2022 was a big year for online repairs. It started with ongoing work to the MVP – refining pages and completing tech spikes which looked at integration with UH and scheduling repairs by area. My boss had also recently reached out to the project team to understand what was required to get involved. I can’t say I was expecting to be writing the updates by the end of the year!
Fast forward 12 months and the progress has been immense. 2 councils have the service live with another 2 working towards going live. Funding was secured for an additional beta phase with most targets delivered by the end of 2022 and thoughts turning towards governance and a final funding bid with DLUHC.
The beta phase 2 targets were:
- Continued development of the product including amend appointment, cancel appointment, raise communal area repairs requests, raise leaseholder repairs requests.
- Install and replicate the product for use at a partner council
- Continue user testing with a wide range of personas
- Developing adoption playbook
Additionally we have investigated integration options with NEC and Capita housing management systems and developed the requirements for create job functionality which will support improvements to the back office process automation and reduction in manual data entry duplication. The create job functionality work will be completed for Newark and Sherwood in January, enabling them to move to go live with the service.
We have also been working hard to look at developing how we can create a governing group to lead the future direction of the product and ongoing support options.
Demo’s
Searching through the show and shares for demo’s can be time consuming so I have recorded 5 short demo’s to cover the different functionality elements of the current service. At some point soon we will also expand the website so they have a permanent home for easy reference but for the moment you can access them here:
Tenant raise a repair
Leaseholder raise a repair:
Communal area – raise a repair:
Amend an appointment:
Cancel an appointment:
What’s next?
For the moment it may look like we are taking a breather once Newark and Sherwood go live but there will be plenty going on behind the scenes. During the first 3 months of the year we will be working hard on reviewing latest user research to inform the next priorities for product development and agreeing what the priorities are for our last funding bid to DLUCH.
Get involved
We are not an exclusive club with secretive handshakes so if you are involved in delivering social housing repairs services and are interested in getting involved, whether to potentially implement the service or get involved with shaping the future direction, please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you. You can get in contact with me via the contact us page or emailing @kristinnewark .
Repairs Online 