Innovation is everything. When you’re on the forefront, you can see what the next innovation needs to be. When you’re behind, you have to spend your energy catching up.
(Robert Noyce)
Well — we may be behind on our blog notes of our digital innovation project — but pleased to announce we’re progressing well on our actual project 😊
Picking up from our last Blog — in early August we held our second workshop at our partner’s Bath & North East Somerset’s offices. The session was in their Keynsham venue — what an amazing building — very Nordic in design!
In the session, we finished off the stakeholder mapping — dividing the stakeholders we’d identified into four categories — interested parties, suppliers, customers and financiers.
We then imagined what the stakeholders may say they’d want to see as an outcome from the work we’re doing. Guess work at this stage, but useful to get us thinking about the different needs from different groups. Hopefully — we will find out more from those stakeholders once our User Researcher starts to engage in sessions with them.
The post its were then translated into our Miro board for ease of viewing!
We also updated our As Is journey mapping which continues to develop. This time focusing a little more on what the Technical Support officers did in their role and how that differed across the partners. Some were a little more technical focused than others, who were slightly more admin orientated.
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During this period, we had been looking at the output from the project team’s interviews with the Lambeth Building Control service. We’d broken the findings up into three groups — Technical Support, Surveyors and Principals. From there, we’d identified pain points — initially entered into a Miro board, but these have now been transferred to a spreadsheet, where the data can be analysed with more ease.
The spreadsheet will additionally allow us to capture case frequency and the time spent to resolve each case. The analysis will help us understand the impact of each pain point. It will be interesting, using a discussion guide, to see where issues are unique and where there similar — and if the frequency and time spent resolving are the same — or there are different (better or worse) approaches to resolution.
We also did some assumption mapping in our second workshop. One of the things we found we had to do was redesign the planned approach as we found most of our insights were important and very few were unimportant!
Following our second workshop, We met with our newly appointed User Researcher, Aspasia of Marvell Consulting. In our first meeting we discussed the breakdown of how work was picked up by officers across the three partners — and how that differed. We discussed that some councils have separate plan checking and inspection functions — and that it would interesting to know how many across the UK use this approach, and how many have merged that into one.
We discussed how some councils have a system whereby one officer does a plan check and one an inspection on the same application and how this provides a kind of quality check.
Again — it would be interesting to gather data around this and how well this works and if it reduces the number of issues / errors that Local Authority Building Control services can experience.
We also chatted about the different users (applicants) that we want to engage with. Some applicants put in a Regularisation type application — so this is for works that started without a Building Control Regulations application and sometimes may also have finished the works but require a completion certificate to sell their home. We agreed it would be really useful to interview those types of applicants to find out more on their experiences and understanding of the function.
We discussed what is required to obtain a completion certificate, and the number of site visits and plan checks required, along with the difficulty Local Authority Building Control services have when there are problems. They have to enforce, but they may not have been the employed surveyor on site and that obviously creates extra cost to carry out the enforcement against a site that they didn’t receive the fee to actually provide the service.
Now to some tools and link updates! We set up our Project Delivery Trello board during this time, and Aspasia set up the User Researcher Trello board.
Finally — we did more work on our Metrics and you can find out more on this in our Second Show and Tell (8 minutes in) here: Show and Tell 2 — Improving Local Authority Building Control Services! If you’re a slave to accuracy — yes we spotted it too: it’s X formerly Twitter, not the other way around — doh…!
So that brings us up to the end of August — our next blog will update you on our third workshop and the sprint on from that. We’re working roughly in 4–5 week sprints as none of us are able to work full time on the project so this allows us to get some solid tasks completed in a sensible amount of time.
Don’t forget to follow us on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn 😊
