Aylesbury Vale District Council (as of April 2020 - Buckinghamshire Council) Digital Housing case study

This project has effectively built upon its well-established digital housing offer through this project. The team have implemented further resource alleviating solutions into the service while at the same time consolidating back office services under a unitarisation programme of 4 local districts with the county council.

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Constructive Outcomes

Building and enhancing existing products

Prior to this project Aylesbury Vale had developed a combined housing application and pre-assessment form in the Bucks Home Choice Service. This iteration of the project focused on reviewing the existing forms under the new emerging unitary authority allocations policy while also streamlining the customer experience and delivering a concise journey for the user.

Locata were onboarded through the procurement process as the same supplier used for the previous project in 2014. It allowed the team to work with familiar colleagues who had a clear view of the project aims and a robust understanding of architecture and plans.

The second phase of the project had been priced up to include another comprehensive offer comprising of surveys, GDPR compliant data silos and developer resource. The supplier was aware of the pressures of the council and understood the political process of decision making required from the other 3 councils, Chiltern, South Bucks, and Wycombe.

The forms went live in October 2019 and were incorporated with the anticipated rollout of the new enhanced and accessibly formatted Buckinghamshire Council website with further form enhancements in July 2020. The team felt that as services were integrated continuous improvement points were sought out as they moved into the new authority. The hard work the team put in over this period led to the development of a policy and resource that has a predicted shelf life for the next 2 years plus.

Under the Covid-19 lockdown the early launch and continuous improvement approach had a positive impact on service delivery. It enabled the majority of staff to work from home due to the inclusion of the developed scanning functionality for the online processes. Documents can now be remotely scanned that enables staff and residents to make legitimate photocopies of ID and crucial documentation that saves both considerable amounts of time and modernises this process that was previously required to be done in person pre-Covid-19. 

Balancing priorities delivering project fundamentals

The project manager and SRO had a strong understanding and experience of the project management skills required to deliver a product while balancing competing priorities.

The team reflected on the key fundamentals that helped them succeed during the challenge of moving to a unitary authority.  

They highlighted the following as critical factors to success:

  • Stakeholder engagement, strong supplier relationship & user feedback.
  • Consultation & critical friend reviews.
  • Having a clear vision using the MoSCoW technique setting out: (M)ust haves to meet the business needs, (S)hould have if possible, but not critical to success, (C)ould have this aspect if not affecting delivery and (W)ould like in the future with further improvements.
  • Ensuring understanding of project roles and planning deadlines.
  • Utilising and connecting with the 4 other councils on the LGA programme and the shared space for learning.

Holistic user engagement with innovative video testing

The team worked closely with Smarter Digital Services (SDS) to establish strong user testing with new emerging methods.

The project team set users up in five different testing scenarios of recurring problems encountered by a typical user in five separate meeting rooms. SDS and council staff had set up a recording system to monitor the answers and using screen capturing technology to understand how quickly customers were completing questions and where they met difficulties.

A similar exercise was undertaken just before the form went live with service users. The video capturing technology showed participants completing the form where an issue kept occurring around the entry of personal details for the individual. The exact section was pinpointed, and changes were incorporated into the review before the actual form was deployed.

User feedback such as this is now business as usual and the team have implemented a commercially aware and client centred policy approach.

Challenges

Supplier demand

The company Locata who had been chosen to deliver the second iteration of the form experienced an unprecedented demand on services. This led the council’s form production to be added into a large work stack that forced a delay to the project while they waited in the supplier’s task queue for an update between sprints over a 3-month period.

The delay provided the team with additional time to rewrite a number of policies and a new set of procedures to enhance the partnership over the Bucks Home Choice footprint with the breakdown of data silos. This was done through the political process and working on consulting with members and users. As the council had worked with this company on delivering the first iteration of the project there was a good relationship built between the council and the supplier that allowed them to negotiation a quicker delivery through the work stack to avoid missing deadlines. A strong working relationship with the supplier played a key role in effective delivery.

Unitarisation and resource strain 

Sighted as one of the biggest risks and milestones for the project when implementing this digital change project, the team had to attend and receive a decision from all 4 political landscapes and bodies by April 2019. The major challenge being to update members from varied political backgrounds and contexts outside the team’s immediate locality and to persuade them to back the holistic service over the new footprint.

This risk was exacerbated with the announcement that Buckinghamshire’s 4 district councils and county council were to be combined into a single unitary council. Workloads were increased substantially and more than just the online digital service had to be agreed in the unitarization process applying further pressure to the team. Additional elements such as branding, and system access needed to be considered and developed into the specification. 

The unitary workstreams caused a massive capacity issue within the team as they now needed to focus on integrating 3 or 4 back office systems while conveying this to Locata as the fasting moving environment would change on a daily basis at Aylesbury and across the county.

In addition, there were several GDPR data silos that needed to be combined in a safe and secure way for the housing service of the new unitary. This needed to be adapted and carefully planned out for the new council teams to ensure residents did not slip through the net when the emerging county wide service was launched.

As change continued to grip the organisation and neighbouring councils, the team had to cope with a shifting management structure with the leadership of the organisation departing as the new unitary launch approached. The team had to find a source of internal leadership direction from the senior responsible officer and project manager in order to continue forging the products under the tumultuous political environment they were navigating. Even in a vacuum the team demonstrated that strong management and leadership was crucial to delivering a project.

Managing multiple layers of political and internal pressures from the new emerging landscape along with navigating the political desire to reframe the policy for the forthcoming authority put the team under an immense amount of pressure to deliver. The team had to not only manage users’ expectations but also, once the new authority was launched, they had to serve what is now the largest number of members to be elected to represent a single local authority in England. Holding a flexible and resilient mindset was key to meeting the evolving objectives, risks, opportunities and challenges of combining authorities into a single entity.

Benefit realisation

Key Tools and Approaches

This project valued the delivery of products using Agile methodology. Moreover, the user video testing gave significant insight into usability and informed further amendments to the form prior to the go live launch.

How valuable was the input from the local government supplier (SDS) 

SDS helped deliver ‘as is user testing’ of the current application form and findings were fed into the development of the new form. SDS then collated the feedback into a comprehensive report and included key recommendations for redeveloping the form. This was used by the team to understand the issues with the current form and enabled them to develop the new form with the customer journey at the forefront of any changes being made.

They highlighted the need to focus on the following specific areas of development:

  • Using an agile approach
  • Removing repetition and ambiguity
  • Managing customer expectations
  • GDS styling addressing accessibility and plain English
  • Environmental impact and relevance of paperless services.
  • Accessible format

Replicating the Kent digital asset

The team already had an online form which was in place prior to Kent which meant the main area of consideration focused on the additional features that were being delivered and navigating the same software provider to deliver in an agile way as testing suggested.