Housing Repairs

Weeknotes - 31 January 2020

We’re working on an alpha project with DXW Digital, Greenwich, 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. 

You can view a recording of our first show and tell here and see the slides here. Our next show and tell will be on Monday 3 Feburary at 2.30pm in Lincoln Council. We’ll make a recording available shortly afterwards.

Along with our show and tells, these weeknotes are the main way you will find out about the project so please read on. Get in touch with Alex with any questions or feedback.

What are we thinking about?

Common service patterns are well suited to transactional services with a clear and linear journey, for example applying for a bus pass or a parking permit. In this type of service, a resident applies for a thing, and gets that thing. 

Housing repairs is a more complex service, as, depending on the information that a resident provides in the reporting journey, many different things can happen. There are also parts of the journey that aren’t linear for example diagnosis can happen in several different places (on the phone, during a visit) and jobs are often not completed on the first visit and require multiple tradespersons potentially sending the resident back to an earlier part of the journey.

Because of this, we’re defining where there are patterns in the different stages of the reporting and booking journey, rather than assuming that a single end-to-end pattern is the answer. For example what the patterns are for ‘checking eligibility’, ‘reporting a problem’ and ‘checking availability’. Where patterns exist in these different stages, local authorities may be able to adopt the patterns in part of the journey if they have constraints that prevent them adopting the whole journey. 

The current sprint finishes on Monday 3 February and we’ll be using sprint planning the next day to determine the stages of the journey to prototype and test where we still have the most to learn.

What have we done in the last week?

• a design workshop was held with participants from Greenwich and Southwark. We used the outputs of the observation sessions in Lincoln and Grantham to outline a service map which was tested and challenged to see where the commonalities and differences in the services are. The participants sketched their ideas for the reporting journey, and critiqued the prototype from Sprint 1
• a technical discovery has started - we welcomed James Smith (technical architect) to the team. He’s been looking at the technical and data flow aspects of the pattern, as well as looking at the HACT data standards and sequence models
• we’ve started collecting detailed data from the four authorities to inform the business case

What are we planning to do next?

• We’ll be doing further prototyping to inform our learnings about what should be in a pattern (or patterns). Testing with residents is scheduled for the following week
• We’ll finalise the numbers for the business case
• The technical discovery stage will complete

Who is on the dxw team?

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

Page last updated: 11 March 2020