Investigating a digital support hub for carers

The project is awarded £99,300 in funding through Round 6 of the Local Digital Fund to begin a discovery phase.

The project team recently attended Local Digital’s R6 welcome event to network with other boroughs and develop their project roadmap and communication plan. They are now drafting their Terms of Reference and confirming roles and responsibilities within the team.

The project reference group recently met to review the Terms of Reference document, focusing on project governance and social and emotional learning (SEL) partner roles.

Some team members attended the Local Digital webinar on conducting a discovery project, which provided valuable insights. Hiren Gandhi (Project Manager) has met with Southwark Council’s procurement team to understand their IT/Digital procurement process.

In the upcoming sprint, the team will hold a project reference group meeting to agree on the high-level project plan, milestones and Terms of Reference. Hiren will review procurement options and register on suitable procurement frameworks.

Over the next two weeks, the London Borough of Southwark team will focus on defining the project requirements in close collaboration with the project steering group. They will also work on completing the first draft of the DOS Outcomes Requirements template. The team is beginning to target suppliers to support the project delivery. This includes plans to reach out to potential suppliers from the provided CCS list for initial market scoping discussions.

The South East London (SEL) team has recently defined the project requirements and completed the Digital Outcomes and Specialists (DOS) Outcomes Requirements template. Southwark has signed up to the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) Public Procurement Gateway and has begun uploading project requirements onto Lot 1 of the Digital Outcomes 6 framework.

During the final two weeks of August, the project team successfully began the procurement process by posting the opportunity on the Crown Commercial Services eSourcing portal. Their objective is to find a Discovery partner, and they are looking forward to engaging with suppliers’ questions.

As the project advances, they are preparing to shortlist with the borough partners. In addition, they held a productive meeting with the PUBLIC team. Discussions covered project evaluation and the team’s involvement in the Local Digital Fund programme. They looked into metrics, exchanged valuable insights and feedback regarding the received support.

The South East London (SEL) team published the requirement for a partner on the Digital Outcomes framework. They received 30 supplier bids, however 29 of them lacked responses to essential Technical, Cultural, and Pricing criteria. They’ve raised this with the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), which will provide guidance on the next steps to take. This may cause a slight delay in procurement.

Next sprint, the SEL team will evaluate the supplier bids through a panel process. Their objective is to select 5 suppliers for the next stage, which involves presentations and proposals.

The project team has completed the evaluation of the first stage of the procurement process. They’ve now shortlisted suppliers for stage 2 and published the requirements, which involves a written proposal and presentation.

They are currently arranging the supplier presentations for the upcoming sprint and are expecting to receive written proposals. Additionally, they are in the process of creating evaluation metrics for the discovery.

Southwark have officially started the project with their supplier, The PSC. They outlined the project plan and outputs in their kick off meeting. During Sprint 0, the focus was on establishing effective project rhythms, refining stakeholder collaboration, and preparing for user research with unpaid carers in Southeast London.

January brings a busy period of unpaid carer research, with the team finalising plans and interview guides. Once they receive a list of suitable carers, interviews will begin, complemented by a flash survey circulated through carer organisations.

The PSC team plans to engage with carers at the Southwark Carers Café and a virtual Carers Forum for casual conversations. January’s goal is to complete most user interviews, and to start the development of user personas and service maps.

In this phase, the project team continues to work with their Discovery Partner, (The PSC), to conduct user research at scale. Through events and carer activities across South East London (SEL), we have reached 78 carers in total, providing a strong evidence base of carers’ needs and pain points in their journey to access and use support services.

Building on this understanding, they have started designing potential solutions to meet carers’ top needs where gaps exist. Their initial designs involved a long list of ideas which they then synthesised to 8–10 solutions. To promote the co-production principle, they hosted an in-person co-design workshop with 10 carers to gather their input on solutions and their requirements in each solution.

A refinement workshop was held with all partner borough leads to prioritise and refine the solutions, as well as to sketch out potential mobilisation steps.

Approaching the end of this unpaid carer discovery project, their main plan moving forwards is to document their learnings and proposals in a final report. They will work with The PSC to present findings to relevant forums where needed and share the final report with interested parties.

They will also be hosting internal discussions to determine how to take some of the solutions forward to truly benefit unpaid carers in SEL.