Fix up, look sharp — getting smarter with repairs and maintenance
The Newham Repairs and Maintenance Service (RMS) is responsible for delivering housing repairs for tenants across Newham and the council’s properties outside of the borough. It also delivers the council’s gas servicing, highways maintenance and planned highways works.
The service and its scope has grown over the years and RMS now carries out over 55,000 day to day repairs and 30,000 gas repairs and service jobs in a year. On top of this, the contact centre fields over 235,000 calls in a year.
Digital Services were asked to run a Discovery project with RMS to investigate how these call volumes could be reduced and an improved service delivered to users of the service. We decided that a service design approach would be best suited here to holistically understand the service and deliver quality recommendations for improvement.
A key tool in a service designer’s arsenal is Service Blueprinting. Service blueprinting involves choosing a handful of ‘iconic’ scenarios of a service that, when analysed together, will highlight the majority of the common experiences that users of the service will recognise.
Blueprinting differs from traditional process mapping in that you are not trying to map everything on one page, but are instead using specific scenarios to draw out and analyse common themes. It also keeps the audience creating the blueprint more focused on the scenario at hand instead of trying to map every possible tangent that a service can take.
In service blueprinting, you map the frontstage processes that a user of your service will see, the backstage actions that are happening to make the frontstage work, and the behind the scenes tools and processes that underpin the service. On top of that, you map the pain points and opportunities for improvement on each scenario to end up with real actionable insights and concepts to prototype and test.
From service blueprinting with a range of stakeholders across RMS and shadowing staff and engaging directly with residents, we identified the common challenges staff and residents were facing with the service. From there we put together a set of recommendations for us to Alpha with RMS.
In the Alpha phase, we will look to prototype an improved Report a Repair tool with residents, to understand how we can reduce call volumes with an improved online tool to request a repair and schedule a suitable appointment slot based on real-time operative availability.
We will also be improving the backstage processes of the service, investigating how we can reduce the workload of non-urgent repair scheduling through automation, freeing up staff time to focus on urgent and emergency priorities.
Newham Digital Services continue to transform services, making them fit for the digital age, on behalf of residents, visitors and businesses to ensure people choose to live, work and stay in the Borough.
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This blog was co-produced by London Borough of Newham’s Digital Services team and Rainmaker Solutions, their Strategic Digital Partner.
