Committee. That's great. Thank you very much. We'll also have a number of officers joining us virtually throughout the meeting. Item number one is for apologies. Lawrence, can you confirm if we have any apologies for absence today? Yes, thank you, chair. We have apologies for absence from councillor John Williams, and I believe councillor Peter Fane is substituting for him. That's great. Thank you very much. Okay. Item number two is Declaration of Interest. Do any members have any interest to declare in relation to any item of business on this agenda? If you have an interest subsequently that becomes apparent later in the meeting, please will you raise it at that point. Is there anybody to declare an interest? No, that's great. Thank you. We'll move on. Item number three is Minutes of the Previous Meeting. Are members happy to approve the minutes of the meeting of the committee held on the 9th of June, 2022, as a correct record? Agreed. Therefore, I approve the meetings. Can I take that as affirmation? Thank you. The next point on the meeting was actually to have a public speaker who registered to speak, but they are not here to do so. We'll move on to the next agenda item, which is item number four, which is the Retention and Turnover Report. Members, we now come to that point. The committee has been on some note to the report. We have Claire Lomahill, which HR advisor, which will virtually ask us to present the report. But before I call upon her to do that, I'm going to ask our CEO if there is anything else that she would like to say as I'm conscious that Liz actually is to depart at 2.45. Liz? Thank you, Chair. Well, as part of this report, this report talks about recruitment and retention, and I wanted just to come and suppose to just give you an update on where we are on the four-day week, given that a key criteria for a successful four-day week would be our ability to improve our recruitment and retention. Obviously, we're a long way off that yet. We're only announced that we'd be looking at trial four weeks ago today, and we haven't even entered the planning period yet, but I did want to come and give you a very brief update, and I'm happy to answer any questions if you'd like me to. In the four weeks that have passed, it's been really inspiring, actually, to see many of my colleagues sort of approach me and say we've been having these really positive conversations about how we can be more productive, how we can use our time more wisely, and how we will make sure that we're measuring what we're doing and maintaining service provision. So that's been really, really positive. The next three months, so from October to December, is our formal planning period, and the idea is that we haven't formally started it yet. The idea is that in October we have a conversation across the whole organisation using a number of techniques and tools to draw out what people's concerns are, what people's ideas are, and to really, from the bottom up of the organisation, try to understand how we can make the trial work. Then during November we'll sort of analyse all of those things, and I think there'll be loads of good ideas coming out. I think there'll be ideas that come out that might be really good for one team, but actually have an unintended consequence on another team. So we will need a corporate leadership team level to assess what's going to work for everyone, what's going to work for some teams, and what isn't going to work because it has unintended consequences. Then in December the idea is that we have a draft, I suppose, of principles of working, but as an organisation we can say, okay, from January to March this is how we intend to change the way that we work in order to be more productive and to trial the full day week. So that's where we are. I just wanted to give you a very brief update, Chair, and I'm obviously happy to answer any questions. That's great, thanks. I was going to move on to the next point, and actually I'll answer one, but considering your time sort of freshness, so we'll just go on to any questions about the four-day week at this point, yeah? So please, Faye. Thank you Chair. As Chief Executive said, it's going to be different for different departments, the effects, I'm thinking in particular of the planning department, and how is it going to be possible to have a degree of predictability as to which days particular planning officers are in? Teddy, there'll be some scope for flexibility, but I think it is important that those who need to contact planning officers on a regular basis can be fairly sure as to when they'll be in and when they want to do it. Through you, Chair. So I should have said at the beginning that we are going to strategy and resources in the City Council on the 10th of October, because obviously that the planning is a shared service, and I've spent quite a lot of time briefing city members and has some really useful feedback from them, and so I think it's across the whole organisation, the idea of which day-off do you take is really important, and one that we don't have an answer to yet. So it's much easier for a small organisation, or an organisation that doesn't run service for the public, so we'll all take the same day off, because that means that nobody's trying to look for anybody on their day off because everybody's got the same day off. Clearly that wouldn't work for us, but what we haven't got to the point of doing in the past, the planning period is about doing that, is saying, okay, do we all want to take a Monday or Friday off, or does everybody want to take a different day off? And actually a number of people have said to me, actually what would really improve my health and well-being is being able to pick my kids up from school every day. So just working a shorter day, but five days a week. So there are all sorts of different conversations going on, and we haven't decided yet. I think the point that you make is we will need to be really clear in our communications about what day off you have. So at the moment we have a flexi-time system and people can take time off, and it's not always clear if somebody isn't in the office because if you have one flexi-day you don't always say you're out of the office. Some people do, some people don't. So we will need to be really clear, and I think it's a point really well made that potentially email signatures will need to say these are my working days so that people, our customers and colleagues can know what to expect. That's great, thanks. Council Alan Brennan, question? Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to thank Liz because I had a very comprehensive set of questions from a resident in my village, and I went back to her with my understanding of the likely answers, but I also forwarded to Liz who added her understanding to the answers I'd given, and I wondered whether you were thinking perhaps whether we might draw up a FAQs for the website because there are sorts of questions that people might want to ask. I don't know whether that's relevant because basically the public should just see it as a seamless continuous delivery, but I wondered if perhaps you're planning to do that certainly for insight for the colleagues so that they can answer those questions. Thank you. Thanks, Anna. Yes, if you're in comments on that. Yes, so we already have an FAQ on insight where we've had loads of questions asked and colleagues in HR have been brilliant about responding to those, they will post on insight now. We have added, so obviously we've got all the news releases that we did on the website, but we've also added a feedback button on our website for the public to provide us any comments that they want to on the four-day week. I think it may have been that resident, actually, or it may have been another resident. I can't remember who said, I don't really want to complain about this, but I do want to say something. Yes. So now we have a button on the website where people can comment on the four-day week, and we'll be keeping a close eye on that, and seeing, you know, I'm really keen that the public engage with this, and we understand what their views are. Thank you very much. Thank you. We have a question from Councillor Heather Williams. Chair, unconscious committee members have also requested, so I would normally go after them as I'm not a committee member. Happy to ask now, but equally respect the protocol. Thank you. So we have a question from Councillor Richard Stobart. Thank you, Chair. So a question for this. There's experience elsewhere in the public sector, although there's a body of work being done in New Zealand and also in Iceland in the public sector. I think the experience in this country is in the private sector. I was wondering, those lessons learned, because they seem to be quite upbeat, both of those projects. How useful those lessons are in getting the exercise going here? Does it provide a kind of a starting point? Thank you, through you, Chair. So it's really interesting because each trial is quite different. So the trials in the Scandinavian countries have tended to be quite often led at a government level, or a municipality level, not at an individual organisation level, and they've been slightly different. They've been about shortening working hours, rather than what I'd call a pure four day week. Everybody who does this brings a wealth of experience and learning. There were a number of trials in public sector organisations in the States during COVID, where people were just trying to save money by closing the office for a day a week. They tended to be more what you traditionally call compressed hours, where people work for longer days and have the fifth day off. But there is a huge wealth of academic literature out there from all of these trials, which is really useful. The thing that I haven't found yet is a local government doing the trial that we're doing, which is the four day week trial. People have done compressed hours trials, but not four day week trials. And we've had a lot of interest from other councils who want to learn from what we're doing about, I think, 15 at the last count had approached us and said they're really interested. So hopefully we will continue to add to that body of literature that helps other people, other organisations, as well as us learning from what's already there. Can I ask a follow-up? Yes, please do. So as people, those teams are getting together and conceiving of fresh ideas, and they might be as basic as I suppose I've seen this in some industry sectors, where you take away in the meeting space the chairs, so all meetings are conducted standing up. And so there is that kind of immediacy about concluding a meeting because it's simply uncomfortable.  