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Hackney Council noise case management sprint notes: 6 July – 3 August 2021

These sprint notes are part of a series following our work with Hackney Council on the production of a noise case management system. View the previous notes here.

Service assessment

In the previous month we took part in a service assessment, which was a chance for us to share the work we’ve been doing so far with a panel, and to check that we’re meeting the Service Standard by testing our work against fourteen Government Design Service (GDS) criteria.

We have now received the full results and while feedback was generally positive, we have also been given recommendations on criteria that the panel feel we did not fully meet. We have been through each of the comments and recommendations with Hackney, and have agreed on which ones we’ll be taking forward. We’re due to meet again in a few weeks to show some of our changes and what we’ve learned, and are currently in the process of gathering further evidence for the assessors. One of the things they felt we weren’t clear about is what we’d learned from our testing with staff at Hackney. Our plan is to go back through the prototypes and provide specific examples of work we’ve changed based on feedback. Another recommendation we’ll be working on is showing the end to end process through a process diagram with swimlanes, something we had in the earlier stages of discovery, but with all the new information and understanding we have this is something that could be expanded upon. 

Alpha and Beta

As we’ve moved from Alpha and into Beta, we wrapped up our work so far with a report detailing all our findings and links to all relevant prototypes and user stories that were gathered. This is something that we’re currently asking Hackney for feedback on and will form a create base for future documentation.

With the move to Beta we’ve gone through about 70% of the prototypes and started to document the technical functionality of each feature in Github tickets and an accompanying technical specification. To make the work easier to follow and prioritise, we’ve grouped related sections of work together in Github as milestones. This will help show any dependencies between work more easily too. 

The technical specification will be a working document as we develop and test with the team at Hackney, but for now we’ve sent over the first draft which details how high level key functionality, citizen reporting, authentication for staff and the citizen view when authenticated. 

Development work 

As we’ve worked with Hackney before on FixMyStreet Pro we knew certain things would need to be in place, like the way council staff authenticate using Google login. 

We’ve also been working on the reassignment of cases between different officers, and have demoed that at a recent ‘Show & Tell’ meeting to the team at Hackney.

Image: Pawel Czerwinski


Hackney Council noise case management sprint notes: 8 June – 6 July 2021

These sprint notes are part of a series following our work with Hackney Council on the production of a noise case management system. View the previous notes here.

It’s a bumper edition of our Hackney noise case management sprint notes, this time covering two very busy sprints.

Service assessment

During the last two sprints, we prepared for and submitted the noise service we’ve been working on with Hackney for a service assessment. This was a chance for us to share the work we’ve been doing so far with a panel, and to check that we’re meeting the Service Standard by testing our work against fourteen Government Design Service (GDS) criteria.

On the day of the assessment, we were joined by Emma Gowan and Selwyn Preston from Hackney, as well as Phillipa Newis from Greenwich. 

We’re still waiting for the full assessment results, but we can certainly say that it was a really useful exercise for us to gain an external view of the service and take some guidance from experienced specialists from the government digital community.

Citizen user experience research

We also spent some time carrying out further research into the citizen experience of creating noise reports. Specifically, we wanted to find out more about what citizens want in terms of creating a diary of noise reports, how they want to see case history and the preferred way to receive notifications.

For this, we spoke to a sample of Hackney residents, 73% of whom had previously made noise reports. Our investigations found that most of them would rather be notified about their noise cases via email than via a text message, phone call or letter.

Interestingly, while 54% of the residents we spoke to say they would likely make their report on a mobile phone, the majority of them don’t want another app. This is fortunate, because we’re looking to build a responsive website that doesn’t leave older devices behind.

Take a look at some of our other findings:

Was it fairly easy to report the noise recurrence?

Was the language clear and easy to understand?

Is it useful to see a log like this, of all the actions following your complaint?

Alpha and Beta

The last two sprints saw us enter the final round of Alpha testing for the noise service. Wanting to be prepared for what happens next, the SocietyWorks team met internally to discuss the Beta part of the project.

First up on the list for this stage is to work out how the product will be built and to start creating tickets to document what we need to build. To start with, we’re focusing on allowing officers to reassign cases to each other. This will involve looking at how real-life staff profiles are set up within the system, instead of just the example profiles we have so far. 

Image: Nick Fewings


Hackney Council noise case management sprint notes: 25 May – 8 June 2021

These sprint notes are part of a series following our work with Hackney Council on the production of a noise case management system. View the previous notes here.

