The Children’s Safeguarding project is a new way of working for Hounslow, supporting our One Hounslow transformation. Martin Forshaw, the service Assistant Director, was the first ‘service owner’ to bring an outline business case to the Council’s Digital Design Authority, a new group comprising disciplines from across the council to review all key digital projects.
We have started with an 8-week discovery phase, working with FutureGov as our partners, aiming ultimately to deliver a redesigned Safeguarding service which is customer-focused, employee-friendly and digitally optimised.
A key aspect of this is the data and as a joined-up part of this project we have also brought in some specialist help to redesign and improve the management reporting for this Service.
We are working collaboratively as a blended Hounslow and FutureGov team in an agile way to understand how we can best redesign the service to improve the user experience for clients, professional partners and staff; and where we can improve efficiency and ultimately enable social workers spend more time with their client families.
Getting started
We used the first week of the project as our planning week to get the project set up for success. We had a team kickoff workshop where we were able to:
- Establish the team and define roles and responsibilities within it.
- Set up the project communications and rhythms, particularly how we are going to work together remotely throughout the project.
- Plan the project work and what we would like to achieve in each sprint.
- Started identifying user groups that we wanted to engage with going forward.
Research planning session
We kicked off the actual project work with a research planning session. Using Microsoft teams and the collaborative online tool called Miro, the team started off with an introduction to design research from FutureGov and then worked together to map out the research plan for the project.
The research plan covered the key research areas (what we want to find out), the key user groups (who do we need to speak to and how many people) as well as the methodologies we want to use (how best can we speak to these people to get the information we need).
Next steps
Having a draft research plan in place, the next phase of the project includes recruiting the users and actually conducting some of this research to learn more about the current service, uncovering the main pain points and opportunities within it.
Alongside this, we are mapping out the current end-to-end user journey within the Safeguarding service. This way will help us identify potential pain points within the service as well as opportunity areas where digital improvements can be made which will lead to more efficient ways of working.
Keep in touch If you would like to contribute or talk about any of the work, you can get in touch with Franco Degan, Barbara Munden or Priscilla Kurewa.