Sprint Notes #78
February & March 2024
Welcome to Sprint Notes #78. In this issue, you can read about the progress of our funded projects over February and March, and catch up on all our latest news, including an update on the Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) for Local Government and our three year plan for Open Referral UK.
We would like to thank everyone for reading our Sprint Notes. These monthly editions will be paused due to the conclusion of many of our Local Digital Fund projects and the upcoming pre-election period. We will continue to share what we’re working on and any significant updates in our fortnightly newsletter and on the DLUHC Digital blog. See you there!
News from Local Digital
Developing a service to assess and understand cyber resilience in local government
In 2024, DLUHC will introduce the Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) for Local Government to support councils to assess and improve their cyber security.
We’re currently designing and testing a service to help councils to prepare and complete a CAF self-assessment. You can learn more about how we’re developing the service and what this will mean for councils in our latest blog post. We’ll also be sharing more information and guidance on how to get your organisation ready for the CAF over the coming months.
Read our blog post about the Cyber Assessment Framework for Local Government.
iNetwork awards 2023
Congratulations to Wigan Council and their partners in the Kraft Heinz Care Leaver Traineeship Partnership Group for winning the 2023 iNetwork Partner Excellence Award. An excellent project bringing together public and private organisations for a positive impact.
As part of the judging panel Phil James, Local Digital Collaboration and Engagement Manager, said “an excellent project and achievement for all those that worked on it and with a massive impact and positive outcome on the young people concerned.”
Presenting the award was Tom Lowndes, another Collaboration and Engagement Manager at Local Digital, who spoke about our work and the fantastic finalists. “iNetwork works so hard to be heard and its strong collective voice confronts public sector challenges. I would like to congratulate all the finalists and the winners.”
News you may have missed
Driving adoption of Open Referral UK to deliver millions in annual savings for councils
The Local Digital team is pleased to announce an ambitious three year plan for the Open Referral UK (ORUK) data standard that could potentially deliver millions of pounds in annual savings and help get citizens access to better quality information when they need it. An initial fund of £600k will be allocated to drive further adoption and to set up a Cross-Government Advisory Group.
Learn more about the benefits of the standard, our three year plan, and how you can join the community in our recent blog post.
Local Digital evaluation study update: Understanding the needs of local government
It has been almost a year since we commissioned an independent evaluation of the Local Digital programme. You can now find an update on our evaluation process, some key findings so far, and the benefits for councils that share their insights on our website.
We are also asking all councils in England to complete our evaluation survey, even if they have done so previously, to ensure that we have a comprehensive set of responses from across local government.
To hear more about this and ask questions about the study and survey, you can attend our webinar on Thursday 21 March, 11am to 12pm.
News from our Round 6 funded projects
Delivering an infrastructure mapping platform (Kent County Council)
Over the past month, the project team hosted a successful Local Digital Fund visit where we clarified the next phases of the project. They improved internal and external stakeholder communication and collaboration. They’ve continued to build the platform, including dashboards and maps.
They have been invited to two internal team events to demo the platform and plan to continue internal and district engagement. Additionally, they will collate and audit the datasets currently available. Streamlining vlog and project admin tasks is underway as they move towards business as usual operations. Stress testing the access rights of users is being conducted to ensure full visibility of access rights as the user base grows.
Improving social care hospital discharges (Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council)
The Stockport project team have completed their discovery project and are currently finalising and sharing their learning.
Investigating a digital support hub for carers (London Borough of Southwark)
In this phase, the project team continues to work with their Discovery Partner, (The PSC), to conduct user research at scale. Through events and carer activities across South East London (SEL), we have reached 78 carers in total, providing a strong evidence base of carers’ needs and pain points in their journey to access and use support services.
Building on this understanding, they have started designing potential solutions to meet carers’ top needs where gaps exist. Their initial designs involved a long list of ideas which they then synthesised to 8–10 solutions. To promote the co-production principle, they hosted an in-person co-design workshop with 10 carers to gather their input on solutions and their requirements in each solution.
A refinement workshop was held with all partner borough leads to prioritise and refine the solutions, as well as to sketch out potential mobilisation steps.
Approaching the end of this unpaid carer discovery project, their main plan moving forwards is to document their learnings and proposals in a final report. They will work with The PSC to present findings to relevant forums where needed and share the final report with interested parties.
They will also be hosting internal discussions to determine how to take some of the solutions forward to truly benefit unpaid carers in SEL.
Improving Local Authority Building Control Services (London Borough of Lambeth)
The Lambeth team continues to finalise their report and recommendation. They’ve analysed the interviews with builders, and drawn together these insights with feedback from customers and officers to inform their recommendations, metrics and business case.
The plan is to share their report with Local Digital and stakeholders shortly. A session is booked to review the first draft with Aspasia, their consultant UR lead.
Improving the automation of the starters, movers and leavers process (Southampton City Council)
The project has progressed from Sprint 6 to Sprint 7. Sprint 6 delivered version 2 of the Starter/Mover form which included Facilities Management questions and changes informed by user acceptance testing and feedback. They’ve developed the integrations between the Starter/Mover form, the HR system and the IT Service Desk systems. Lastly, a system of automated testing was implemented.
They are expecting to have completed version 3 of the Starter/Mover form in the next sprint, which will integrate the IT forms and raise requests in the IT Service Desk System. They will also go live with the first version of the HR and Facilities Management Visibility Tracking.
Coming soon, they have a knowledge sharing presentation planned with Richmond and Wandsworth council to share information about our SLAM solution.
Scaling a rapid identification tool for vulnerable households in an emergency (Westmorland & Furness Council)
Despite a quiet month awaiting confirmation of the technical partnership for the prototype, the Senior Stakeholder Group still met twice during this period to discuss future funding and the next steps for the project.
This month, the project team is hoping to confirm next steps with a technology partner for the remainder of the Local Digital funding. Plus they’ve scheduled a run through of the current prototype with new Local Resilience Forum (LRF) partners from Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Cheshire and Knowsley.
That’s it for this sprint, thanks for reading! For the daily download on all things #LocalDigital, be sure to follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and the DLUHC Digital Blog.
