Digital Housing Needs project sprint five

Sarah Piercy, Friday 12 August 2022

This sprint, I’ve been decorating in my spare time, when I’ve not been working on the Alphas, and I realised that there is a relationship between the two! I know but bear with me!

To get a wonderful end product, that meets my high standards, there’s a load of work that needs to go into the preparation. Peeling off old paint, stripping walls, filling, sanding down, all to get the base as sound as possible. There’s nothing worse than paint peeling off because you’ve not sanded and primed enough or wallpaper with lumps and bumps underneath.

To get a perfect finish, you need to put the time and effort in and understand your canvas – what are you working with and is wallpaper over rough plaster really the right thing to do?!

It’s the exact same principal for the alphas and this has been the case for the Rough Sleeper Pathway this sprint.

We have reviewed the requirements and identified which elements of the service we need to prioritise in the next phase of work. We’ve developed a brief as a baseline and are designing metrics that will measure the alpha performance.

A great deal of effort has gone into refining the roles and responsibilities of the project team, before interrogating each activity within the scope of the service design and adding specifics to each action. . All of this gives us a strong foundation to work on!

This way, we can develop the service and associated support systems that will take the Rough Sleeper Pathway into the next 5 years, knowing that we have considered all aspects of the service and aligned with the current Redbridge Plan.

Here’s what we did as part of sprint 5:

First Contact and Web Content Design

  • We had a big push for volunteers Estate Days with the Resident Engagement team, Contact with Ryedale and a bigger push on social media​
  • Completed the necessary data protection governance tasks​ to enable us to speak with residents.
  • Arranged user interviews through preliminary calls to make sure the volunteer was happy with the media being used (Teams, Zoom, WhatsApp, phone)
  • Explained what to expect in the user research interview and send out consent forms.
  • Completed the content audit and qualitative content review so we could use key findings from that and the Discovery research, to identify key user needs.
  • This review informed our thinking around the prototyping of the content. Not only around homelessness and rough sleepers, but also ‘duty to refer’, which is a key activity in supporting rough sleepers through the pathway.
  • Defined the user needs and acceptance criteria for the homelessness and rough sleepers and the duty to refer pages

​Rough Sleeper Pathway

  • Demo of rough sleeper module in HOPE​
  • Developed project brief for the Rough Sleeper pathway​
  • Detailed discussion with Interim Head of Housing Needs relating to the Rough Sleeper requirements for data, engagement and commissioning.​
  • Met with Service Improvement & Monitoring Officer to discuss KPI’s for rough sleeper pathway​
  • In depth review on web content for rough sleepers

Accessing Temporary Accommodation

  • Shared themes from the TA workshop to prototype​
  • More detailed work around TA journey​
  • ​High level RASCI (Responsible, Accountable, Supporting, Consulted and Informed) matrix for TA journey​
  • ​Met with Service Improvement & Monitoring Officer to discuss KPI’s for TA

Next sprint

Our planned activities for the next sprint are: 

First Contact and Web Content Design

  • Completion of all data protection governance tasks
  • Continue to process new sign-ups for the research
  • Arranging and conducting the research interviews with service users as part of the web content for temporary accommodation and rough sleepers pages
  • Complete the prototype for the Homelessness and Rough Sleepers web page
  • Complete the prototype for the Duty to Refer web page

Rough Sleeper Pathway

  • Rough Sleeper pathway design kick off and sprint set up
  • Plan a meeting with all partners to discuss rough sleeper web content
  • Further develop metrics for rough sleeper pathway
  • More detailed RASCI for rough sleeper pathway design

Watch the sprint five Show and Tell 

The next Digital Housing Needs Show and Tell is planned for Tuesday 16 August. We look forward to seeing you there.

Find out more 

For more information about the Digital Housing Needs programme, get in touch with us via Twitter @lbrdigitalvoice 

View all Redbridge Digital Housing Needs Show and Tell videos 

Previous sprint notes: