Image showing four plates spinning, to reflect the fact that DDaT Luton is managing several different tasks, responsibilities and activities at the same time, trying to keep them all going without letting any fail.
Building our permanent team
We’ve been preparing recruitment materials and holding interviews as part of the restructure.
We’re building a permanent team with the digital skills we need to transform public services ourselves, so we don’t have to rely as much on contractors. There’s still a place for contractors to:
- bring in skills we don’t have
- provide specialist support
- help us get things done quicker
But if we know we’ll need those skills long term, we should be creating permanent roles and recruiting to them.
The best contractors are those whose work is still useful long after they’ve left. That might be a new website, a design system, or a better understanding of our business processes, captured in process maps and improvement plans we can keep using.
For me, the important thing is to transfer that knowledge to the core team so we can carry the work on ourselves.
Learning from the apps we’ve launched
We’re keeping a close eye on how the new applications are being used and talking to services about how they’re working in practice.
There are now enough cases in the system for us to spend more time on reporting and dashboards. We want to make it easier to see where demand is coming from, what’s working and where we might be falling down.
We always think about reporting when we design an application, so we’re collecting the right data from the start. But I find it much easier to build dashboards once we have real data to work with. You can see what the data is telling you and whether it matches your assumptions.
Services have also had time to use the application, see the data we store, and think about how they want to use it.
I’ve also been going back over the stats spreadsheet I received on day one. It helpfully covered contact across every channel and service, alongside complaints, giving us a baseline to measure against.
Residential waste
The residential waste go-live is taking a little longer than we’d planned. Integrations can slow things down, and that’s been the case here. This milestone is running late but the wider waste programme is still on track.
We’re using the delay to get ahead on other parts of the programme, including assisted collections and discovery work on residential and commercial clinical waste. Agile working FTW.
Building on our general enquiries framework (GEF)
We’re using some ancillary waste processes to test the general enquiries alpha and work out which features to prioritise next.
This is raising some architectural and strategic questions, particularly around what a general enquiry is and what it isn’t. I went back to a paper I wrote about this to remind myself of the thinking behind it.
The GEF gives teams a flexible way to manage small, trackable enquiries and work requests without needing a dedicated service application. It could be useful for teams that don’t have their own system and manage casework through shared email folders. It’s a good fit for simple requests where we can ask standard questions, send the case to the right team and keep the process straightforward.
It won’t be right for everything. If a service needs bookings or payments, complex rules, several teams and approvals, or integration with another system, a dedicated application may be the better option. That may also be necessary for specific data capture or reporting requirements, stricter controls, or greater resilience. Some services may need a different user experience and design too.
The waste work will help us test this. Some processes will need integration with our in-cab technology, while others may work through general enquiries. As we test the alpha, we need to work out what belongs in the GEF and what needs its own application. Whichever route we take, it should feel like one platform to the people using it. The CRM at the centre will bring the cases together so we can see them in one place.
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