During the last sprint we focused on prototyping the system’s mobile-optimised interface to get a second round of feedback on some of the suggestions the team has already made in previous sprints, and also identify ways that the product can help officers attending noise complaints ‘on the ground’

The prototypes received some good feedback including:

  • Case list page works well – combination of filtering and searching by address or name addresses the needs of officers prioritising their work.
  • Great suggestion that the case page should display the number of previous cases at the given address, and/or number of notices previously served to the address – again, to help surface context that might affect the priority of a case.
  • Confirmation that officers expect to be notified by email when a case is assigned to them.
  • The concept of logging “actions” on a case generally makes sense to officers. Important to include failed actions as well – eg: “unable to contact reporter” or “phone unanswered”.
  • Extra information about perpetrators was valuable – we now need to investigate what we can show / where it would come from.
  • 100% of respondents said what they’ve seen so far would save them time compared to current or previous tools.

As we’re getting nearer to actually coding up some of these prototypes we’ve also had discussions about the infrastructure and languages used to develop the new NoiseWorks product as well as scheduling time in future sprints to start building the prototypes.

This sprint we’re testing the final set of prototypes around the citizen experience of the service. While most of the case management features are staff-only, we’re keen to get citizen feedback on how they access their past complaints, keep digital ‘diary sheets’ of noise re-occurrences and how they’d expect to be notified about updates to their case.

Image: Frederik Lipfert


Full green garden waste bin awaiting collection

Sprint notes: 26 May – 7 June 2021

Here’s what the SocietyWorks team got up to during the latest sprint.

FixMyStreet Pro

This sprint the team hosted an informative Show & Tell session for Buckinghamshire Council, impressively titled ‘The Art of the Possible’. The aim of this session was to outline some of the new improvements available for FixMyStreet Pro, as well as to provide an overview of how WasteWorks, our waste management service, and ApplyForIt, our licensing application service, could bring further improvements for the Council. These improvements include: an enhanced customer journey; extra streamlined data flow from back office systems; adding additional service areas to reflect unitary status; additional asset layers; augmented mapping.

NoiseWorks

Not satisfied with just one Show & Tell session this sprint, we also met up with our friends at Hackney Council to show them the latest progress on our in-development noise case management service. The focus this sprint was on examining the mobile app experience for officers in the field. We gained valuable feedback and insights, with 100% of officers stating the NoiseWorks experience would save them time. Can’t get better than that!

WasteWorks

Also this sprint, we’ve been working hard with Bromley Council on their online green garden waste payments system – part of the WasteWorks service. This system will allow Bromley to generate income from new subscriptions, renewals and direct debits for their green garden waste collection service. This will be going live next sprint. 

Other projects

Another Bromley project, we’ve been doing some work on a CRM project for them, as well as integrating parks into their installation of FixMyStreet Pro, so that residents can now search by park names. Alongside this, we ticked several smaller Freshdesk enquiries from clients off the list, and added a new logo to Zurich’s version of FixMyStreet Pro.

SocietyWorks Team 

And finally, an exciting update on the SocietyWorks team: we are very happy to announce that we have recruited two new developers who will be joining the team very soon!

Got questions about anything we worked on this sprint? Get in touch.

Image: manfredrichter


SocietyWorks is working with Hackney Council to produce a noise case management service

Hackney Council noise case management sprint notes: 11 May – 25 May 2021

These sprint notes are part of a series following our work with Hackney Council on the production of a noise case management system. View the previous notes here.

We are now halfway through the Alpha phase of the project, which involves prototyping, testing and iterating the noise case management service. This sprint the testing focussed on how we could allow Hackney staff to filter and manage multiple cases, and this led to some really useful follow-up conversations with Principal Officers, which identified a more action-based approach as an intuitive way to help them quickly pick up and understand cases.

Findings from this sprint’s prototype testing included:

  • The importance of displaying full addresses when listing cases – including street and flat numbers.
  • Being able to find or filter cases by letters or notices that have been served to the perpetrator – this would help officers identify cases that need follow-up.
  • Ideas for better ways of prioritising cases – for example, by repeat offenders, breaches of notice, multiple complaints, or priority categories (like car alarms).
  • The usefulness of displaying actions that have been taken on a case, such as contact with residents, visits, notices, referrals.

Whilst ASB isn’t within the scope of this phase of the project, there is naturally some crossover between the noise and ASB teams at Hackney. This sprint we had a really energising meeting with members of the ASB team, where Beth and Soraya (the leads on this project at Hackney) took the team through the work we’ve done so far, to ensure we’re sharing as much knowledge as possible and learning from each other.

