The Digital Team have reached a milestone Show & Tell in their Digital Customer Programme Discovery Phase with Newham Council - Sprint 10. With a buzz across the room, spirits are high as it reaches 11am – the time for the Show & Tell kick-off.

Digital Discovery - Sprint 10

Show & Tell duration: 20 minutes

Martyn stepped up to the plate to recollect and share the progress achieved by the Digital Team across Sprint 10, including:

• The Show & Tell roadshow – delivering a series of Show & Tell sessions by going into each relevant service department (including Housing, Homelessness and Children’s Services) across the borough to share progress with a much wider audience and gain more stakeholder buy-in
• Further iterations of the current eight user personas (including our old friend Jenny – the original Newham persona)
• Visiting a parent’s group to further share the latest prototype of the Local Offer service
• Initial planning for the upcoming Alpha phase, following this Discovery, to take each prototype further and identify any risks involved within each service
• Addressing the smooth transition into this Alpha phase

Progress reflection

The Newham Council team reflected over the last 10 weeks, sharing their learnings and what they have achieved so far from undertaking this Discovery phase:

• It’s all about finding out what people want from our services
• Our current Local Offer service ticked a box, but when sitting down face-to-face and talking to real users, it was soon realised that some requirements just couldn’t be met with the current system
• The learnings of user interviewing – it’s not just about asking a large list of questions but engaging constantly in conversations with users and taking away even the smallest of insights and comments they may share during this time
• There is so much more to addressing online user behaviour than just using systems such as Google Analytics

Agile reflection

Also reflecting on the new experience of the Newham Digital Team working in an Agile environment for the first time:

• Breaking down the work into short sprints has created more focus
• Daily standup has reduced the time taken to address any issues and blockers – whereas before, it might have take weeks to unblock progress, it can now be addressed daily
• Agile has now been introduced and begun to be embedded into the Newham Council team
• It’s all about building and embedding our digital expertise now and progressing into the future
• The next steps are about bringing more and more capabilities into the team

Slack also received a special mention as being “revolutionary” in cutting down email communication and opening up more necessary and easier group and one-to-one conversations.

Brilliant reflections from the amazing dawn turner on her experience of discovery at out last show and tell @NewhamLondon @Ubxd - users! pic.twitter.com/XRbVEVhru4

— Tracy Green (@greentrac) November 23, 2016

The Digital Team then wrapped up this Show & Tell by summarising the overall Discovery phase so far, including:

• Any initial nervousness of stakeholders has now been reduced through seeing multiple prototypes come to life over this 10-week period
• These individual service area stakeholders can now see how their services can help more people
• The task now is to build up on the progress already made, keeping up the Discovery momentum and carrying this through to the Alpha phase

Newham Council is going through a step-by-step change, with this Discovery phase being the first step in this journey to Agile. It’s a very exciting time for the Digital Team, and wider overall team. So, Sprint 10... That's a wrap!

So what’s next for the team?

• Heading into the Alpha phase of selected services
• More Discovery work on services still at early stages

A quick team de-brief and it’s onwards and upwards to the next challenge - the Alpha phase.