London Borough of Hackney

Pipeline was first developed in 2014 by LocalGov Digital Makers through a collaboration of councils as part of LocalGov Digital. The product was developed on a basic wiki platform using SQLite as a database and launched as a prototype. Initial use was promising with over 100 council’s signing up in the first 3 months through nothing more than a couple of articles and social media promotion, strong evidence that there is a desire for a tool to promote collaboration (see blog post from Phil Rumens, West Berkshire). The use of Pipeline declined and with no funding or resource to keep developing/pushing the product its use in 2018 has been minimal.

Hackney identified a local need for such a tool and in July 2018 funded a further iteration of Pipeline and will be adopting it as the Council’s platform to share details and status updates of projects through all phases (Concept, Discovery, Alpha, Beta, Live). Theo Blackwell recently (4th October 2018) shared details of Pipeline across all London CIO’s. Feedback is encouraging with Kingston, Sutton, Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Islington, Haringey and Camden all committing to using the new iteration of Pipeline.

LocalGovDigital and the GLA have also agreed to partner this bid. 

Discovery evidence

The initial discovery in 2014 involved 25 councils participating in a workshop to identify needs and the functionality required from Pipeline to meet those needs, this was captured in a Trello Board.

Hackney’s iteration in 2018 ran a small discovery piece that identified the following high level user needs:

• As a delivery manager I need to report once on the status of my project so that it’s easy to update stakeholders
• As a portfolio manager I need to see an overview of all my projects so that I can communicate our projects
• As a manager I want to see other authorities’ pipelines so that I can identify opportunities for collaboration

The recent discovery generated a number of user stories, captured in this Trello Board.

This EOI is to fund the delivery of user stories from the backlog and recreate Pipeline on a modern scalable platform. This would deliver a product that meets MVP and can be published as BETA.

There is further detail re Hackney’s latest work in the slides presented at LocalGov Camp this year and my recent blog post.