Hello! I’m James Coleman and, last week, I joined Luton Council as a Senior Digital Developer for DDaT. While it’s a new organisation for me, it’s a role I love, focusing on supporting digital services that help deliver improvements for people.
Joining a council that provides such a vast array of services can feel overwhelming at first. Yet that breadth, and the team’s commitment to providing it, is exactly what brought me here.
I’ve been welcomed into an excellent group of people dedicated to improving what the council does. Being surrounded by this continuous improvement mindset is a great reminder that our work isn’t just about launching a digital tool and moving on. It means taking a step back to evaluate:
- what works
- what doesn’t work
- how we can improve to ensure our services evolve alongside the needs of the residents and businesses that rely on them
There is no better way to learn about the organisation and its people than by diving into my first project: building a reporting framework and dashboard for resident complaints.
Dashboarding complaints
At their best, reporting dashboards provide meaningful insights that drive operational changes. At their worst, they add operational noise and increase the effort needed to understand the data.
To prevent the latter, a few key questions are guiding our initial development.
Do we really need a dashboard?
Data is essential to local authority services, which often leads to the instinctive assumption that every application requires a dashboard. However, cramming data into reports without a clear purpose wastes time for both developers and end users.
If data requires significant context to prevent misinterpretation, or if it won’t be updated frequently, a narrative report or an exportable dataset is often a more responsible use of resources.
How will the data be used?
Complaints span the entire council, meaning we must navigate diverse and sometimes competing needs.
Frontline staff need snapshots of open cases.
Service managers look for recurring issues.
Leadership relies on high-level strategic summaries.
Clarifying the reason for including a metric is critical. Before building, a good place to start is to ask what data will trigger an action or decision, such as identifying a process bottleneck. A bottleneck in a process is the slowest step in a workflow, where the volume of work exceeds capacity and causes a backlog. In other words, we do not like bottlenecks!
To make sure a dashboard is a genuinely useful and insightful tool, we need to incorporate:
- logical grouping
- prioritisation of the most frequently needed data
Can you trust the data?
Establishing trust with the user is also essential. This means:
- using clear, descriptive labelling
- being transparent about the quality of the data
Highlighting known gaps or methodological changes directly within the tool prevents misinterpretation and builds confidence in the system.
Ultimately, these principles are about making sure our technology serves a practical purpose. Getting to apply this mindset to a real world challenge, right out of the gate, has been the perfect introduction to life at Luton Council!
I’m looking forward to sharing more updates as this project and others develop.
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