What we’ve learnt — so far…

The results are in, well the initial findings at least.

Having launched this Discovery project back in June, we are eager to identify opportunities to improve the Building Control service.

That means lots of interactions with customers and internal users to learn about their experience and the problems they face.

This is an exciting stage in our journey with our user researcher, Aspasia of Marvell Consulting, reporting her initial findings and lots of volunteers signing up to help us improve the Building Control service.

Avid readers of our last blog will know that Bracknell Forest hosted our fourth workshop on the 13th October, where we explored the key findings from our user research to date. But what did we find out?

Keep reading and you’ll find out!

As a reminder, the user research sessions involved in depth interviews with very experienced Building Control officers at the partner councils. Our user researcher presented the high-level findings from these interviews at the workshop.

Having some Building Control experts in the room, including three Heads of Building Control, led to lots of interesting and valuable discussions around the findings. Importantly the project team built on the findings to understand the issues that resonated across the partner councils and which pain points were unique to individual boroughs.

At Lambeth we found that we are receiving lots of invalid applications which do not progress into business for the service. Customers are not always receiving the best experience which leads to loss of revenue with customers opting to switch to private approved inspectors. We discussed what additional information can be provided to assist customers submitting applications to reduce invalid applications and how we can improve the existing workflows to ensure we retain as many customers as possible.

Another significant issue reported by Lambeth was the absence of a single customer relationship management tool to give the team a complete view of every customer interaction. Lambeth uses multiple channels to interact with customers and contact is not captured consistently in the customer file. For example, emails to surveyors cannot be seen by technical support officers. This creates a major hurdle to quickly resolving customer queries and increasing customer satisfaction.

All three partners agreed that their Document Management System, from the same supplier, does not work well. Some of the issues reported include lots of manual processes required to file and update documents which increases the risk of human errors.

Corrupted files are also regularly found in the system which cannot be used. To open the files requires a manual workaround to find the relevant item again from emails and reupload, which can be time consuming.

There is also a difficulty with accessing documents on site by surveyors. Part of the problem is due to documents not being properly tagged and filed which could be improved with an agreed protocol for indexing.

More generally the Case Management System has a range of issues around the lack of structured data. This makes it more difficult to automate processes and produce accurate reporting. The system could be used by Building Control Officers to input more categorical data manually. However, the preference would be to automate processes where possible to free up officer time to serve customers and win more business.

In an earlier blog we discussed the work we completed to create two surveys, one for customers and another for Building Control Officers. Since then, we have explored the building control applications process further using service blueprints and brainstormed further questions we want Building Control Officers across the country to answer.

After collaborating at the Bracknell workshop the project team all agreed that splitting the officers survey by role was required, with different questions for technical support officers, surveyors and management.

At the end of the workshop we completed a brainstorming post it session to identify the most important questions we wanted to ask customers in a user research session. These were later put onto the Miro board below and categorised into background questions, how the customer chose the building control service and their experience applying and using the service.

In this sprint, we also sent out over 500 emails to past users of the Lambeth Building Control Service looking for volunteers to engage in User Research sessions with us. We hope that they will engage and have some interesting input into what worked or didn’t work as applicants of the service. We’ve already had 14 responses, expressing an interest in speaking to our User Researcher, so that’s a really positive result. We’ve created a screener so that we can collect information from volunteers to ensure that the people we meet represent as wide a demographic as possible in terms of user type. We have also promoted our search for volunteers on X. Plus the other partner councils will be contacting past users of their building control service so we can reach lots of different types of customers from a wide geographic area.

Tune in next time for an update on developments from our fifth workshop hosted by Bath and North East Somerset Council on the 26th October. Come along with us on our journey to improve the building control service.

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