Year Notes 2024 — a Resilient Year in Review
Throughout the year, we actively developed solutions to address our budget challenge. Many teams underwent redesigns to focus service delivery priorities and enhance operational efficiency.
The challenge this year has definitely been maintaining delivery pace while staying resilient to the organisation’s changing priorities and finances, whilst also being mindful and respectful of how change affects others. As always, the Digital team has thrived on adapting and changing.
We changed some of our team names and language from ‘Rapid Improvement’ to ‘Transformation’. We then moved to give service teams more responsibility for driving change by helping them produce service roadmaps.
Here’s what we’ve achieved with the help and support of each service we’ve worked alongside…
January
We expanded the use and area types of our compliance platform — automating contractor certificate imports and utilising the GOV.UK API Catalogue to effortlessly obtain energy performance certificates.
We upgraded our main development platform, Liberty Create, this month and extensively tested our applications and the new features.
Our new triaged Benefits contact form streamlines both customer self-service and enquiry handling. Customers can now quickly find relevant information before submitting an enquiry, reducing unnecessary contact. When an enquiry is needed, the form captures structured data instead of freeform emails, dramatically improving efficiency in three ways: less need to request further details, data captured in a way that makes it faster to process, and automatic indexing into our document management system.
February
To bring our beach hut licence agreements up to date, we used our in-house built campaigns platform to help the team issue over 650 digital and 174 printed agreements via GOV.UK Notify. This generated automated follow-ups for digital signatures, saving the team time and postage costs.
After the success of triaged contact forms for Council Tax and Benefits, we launched one for Customer Services. We’ve helped teams change contact details on letter templates to direct customers to these new forms rather than freeform emails.
March
The WebAIM Million project, evaluating the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 website homepages around the globe, ranked our website as 89,325th — an impressive achievement worldwide, though with obvious room for improvement. At the same time, our website was ranked second in the UK for accessibility by the Sitemorse Q1 local government index.
As we helped the Housing Systems team with their annual tasks of adjusting rent, leasehold and service charges and issuing notifications, bills and direct debits, we took note of the challenges. From this work, we helped them produce a lessons learnt story along with a structured work plan for next year.
April
To avoid our Customer Services team having to manually print and post paper forms for our digitally excluded customers, we built an interface to send these via GOV.UK Notify, saving nearly 10 hours per week and reducing postage spend.
Another great use for GOV.UK Notify this month was connecting our contact centre IVR so that customers can request a web link sent to them via SMS while they are queuing, enabling them to carry out the transaction online rather than with a call agent. This has saved the contact centre several hours per week by diverting customers to digital channels.
May
We launched a Business Support Fund platform, allowing local businesses to access a mentorship programme, workshops and funding opportunities, with over 300 applications received. We based this on what we learnt during Covid times and built it as a customisable system that we can reuse in future by simply editing configuration.
We upgraded our website content management system, testing for new features and resolving issues.
Using our no-code form builder, we continued the success and time savings of our structured contact forms by launching one for Business Rates (National Non-Domestic Rates).
June
Our website was rated first in the UK for website accessibility in the Sitemorse Q2 Local Government league table, making us exceptionally proud.
To help reduce customers getting into debt, we built an SMS reminder system for Council Tax payments. Just before letters are due to be sent for missed payments, we now send customers a text message so they can avoid getting a formal reminder. This has also proven to reduce our postage spend as we now send fewer letters.
Another way we helped customers was by launching a new online Council Tax Support form — this means requests for CTS reach us faster, there is no manual handling of paper, and ultimately means we can provide better support.
Our new Report It platform, which allows residents to notify us of issues in their neighbourhoods, was nearing alpha, so we took the opportunity to start user testing. Several members of the team attended a community leaders meeting and gained some really useful insights into how the system was used.
July
Our newly designed Report It frontend forms and backend case management system went online in beta with our waste department, allowing the public to easily report issues in their neighbourhoods through simple, easy-to-understand forms. This enables our teams to ensure a feedback loop with residents by using an intuitively designed and co-tested (with our officers) system of responses. The new case management backend is also a launching point for better data collection use within the council.
Additionally, we launched the Report It webpage, which collates all topics that the public may want to report to us on a single page, making it easier for residents to find what they are looking for and be signposted to the correct place.
