Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities
Laying the foundations for the local public services of the future
This project, led by Birmingham City Council, will develop a platform to enable field workers to capture data to present casework in a consistent format, and to provide the ability to assign ‘risk markers’ to people or places.
More information, including outputs and working-in-the-open activities, will be published on this page as the project progresses. In the meantime, you can read the project application (Microsoft Word Doc) to find out more.
The project, led by Birmingham City Council, is awarded £350,000 of funding through Round 5 of the Local Digital Fund to conduct a beta phase.
The whole project team from Birmingham City Council joined members of the Local Digital team to talk through their journey to beta development, and their progress in the development of a ‘Guardian App’.
The team held their Sprint 7 Show and Tell on 21 Jan 2022. The 50+ attendees were given an update of their work and progress, and were shown a demonstration of the tool.
Their aim is to allow their 7000 field workers who work ‘on the ground’ to be able to, through their mobile phones:
The Show and Tell guides you through a caretaker’s user journey. These caretakers do health and safety inspections on council properties, including tower blocks and communal areas.
Through the use of the app, workers can assign themselves a job, inspect an area and add evidence such as photographs and videos to their report. At the moment, this is all paper based. This creates additional work for field workers and makes it difficult to assign and track inspections and jobs.
The project held a Show and Tell to share their progress from Sprints 8 and 9, as they are now 85% of the way to delivering a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
During the Show and Tell, the team also talked about:
The project team presented the latest feature of the Birmingham Guardian application as part of the Local Digital Midlands Roadshow in Birmingham on Thursday 12 May.
This feature allows one of the key users — caretakers — to take an image of a task and upload it to the platform. This means that a clear record of the task assessment or task completions can be captured and allows managers to make better, faster decisions on the deployment of resources with quality data.
June will see the roll-out of the new app features, ready for testing with the 300-odd caretaker team.
This sprint the team has been conducting user testing of the Birmingham Guardian app with field workers, which will continue throughout July and into August. While out testing with neighbourhood caretakers, James Gregory (Head of Delivery at Birmingham City Council) tweeted:
“Out and about today with neighbourhood caretakers testing our new Field Worker app. These folk do such a worthy job with little thanks and it’s rewarding to see how much value our app will deliver for them. It worked well in test too. Phew! Testament to the dedicated team”
The project team has planned a final Show and Tell for the start of October which will provide an opportunity to discuss how the process of business change, upskilling and product development shaped service development.
Within the West Midlands region, Solihull, Wolverhampton and Shropshire have expressed a need for this product with implementation via Microsoft (MS). The project team is also looking to connect with MS representatives to promote and amplify the sharing of the product/service on MS Power BI/Canvas platform.