We’re proud to be working alongside Hackney Council to develop the new NoiseWorks product, and have already had some great feedback the staff at Hackney – Gerry, the Service Manager for Enforcement, in particular, thanked us for the work we’re doing, and appreciates that we’re taking the time to really involve and listen to the team.

Next sprint, we’ll be prototyping the system’s mobile-optimised interface to get a second round of feedback on some of the suggestions the team has already made in previous sprints, and also identify ways that the product can help officers attending noise complaints ‘on the ground’.

Image: Justus Menke


Sprint notes: 11 – 26 May 2021

It’s been a cold and wet May, but we haven’t let that dampen our spirits here at SocietyWorks. Here are some of the highlights from the last sprint –  it was a busy one!

FixMyStreet Pro user group

This sprint we hosted another successful user group for our FixMyStreet Pro customers. These events give our council partners the chance to catch up on all of the new features we’ve been working on for the service, and also provide the opportunity to influence our development roadmap.

Thank you to everyone who made it on the day, and a special thank you to Jack Bowers from Central Bedfordshire Council and to Tom Scholes at Oxfordshire County Council who each presented a fantastic case study for us.

We also heard from Senior Developer Dave Arter who provided an expert demonstration of the recently added FixMyStreet Pro features, which now include OS Maps with MasterMap detail, mobile navigation improvements and image redaction.

You can find out more about the user group here.

WasteWorks

If you’re a keen follower of our sprint notes, you’ve probably noticed that we’re very excited to be co-designing with councils on the new WasteWorks product.

This is a citizen-centred system for councils to manage all elements of domestic, bulky and green waste online, integrated fully into any and all in-cab systems. We’ve moved into post-go live phase with Bromley Council after launching their phase 1 of work the other week.

NoiseWorks

Sshhh!  NoiseWorks is coming….

We have been partnering with Hackney Council to develop a nuisance noise reporting system for their local residents. We have completed phase 1 and are working towards completing phase 2 of the project. Please get in touch if you would like to know more. 

Smaller projects

We have also been working across a variety of smaller projects. This includes working on Red Claims for Buckinghamshire Council, bug fixing and supporting our clients via Freshdesk. 

Putting our heads together

This sprint we also had our SocietyWorks team meeting. This was a great opportunity for us all to get together to examine our internal processes, discuss the SocietyWorks suite of products and prioritise future projects. 

If that’s not enough we have also been looking to recruit new developers so we can continue innovating, collaborating and partnering on projects that will make a difference for citizens in our communities. 

Image: Gary Ellis


Sprint notes: 16 Mar – 1 Apr

Spring is in the air, the clocks have gone forward and it’s been another busy sprint for the SocietyWorks team – here’s what we got up to.

mySociety team meeting

We attended the first mySociety team meeting of the year (online, of course), where we took a look at what we’d achieved over the past 12 months, and what we need to achieve in the next 12. It was a great opportunity to speak to colleagues and share the SocietyWorks strategy and vision with the rest of the team.

During the meeting, we hosted various breakout sessions, including a marketing catch-up to see all the new things our Marketing & PR Manager Sally has been working on. We also reviewed our internal coding practises with Senior Developer Chris. We’ve got our fingers crossed for an in-person meeting soon, as much as we did all enjoy receiving cookies in the post to nibble on throughout the meeting!

Bromley waste project

As well as the team meeting, we’ve been continuing work on Bromley Council’s new waste project and have started our internal review process, in preparation for handover to the client in a few weeks’ time.

Hackney noise case management

We also made progress on our new product NoiseWorks with Hackney Council (read more about it here). We’ve been getting up to speed on the discovery interviews Zarino, one of our wonderful designers, has been holding and working out what our next set of priorities will be.

FixMyStreet Pro

We’ve also been meeting with lots of our FixMyStreet Pro customers, with Account Manager Clare holding her quarterly account management meetings. These meetings give us the chance to regularly check in and catch up with our clients to discuss feedback, issues and any concerns they may have. We also talk about the latest feature developments to FixMyStreet Pro, as well as providing a SocietyWorks product update, which currently includes our new WasteWorks product. Here again, we are very much looking forward to being able to see our clients face-to-face once more in the near future!

