With a couple of sprints under their belts since last there, I went along to Newham Council a few weeks ago to attend the Digital Team’s third Show & Tell. This is the third installment of what’s been happening during the council’s 10-week Discovery Phase for their Digital Customer Programme.
Digital Discovery - Sprint Three
Show & Tell duration: 20 minutes
Led by Martyn and Paul (the service designer of the project), the team shared the progress that has been happening across the previous one-week sprint of the project, with stakeholders and interested parties from around the council.
A few examples of important progress milestones the team have achieved include:
- Meeting key stakeholders around other major services within the council
- Exploring the customer journeys in the Housing service department in more depth
- Interviewing local residents across a range of council services
Other specific milestones met over the last week include:
- Joining a specialised forum, as a method of getting in front of more residents in specific service areas
- Being introduced to Data Warehousing (DW) as the first steps in beginning to analyse the data already gathered through interviewing
- Introducing sketching phases to begin drawing out potential solutions to the problems already expressed by residents
- Thinking about how to prioritise candidate services within the overall bigger picture
The team beginning to draft solutions during the sprint
Customer journeys in Housing
One of the specific areas that has been focused on is within the council’s current Housing service. The team have began to get a focus on the overall service, with members branching off to address individual areas, for example - the journey residents take to join the housing register and what pain points they are faced with in this journey.
A member of the team carrying out user interviews in a service location during the sprint
It was also highlighted that the agile process has slowly begun spreading across departments. The Housing team are beginning to adopt these new agile ways of working, such as getting a physical prioritised project board up on the wall of their working space - making the sharing of this information much more open and transparent.
What’s next on the roadmap?
The team wrapped up this Show & Tell installment by sharing what’s next on their roadmap and the tasks they aim to tackle across the next sprint. Some of these individual tasks include:
- Exploring more possible solutions with the Housing teams
- Mapping customer journeys and processes in other service areas of focus
- Spending time with specific internal teams
- Continuing to carry out more interviews around specific needs
- Gathering more data on current candidate services
Another key milestone is conducting the first team retrospective to find out what’s been going well so far, what’s going not so well and what can be improved when heading into the next sprint.
Sprint Three: Done! It’s now time for the Digital Team to build on the progress they’ve already been making by continuing to build up their user research data and apply this to further iterations of possible early-stage service solutions.