I think it's a great idea. Where I saw it at work it was very successful. I said they concluded meetings much more quickly and decisively by... Anyway, sorry, I digress, but there are going to be a number of innovations and productivity ideas, some of which will require funds and some of which will, you know, can be organised. How do you kind of capture those and prioritise them as they're emerging? Sorry, thank you Richard. Yes, Liz? So interestingly, a lot of what we've been doing in the transformation programme over the last two years has really been about increasing productivity. And so for those projects, my colleagues in transformation are saying to me, actually rather than us kind of going out to teams and saying we can help you do this, they've got teams of questions and saying please can you help us do that because we think that's the way that we can be more productive. So we've really got a team of transformation people in place and a lot of this is about IT, basically about changing the way that we use our IT or enhancing what we're doing with IT.  For actually everything else is non-cost. It's just about changing the way that we work without needing to spend more money.  I don't want to spend a lot of money, but I don't think we need to. We have, you know, all the change works best when the people who it's happening to are in control of it. And I've seen that in the last four weeks, you know, people who have, you know, really been sort of kind of quite inspirational about what they think they can do differently. So I think apart from the transformation stuff to do with IT and, you know, the use of forms and database kind of stuff, it will be cost free for the trial. And, you know, hopefully that will continue. I think it doesn't need, there doesn't need to be allowed to cost, any cost really associated with this. That's right. Thank you very much. We have a question from Councillor Mark Howell. Thank you. How is this going to be adapted for the manual workers within the organisation? Yes. Thanks, Mark. Is there any comment from that? Yeah. So what we always said was that the trial and, and I'll just, I'll call it the depot. So the trial and the depot is really different because there are only so many ways that you can pick up a bin or Super Street. There aren't, you know, you can't start changing the way that you do those kind of activities particularly radically. But what you can do is look at the, the, I suppose the broader operational issues. And so my colleagues in the depot think that there are round reorganisations that we can do that will be more efficient, that will save time. And that's, that will be part of planning for the depot trial for our, for the waste operatives looking at how could we reorganise the rounds. We also know, you know, with eight bank holidays a year that we already incur eight sets of Saturday overtime as days shift from the bank holiday day, everything shifts over. And actually a number of councils, I think even one in Cambridge Hill already doing what, you know, already operating a waste service working four days a week. Now that's for slightly longer days rather than for usual normal days. And they're doing that because of the bank holiday issue and because they save costs there. The other areas where potentially we could save costs are in reduced thickness from people, you know, a lot of our sickness and waste is around just the constant manual pressures of lifting bins five days a week. And so we think that there will be some cost savings there. But the reason why that trial is separate is because it is a really different sort of trial. The changes that we'll make will tend to be at management and kind of operational level rather than individuals saying I can do this differently because there aren't that many things that you can do differently in terms of picking up bins. Yes, please. Thank you. So two points from there. One, what will happen with regards to the commercial ones will work on the Friday and the Saturday already to collect especially those in the city. And also what happens to, I believe we still have cleaners in the sheltered housing, what was communal areas, what happens with them as well. Yes, thank you, Mark. Please, any comments? So we'll need to sit down with our colleagues at the City Council before we do anything in waste and work through all of those things. It hasn't kind of gone unnoticed. I've briefed all of the waste operatives the same time that I've briefed all of our desk-based colleagues. So obviously they know that the first trial is going ahead. The commercial team are enthusiastic about trying the trial. There's no reason why in the same way as in the office we're looking at potentially extending opening hours one day a week by rearranging shifts, there's no reason why we couldn't do something more creative in the commercial team. So it is about completely changing the way that we approach work and working hours, not just kind of doing the same thing with fewer hours. So that's in waste. FM cleaners, again, that needs to come through in the second trial because it's just a really different sort of trial. And we haven't addressed that yet. Thank you. That's awesome. Thank you very much. Okay, so we have a question from councillor Sinita Hans-Rach. Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to say that for years I did a four-day week and I appreciate that the job is a different one. But I'm just concerned. A four-day week turned out that in order to get everything done, including practical and paperwork, we used to work through lunchtimes, go off late. The expectation was that you'd get the job done, obviously. But by the time the day off came, you were absolutely tired. And I just wondered if these people are going to suffer the same. And yes, it's a good thing so you can get your hospital appointments, et cetera sorted out. But this is what used to happen. The changes that happened within the NHS and the meetings that happened, sometimes you had to go in. So I'm wondering if these people are going to suffer the same things that we did. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Sinita. Yeah, good point, actually. Liz, do you have every thoughts on that? So I'll just address both of those things, if I may. So in terms of how will you, you know, will people be worse off as a result of this? We don't know yet, but we will know because we've got all of the health and well-being data that we did during the survey in August. And that's incredibly granular data. So I've got data by service area, by gender, by part-time full-time, by do you have children. So I've got health and well-being data, which is kind of industry standard, which is very, very granular. So I'll be able, so at the end of the trial, we'll run the same survey. And then we will be able to know exactly, you know, of the female part-time workers with children, what were they saying about their health and well-being before the trial, and what are they saying now. And so we will know. We don't know, you know, we don't know what the answer is. And part of the point of doing the trial is exactly to address your concern. Is it something that's going to benefit people's health and well-being or not? Because if across the board, you know, all of the indicators are kind of flashing red when they were either sort of, you know, sort of amber or some green, some red. If everything gets worse, then clearly we won't want to continue. We will have done the trial, it won't have done what we wanted it to do, and we won't continue. So that's in terms of how or we know, we will have the data. In terms of, I suppose, the broader thing about having done a four-day week, and I don't know, councillor, if your four-day week was compressed hours or if it was, you know, the kind of four-day week that we're proposing, but you're absolutely right. Unless you radically change the way that you work, you can't fit five days into four without doing four longer days and working for your lunch hour. It sounds to reason that if you're not going to change how you do things, you'll need the same number of hours, and effectively that's compressed hours, you know, doing four days of maybe nine hours or nine and a half hours a day, and that's not what we're trialling. We're trialling for seven and a half hour days, and the way that we will, you know, do that as I've alluded to, is to look at how can we change the way that we're doing things so that we are more productive and we deliver the same amount in less time. Thank you. That's great. Thank you very much. We have a question from councillor Selyon Hott. Thank you, Chair. I just want to go back to what you said at the beginning, Liz, whereas some people have asked for the five shorter days so that they can, when music to my ears thought that you could be available to drop your children off and pick them up and especially when you think about childcare costs, is that something, is there flexibility in the system for that, or does it have to be for days? Yeah.  