Firstly we would like to wish a happy new year to everyone who has been following this project. I know its been a while since we have given an update with the Christmas holidays, so its great to be able to share some of our recent work with you again.
We have hit the ground running after our festive break and we have been working hard on these objectives
- New MVP pages including
- Repair request confirmation (confirmation with repair number)
- Confirmation notification sent to resident (SMS or Email)
- Tech spike – integration with UH
- Tech spike – Scheduled repairs by area
- DLUHC Monitoring & Evaluation
- We have defined how the service will be measured
- Able to save a record of a repair and report on that data
- Fixed some bugs 🐛
New MVP Pages
The full linear journey is now complete for our first repair classification of kitchen cupboard issue. This now means the customer receives a repair number, the repair is recorded in our online system and a notification is sent.
We are utilising GovNotify for the system notifications, not only for a receipt to the customer, but also to inform our customer services team of the repair so they can check details and log the repair in Universal. We have found the setup and integration to GovNotify to be a straight forward process and would encourage others to use this service where possible, as it supports the idea of reusable components as detailed in the digital declaration.
Tech Spikes
The development team have spent time understanding the best way for us to operate the service with Lincolns technical configuration. As integration options are limited to our housing management system we have decided to leave this as a manual process for MVP, the other options were not viable or carried too much risk. It is worth highlighting that this manual step is still much less work than it would normally take to log a repair.
Lincoln have also introduced a pilot for scheduled repairs, meaning non urgent repairs are completed in pre-defined slots for different zones of the city in an ambition to reduce travel and material costs. With a potential wait time of up to 80+ days this has meant configuration changes have been required to the API setup and configuration of DRS to make this possible, while retaining reuse and replication of the product to authorities that do not operate in this way.
Monitoring our product
Following discussion with the partners and DLUHC we have agreed on three simple measures for golive to monitor takeup:
- Number of repairs logged through the product
- Number of telephone calls into our housing repairs queue
- Time of day the repair is logged online
We will add further measures in the future but wanted to keep things simple at this stage while the product is still an MVP.
Show and Share
Why not check out our show and share session from the 18 January 2022
Sharing our Journey
Wherever possible we are happy to share and talk about our journey so it was great to be featured on the Crown Commercial Services website, hopefully expanding the reach of our project. You can read the story here.
Although this was shared in our last update I just wanted to share again that anyone wanting to share this project I would recommend sharing this brief update with them
Repairs Online 