August
We expanded the use of Report It to our Parks & Foreshore teams, enabling residents to report issues related to this team, and allowing the team to respond in a more direct and timely manner. With this, we also expanded the use of mobile technology with Report It, allowing officers to receive notifications of new cases and update them on the go through tablets and mobile devices, giving more accurate data on case times.
The My Worthing app was launched, funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology as part of the BEACH project, aiming to overcome issues of poor phone connectivity across the seafront and town centre. The project will enable researchers to test and understand current connectivity issues and has been a collaboration between West Sussex County Council, Worthing Borough Council, Time for Worthing, Worthing BID and Dense Air.
September
Our position in the web accessibility index dropped this month, which hopefully means other authorities are putting more work into making their websites accessible for all. Our main barrier at present is the number of older PDFs we have, so we’ve set a clear reduction goal for next year.
We adapted our bookings platform to allow beach huts to be booked for daily use. This will provide a much fairer usage option for more residents. While this hasn’t gone live yet due to some operational barriers, we are ready for when it does.
We built a reusable application to manage our commercial waste customer accounts, giving an improved financial view of customers and helping us to automate the signing of documents and collection of invoices. This has been built with a view to rolling out for our community alarm and beach huts in future.
We built an improved way to manage agency workers and consultants being added to our systems. This will give the organisation an improved picture of real numbers.
October
Reusing our previously built booking system integrated with GOV.UK Pay, we helped sell tickets for Jack on the Green light and lantern trail. Selling out nearly 10,000 tickets, we learnt lessons about system performance and capacity, but crucially we saved nearly £6,000 on fees that major ticket platforms would have charged us.
Throughout the year, we have been working on significantly reducing our end-of-life Windows 2012 Server estate. Working with our Infrastructure team, services and suppliers, we have made excellent progress with either upgrading or migrating platforms and now have a clear plan for the small number of remaining servers.
After our Digital redesign, we launched the Applications team within Digital — a hybrid team that will work more like business partners with service teams. They will build relationships with services, be one part in improving digital skills, and encourage ownership of systems.
November
We started launching system and service improvement roadmaps with priority teams. We wanted to get a fuller idea of work requirements from teams and work out what they can do, where we need to support, and what will have a more systems focus. Part of this also included giving a presentation to the Organisational Leadership team and our Major Programmes board.
As well as implementing a major version upgrade to our Housing Management System a few months ago, we worked with our supplier to implement a modern web interface to the product. This will give us the ability to remove some older technologies from our platform delivery infrastructure and reduce associated costs.
We started training on Liberty Spark, a process mapping tool we will be using to map and calculate benefits across a series of system processes.
We worked with our Proactive and Benefits teams to compile data on more than 4,500 residents on low incomes or in receipt of benefits. Working in partnership with Southern Water, this has helped record numbers seek help with water bills, moving them to social tariffs. This has saved residents around £760,000 across Adur and Worthing.
December
Developing our dog bin data collection work and Report It platform, we have expanded the use of officers using mobile and tablet devices to collect more accurate data about our cleansing services. With this, we have added additional rounds and reporting that our staff can collect information on, helping make our services better for residents. This includes Car Parks, Bus Shelters, Litter Picking rounds and the launch of internal Public Convenience reporting, soon to be launched to the public too.
For the last few years, the Digital team has been working on a network refresh project to replace aging infrastructure and bring new network switches, wireless access points, robust security and improved fibre connectivity. During a major milestone of this project, we tested a large array of applications to prove speed.
Throughout the year, we also responded to over 850 incidents and 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.
Looking Forward: Our Vision for 2025 🎉
As we look ahead to 2025, our digital team is embarking on an ambitious journey to transform how we work and deliver value to our community. We’re implementing a structured approach built around clear goals and OKRs, ensuring every project aligns with measurable outcomes that matter to our residents and organisation.
A key focus will be empowering our system administrators with robust product management practices, shifting from reactive maintenance to strategic development of our digital services. We’re also planning to increase digital skills across our service teams, recognising that true transformation happens when we build capability at every level.
Perhaps most excitingly, we’re hoping to take our first careful steps into implementing AI solutions, backed by policy and guidance to ensure responsible and effective use of this technology. Throughout this journey, we’re committed to working in the open — sharing our successes, challenges and learnings through blogs and storytelling, both internally and with other councils. This collaborative approach not only helps us improve but contributes to the wider local government digital community.
Happy New Year… here’s to continuing momentum in 2025!