Image: Tatiana Rodriguez on Unsplash


SocietyWorks sprint notes for 2 - 15 February 2021

Sprint notes: 2 – 15 February 2021

Days are getting longer, nights are getting shorter and the SocietyWorks sprints are getting busier! Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to recently.

Working on waste…

If you’ve been following our sprint notes closely, you’ll know that we’ve commenced phase 2 of developing Bromley Council’s new waste service. This sprint we delved a bit deeper into the different APIs we’ll be using, and drafted a technical specification that we shared with Bromley and the third parties involved to get their feedback. We do this because, as part of our processes, we like to make sure we prepare fully, rather than jumping straight into code. This makes for a smoother roll-out, and is also an opportunity for the our customers and any relevant parties to raise any potential issues that may need to be addressed. 

We also continued our work on Peterborough City Council’s new waste service, which involves an intelligent integration with Bartec. It’s coming along nicely and we’ll have more to update you on in the near future.

…and on FixMyStreet Pro, of course

On the FixMyStreet Pro side of things, we worked on several smaller work orders this sprint, including projects for London Borough of Bexley and Bath & North East Somerset Council.

We also looked at how we can roll-out the functionality to send an email when a user is subscribed to a report by council staff on a wider scale – this is something we’ve already built with Oxfordshire County Council, but we see real value in it, so we would like to offer it to all of our council partners. Let us know if this interests you.

Plus, we caught up with our friends at Buckinghamshire Council about how they’ve been getting on with FixMyStreet Pro, which they first switched to back in 2018. We were thrilled to learn that, as the service has improved the user experience for citizens when making a report online, calls to the Council have decreased by 49%, saving Buckinghamshire more than £32,000 per year. Not bad, eh? If you’d like to learn more, we wrote a blog post here.

Giving ourselves more credit

As a team, we’re all really proud of what we do and why we do it, and yet very rarely do we shout about it. Now that our new Marketing & PR Manager Sally is here, we’re going to change this. To that end, we’ve been busy preparing submissions for entering a few awards in the areas of system integration and digital transformation – two things that we live and breathe here at SocietyWorks. Keep your fingers crossed for us, and watch this space!

Growing the team

Sally’s not going to be the new person for very much longer; this sprint saw us conducting interviews for a new Project Manager role. We’re all very excited about this new addition to the team, and we’ll be sure to introduce you as soon as they get started!

Image: Max Conrad on Unsplash


Sprint notes 19 Jan - 1 Feb Featured Image

Sprint notes: 19 Jan – 1 Feb 2021

There’s been lots happening during the second sprint of the year – here’s what the SocietyWorks team has been working on.

Waste product development 

We’re very excited to have started phase two of our work on Bromley’s waste product, which includes incorporating green garden waste and payments into the service. 

We’re working closely with the team at Bromley, Capita and Veolia to create this new system.  Currently, we’re designing the prototypes for the citizen forms to understand what information we’ll need to capture and how to make this as easy as possible for the user to fill in.

Client feedback

In other waste-related news, we’ve been speaking to a few of our clients to get their feedback on features and pricing for our general waste product. We’ll also have a new name for the product confirmed in the next few weeks! If you’re interested in learning more about our new waste service, drop us a line.

GOV.UK Notify

Also this sprint, we’ve applied the finishing touches to the GOV.UK Notify work we’ve been doing for Hackney. This new service is going live on the 4th Feb and is available to all FixMyStreet Pro Gold clients – find out more about how to buy here.

Cookie banners

A hangover task from just before Christmas, we ticked updating client cookie banners off our list this sprint, making sure they’re all as up-to-date as possible.

Marketing and social media

Our new Marketing & PR Manager Sally has been getting her feet under the table and is looking at our overall Marketing goals for the next 3 years, as well as the best ways to spread the news about all the good work we do. You might have noticed during the last sprint that we now have a SocietyWorks LinkedIn account, a SocietyWorks Twitter account and a FixMyStreet Instagram page – go give us a follow!

Internal processes

We’ve taken some time this sprint to look at our internal processes, including how we operate and organise the sprint itself. This is something we’re going to be mixing up a little over the next few weeks – we’ll let you know how it goes!

User groups

Last but definitely not least, with it being February already (we know, we’re shocked too), we’ve started to plan for our summer user groups. We look forward to running these groups every year, and this one is no different. If you’re not familiar with them, have a read of this blog post about our most recent user group and keep an eye out for more details coming soon.

Image: William Santos on Unsplash


Featured Image for Sprint notes 5 - 18 January

Sprint notes: 5 – 18 January 2021

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


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