Year Notes 2023 — a Rapid Year in Review
This year started a little differently than previous years. We were forming a new multidisciplinary team called Rapid Improvement, with the aim to step into services and help them quickly unblock process transformation, as well as inject some innovation into that change.
As with many other local authorities, we were (and still are) experiencing unprecedented budget pressures and need to find innovative ways to deal with that. The purpose of the new team was to build our service design and business analysis capabilities, along with our in-house development team. Ultimately, if we can help our service teams work smarter and more efficiently, we can provide an improved customer experience.
Having a senior leadership team that is digitally progressive has been fantastic and helped us start 2023 in an impactful way. Here’s what we’ve achieved with the help and support of each service we’ve worked alongside…
January
Making use of the Liberty Converse solution already being used by Customer Services, we set up a contact centre for Bereavement Services, integrated with our Citizen Hub platform, enabling online payments via GOV.UK Pay.
We implemented a case opening process for Legal Services, that allows staff to fill in one request and the admin team to streamline opening cases in Iken.
We started learning and implementing Google Analytics 4 on our public website and intranet to enable improved tracking of customer interactions.
We completed initial analysis of Business Support processes to identify priority areas for improvement initiatives and decided to develop an online change of address form for Revenues & Benefits. We provided feedback to the system supplier after initial testing of automations with Revenues & Benefits whilst they demonstrated additional automation capabilities.
February
We launched a work order management system for Technical Services to support creating work requests with suppliers and managing payments. This replaced an ageing system and reduced our future security risks. It also made a significant reduction in printing invoices and posting work orders.
With budget approval secured, we commenced recruiting, and changing roles for new roles and existing team members.
As annual billing work ramped up, resourcing from Revenues and Benefits reduced although we maintained engagement when possible.
We formed a cross-team Damp and Mould working group to investigate opportunities for improving systems and processes to better support social housing tenants.
An internal audit of application development practices highlighted only 3 issues to be addressed around adoption of agile methodologies. Our response focuses on improving consistency of sprint planning, requirements gathering and documenting processes.
We mapped the current pathways through our Housing Needs team, and shared this with a wider group of internal stakeholders.
March
A consolidated change of address internal form was launched for Customer Services, standardising data capture and integration through to Revenues & Benefits and our Citizen Hub.
Continued progress on a prototype contact us form for Revenues & Benefits, that triages users before allowing for structured enquiries to be sent. We tested the form with some residents at the local library to get their feedback.
Team resources were reduced due to the annual billing demands on Revenues & Benefits and Business Support for this priority work.
A process and system needs workshop was organised to confirm the uses of Content Manager, Estore and links to our document management system ahead of next step discussions with our supplier.
We also helped Finance produce a payment request form to manage service requests for invoices.
We ran a sailboat retrospective with the Commercial Waste team to understand where the teams strengths, risks and areas for improvement were.
April
We introduced automatic indexing into our document management system for the change of address form which saves Business Support performing manual indexing. More agents in Customer Services are using the change of address form successfully now.
The online change of address form launched publicly, with integrated feedback capability enabling us to monitor usage and respond quickly to identified issues. New automation eliminates previous manual document handling.
Our supplier was approached to confirm training dates for the content manager and e-store systems.
A process was agreed with Communications to run promotional messages via social media when new functionality goes live for our online services.
We carried out a huge upgrade of our document management system, moving from client based to web based, involving some 300+ users.
We mapped and shared the current processes for Damp and Mould cases, identifying pain points and opportunity areas for further discovery work.
May
We successfully upgraded our website content management system and some underlying software inline with recent security patches.
Work was carried out to investigate the impact of a supplier data breach. Ultimately this included very little of our data but unfortunately still took a huge amount of internal resources to work through.
We monitored the feedback and iterated on our resident change of address form. We launched a change of address for landlords form to notify us of tenancy changes — this too will be auto indexed onto our document management system.
There was also a large impact on the team supporting user and system issues from the recent document management upgrade throughout the month.
