Sprint Notes #32
By: Local Digital Collaboration Unit
Tags: Local Digital, Digital Government, Local Government, Digital Planning, Sprint Notes

Covering 18–31 August 2021

Welcome back to our sprint notes! Read on to find out what the Local Digital team and our funded projects have been up to over the past 2 weeks.

Improve your digital skills with an online training course from FutureLearn

Earlier this year we launched a new online training offer, inviting local authorities to apply for a funded place on a course with the online learning platform, FutureLearn.

We only have a limited number of funded places left, so don’t miss out on this opportunity to brush up on your digital skills or learn something new!

Choose from a list of recommended courses or pick any short course that will benefit you and your organisation. Browse the training library.

A testimonial from one of our course attendees.

Updates from our funded projects

Children’s Social Care Demand

The team is continuing to test the demand modelling tool with users. This sprint, they carried out testing with commissioners in Dudley to get a better understanding of use cases and develop a list of ‘must / should / could’ functionality. They also tested the tool with analyst users.

There is an hypothesis that these two sets of users have slightly different user needs, so the team will need to consider how they manage this.

Digital Inclusion Toolkit

The project has now completed 5 user research interviews and have more booked in. The team is also looking to extend the budget for their user researchers so they can analyse the interview findings.

A playback session on the user research is being planned and the team are looking to procure a Content Designer to update their website based on the findings.

There will also be a team retro on the 9 September facilitated by LDCU’s Delivery Manager, Sarah Deignan.

If you haven’t already completed the project’s Digital Inclusion Survey, the deadline has been extended to 21 September so make sure to get involved!

Future Work Design

This sprint, the team published a new blog post about their use of social media on the project, entitled ‘Social Media & Future Work Design’.

A tweet from the Future Work Design project.

LocalGov Drupal

The team have started work on their ‘shop window’ website, and Will and Kate took time to sit down and talk about LocalGov Drupal with Dave Briggs.

The team has also launched a fortnightly newsletter to make it easy to follow the project. In the latest edition you can:

read about the objectives for the latest sprint

watch a walk-through of the new Content Lifecycle and Workflow feature via YouTube

watch a demo on how to get content out of LocalGov Drupal and into a decoupled site with a different theme

Quality Data for Children in Care

The team entered their second week of ceremonies and drop-ins with the analysts who are helping to deliver error coding in Python for the various errors seen in 903 returns data. The team are making great progress, with a further 25 errors passing the review stage.

The team have also made some front-end improvements to the tool to display placement distance and postcode, and completed the videos supporting analysts to deliver advanced error code.

The Quality Data for Children in Care project dashboard, showing progress in the first week.

There has been an average of 20 views across all of the training videos and 6 out of 17 analysts have ‘engaged’, defined by going through all the training videos, joining GitHub or contributing an error. The community has already contributed 30 errors for the tool.

In order to support those analysts who are progressing, the team has prioritised completing training videos for the more complex errors so that analysts can move forward.

A tweet from Data to Insight, the Quality Data for Children in Care project’s supplier.

RIPA and BOPS

We have just launched a series of three showcase events in September, where councils can find out more about the BOPS and RIPA tools and how to get involved in the projects with support from MHCLG.

The BOPS team has created a new open source ‘draw site boundary tool’. The basic tool was originally developed by Open Systems Lab, the delivery partner for RIPA. They packaged this up and shared the code on Github so that the BOPS team (and delivery partner Unboxed) could develop a new piece of BOPS functionality to simplify the communications between planning officers and applicants.

Now, applicants and planners can propose a redrawn site boundary, rather than a planning application being returned as invalid and requiring a completely new submission. This development work marks a recent high-point in cross-product collaboration.

A tweet from the RIPA project.

Scalable Approach to Vulnerability via Interoperability (SAVVI)

This sprint the project team held a workshop to review their learnings from working with North Yorkshire County Council, and begin to shape this into a case study.

Product Owner, Paul Davidson, and SAVVI coach Simon have been continuing to work on the SENA case study. Paul is also working on making the SAVVI catalogue prototype compliant with GDS design patterns and standards.

Project Manager, Shelley Heckman, has published a blog post outlining notes from the information governance quality assurance Working Group for Vulnerability. Read the blog post on LinkedIn.

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