Housing Repairs

Weeknotes - 10 January 2020

DXW Digital are working on an alpha project with Greenwich, Southwark, Lincoln and South Kesteven councils exploring approaches for the design of a common pattern for reporting, diagnosing and scheduling of housing repairs. The project is part of MHCLG’s local digital collaboration fund.

We send out week notes to update the team and stakeholders on the progress of the project. The week notes will highlight the key things we’re working on, acknowledge achievements and show progress. They will also outline any blockers, and what we’re planning to work on next. 

What are we thinking about?

After an inception period to set the project up and agree the overall vision, we just started our first two week delivery sprint. In total, we’ll be working for 3 sprints (6 weeks) so we’ll be working at pace to make sure we deliver the project outputs. These outputs include a prototype, a recommendation report, a User Research report, a business case, and importantly a clear understanding of whether a common pattern is a viable proposition.

We’ve set two overall visions for this work, one for residents and one for local authorities:

Building on the work from discovery, we’re working hard to get going on prototyping parts of a common pattern for housing repairs that are most likely to solve problems for users. We held mapping and co-design workshops at each of the four authorities this week. The outputs from that are informing where we start with prototyping, by showing what is common (and what isn’t) across the councils. We’re planning to test an initial prototype with residents next week.

We need to be clear about the scope of this work – we’re exploring approaches to the reporting, diagnosing and booking/scheduling of repairs. We also need to test the journey for a repair type that is sufficiently representative of the overall journey. Initially, we’re looking at the journey for leaks and damp, or what we’re describing as ‘water being somewhere it shouldn’t be’.

mapping the repairs journey at Lincoln

What have we done in the last week?

• we held our first sprint planning session. The goal for our first sprint is to Define scope and assumptions, prioritise for prototype and test with residents
• we’ve reviewed the discovery outputs in detail and re-written a set of user needs for the alpha phase
• we ran mapping workshops in Greenwich, Southwark, Lincoln and South Kesteven
• we’ve started analysing the outputs of the workshops to determine priority problem and opportunity areas to test in a prototype
• we’ve been walking through some online repairs journeys from various authorities to see how different approaches have been
• we’ve been reviewing data on repair types from the four councils 
• recruitment of residents for testing has started, with sessions being booked in for next week

What are we planning to do next?

• we’ll finish analysing and feeding back the workshop outputs 
• the initial prototype will be built based on the priorities that we’ve identified
• we’ll be running testing of the prototype with users on Thursday, using the feedback to inform the next iteration

Who is on the DXW team?

• Daria Kwiatkowska (service designer)
• Debs Durojaiye (interaction designer)
• Vita Mangan (user researcher)
• Alex Yedigaroff (transformation manager)

Page last updated: 11 March 2020