I know exactly what that feeling was, of being in the office kind of desperate to know are you going to get to the childcare on time or not, and you know, it may well be that your health and well-being as a parent of school-age children would be as improved if you were able to pick them up every day and do five shorter days as it would be if you were able to take a whole day off, you know, and you know, in my case it probably would have cleaned the house. So yes, we are thinking, so we haven't sent anything in stone yet, but we are thinking that it would make sense to do that trial and we can measure then the difference between the people who did five shorter days and identify those in the health and well-being survey and identify, you know, were their outcomes as good as the people who had a whole extra day off? So that's kind of where we're going. We haven't made any definite decisions because I'll be honest, we weren't really expecting that question, but the whole point of the planning period is to work through all of these issues and understand, you know, how can we make the trial, you know, as successful as possible in that we, you know, can measure lots of different things and see what the outcomes are. Thanks. So yes, thank you for bearing with us, and Councillor Heather Williams of your question. Thank you, chair. Two questions, if I may, through yourself. One of which is in relation to, if we're able, because we heard that our agency staff will be on five days a week, particularly reference to planning. I think when we're looking at KPIs and et cetera and when we're looking at performance, it would be really useful if we can report separately what has been done by agency work on five days a week and what has been done by our officers on four days a week, because if we have the figures merged, we won't really be able to see, actually, if one is compensating the other and what would happen if everybody went for a full day week. So is it possible to have those figures separately so we get a better sense of comparison? The other is in relation to the food waste separate collection trials, which I have in my ward, and I believe Councillor Bradman, they have Milton, she's nodding, not good, I've not got that wrong. Obviously we were hoping to roll that out further, that hence we started the trials, just wondering is there any impacts from the four day week, because obviously we would need more people. We're going to need more people anyway to do the separate food waste collections weekly, and then we're factoring this in as well, and a very cheeky third chair. Is it okay if an officer would turn round through this consultation period and say, do you know what, particularly like part-time staff, I do four days a week, I want to do four days a week, I don't want to take part in this trial, are we allowing them to have choice as to whether they take part or not, or are we mandating that they have to? Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Let's have any thoughts on those three. So taking them backwards, people don't have to take part in the trial, they don't want to. On food waste, we're not looking at starting the waste trial until next spring, and so everything that we were doing would continue. I have a recollection of the head of waste telling me that there were some issues with rolling things out because of not being clear about where DEFA are on the actual changes that they're going to make in terms of food waste. So the four day week won't impact the food waste trial, but wider things may, and I'd need to go back and talk to my colleague about that. So I think the rollout will be impacted by legislative changes coming through DEFA, it won't be impacted by the four day week. And on agency staff, I think I'd need to take that away. I don't see any issue in principle, as long as it's colleagues where they are doing something that is easily measurable. So if it's processing planning applications, I think that's fairly straightforward. If it's contributing to the local plan, that's harder to measure in terms of productivity, even though we have some board service level measures. So it depends on whether you can measure an individual's productivity and for the workflow, transactional things you can. That's great. Thank you very much. I'm very cognizant of Liz's time because we've only got nine minutes. Are we still being sat here? If it's all right, we've got a question from Councillor Richard Stobart's, Alibam, and also Heather Williams. Will that be okay for just others? Okay, Councillor Richard Stobart. Thank you, Chair. So we've talked a lot about the staff, the officers of South Council, but what about the members? And we need to fit in with this new working regime. It would be great if we could do some exemplar things amongst the councillors. What would that typically be? And can we be taking prompts from the officers to fit in with their new working patterns? It would be great to know if we're working closely with planning, for example, to know what they're thinking of, and how do we interact with planning staff in a way that supports their goals? So that's a general question, but how do we fit in? Good question. Liz, do you have any thoughts on that? So, yeah, absolutely. One of the main work streams in the planning period is about members, because it's really, I'm grateful that you're saying how are we going to change or respond to what I, but what this child isn't about is making other people's, our customers, if you like, whether that's members or residents, making their lives kind of difficult or having to change. We want to be able to deliver the same service, whether it's to customers or members, ideally without you even noticing. But because you are close to us and you're obviously interested in the trial, we want to make sure that we are trying to provide that, I suppose, seamless service, and we'd really welcome feedback about what you think we could do more productively, how you think we could engage better and so on. And I'll certainly be holding a couple of member workshops just to get your ideas, really, and make sure that we're getting feedback from you. Great, thank you very much. Councillor Anna Bragman. Thank you, Chair. I just wondered if there are any staff who have expressed concerns to you, Liz, who are anxious about the amount of work that they have at the moment and whether they're anxious about being able to do it at the moment and therefore are anxious about being able to do that in 80% of the time. And if there are, how can we help those people to feel confident that they can take part in the trial and be understanding what their workload is such that we can make it possible for them to do it in 80% of the time? Yes, thanks. Thank you, Chair. So that's probably one of the main concerns that has been raised by people. My colleagues are generally incredibly passionate about what they do and they really care about what they do and they want to do a good job. And quite often people can't see how they can, you know, they say, I love the idea of a four-day week, I just don't think I can do it. And that's the bit where we need to provide support and training and have conversations with people about how things can change. You know, I've just come from a meeting that was planned for an hour. I said at the beginning of the meeting, we're going to do this in half an hour and we did it in 26 minutes. And it was not difficult. But people need to be given the licence to do things differently to be clear about, you know, why are you in the meeting? Do you need to be in the meeting?  So there's a whole range of things that we can help people in ways in which we can help people change. And it's just about, I suppose, giving people the confidence to know that we will provide support to people. And lots of those ideas will come from all of my colleagues in the organisation and that, you know, it's a trial. It's a three-month trial that, you know, that we will make mistakes. We know that we'll make mistakes and the evidence coming out of the four-day week global trials, which is the 70 companies who are halfway through a six-month trial is, it's been brilliant. We know we want to continue, but we've learned a lot and we're already starting to change things. And so, you know, I think we just need to give people the license to be able to make mistakes, but to make them quickly and to learn from them quickly and to change things. So it's a huge, you know, it's a big kind of learning exercise for the whole organisation. I'm just very aware of times but that, so if it's all right, I think we had a very quick question from Councillor Heather Williams and then I think we might have to let Liz go. Thank you, Chair. Through yourself, if I could ask our Chief Executive, in relation to my question earlier, have a think about how we can separate and look because if there are areas where we cannot find easy ways of measuring productivity across everything, which is sort of what you're saying about policy areas, then we won't be able to assess how the success of the trial has been, the whole point is productivity. So maybe if we could just have a think and come back to us and I'm happy to take a written response, Chair. Point next to this, but yes, violence, please do the lesson. So individual productivity is notoriously difficult to measure unless you are doing a transactional process. What we are measuring is performance across the organisation and that's how we will know in quarter one of, sorry, quarter four of this year, January to March, what are performances in our usual kind of suite of KPIs compared to quarter four of previous years adjusting for kind of COVID noise. So I think we need to be careful that we will not be able to commit to individual productivity for every person. What we are going to do at the end of the trial is some kind of in-depth qualitative work interviews with 10 colleagues and 10 managers to understand from their perspective, did they feel as though the productivity gains that they made enabled them to do a four day week and did managers feel as though their teams were delivering what they would previously have done in four days. But it's not an exact science and if we solve the productivity puzzle in sad camps, we'd be going on too much bigger things. Thanks. Okay, again, I'm just very aware that you've, so thank you very much Liz, I'm very aware that you've got to run to another meeting, so thank you very much for your time. What we would like is if we do have anything else you could potentially follow up and then do that in my time. Great, thank you very much. Okay, if we could just move on to Clare Lohmer Hill to then present the Reswell retention turnover report, please. Thank you. Hi, Clare Lohmer Hill, HR advisor. I'll just talk through the report. Okay, so just to go through some highlights of the report in that the performance indicator for the last quarter was 3.60% based on average head count of 637, so that's a very slight decrease on the previous quarter in quarter four. In the, just to really just go over some key points, you can see in the graph the how that compares to previously and there was actually a small decrease in the number of voluntary levers in quarter one. Previously there'd been a small increase in quarter four. We now have information recorded from levers forms input on itrend and the exit interview is sent out to each lever to find out more information on why people are leaving us. So in the last couple of quarters there hasn't been a very significant increase or decrease of the amount of exit interview forms we've been receiving, but we can say the figure we're receiving is double that received in 2019 and 20 and just over double that received in 2021. So obviously there is an increase in that. So the exit interview is able to gain feedback from staff and why they choose to leave in there. So just to go through the recruitment information that the actual number of roles advertised fell