Wirral Borough Council

Generic Case Management Solution

Despite PC’s being a standard fixture in councils up and down the country for decades, it is surprising how many services still rely on paper processes to manage their workload in one way or another. Where PC’s are used, it is often in an outdated way. For example, the use of email is a common method of passing work items to staff or communicating with other departments. This is obviously wholly inefficient in so many ways and many managers, having recognised this, then go out to the market and purchased a niche case management software tool solely for their specialist area of work.  In doing so they have inadvertently perpetuated the problem of expensive silo’d council IT systems that don’t talk to each other and can’t provide the organisation with the joined up data it needs.

In essence, much of what departments do is very much like another department. The work of the Anti Social Behaviour Team when investigating ASB is much like the work our Environmental Enforcement team undertakes when investigating an illegal fly tip. If we were to break the processes down into their basic components its about talking information, receiving information and storing information all in a controlled manner. Tasks are scheduled and diaries maintained.

We want to investigate the development of a generic case management tool that can be deployed across multiple teams with easy configuration, thereby removing the need to run multiple expensive niche systems. Other councils could also use the software and reap the same benefits.

We have project manager, business analyst and developer resources to help progress this work but require some further support and guidance in Agile development, user story creation and possibly some technical areas such as integrations.