Interviews were held for two new service designers to join the team, one started later this month and the other next month.
With the self referral of Adur Homes to the Housing Ombudsman we started a discovery into compliance systems and data to improve the future reporting.
We started a discovery into housing repairs, damp and mould. This included a review of call data for housing repairs, showing although there was positive feedback, more residents were calling that using the online service and we were receiving a lot of repeat contact. Additionally a review of complaints data and call listening was carried out, with some examples to be used as case studies.
A damp and mould working group formed to support the urgent process improvements. Work started on drafting notification letters and collating a list of system issues.
June
We updated the councils leadership team with a presentation including our work so far, the benefits realised and what’s next on our plan.
A backlog taskforce was setup to help work through and track the progress of customer contact with Revenues & Benefits. This proved extremely effective at bringing down the processing time for change of address and circumstances.
Discovery work started with the goal to collate and bring all the compliance data in one place and dashboard this information to make it easier for staff to access, know how compliant properties are and to be able to run reports on this information. The team held discussions with services to collate compliance roles and responsibilities, data sources and centralise in one document. Developers worked on a proof of concept design, importing known accurate data for automated sources including gas safety, fixed wiring and energy performance certificates.
The discovery into damp, mould and repairs continued with in depth sessions to understand from staff members their frustrations. The current system was demonstrated to see specific functionality for different teams. Functionally was added to allow all users to add photos when raising repairs, including when they call to report a problem.
We held a debt policy implementation workshop for our Council Tax and Customer Services teams. A new policy had been launched, but we needed to understand what this meant for the teams on a practical day to day level. A number of changes to working practices that could be implemented immediately were identified, some that needed further approval and some that we wanted to do but would need to wait for further resources to be available.
July
A service planning tool was developed to help managers create plans including budget requirements for the future and awareness of cross cutting team work. As well as taking time to plan our own services, we also analysed the data coming back from the tool and used this to inform our future roadmap.
Over 2,250 council workstreams were identified and mapped back to strategic principles and missions.
Sitemorse Q2 local government league table rated Adur & Worthing as 2nd in the UK for website accessibility as we continue to build on the success of our website.
A design brief was created to tackle the high numbers of reports and enquiries we get as a council, and improve the management of the reports coming in. A team was assembled who planned and started the discovery phase of work into understanding the reasoning behind the issues, and work was kicked-off through a research led approach. Focusing on the perspective and issues faced by the Waste and Parks & Foreshore teams.
We improved the presentation of damp and mould performance data, including splitting the pages and adding filters and descriptions.
We prototyped some new designs for the back-end repairs system. These changes aimed to address some of the frustrations that customer services and housing staff had with the system, making it easier for them to use and find the information they needed.
August
With many staff taking summer leave, pace of delivery slowed as expected. However, positive progress was still made across key areas.
For housing compliance, the decision was taken to consolidate entirely onto our own purpose-built system after limited adoption of a third-party solution. Additional work to automatically upload certificates into cloud storage continued.
We built a prototype for damp and mould case management and went live with a notification letter and educational leaflet, advising tenants of the immediate next steps.
Universal Property Reference Numbers were applied to our housing system to improve compatibility across other integrated systems used by front and back office teams.
The Service Designers started to build a shared library of tools, templates, and items that are going to act as a central place of information for people who want to engage with the team and perhaps want to learn more about SD themselves.
The Systems and Quality team implemented their own automation to cancel council tax support and suspend housing benefit when a move form is received. This allows Benefits to make amendments before letters are printed and reduces internal team messaging.
September
We automated the way bin collection calendars are sent out using GOV.UK Notify, so Customer Services can click a button and it will be posted to a requestor. We also transitioned more services to using Notify SMS messages, away from our previous supplier, gaining some cost savings.
We launched an internal death notification form for Customer Services to send data to Revenues & Benefits.
We added automatic suppression to letters to stop payment reminders going out while online forms are being processed with Revenues & Benefits.
