Blog posts about procurement

The first sprint of 2021 is complete, so here’s your update on everything the SocietyWorks team has been up to.

In light of the latest lockdown announcement and school closures, we had to make a few adjustments to the sprint schedule to make sure that we were being realistic with what work we could complete. But as always, we pulled together as a team to give each other the support we needed, which has meant we were still able to work on the following things:

Noise reporting for Hackney

In an exciting start to the year, we soft-launched one of our new services: a secure noise reporting workflow for Hackney Council. If you’ve been following our blog for a while, you’ll know that this is something we’ve been excited about working on, so it was great to get it live.

FixMyStreet Pro

Alongside working on the new noise service, we got to work on some smaller FixMyStreet Pro orders for our clients, such as private comments and amends to map layers.

Integrations

Also this sprint, we’ve been following up with clients on work that was completed last year, like pulling photos back out of Alloy and Confirm – something we’re keen to see progress. Learn about how we are able integrate our services with any backend management system here.

We’ve also been working on a new Bartec integration for a waste service with our friends at Peterborough Council. This is the second waste product project for us, and we’re very excited to roll it out – stay tuned for more updates on this soon.

Service discovery

In other exciting news, we completed a big piece of discovery and have been able to take it straight to an alpha build for a client this sprint, which we’ll reveal more about in good time. If you’re not sure yet what our discovery service is, you can read more about it here.

GOV.UK Notify

Another Hackney-related thing we worked on this sprint was to collect the final reviews on their GOV.UK Notify project, which will go live in early February. This is available to all FixMyStreet Pro Gold clients – find out more about how to buy here. 

Communications

And finally, ahead of a busy and exciting year of development, we’ve been preparing a variety of different comms pieces this sprint, including drafting some announcements about our upcoming new mobile improvements for FixMyStreet. Watch this space!

Image: Lisa Fotios on Pexels

The quickest and easiest way to procure SocietyWorks services is on the G-Cloud digital marketplace.

You can find our street fault reporting system FixMyStreet Pro, and our Freedom of Information service FOI Works on the G-Cloud 12 framework right now.

Also available through this route is our Service Discovery programme, which you’ll find as an option on the FixMyStreet Pro PDF.

Procuring services through this government framework is faster and cheaper than entering into a direct contract: services come pre-approved, so there’s no requirement to go through a long process of tendering. You can see the full specs laid out, download PDFs to share your colleagues, and compare with other services on price and features.

Any questions? Just get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

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Image: Joshua Earle

What a year it’s been for FixMyStreet Pro, now the official street reporting system for 21 authorities across the country.

Growth…

During 2019 we’ve welcomed Bexley, Cheshire East, Hackney, Northamptonshire, Hounslow Highways, Westminster, Island Roads (Isle of Wight), Peterborough, and now Transport for London to the list of Pro clients.

In all, that adds up to 6.5 million residents who can now report problems such as potholes, faulty street lights or vandalism, either on FixMyStreet.com or on their councils’ own websites.

And if you consider that TfL covers all of Greater London, a further 7.5 million residents and countless commuters, tourists and visitors to the city are also covered for reporting on overground and underground stations, red routes, bus stops, etc.

In all cases, reports pass directly into the authorities’ internal systems, making for swift resolution and the ability to keep the report-maker informed of progress at every step.

…and improvement

It hasn’t been all about expansion, though. This year, we’ve also been adding further features for councils to the FixMyStreet Pro offering. It’s worth noting, perhaps, that improvements for councils always translate into improvements for residents too, either in terms of quicker report processing, better status updates, or public money saved — and often all three.

Here’s a rundown of the new features we’ve introduced this year:

• Councils can add assets like street lights and trees to the map so reports are made in precisely the right location.
• If you’re trying to report a problem that’s already been logged, you’ll be alerted and can sign up to get updates on the original.
• Our new dashboard heatmaps show council staff at a glance where problems are.
• We made changes to the way councils can manage categories, easily adding context-specific guidance for the report maker…
• … and also made it so that a subcategory can belong to more than one parent.
• Managers can now assign roles to team members much more easily, too.

Getting out and about

We attended Highways UK in Brum and the LGA conference in Bournemouth — it was good to meet so many of our clients and those considering whether FixMyStreet Pro might be a good fit for their needs.

And we were delighted to meet up with residents in Westminster and let them put the FixMyStreet to test while we watched and learned.

Looking forward to 2020

We’ve already been carrying out some research with client authorities, and we’ll be continuing this work into the new year. We also have some development planned.

• Conducting user testing to see how people use the input forms, what might be confusing and how this can be addressed…
• …and further user testing to observe how people use FixMyStreet on mobile devices.
• We’ll be talking to District Councils to see how their needs differ from other authorities, and how we can meet those needs.
• Meanwhile we’ll be giving the FixMyStreet app a much-needed update.
• We’ll make it easier for staff to add the email address of someone who requests updates on an existing report.
• And lots more!

We’re really looking forward to getting our teeth into these features and then rolling them out to our client councils in 2020.

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Image: Nadine Shaabana

We are happy to confirm that FixMyStreet Professional (the service formerly known as FixMyStreet for Councils) has been accepted onto the GCloud9 procurement framework.
Why is this important?

Using GCloud9, which is overseen by the Crown Commercial Service, removes much of the admin burden from public sector teams who are seeking to procure cloud based software and makes it easier to get down to the question of who has the best product for their needs.

What is FixMyStreet Pro?

FixMyStreet Pro represents the outcome of our co-design project with Oxfordshire County Council to take our popular FixMyStreet platform and build in a new set of features that genuinely made it as useful as possible for their staff (and Council staff all over the UK).

With a focus on retaining the user focused design and approach FixMyStreet was known for we have added or improved functionality for Council customer service staff and introduced a whole new set of tools to support Council inspectors including the ability to manage their tasks from within the app and to work offline when out and about.

This project has also made some improvements to the wider user experience for citizens with new front-end features being added all the time based on user research and feedback.

Want to learn more?

You can find out more about the service over on the GCloud Digital Marketplace or check out our own product pages where you can also get in touch with us if you would like to see a demonstration of the service or learn more about how we might be able to help.