Sprint notes #14
Covering 30 September — 13 October 2020
Welcome back to our team sprint notes!
A fortnight of events
Local Digital Takeover Event at Local Gov Camp
A huge thank you to everyone that tuned in for our Local Digital Takeover event during Local Gov Camp 2020! We had a great turnout for our keynote speeches from Paul Maltby and May-N Leow, and the lightning talks from a selection of our C-19 Challenge project teams.
Local Digital Declaration workshop
As part of the takeover event, Sam and Maddie hosted a workshop for local authorities that centred around the question: ‘What do you need to become a Local Digital Declaration superhero?’
During the interactive online session we asked attendees to identify the superpowers that make them well-equipped to adopt the principles of the Declaration, what might be blocking their way, and what they need to overcome these blockers. We wanted to hear your ideas for growing the Local Digital community and further embedding the Declaration at your council.
It was great to hear thoughts and ideas from a wide range of local authorities, and we plan to organise a follow-on session with the participants in the coming weeks to delve deeper.
We’re also hoping to share outputs from the workshop and hold an informal show and tell, so keep an eye on our channels if you’re interested in hearing more.
Digital Leaders Week 2020
Egle joined up with the Reducing Invalid Planning Applications (RIPA) and Back Office Planning System (BOPS) teams to share an update on MHCLG’s digital planning projects for their talk, ‘Planning for the Future: Local digital collaborative project’.
Sam also gave a talk entitled ‘How to tell your story so the world listens’, encouraging agile and digital professionals to tell compelling stories about the work they do. You can read more about Sam’s talk in her blog post, ‘Telling the story of your project… using The Tiger Who Came to Tea’.
Local Digital C-19 Challenge
We’ve recently published two new guest blogs from our project teams:
- Howbusyistoon.com: Challenges around technology, data and privacy by Luke Smith, Deputy Director of the Urban Observatory
- Developing a crisis response model to support Neighbourhood Team delivery by Paul Holme, Strategic Lead (Intelligence and Data Science) at Manchester City Council
Check out the latest issue of our C-19 Challenge Highlights for more updates on our projects.
Cyber
The Cyber team is briefly exploring, at a high level, the provision of and demand for cyber security training for Local Authorities. This activity is to inform some of the substance of the cyber security training roadmap.
We are evaluating suppliers for our technical remediation cyber stream for local authorities.
On the cyber health framework, we are starting the tendering process to recruit suppliers to start our alpha and beta for a cyber security baseline for local authorities.
Funded projects
Housing repairs
The housing repairs project has now closed and the team held their final show and tell, with over 30 people joining the call.
The project is now going to take a short break and resume w/c 19 October to finalise the project outputs and reports. In the meantime, you can watch the final show and tell on the project website.
Planning projects
The Reducing Invalid Planning Applications (RIPA) and Back Office Planning System (BOPS) projects both presented during our Local Gov Camp takeover and Digital Leaders Week. They also attended a roundtable with Minister Pincher.
We’ve been working on aligning the two projects more, and held a second project alignment workshop during which we discussed:
- MVP for Certificate of Lawfulness
- User research (testing and observing)
- Roadmap for future modules
- Working more closely with council IT teams
Meanwhile, the RIPA team has also been continuing with user research, updating it’s prototypes and so much more!
The BOPS project has been busy setting up new comms channels and you can now follow the project on Twitter at @bops_digital.
Income management system
The delivery stage is now complete, and the project team presented a panel interview style session at LocalGov Camp with almost 30 people in attendance.
While they prepare for the next delivery stage, you can find the project report and a prototype on their website and on localdigital.gov.uk.
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