Digital specialists help transform both team and systems, improving online experiences for housing, homelessness and children’s services.
Published 20 February 2018
Last updated 3 April 2019
The requirement
The Council’s 2020 Transformation Team recognised the need to take a more customer-centric approach to transformand redesign how it delivers vital online services to over 300k local residents. They wanted to be more efficient, effective and innovative with a primary focus on creating end-to-end services to help residents at every step of the process.
Using the Digital Marketplace, London Borough of Newham Council used the Digital Outcomes and Specialists (DOS) framework procure a specialist supplier to deliver expertise, working with them to understand and improve the user experience of vital services such as Housing, Homelessness and Children’s Services.
The solution
“Super straightforward” and helpful templates made it quicker and easier to prepare and run the procurement than other frameworks the team had used before. They also found it really beneficial that the suppliers on the framework were so familiar with the system, which helped to make the process easier.
The project was awarded to digital specialists, Unboxed, who were able to provide a team of digital specialists to work on-site at Newham Council over a period of 10 weeks. After a large scoping and research exercise and through regular meetings, workshops and presentations throughout this time, stakeholders were fully engaged in this process, and Unboxed were also able to coach and mentor the internal team. With this collaborative working, council staff were left with the skills to run a Discovery process internally themselves.
The result
Now that Unboxed has helped them to better understand the needs of residents, Newham Council has been able to ensure that the next development stage for this project will build the right end-to-end product for their residents.
This project has helped to secure senior buy-in to a new agile approach to service design, and the budget to go back out to market, via DOS, for other suppliers to provide the additional development for this project.
“This project has been a real journey for our team. It was disruptive, but in a good way! It has enabled me to learn new skillsets and I’m excited to see this Homelessness Online project head forward into the next phase.”
Ikramul Haque – Delivery Lead – Customer Digital Transformation, Newham Council
For further information, view the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework webpage.