Read about management consultant Julianne Ezra's experience:

As a strategic thinker committed to delivering quality, adding value, and transferring lessons learnt, Mott MacDonald provides a unique opportunity for me to work in a consultancy committed to working in partnership with local authorities, with our local government services team acting as a facilitator to draw out local expertise and to provide knowledge transfer where our experience can make a real, sustainable difference to local services.

My previous role in Portsmouth City Council Strategy Unit gave me first hand experience of working in a unitary authority. This included working on business planning processes within the Council to develop a medium-term vision for the city with the council’s directors and to establish milestone targets with officers within departments.

I also worked extensively with Portsmouth’s Local Strategic Partnership (LSP), coordinating the development of local area agreement outcomes and activities. The aim of this was to deliver better services through closer partnership working across agencies and sectors, gaining efficiency savings as well as improvements ‘on the ground’. Part of this was to organise conferences and workshops for stakeholders ranging from senior executives to the general public.

My experience ranged also to county, regional and national levels in my role as Portsmouth lead contact for LSP networks across the UK. This involved contributing actively to discussion groups, forums, action learning sets and steering groups on public service policy, feeding local issues up to central government to influence policy.

Part of my role at a city level was to communicate progress to local residents, such as publishing a ‘Report Card’ monitoring progress against locally agreed performance indicators and outcomes set out in Portsmouth’s Community Strategy 2004-2009. I project managed the publication of short and more detailed formats, the summary version of which was cited as best practice in the government white paper 2006 ‘Strong and Prosperous Communities’.