Transforming the resident experience with Newham Council
Unboxed worked with the London Borough of Newham to deliver multiple Discovery activities and an Alpha as part of their Digital Customer Programme to improve key services for 360,000+ local residents.
What we did
Discovery
Alpha
User research
Service design
Stakeholder engagement
Digital transformation
Co-design workshops
Prototyping and testing
Agile delivery
UX/UI design
10 week
Discovery phase where we embedded with the Newham Council digital team
8 week
Alpha phase to build and test a Homelessness Triage Centre digital tool
The Challenge
Tighter budgets, growing populations with greater needs, and rapidly changing technology are increasing the complexity in which local authorities operate. This requires constant development and improvement of the services they provide.
These pressures are driving a wave of digital transformation across local government services in the UK .
As part of an organisational change programme, the London Borough of Newham wanted to transform its digital services to improve the experience for its residents, while saving money. Unboxed was asked to help them build a culture of resident-focused service innovation through a series of Discovery activities with their internal Digital Transformation Team.
Background
Newham is one of the youngest and most diverse boroughs in London, with a population of over 350,000. It is also one of the fastest growing boroughs in the country with regeneration and investment creating change and new opportunities. However there is much inequality across the borough. A quarter of its neighbourhoods are the most deprived in the UK and after housing costs, almost half of its residents live in poverty.
Meeting the needs of such a diverse population is a key challenge for the Council, particularly with the digital landscape undergoing such a rapid pace of change.
Our approach
Unboxed joined with an internal digital transformation team, which included business analysts, a call centre agent and a digital officer. As a blended 'Newham Digital' project team we worked together on-site to model and spread user-centred ways of working across the organisation.
We used a 'learn by doing' approach to introduce Agile principles and user-centred design techniques, such as user interviewing, testing and iterative prototyping. We supported the team to interview residents for the first time, helping them to build empathy and ask the right questions so the team could fully understand the challenges they faced.
Not only did the internal team learn new skills, they also became Agile pioneers within the organisation. They used their contacts and relationships within the Council to share the work we were doing and find opportunities for Discoveries.
We embodied working in the open by basing ourselves in a glass-walled room located next to the office entrance. In this space we made our work visible, sparked new conversations, ran workshops, and presented our fortnightly show and tells.
Here are some of the areas we explored through the Discovery activities:
Special Educational Needs - How the Local Offer website could be improved to meet the needs of families, while also meeting the legal obligations of the service.
Homelessness - How to enable the Homelessness support service to manage the complexity and unpredictable volume of demand they experience.
Housing Account - How to make a seamless experience for residents currently on or looking to join the housing register.
Council Tax and Benefits - How to support processes and relationships between residents and council staff in a traditionally paper based service.
Building a case for change
Our research demonstrated that there were opportunities for digital transformation in each of the Discovery areas. With limited resources, we needed to prioritise which opportunity to take forward to an Alpha phase first. We used criteria, such as expected impact and volume of service use, to score each one.
With approximately 20,000 visits made per year, at the time of the project the Homelessness Triage Centre was one of Newham Council’s highest volume service centres and became the focus of the first Alpha.
The Discovery taught us that not everyone who visited the centre needed immediate assistance. We identified this as an opportunity to provide an alternative pathway for residents with less immediate needs, freeing staff time to deal with more complex cases and creating cost savings for the council.
The Alpha helped us to develop, test and iterate prototypes of the digital tools that would enable the new pathway. We were able to demonstrate that the new pathway could reduce demand on face-to-face appointments and had the potential to create an annual saving of £70,000.
What our client had to say
"The team at Unboxed really understood the complexities of our services. By co-locating with our staff and residents they helped us create a solution that truly works for everyone involved."
-- Ikramul Haque, Delivery Lead - Customer Digital Transformation, Newham Council
What we learnt
Change can feel daunting for staff. Uncertainty, concerns over job security and pressure to learn new skills are just some of the reasons that can create resistance and a reluctance to get involved. Some staff were so overstretched that they told us they didn’t have the time to get involved. We needed to bring staff along with us on the journey, and make them a part of the change. This is how we did it:
Use your advocates for change We were very fortunate to have staff in our team that knew the organisation well and had strong relationships across the council. Not only did they make introductions, they helped to build confidence in the process by learning it themselves and showing the impact of our work. Our advocates in turn created new advocates.
Engage staff with real life stories Change can take time and not all members of staff were ready to engage in the process, particularly in activities, such as co-design workshops, where they often felt out of their comfort zone. However, simply being the voice of residents, their customers, consistently helped us to show them why the approach was important. It provided insight they sometimes had not had before and created opportunities for discussion.
Make the most of key meetings A big turning point in our project was being invited to present at a Senior Leadership Meeting. In front of an audience of almost one hundred directors and heads of service we brought our process to life. Using real stories from Newham residents and prototypes we helped them connect to residents' needs, made the future tangible, expanded their horizons and made the case for change. It was a nerve-wracking experience, but a positive one. Senior leaders were genuinely interested in the work we had done and felt empathy for the residents whose stories we shared. It felt like it gave us a green light to reach out and start Discoveries with other service teams.
Involve ICT from the beginning One of the most important relationships we formed was with ICT. Their knowledge of systems and data helped us to understand the possibilities for joining up services as well as the limitations.
The outcome
Our work with Newham helped the Council to recognise the need for a more resident-focused, rather than service-focused approach to service development. It demonstrated how collaboration between service teams can support a shift away from siloed back-end processes and fragmented data and provide a better experience for residents.
We supported the Council to build capability and capacity within the internal digital team so they could continue to apply agile, user-centered approaches to other council services.
What our client had to say
“We are constantly trying to manipulate technology to make it meet our needs, so it has been refreshing to put it aside and think about what our users actually need from the service for a change. Starting with a blank piece of paper has led to all sorts of new ideas to improve the experience for our customers.”
–– Ian Sutton, CYPS Manager, Newham Council
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