BoPS is back! (sprint notes)
By: Michelle Ann Isme
Tags: Digital Transformation, Digital Planning, Urban Planning, Local Digital

We’re excited to announce that development on BoPS — the catchier way to say ‘Back-office Planning System’ — has kicked off again.

Photo by Nicole Baster on Unsplash

Quick recap: earlier this year we built a minimum viable product (MVP) that will make it quicker and easier for council planning teams to assess applications for householder permitted development… in a nutshell, it will help councils to provide a better service whereby applicants receive a quicker decision on their application. It does this through clean and intuitive design (backed up with lots of research and testing with planning officers) that makes it easier for planners to find what they need to make an assessment, and by receiving applications as “data” (rather than PDF application forms) which makes it easier to surface or re-use that data elsewhere.

So, what’s next?

Southwark Council, the lead partner on the BoPS project, is working with Unboxed and other council partners, with support from MHCLG’s Local Digital Fund, to move the MVP into beta testing over the next few months.

We will publish more blog posts about this as we progress through the project but, to begin with, we plan to beta test with one planning officer in each of our partner councils. We’ll start in Southwark, Lambeth and Buckinghamshire councils with Camden Council coming onboard later on. The planning officers involved in beta testing will use BoPS to assess applications for householder permitted development only — potentially starting testing with historical applications and then using it with new applications. You can find out more about how the beta phase works here.

We are also engaging with other councils who are interested in being involved — please get in touch if you would like to find out more about the project (detail below)!

While our immediate focus is on moving the BoPS MVP into beta testing — so we can monitor and learn from how it’s being used and iterate accordingly — the medium-longer term vision is to expand BoPS so that it can be used to assess all types of a planning applications (non-householder permitted development through to major planning projects). Again, watch this space for further blog posts about this.

Development roadmap…

Our development roadmap is focussed on four key areas that will enable us to move into best testing with the councils mentioned above:

Developing the API to receive application data: from applicant facing services — starting with taking data from RIPA.

from applicant facing services — starting with taking data from RIPA. Multi-council tenancy: infrastructure to ensure that planning authorities, and the officers in them, only see the applications submitted to their authority.

infrastructure to ensure that planning authorities, and the officers in them, only see the applications submitted to their authority. Validation features: approving documents, displaying a payment reference, stating whether it is proposed or existing development, adding the ability to withdraw applications.

approving documents, displaying a payment reference, stating whether it is proposed or existing development, adding the ability to withdraw applications. Making data available: building on the API that was developed in the previous phase of the project so that planning data can be shared on a planning register and for reporting purposes, providing the ability to not publish certain documents (containing personal data).

Sprint notes:

We kicked off this phase of the project with an alignment workshop with attendees from the partner councils mentioned above, Coventry Council and MHCLG. This gave us the wider team an opportunity to discuss their hopes and fears for the project, discuss potential risks (and how we can mitigate them), share the roadmap for this phase of work, and discuss how we can work together collaboratively.

Screenshot from ‘Hopes and Fear’s activity in the project alignment workshop.

This was followed by a “sprint zero” — a short, one week sprint to allow newer members of the development team to explore and understand what has already been built and investigate how to approach some of the “big ticket” items, set up our agile meetings, and start re-kindling the relationships developed with other councils in earlier stages of the project (following a few months break since the last phase).

During our ‘sprint zero’ the team:

researched and decided on the infrastructure required for supporting multi-council use of the product

had several meetings with RIPA’s development team

begun work on the API — a “spike” (ahem, that’s a technical investigation) to identify the best way to receive application data

started prototyping validation features — collaboration and co-design with a planning officer in Buckinghamshire Council (thanks Emily!)

demoed BoPS to Greenwich Council and Camden Council.

We are now in our first full two-week sprint and you can see what we’re up to here, on our public backlog: https://trello.com/b/KQqYJd7W

We will share what we achieve in this sprint at out first Show and Tell on 8th December at 11:30am (tune in at https://rebrand.ly/bops-show-and-tell) and in our next sprint notes!

If you are interested in being involved in this project or have any questions please get in touch with Tom Buttrick, our product owner, at tom.buttrick@southwark.gov.uk or post a comment below.

You can also find the latest updates on Twitter at @BoPs_Digital