Damp and mould cases deemed high risk will now be flagged for an automatic mould wash on the repairs system.
We used a DLUHC funded design to prototype improvements to the accessibility and usability of our report a housing repair online form.
New internal forms for People & Change to provide better data, supporting the design of a new policy framework and volunteer management.
October
We presented our latest work to the councils leadership team ahead of starting to write a committee paper for a December meeting.
We supported the Participation team and the Council for Community group in running and analysing a workshop to renew a method of community engagement called the Big Listen. The workshop allowed the SD team to support in creating and developing the initial basic service blueprint that will continue to be developed for this engagement method. Hopefully allowing for more impactful engagement with residents.
Our new compliance dashboard went into testing with an initial data migration. A new interface was produced for sheltered housing to report their safety checks directly into the compliance system.
The service team worked to change statement of rate codes into plain English to make them more understandable to everyone in the repairs process chain.
We launched a no-code online form builder that can be used by service teams to create forms for themselves, reducing reliance on our team.
We started a piece of work to understand how our Customer Services team could support our Adur Homes team when they receive calls about rent payments.
We improved data availability to our Community Support system to aid continued future funding of the Social Prescribing service.
November
A prototype application was designed for dog bin data collection and report management, which was positively reviewed by frontline staff and management. The app allows for the dog bin team to move away from paper forms and increases efficiency allowing crews to manage reports on the go, and saves labour time of various staff. Additionally it gives management an overview of data.
After confirming questions, we are now collecting equalities data by prompting customers from multiple online forms. This will start to be surfaced on our website.
We launched a social housing compliance dashboard and did a final data migration for energy performance certificates, gas safety, electrical installation condition reports, smoke detectors, fire safety, portable appliance testing, legionella and lifts. Asbestos will be included once we have access to a new system.
Our presentation to informal cabinet was well received, with members taking interest in our work and the benefits achieved so far. We will follow up with committee next month.
We tested and launched a restructured interface to housing repairs to help different teams see a simplified and more standardised view of the system and reduce future maintenance.
We built and launched a council tax contact us form using our new no-code form builder. This triages enquiries and requests the right information from customers for each contact type so we can resolve issues first time — reducing failure demand and calls.
We ran a sailboat retrospective session with some of our street cleansing team. This will be used to feed into future work in this area starting in 2024.
Finally for November, we introduced Apple Pay and Google Pay as options for most of our online payments.
December
We launched a council tax direct debit setup and change form for regular payments. The housing benefit claim form and change in circumstances form also went live via the Capita system. This major milestone overcame significant delivery barriers all year.
Our report to Joint Strategic Committee was presented by the Head of Technology, detailing benefits realised throughout the year, our return on investment and asking for further funding for the team based on current success. It was very well received by elected members and our recommendations noted.
The discovery for the enquiries and reporting project drew to a close, with the findings informing the planning of 2024 and informing the teams of the issues found and ideas to overcome these issues with design improvements. The approach taken, the findings and the next steps were positively received by the department managers, who are looking forward to implementing the developments in 2024.
We used an API to start gathering bin collection weight data from our vehicles and sending this to our commercial waste system. We’ve also used an update in our platform to start reading contents of PDF files to help us analyse printing and postage costs — as we push to drive down organisational costs.
Two areas of work we have started and will carry forward into next year are examining customer journeys for contacting us and what we can do to push more to online services, and a new business support grant system.
Throughout the year we also responded to over 950 support requests. This was a mixture of development requests and system support incidents. For next year we are hoping to push more into product backlogs and work with product owners to prioritise these.
We had an exceptionally proud moment when the team were announced as finalists in the App of the Year competition for our no-code form builder — also being the only local authority to get to the final. The trophy was a perfect end to a hugely successful year.
2024🎉
Our roadmap for the next phase is taking shape and will be shared across all services and teams. Happy New Year… here’s to continuing momentum in 2024!
