Single View Dashboard
Karen Cranwell, Product Owner for Single View reminded the audience that at the last showcase the Single View Search screens had been shown enabling a user to search for an individual from basic name or address detail criteria. Karen demonstrated the Search results screen indicating the top level information that will appear, including full names and addresses and contact details and the ‘More’ button.
The ‘More’ button
The focus of the past two weeks has been what happens when a user presses the all-important ‘More’ button. The team demonstrated that clicking ‘More’ now enables the display of information from the Stockport Family system, such as gender, DOB, address history, extended family relationships, contact history and current key workers involved.
However the real power of this Single View is still to come when we start to link information from the different systems allowing users to process each contact much more quickly based on the evidence it provides. To give one example of the possibilities, for a case involving a child, it would be useful if we could look at the extended family relationships shown and pull up information held by Revenues and Benefits on the connected adults, thereby quickly building more of a picture of that family.
Permissions based layers
These are the type of integrations that the team will be working on next. Vital to this is creating the ‘permissions-based’ layers so when people access Single View they only see what they are allowed to see from the data held on a citizen from the different systems and this is a key focus of our work at the moment.
The initial tool being developed will be released in its ‘Minimum viable’ form and used in tandem with the current Case Management/ Contact Management systems to enable user feedback and improvements. However the team hopes ultimately to integrate it as a widget into the existing systems.
Mobile Working
An update was given on the Services that are now in the Mobile Working pilot and it was emphasized that new requests are being received all the time and will be added to the ‘Backlog’ list for inclusion in due course.
The seven teams now in discovery or trial stage for mobile working are:
- Stockport Family – CAF rapid response, START
- Building Control
- Cemeteries
- Welfare Rights
- REACH
- Neighbourhood Management
The variety of Services involved highlights the varied requests that the Mobile Working workstream is dealing with and the challenges that this presents. Every team is completely individual and all the users have different needs, different systems and different equipment requirements.
Equipment trials
We have been trialling a variety of equipment and we are also undertaking a lot of behind the scenes IT work developing the capabilities to enable the various systems to work in a mobile environment.
To give one example Stockport Family, a very mobile team, require highly mobile devices and the resolution of connectivity issues as they visit people in their own homes. A number of tablets have been trialled but following staff feedback these will be replaced when they go out of support by new lighter tablets with larger screens, full keyboards, stands and longer battery life. We will continue to test devices and feedback from staff will continue to be of the utmost importance.
Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics
Mike Henry, Product Owner for BI and Analytics gave a high level update on the data that has been brought into the central data warehouse from the different systems over the past two weeks.
The team then went into greater detail on the work that is taking place ‘out of view’. In metaphorical terms the BI and Analytics products are being transformed from caterpillars into butterflies and are currently in the ‘pupae’ stage where there is a lot going on that you can’t see!
Massive time savings by automating data extraction
A tangible example was given of the procedure currently required to extract information from an Agilisys Web Chat log which in the past involved a person being sat at a machine and manually downloading thirteen individual CSV and PDF files, amounting to approximately thirty minutes a day or ten hours per month.
Using web scraping techniques this process is now fully automated and we have successfully extracted web chat data from a website, structured the data and loaded it into our data warehouse. A month’s worth of data can now be analysed in eight minutes allowing the user the extra time to spend on assuring quality and work that requires human input. Rather than you working for the data, the data can work for you!
Automation of data analysis
Now that we have web chat data stored in a structured way, we can analyse the data to gain better insights. Currently the manually generated reports all result in a vast and complex monthly aggregated spreadsheet requiring manual manipulation.
Example of Current Contact Centre Report
Once we have data from our telephony system and our customer relationship management system also loaded into our data warehouse we will be able to automatically analyse all of our customer contact data in one place.
Generation of more visual reports
We plan to develop a set of products in relation to the Contact Centre that are visual. The human brain processes images sixty thousand times quicker than it processes text, so we intend to use that skill to improve the way we process information in this organization.
Example of more visual Contact Centre Report
The products we are developing will be dynamic so users can slice and dice the information any way they want to. They will be easy to use, live (updated every single night) and fully automated. It will be easy to visualize trends and will also give users the tools to drill down to all the detail they need.
This will allow us to monitor channel shift in relation to current contact channels but also identify future channel shift opportunities. These products will be completely transferable to other Services.
Information Advice and Guidance
Alby Atkinson, Product Owner for IAG, presented the latest on the two new products ready to go live next week: the new Healthy Stockport website and a beta version of stockport.gov.uk.
Since the last Showcase additional functionality has been developed and added to both the Healthy Stockport and the new beta Stockport website and we’ve also made a few changes to the Healthy Stockport website following feedback from the Services.
With regards to the beta version of our main website, we will still have by default www.stockport.gov.uk but we will run the beta site in parallel starting with eight areas of highly used content:
- Council Tax
- Benefits
- Waste and recycling
- Libraries
- School admissions
- Stockport Family – a brand new approach for content spread across different areas of the existing site
- Births, Deaths and Marriages
- Jobs
There will be clear links from the pages on the current site to encourage users to try the beta site where there are new versions of those pages and clear signposts back to the current site from the beta site.
The idea behind this is to test the new design, the way we present the content, and the changes we have made to the user journeys of our IAG and Digital Transactions Service in order to build the rest of the website. We want feedback from our end-users, the citizens, but we continue to work with the Services to get their feedback on content on the current site and to show them how it will look on the new site.
Navigation on the new website
For the preliminary areas outlined above most content/articles have now been prepared so the task of the User Experience Design team over the past few weeks has primarily focused on navigation – how do people get to the content they are looking for.
Navigation starts with the Home Page, and there are a number of different routes by which users may reach the information they are looking for. Following detailed mapping of these routes we have determined that the key navigational elements of the new site will be:
- Enlarged Search box at top of screen
- Quick links to the six most common areas people search (based on actual page stats of current website)
- Topic areas of website (again based on current popularity)
- Announcement/news space – rich imagery possibilities
- Navigation to news and events (currently links to existing website)
- Login to My Account (New Data Transactional Services product)
- A to Z Search
The quick links can be changed very quickly based on seasonal priorities, changing demand and unexpected events. For example during the recent Floods we could have brought a relevant link to the top. Potentially we could automate this in the future, though we would have to weigh up whether the navigation links would change position too quickly and detract from the user experience.
The beta website will evolve
The IAG team emphasized that the beta website will keep changing week by week and the importance of staff looking at it, discussing it with colleagues, giving us feedback and suggestions and looking at it again. And again!
Communications
We have a full schedule of Communications this summer focusing on the new products that are emerging from the programme. We will be communicating both with our own workforce and with the wider public, to promote the new products and encourage the feedback that is so essential for our iterative product development.
The Better Off website was launched last week and we have issued Press Releases, social media posts, links from the Council website and email bulletins to subscribers of the Council News as well as a raft of training and communications to staff.
This last week the Council’s own newspaper ‘The Stockport Review’ has been distributed containing articles on the new beta site and the new site for Healthy Stockport. The internal staff newsletter ‘Stockport Connect’ has also been used to promote the new products to staff, in addition to the intranet and Yammer.
There will be a full launch of the Healthy Stockport site next week with Press releases, social media and promotion via the main website and public health partners.
The full launch of the new stockport.gov.uk website will take place later in the year.