by a third from 103 and quarter four to 69 and quarter one. And we have actually recently struggled to fill apprenticeships roles with the lack of candidates in the market, but four apprenticeship positions were advertised with interviews taking place in quarter two. And the good news is for the first time in two years, particularly following COVID, we'll be taking on six work experience placements and are currently working closely with local schools to continue this. We have also advertised a graduate role through the local government association national graduate development programme which started in September. So just to sort of give you an idea of the new roles that are coming into the council, in relation to the retention scheme for drivers, we've had two new signed up and we had just one signed up in quarter one. So that's continuation of that one. And to go through the number of temporary workers, agency workers, the most significant areas, which I believe has sort of continued, is in the planning service and the shared waste service, which gives you a breakdown with like 65% of agency workers actually being in shared waste, the essential service that we need to provide. So I'm just sort of really going to, you've already had this to read, but just go over some key points. So the recruitment coordinators have been busy during this quarter and there continues to be a high volume of recruitment forecast for the quarter just gone in July to September. And they're also a recruitment also preparing for future recruitment and the implementation of the recruitment module within iTrend. So we've also, HR has been delivering management induction training sessions, which at the moment is currently remotely for newly promoted managers and new recruits. We're intending to run these quarterly and there are further sessions planned across the year for 2022-23. And just to give you a number in quarter one, nine managers attended manager training and more sessions are planned for quarter two. In relation to apprenticeship, which we're able to provide some more information on, we have now separated the apprenticeship data so we can identify external new high apprentices and existing staff who are undertaking an apprenticeship, which chart 11 gives you more detail. We have one internal apprenticeship who started in quarter one. As previously mentioned, we have advertised apprenticeships in both quarters but found it difficult to recruit and we're exploring more opportunities to advertise our roles more widely and looking at options such as traineeships in there. So the most recent labour market from the CIPD was published early 2022 and recruitment difficult was increasing, as we can see in our data as well as in the labour market report. So the challenges that we are facing are mirrored very much in the wider context and the number of roles we advertised in quarter four 103 was very high but goes some way to explain why the fill rate dropped between quarter four and quarter one. So in conclusion of that, we can say that the turnover rate has slightly that should say decreased since quarter four and the most common reasons cited were linked to career progression, higher salary and personal reasons such as moving out of the area. The number of roles decreased by a third from quarter four to quarter one. The number of staff who transferred to new roles was higher than in quarter four and demonstrates the staff are keen to develop the skills and remain at the council. We're looking to new avenues to continue to recruit the best talent by pursuing digital recruitment solutions and recruiting apprentices and streamlining recruitment application process as well as offering incentives including market factor supplements and golden hello payments. So that's just to give you a summary of all the information from me but I open to any questions that you may have. That's great. Thank you very much for presenting that to us Claire. Do you have any questions? I'll see one from councillor Richard Stabott. Thank you very much for the presentation. I'm really intrigued by apprenticeships. I mean this is a growth area. There's been a lot of investment. Now the challenge on recruitment is a slight worry but I wondered if you said you would spread the net wider for recruitment or that was being done. Does that include geographical? Are we reaching out to further parts of England, Scotland and Wales? The opportunities in South Cambridge might appear more attractive if you're graduating school in Liverpool or Newcastle. I wondered if that is something that's being explored at the moment. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Jessica New. My colleague Donya has been dealing with that as well so she's just going to answer that for you Richard. Okay so your point in terms of looking at whether or not we can expand the search to across the UK is really useful one and I'll pass that across to the recruitment team. What we have put in place for the current roles that we are being recruited is they have got a golden hello attached to them. So for the successful candidate we'll get a golden hello. The first payment will be at six months and then the second payment will be when they complete their apprenticeship. Some people that might be at 18 months or some people that might be closer to two years. We also found that it was a very difficult time to recruit apprentices earlier in the calendar year because of that very fact that a lot of people that we would normally be attracting were at school still and doing their exams and therefore not looking for new employment which is why we then had to re-advertise again at this point. So hopefully that answers your question. Like I said I'll pass on the information in terms of advertising. The adverts are certainly live across the UK and there you can apply for them through, there's a like a finding apprenticeship portal so anyone across the UK could apply. It would just be making sure that our advert text is really clear that we can promote remote working and indeed that's something that we've talked to the recruitment team about this week to make sure that the line managers that are recruiting are being, are selling us and selling our hybrid and remote working as much as possible in the job adverts. That's great thank you both. I think councillor just about had a follow-up question of that. Yes it, thank you Dhanya for the reply. So this is really a matter of detail but what's the typical qualification you're looking at? Is A level to the BTEC? What is it usually? Sorry I jumped in there a bit too soon. So for the entry level apprenticeships which is what they were looking for for the new hires they will do either generally a level two or a level three in business admin or customer service. Some of the apprenticeships that we've done brand new apprenticeships in the last like 12 to 18 months they've been doing level four apprenticeships and so what that means is if it's a level two you know the level of qualification is very minimal. A level three at the end they will get the equivalent of A levels at the end of their apprenticeship and level four again a bit higher up not quite university but more advanced studies. So in terms of the entry levels the applications that apprentices so these are the new hire apprentices have to do it's just a case of filling in a CV so they don't have to go through the full application process that any other job role has and therefore they just have to have an up-to-date CV. We are doing some work with form the future a local charity to see how we can promote ourselves within the community and we're looking at doing an event that ties in with National Apprenticeship Week in February 2023 even. I know that seems like a long way away but we are starting the groundwork with that I'll take a little bit of time to get that off the ground but yeah I guess that's it really if we're able to promote ourselves by going into local schools which is what we're looking to do then obviously that increases the like the brand awareness that we are a good employer for apprentices and we hope that that will kind of it will just grow and grow and so we'll get more candidates for the apprenticeships. That's great thank you thank you so much for that. We have a question from Councillor Peter Fane. Thank you chair it was in relation to the induction process I think paragraph 22 refers to this and it seems to me that that is a particular challenge this council at the moment when you look around you see the number of chairs still left here given the number of people who have taken chairs home to be able to work from home and then we add to that the challenge of not knowing quite when people will be in so it's very difficult I guess for new members of staff to have the sort of induction face to face that they would have had in the past where they would get to know colleagues informally and understand the sort of culture of the place more easily and I just wondered whether that is a particular challenge that is being faced up to. Donny have you got anything to add to that? Yeah so we have adapted our induction process like since pre-COVID to where it is now so the HR admin team do a small induction virtual induction and also have opportunities to have sessions with the new staff where they might just have like really like basic questions like how do I log my hours and things like that where they don't want to bother the manager but if they were in if we were all in person like going back pre 2020 obviously they would have just asked someone else that they would sit next to them and they're not able to at this point so those inductions have worked really well and there's also a buddy scheme in terms of matching up new members of staff with people that are willing to be buddies on top of the fact that we also offer workplace mentoring and coaching across the organisation. I think the experience that you get now is is different to what you would have got before COVID and you know we work and we respond to feedback which we you know we seek from both managers and from staff and generally new starters the feedback from them has been that the induction process and the buddy system and working in that kind of way has been really helpful so yeah I understand what you're saying I think you know we're never going to be able to return to you know an office full of people in every single seat and every single space in the office because there is that balance where where work has shifted but I think what we offer staff has changed but we continue to respond to feedback so if for instance we were to get about a feedback that said that people you know you suddenly had new starters that were three months in leaving we would be doing next interviews finding out that information and piecing that together to figure out what was going on and obviously at this point that hasn't happened so they're full of the conclusion that we can draw is that we the changes that we've put in place are being well received that's great thank you very much don't you we have another question from councillor Anna Bradman thank you chair I've got two questions one of them is looking at the table under paragraph 18 on page six which is looking at the number of temporary agency workers in each department I absolutely understand that the stresses and strains that have been on the shared planning service and the shared waste service but I just wondered if part of the reason I know this is a bit not maybe intuitive but I just wonder if part of the reason that we've got more agency workers in those services is because they're shared and I wondered if it's something to do with how the shared services are administered or the way people work in them or that they think they're working for one organisation and they realise they're in a shared situation between the city I'm sure the service treats them all as an employee of the service but I just wondered if it's to do with how the employee perceives it when they're in the post and the second question is under that paragraph 19 I'm really encouraged to hear that we're creating a casual worker bank because I know this is what Adam Brooks for a long time providing a sort of nursing bank so I just wondered if we could have a little more detail about that the source of people who are encouraged to work for the bank. Thank you. Thanks yes. Don't need to read that. Okay so the first point it's an interesting point that you raised in terms of do we have more agency staff because they're shared service and I don't know I don't know the explicit answer to that question because I don't think we've ever asked that particular question you know there's obviously a large amount of work that needs to happen and if if we don't have enough staff in place then you know the bins won't get collected etc. I know that the shared planning service are doing work to look to see how we can how we can improve things with regards to growing up to growing their own talent so we have looked at introducing a level seven planning apprenticeships and that's still kind of a work in progress if they are able to maximise interest in the service through that way and therefore encourage people to work for you know that you'd have to work between three and four years generally for those kind of apprenticeships but then that would encourage talent to progress as time went on so I think that answers as much as I can the question about the planning and shared way so certainly share that question back to the rest of the HR team for them to take forward. In terms of casual bank so do you mean you want to have more of kind of like granular data in terms of examples of roles that are currently in place that are accessed in the casual bank is that what you mean? I just wondered the sorts of how that works you know whether it's people who are retained on a bank and then they might go what sort of jobs do they go into it might it be on contact centre or working on housing benefits or how does that work and are they people who work could work one day a week or are they people who you know have more hours available I just wondered how it worked thank you. So from an admin point of view what would happen is if someone is interested in joining the casual bank they would just email the recruitment team the CV if they had the right skill set to join the casual bank i.e. you know so for instance like office experience or experience in another local authority or transferrable skills of you know experience in another role that might not necessarily be office based but you know they could draw something in. They would then be basically put the CV would be registered and then as and when managers are looking to recruit and sometimes we're looking at bank like casual bank workers in an interim place in case for instance an employee turns around goes on even tomorrow and you've and you've got that vacancy to fill and you know it's going to take you two to three months to fill it then we would look at providing the manager wanted to we would share the CVs that were adequate with the manager the manager would then make a call as to whether or not they wanted to go ahead with any of those people and then we would then go through the necessary recruitment steps to get them in as quickly as possible in terms of flexibility of work so yes they could it's either so they could be working you know one or two days a week or they could be working full time and obviously there is no minimum maximum kind of expectation in terms of hours so if for instance that they suddenly their their availability changed and that didn't suit the needs of the business then the then then obviously we wouldn't we wouldn't have to continue to employ them for you know a separate period of time does that answer your questions yes thank you very much okay and would you want would you want me to include in the next quarter or to a written answer afterwards of examples of different types of roles that have that have been that have used the casual bank would that be useful I don't feel I need it but if I remember a committee would I can see Sally Ann nodding her head saying she thinks she might find that useful so thank you very much don't you yeah I think it would be I also so yes thank you don't you thank you thank you I also raised a point last time in our previous meeting just in reference to keeping a a tally on individuals which Jeff sort of mentioned the fact that there wasn't individuals flipping from permanent into into bank to become sort of more financially sort of lucrative for them or whatever you know and I'm just wondering if that's still being a situation where that's still being monitored because that you know that that has been a case in in other in other areas say outside of the council sorry but I was just making sure that was still being monitored. The one area where I could that I would naturally think that it might be an issue is not going from an like an SCDC employee into the casual bank but perhaps there might be some for instance in the planning service where they might be going from being an SCDC employee into being a agency member of staff so I could ask for us to have that in if all I know is that could be a question I don't know if the world data is if that is a natural answer so we can include it in the notes for us producing the written report for the next quarter so that if it isn't if that is an issue we're highlighting that and then you can monitor that going forward would that be helpful yeah it would thank you yeah I think you know again I don't how it was addressed last time is basically it wasn't an issue and I think that we just need to make sure that things like that are actually being monitored especially when we're trying to become more sort of flexible in our approach um so yeah good thank you very much um is there any more questions yeah sorry from councillors so far just just one final question of detail I mentioned earlier um reaching out geographically but actually if you come very local um often relationships with local schools can can pay off very well um and I wondered what you're doing for example with local schools um getting to know the careers teachers the careers department you know having a chance to you know talk about or in a sense get over the the kind of culture and the opportunities of south camps in that specific way you couldn't do it for all the village colleges but you might choose one or two and from that you get that really intriguing feedback about you know when youngsters are making decisions about careers um I mean just one little thing from from my past is you know big decisions are made at year nine year nine is is crucial um so um what are you doing and is there an opportunity to do more um so the first thing Claire mentioned in the um uh in the intro that she did anyway that um this year was the first year that we had to held work experience placements um since before COVID so since 2019 that's really significant um if local schools know that they that south camps are going to offer work experience placements then they're more likely to approach us um in the first instance uh so with that is something that we had positive feedback from those uh that took part both the um the work experience students and um the uh like the managers and the teams involved so we're looking to continue to offer that next year and again it will just be um it's a like uh open interest in terms of managers like self nominating their teams as being ready we don't we wouldn't go in and say you need to take x amount of work experience students because you need to be in the right environment and have the right setup for that in terms of from the local schools so um there there are obviously quite a few local schools in the area the work that we are doing with form the future so in regards to next year's event for apprenticeship week we're then also hoping to dovetail in um and uh do help support form the future with talks in local schools um both whether that's apprentices uh and or existing members of staff um and and kind of look at things uh in in that kind of way um and we have looked at recruitment fairs um so uh earlier on on the summer holidays um there was a recruitment fair uh that uh one of the business partners went to and that is as again another thing now that um I guess those recruitment events which were very online based during COVID they are now obviously opening up and and a bit more uh hybrid or a bit more in person and that's where hopefully we can maximise um and like make the most of uh them going forward so hopefully that answers your questions that's great thank you very much Tony okay um the I think as long as we've got no other questions from any members of this point okay so um we as uh I actually been asked to uh note the uh this particular report really yeah thank you okay um so uh moving on to the fifth point which is uh sickness absence so uh the sickness absence report for the first quarter of this year um and again we're being asked to note this report um Donia sorry to keep you on there literally in the line like that um so uh are you able to present this report for us please yeah um so I'll just pick out a couple of uh key highlights and then um I'm sure I'll have um a few questions about them uh the sickness absence rate figure for the whole council uh was 1.95 uh so that's um seeing tab d on the spreadsheet so this is a slight decrease from quarter four of point 19 and a really small decrease um 0.08 from quarter one 2021 to 2022 so the top three reasons for absence uh COVID-19 um 223 days stress anxiety and depression at 203 days and stomach liver kidney and digestion at 192 days um so a lot of service areas had a reduction in absence levels this quarter so finance housing shared waste and environment um and shared planning and transformation hr on corporate services saw an increase in absence levels um let me scroll down we had a problem with our eye treatment report and I feel like I said this every quarter we feel like we've resolved the issue um and for next quarter which only ends in a day or two anyway it looks like the data is going to be uh easily uh comparable between quarters um the uh so we've talked about the 1.95 reasons figure for the quarter and the service areas um and there was a slight increase for stress depression and mental health between quarter four and quarter one um a musculoskeletal um was uh pretty similar a very small difference um and then long-term absence significantly more in quarter one uh compared to both quarter four and also quarter one uh of the previous year um that's oh you've all read the reports I'm not going to go through every single uh bit uh point by point but then if you've got any questions for me then feel free to ask that's great thank you very much for that time so questions I think we've got on from councillor panel problem thank you um I'm very encouraged to see uh there's a decrease in um sickness absence absence um and obviously the um COVID and the associated stress and anxiety are probably uh um surprising numbers there um I have a sort of passing concern about I'm sorry bvpi I don't know what that means I haven't had a chance to google it um but just in general with abbreviations it's really helpful if you the first time you use it if you could um put it I can see it says it right at the very beginning six and sickness absence rate I'm just wondering what it stands for um but also I'm just wondering to what degree you feel that people might have continued to work because they were working from home even though they were ill and I suspect that wouldn't come into these figures because they wouldn't have logged off as sick would they so I'm just wondering whether you feel that people might have been working when if they'd had to come into the office they wouldn't have done because they wouldn't have wanted to um affect anybody else sorry I was I was just just scribbling that question down hey don't you have got any thoughts on that yeah so first of all apologies for the abbreviation I'll speak to my colleagues we normally um I thought we normally do a like abbreviations at the very start or like you say the first time you use it put it in brackets basically it's the business performance indicator so it's the target that is set for the the council to achieve do people work so basically what you're asking is do I think that people work even if they were unwell I think so I think there's some examples of where um if they are working from home versus working in the office so for instance if they've got um you know a bit of a bad cold or potentially that mild COVID symptoms i.e. where they're probably able to do most of their normal activities um I think if you were working in the office I think you would be more likely potentially to stay away from work because you wouldn't want to get anyone make anyone else like poorly um so I think there is there is an element of that however the way that well-being is promoted within the organisation from Liz's level all the way down in terms of um you know so communication through leadership vlogs where she's very very clear about people um needing to make sure they take time off whether that's annual leave but if it's you know if they if it's got to the end of the year and they've not taken all the annual leave yet she's it's very much about kind of encouraging that we spread it across the year um and then also with you know if you're if you're struggling then making sure that you're speaking to your manager or you're speaking to HR um and um and going from there really um so I think there's more of a positive culture and it's certainly not a case of um you know we very much from a HR message we say that if someone isn't well enough to work then they shouldn't be at work they shouldn't be just working from home just because they can um because it's it's about ensuring that level of well-being um and that people aren't you know pushing themselves too much when they need to be um so I think it's a good question to ask but I think generally you know I can obviously without going around and asking every single individual and for you across the council I wouldn't know the definite answer but I think generally how how well-being is promoted across the council means that if there is that figure uh that figure is quite small and certainly when we're doing pieces of work with new and existing line managers and we're talking about managing absence and we're talking about uh stress and well-being and and lots of other different elements um that it's they just they understand the message that we're saying and they're and they've got those opportunities to ask questions or come to us if they're not quite sure about the situation I'm not sure if this person should be at work what should I do I don't know how to approach the conversation what you know what should I say and and we do have those kind of conversations with managers which makes me think they are still coming to speak to us they're not just kind of like ignoring us uh in HR so hopefully I think that answers your question as best that I can without me going around and asking absolutely everyone across the organisation I think I think what if through you chair um I think the positive culture is is the key to this isn't it um positive approach towards health and well-being is really important and that's what's filtering down from above which is great thank you thank you very much is there any further questions for don yeah on this particular portion no okay great well thank you very much okay again uh we are invited to note the contents of that report very much um okay uh at which point that uh actually brings this meeting to to a close so thank you very much to all the officers online um very much appreciate your input today so thank you um we've actually got um our next meeting which is scheduled to be held on Thursday the 10th of November so look forward to seeing you all then thank you very much


That's okay. Benik... Benik Kazemi. Benik Kazemi. Okay, I was close. Is a senior research fellow at IBM Research, and he's going to be talking today about network abstractions at different layers of the stack, so we're going to hear a little bit more. I heard mention of Tosca and Heat, so stay tuned, and we'll run this one. We'll get started right away, as we're running over a little bit. Thank you very much. Alright, thanks Mohammed. Thanks for coming guys. I hope you are having a good time in Hong Kong. Excited to be here. So let's get started with the outline. I'm going to talk about network abstractions at different layers, and then focus on Neutron, the open stack networking, and look at the abstractions that are provided by Neutron. And then talk about what we are proposing and is being considered in this design summit, the next session called Policy Extension Framework. I will discuss that and show how more application-centric network policies could be used to express network requirements at higher layers, and then finish with a few conclusions. So as you all know, Neutron is the open stack networking project. And as such, higher layers consume networking resources through the API that Neutron provides. And lower layers of the stack realize these network abstractions. Before I talk about Neutron and abstractions that it provides, let's have a quick look at the abstractions at higher layers and lower layers and see how they relate to what Neutron does. So at the highest level, when you want to deploy an application, usually you are dealing with more application-centric types of abstractions. At that layer, people don't care about the exact network abstractions that are being used other than the functionality that is expected to be provided through those network abstractions. This is just a simple example of a three-tier application. You are all familiar. You define, you want to be able to define three tiers of application, web servers, business logic, and a backend database. And you want to say that when it comes to networking, you want to have your first tier connected to the internet. And probably you want to specify that you provide load balancing and firewall rules that govern the connectivity to the internet. And maybe you want to specify quality of service between two tiers that you have, second tier and third tier. So as you can see, this is the extent of networking abstractions that people are comfortable with at the application layer. On the other hand, at lower layers, abstractions, needless to say, are more network-centric. They are, for the most part, device-oriented, relates to switches and routers. They are topology-aware, talk about forwarding packets, establishing routes between endpoints. And there are a variety of different network controllers, STN controllers, and they all use different northbound APIs. But at the end of the day, these are the kind of vehicles that Neutron uses to realize its abstractions. Having looked at these very quickly, now let's focus on Neutron. The OpenStack networking started as the quantum project and with the idea that it will provide minimal API, a minimum set of abstractions that you need to realize your networking needs. There are three major resources in the Neutron API. Networks are essentially an isolated layer-to-broadcast domains. They can be private or shared. Subnets can be used to assign a block of IP addresses to these networks and possibly define additional properties such as having DHCP servers or DNS servers, associating gatebates with your network, and so on and so forth. And finally, ports are essentially what are used to connect your virtual machines to the network. And there are essentially virtual switch ports. And they can have MAC addresses and IP addresses. And as Neutron was designed and developed, it was designed to be extendable and needless to say, it has been expanding through the last several cycles. Now, in addition to the basic abstractions, we have the abstractions that help with physical networks, things like provider network abstractions, and now in this release with multi-provider network extension, we have extensions for dealing with Layer 3 networking, routers, network address translation, floating IPs. Now we can specify those through the Neutron extensions. And there has been a lot of work being done in terms of specifying various services. Firewall as a service, load balancing as a service, and this has been the focus of the community in the last cycle, and it is a continuous work in progress. So if we want to express our three tier application using the abstractions that are available to us through Neutron today, one possible way of implementing it would be using an architecture similar to this. Use a single router, so you have to specify a router, and define three networks with associated subnets. Connect the networks into the router, specify ports that gets your visual machines connected to your network, and then possibly define a load balancer and firewall rules that govern the connectivity between different tiers of your application, and possibly through some of the plugins with some extensions you are capable of specifying quality of service at certain levels. And then finally you can connect your network to the external network. So this is kind of the one approach that you can use to express what you needed at the application layer. As you look at just a portion of the three tier application that we discussed, this is just the last tier, the web server. I have listed here the commands that you can use to realize it. And I have not included the commands for setting up the firewall or the load balancer or security groups or anything like that. These are just the basic connectivity instructions that you need to use to establish the connectivity between your external network and your web tier. So the point here is that as you can see through these command lines you have to create a network, you have to create a subnet, you have to create a router. For your subnets you assign IP addresses and all that. As you can see whatever you are doing is very network centric. So as an application layer person you really don't want to worry about creating a router and creating a network that gets hooked to that router. You just want to have a higher level kind of abstraction. So that's essentially the problem that we are trying to address here. We want to overcome the fact that the neutron abstractions are right now very close to physical devices. And we want to propose a higher level of abstraction. The policy extension framework adds more application centric abstraction to Neutron. This is the work that is being done by IBM and Cisco through a blueprint that is going to be discussed in the design summit this Friday. And it looks like that finally we are having enough amount of support from a wide group of participants to push this forward. So the idea is that let us extend Neutron by adding a couple of new abstractions. One is the connectivity group which is a grouping of endpoints and the other is policy which specifies the network functions governing connectivity between these groups. We want to do this in a way that is complementary to what is already there in Neutron. So we are not proposing abandoning what Neutron is doing. This is just to extend the abstraction that Neutron has to have a more application centric abstraction at the same time. So you may hear different names for the same proposal. Policy extension framework was the name that we usually started using and we got together with others in particular connectivity group extension API which was being proposed and the overall name of the proposal right now is group-based policy abstractions but you may see different names depending on what program you look at or you look at the blueprint. So they are all referring to the same kind of idea, exactly the same idea. So let's have a closer look. Groups are really nothing but a logical grouping of endpoints, virtual machines. They can have traditional MAC addresses and IP addresses each of these endpoints. The endpoints could be Neutron networks. So grouping is just groups provide the connectivity group provides a grouping of these resources. And policy essentially establishes the network function that governs the communication between these two connectivity groups. That's all. So for a policy you specify a source and a destination connectivity group and you say you specify the way you want to the connectivity be established. So we are going to look at this more carefully shortly. And just to make things easier in terms of development we have policy rules and policy sets. These are essentially just conveniences that makes things get implemented more easily. Policies are made of policy rules and a set of policies create a policy set. So the idea is that you can have multiple policy rules and put them together to create a policy. And at the application level you can specify a set of policies and call them a policy set like an application pattern just as a matter of making things more structured and understandable. So this is the hierarchy that is being proposed. Policy sets are made of policies and policies are essentially made of connectivity groups, source and destination if you will, and a set of rules. And these are policy rules that are essentially saying that perform a particular action on a class of traffic between these connectivity groups. So what are these different types of actions? We are talking about basic connectivity, maybe some access control, some more advanced features which include one or more services, service training, use of neutron services, firewall as a service, load balancer as a service, or even third party services that are available. Quality of service and monitoring that goes with it. These are the types of things that you can specify as part of your policy rule and therefore policy. And logical middle boxes. So let's have a look at the problem or three tier application again. This is again just one part of the three tier application, the web server tier connecting to the external network through firewall and a load balancer. So now that can be expressed by creating a connectivity group, a couple of them, one being external, connecting to the external networks, and then by creating a policy rule and policy. So the idea is that after you create your connectivity group you specify that you want to have a policy rule that only applies on the traffic that uses HTTP or HTTPS. That's the network traffic classifier that you are using. And then you are saying that you want to apply these two middle boxes. And how these middle boxes are instantiated or configured is beyond what we are addressing here but we are going to discuss. We are essentially that during the design summit session we are saying that somehow you have an identifier that refers to a service, a middle box that you are instantiating or somebody has instantiated. Possibly you can pass some configuration to that middle box but that's the extent of things you are doing. So we are using fewer instructions to set up our application but the point is that the kind of instructions or commands that we are using are substantially different now. It's not just that you are using less number of commands but you are talking about connectivity groups and policy rules and policies. This is a different level of abstraction as opposed to creating networks, creating routers, establishing a port on a router. So we are kind of saying that at the application layer this is much more natural for anybody who is not a networking expert to use an abstraction like that and then let's leave the realization of these abstractions to Neutron. That's the main point of using these new set of abstractions. So it says that what you do with the traffic that you are specifying here, we are here saying that just we want to allow the connectivity through a particular type of network traffic, anything that is HTTP or HTTPS is accepted and for that kind of traffic we are going to go through a service chain which includes a firewall and a load balancer. So we are essentially trying to do what is being shown here. We want to allow the traffic between the external networks and our web server here but we want the traffic to go through a firewall and a load balancer. Yeah. So those could be realized through different policy rules. So the way that it is organized right now and this can be evolved during the design sessions and discussions is that for each policy rule you specify a traffic classifier. And for that particular type of traffic you specify what you want to do with them. So you could have multiple policy rules that apply to the same kind of traffic or different types of traffic. So there are essentially what you have to deal with is the type of actions that you can provide, right? We are talking about simple connectivity and ACLs and middle boxes but we are also talking about quality of service monitoring. I will show a couple of examples that kind of make the usage a little bit more interesting and richer that we are going to discuss shortly. So that's the extent of the extension that is being discussed right now. Absolutely. That would be excellent to discuss. Yeah. We are proposing and getting ready to add these abstractions to Neutron as is. So let's look at the complete three-tier application again. This is the same three-tier applications. We have a connectivity group called Web here, a logic connectivity group, connectivity group database, another connectivity group, a special internet connectivity group and the middle boxes. And then the policy that is being specified here except this one didn't have enough space for a policy name but that's also another simple connectivity policy here. So if you say that you are adding these kind of abstractions at Neutron layer, how you consume it at higher layer becomes a question and one place to consume these new abstractions would be through heat. And this is a heat template. This is a sketch that says this is working towards implement using the abstractions that now this extension is providing at heat layer. You specify your connectivity groups. You specify a policy rule here that applies to a particular type of traffic and you specify service chain in this particular example. And then you tie everything together through this policy. Again, this is a sketch. If these extensions are added to Neutron, there will be resources that could be easily consumed at the heat and you can create these resources. We are discussing how what exactly endpoints are realized. For the most part, we want to have the endpoints, the ports and networks that are already defined in Neutron. Another option would be having endpoints, a resource of its own. So the decisions that are made in defining endpoints and how they are essentially whether they are first class objects or not would require that somehow somebody declares or defines the networks that are going to be used to create those endpoints on. So you can essentially have that as part of your service chain. Whether it is a router or a firewall or a load balancer is left to you, this provides the connectivity and directing the traffic between your connectivity groups through those virtual machines, which are your virtual appliances. So how you instantiate those virtual appliances you are addressing right here in this proposal. We are saying that we are able to refer to a resource that is already existing and somebody has created. So that's another problem. That's another thing that you have to discuss, how these visual appliances are created. There are a large number of people who are focused on service chaining and service instantiation. So load balancer as a service, for example, is trying to provide a generic way of specifying one kind of appliance. Some people who create load balancers don't like that kind of abstractions and that's why we are saying that you could use abstractions that are available at Neutron or you could refer to a third party kind of appliance, which is a visual appliance. So we are trying to keep that part as generic as possible. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that's the whole idea. So you have to specify some of this information as your configuration, but you don't need to specify anything about the router, having a router. Whether it is a router or a switch or anything else is irrelevant for what you want, you want the connectivity. No, this is a generic extension to, again, this is a proposal. It's going to be discussed in this summit, in particular on Friday, 3.10. I think I'm going to refer to that. Please join in that discussion. So this is a generic framework for adding policy as a new type of abstraction to Neutron. Yes, we are not showing it here. Yes, absolutely. So we are essentially saying that this is an identifier for that firewall and an identifier for a load balancer. Yes. Yes. How are you? Yes, exactly. So this could be, I mean, you can think of doing these things even outside. Yeah, go ahead. So this is essentially adding to the resources that Neutron has such that a heat template could use those. So we are essentially adding new resources to Neutron. And we are saying here that this is how possibly a heat template could take advantage of having those resources. That's all. As one of the higher layers that could utilize this heat is a candidate. Yes, absolutely. And the idea is that let's get away from more device-centric view of networking where we don't really need to focus on devices and just focus on the type of things that we want to do, the network functionality we want to provide as we move on along. So the question becomes whether, so right now the way heat operates, you can essentially use it as a main vehicle for infrastructure orchestration. You can instantiate resources that, let's say, NOVA, Cinder, or Neutron provide. For what we are saying, you need something at a higher level, which is a software orchestration that could be part of heat. I believe there is discussion among the heat community about extending heat to heat engine to make it something beyond the infrastructure orchestration. Other layers, other specifications such as Tosca could be used on top of what heat does right now to fully utilize these new abstractions. These are possibilities that need to be worked out. So let's look at a couple of examples. So we are saying that let's have these basic abstractions in place and let's see what things we can do. There are a variety of things that you could do if you had this policy extension. I'm just going to go through a few examples. So you could have your connectivity group modified such that a new VM is added to it. And that update to the connectivity group could be transferred to all the policies that are associated with that connectivity group. So as you add a new VM to your web tier because of higher load that you are experiencing, the load balancer as part of your service chain that is added to the policy here get notified and if semantically that load balancer is supposed to direct the traffic to all members of that tier that can be done automatically as a result of updating the connectivity group. That's one example. You can have logical middle boxes. When you specify, for example, monitoring a policy between two tiers, that could be used as collecting statistics on networking resources, mainly aggregating them at policy level, application level, and this could lead to a more comprehensive closed loop kind of processing. So the standard monitor, analyze, plan, and execute could be extended to use networking resources more easily. This is the standard way of having a closed loop where application specifies the service level that they require. They also publish the service level that they are experiencing. Now, if the service level that is required is not being met, you can react to it. And if the problem is the networking, that could lead to changes in your networking, providing higher bandwidth reservation for your applications or changing routes, or indirectly it could lead to changes in your networks. If during the analyze phase of your closed loop, you realize that you need to instantiate more VMs to act as your web server that could lead to changes to your load balancer such that your load balancer is aware of the new VM and can direct the traffic to it. Network controllers provide a lot of information about the topology, the underlying topology, but they are mainly dependent on physical topology. We are saying that you could use those kind of information resources and specify policies that relate to topology at the higher layer. You can talk about co-location and anti-co-location for network routes, possibly. You can specify, again, as part of your policy rules, asymmetric routes for forward and backward paths between two connectivity groups. You could specify hop counts if that's what you want to do. As you can see now, you are using the topology that is available at network controller level, and it's very network-centric at the higher layer of abstraction that doesn't say anything directly about the physical topology of your network. Most of the discussions that we have had has been limited to having the policies belonging to a single tenant. If we establish this framework, we can start talking about policies that govern connectivity between different tenants. That's where you can provide services that can be consumed by other tenants, or other users. The users could be outside your open stack infrastructure, coming out from external network, internet, or could be possibly another tenant. As you do that, you have to establish the connectivity across tenants, whether you do it in a net tenant-centric way or you require an admin-based approach. Again, those are the things that need to be worked out. Again, you could extend this policy abstraction to multiple tenants. To conclude, I talked about the fact that at different layers of stack, you may need to use a different type of abstraction. We are saying that we are proposing to add more application-centric type of abstraction to Neutron. This framework is going to be discussed on Friday. No. 8 at 3.10. The connectivity group extension, you could see group-based policy abstraction, is where we are going to try to start talking about the details or where we can go and how we can start implementing some of these features. We are all invited to attend that session as well. With that, if there are any questions? Yes? Sorry. My question is about the policy enforcement. After you define the policy and actions, let's say you take example as firewall route, the load balancer, what's your plan of enforcing those policies? In particular, you have multiple tiers. How are you going to make sure that in one place you can enforce all the policy across three different tiers? So the way that things are organized essentially in Neutron that is going to implement the policy is responsible for realizing that policy. So that's where you have to establish the network connectivity the way that the policy requires. So there is an implementation behind the policy that realizes it. I don't know if that addresses your concern or not. Probably not so much. I think I used your example for example. You add a new server into a web pool, right? And obviously whatever policy you define for that pool need to be propagated to the server. But I mean, if you have some other policy like a web server need to talk to a back-end server, how are you going to make sure the back-ends also be able to accept a new web server you just add into the pool? So again, these are the details that should be worked out. But we are saying that as resources get updated, connectivity groups get updated, all the policies that are connected to that particular connectivity group gets informed. Again, this is a proposal. That's a possibility. And through that you can enforce whatever is required. Why are you doing it? Because you're trying for some other... Yes, absolutely. We have to have a discussion about that. This is essentially just to get the ball rolling, extending what we have and providing the basic infrastructure for adding more stuff. Yeah, let's discuss. So software defined network controllers are essentially at the end of the day. If you are using an SDN controller is where you realize all these. So the discussion is what is the northbound SDN API that is being worked out if that turns out to be neutron as some suggest. This would be a perfect way of propagating those higher layer of abstractions to your controller. And I think I try to also show that how some of the things that those SDN controllers can do can be kind of exposed to higher layers as well. Thank you very much. And we'll be back at 2 o'clock in the same room, I believe. But it's lunchtime now.