Back Office Planning System (Beta)

‘User-centred back office planning system to unlock transformation’ discovery receives £100,000 from the Local Digital Fund.

‘User-centred back office planning system to unlock transformation’ discovery delivers project outputs which are published on the Local Digital website.

MHCLG awards £100,000 for alpha exploring a user-centred back office planning system from the Local Digital Fund.

Project team delivers agreed outputs from user-centred back office planning system alpha, published openly on the Local Digital website.

Project is selected to be funded as part of Local Digital Fund.

Project had the first show and tell and published Sprint note 1 where they talked about how they:

• had project kick-off and defined the scope
• iterated on the prototypes that were developed in alpha
• created the infrastructure on AWS and shipped the first bit of working code

Project had the second show and tell and published Sprint note 2 where they talked about how they:

• iterated on our prototype
• continued testing with people
• looked more closely at the relevance of information at different stages

Project had the third show and tell and published Sprint note 3 where they talked about how they:

• delivered the first pass of functionality for officers to assess applications and make recommendations, and for managers to make determinations
• tested v4 of the Certificate of Lawfulness prototype with officers and managers at four councils

Project had the fourth show and tell and published Sprint note 4 where they talked about how they:

• mapped the planning application data we would receive from RIPA
• tested the latest version of the Permitted Development prototype
• started prototyping how document management might work and others

Project had the fifth show and tell and published Sprint note 5 where they talked about how they:

• created a basic API and tested it with dummy data
• started laying the foundations for document management functionality
• discussed unique IDs and application numbers
• conducted user testing around how managers ask for corrections and officers upload documents and other tasks

Project had the sixth show and tell and the seventh show and tell and published a sprint note for both sprints where they talked about how they:

• updated the landing page
• built document management functionality.
• started work on full householder applications
• had BOPS penetration tested by the security partner and other tasks

Project had the eighth show and tell where they talked about how they:

• continued testing new permitted development and householder application features
• built a journey that allows managers to send the application back to the officers
• explored Planning Portal’s data schema and others

Project had the ninth and final show and tell where they talked about how they:

• created 3 prototypes for full householder based on last sprint’s feedback
• added features that allow managers to send comments to officers, created a document upload function and others

• The project received further grant via Continuous Funding Model
• Project had a kick off with local authority partners, facilitated by the delivery partner Unboxed.

The project had their first show and tell where the spoke about their alignment workshop, supporting multiple councils and working on an API to receive data from the RIPA project and others.. Watch a recoding on YouTube.

They’ve also been working on final edits to the BOPS system, such as adding more ‘status’ options to reflect where in the process the application is, a way for officers to indicate if received documents are valid and others. You can find more information on the project’s public Trello board! 

The project worked though the festive period on building new features to the system. They also progressed with the Monitoring and Evaluation framework. The team also did their first show and tell of the year, where they did  a demo of the BOPS system receiving application data from RIPA for the very first time! See a recording here.

The project had a workshop with project partners on how to work as a blended team. The team is also focussing on improving their system, they did User Acceptance Testing, started looking at validation letters and many more.

This project has also been preparing for private beta testing, with activities including collating data from ‘real’ historical applications (refused, granted), resilience, bug fixes and integration with Buckinghamshire’s dashboard. They have also been working on their continuous funding proposal. The project had another show and tell where they gave updates about what happened in the last sprint. 

The project receives £325,000 of follow-on funding from the Local Digital Fund to continue their work. During the next phase, the project aims to:

• speed up preparation of the BOPS platform
• launch a beta platform for processing lawful development certificate applications
• implement the programme approach for BOPS
• implement the deeper partnership working for BOPS
• develop BoPs for householder applications to public beta
• provide clear, transparent, informative online information on BOPS

The project also made progress towards making BOPS ready for private beta. The team did some user testing and worked on implementing new application page design, enabling the redaction of confidential information from public publishing, looking at audit logs, and so much more! They spoke about this during their 4th show and tell.

The project had a 5th show and tell where they spoke about their work to accept and process full householder applications. This included work on the back-end, making improvements to content, further user testing and consultations. The project has also started looking at Information Governance activities such as, Data Protection Impact Assessment.

The project has been focussing on some more minor system improvements. This sprint the BOPS project held their sixth show and tell, where they spoke about their work to accept and process full householder applications. 

In addition, the project worked on improving the permitted development application that submits information from RIPA to BOPS. The project has also started looking at Information Governance activities such as Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA).

BOPS project continued with a number of activities, such as:

• developing  the system to allow planners/managers to download PDF decision notice
• allowing officers to add mail applications to the BOPS system directly
• setting up a project board that will enable collaborative decision making

The project held a 7th show and tell (available on YouTube). At the show and tell the project covered:

• requesting to go live with GOV.UK Notify
• making to the ‘edit application’ feature
• staging environments for all of their partners and many more!

The project has also been working on a number of non-development items that include DPA, contracts for beta, setting up a project board for Southwark and partners and doing more user testing.

RIPA and BOPS projects presented at the Planning Officer Society meeting where they spoke about project vision and gathered officer feedback.

The project had an alignment meeting with the digital place based engagement project to discuss how the full consultation process can work and which project can tackle which consultation parts. The project had a householder MVP meeting with their supplier and will look to involve partners in this in the near future. The project is now starting a new phase where they focus on full householder applications. For this, they held a number of workshops with partner councils to look at full householder MVP.

RIPA and BOPS projects also had a meeting to discuss a joint approach to notifications to be sent from BOPS and RIPA systems to ensure a seamless user experience.

BOPS also delivered a presentation at ‘Urban Design London’ on the future of planning data.

The project held their 1st sprint show and tell of the new beta stage where they spoke about progress with the following activities on Lawful Development Certificates (LDCs):

• add location plan to decision notice
• confirming legal requirements for LDC’s decision notice
• building a development strategy
• building Validation: requests for change
• development – updating a description of work 
• design – requesting a new document / requesting a replacement document

The project also held additional workshops with project partner councils to agree an MVP scope for full householder applications.

The project hosted a 2nd Show & Tell for their 3rd beta stage. In the show and tell they covered:

• validations: a tool built to request applicant for changes to the application
• considerations research
• validation user guide and others

 They also progressed with more user research sessions and are putting together a BOPS Validation Guide.

In an important first step towards digital planning reform, the RIPA and BOPS projects launched a private beta of their planning products.

During this next phase, the projects are trialling their beta products to process lawful development certificate (LDC) applications. The participating councils are inviting residents that need a LDC to use the new service, so that the teams can collect user feedback as they continue to improve the products to process other types of planning application.

Read more about this exciting move towards a 21st Century digital planning system in this blog post on DLUHC Digital.

The RIPA and BOPS tools began accepting live applications for Lawful Development Certificates.

The teams fixed a red-line ‘draw site boundary’ issue that had been identified in the testing, and have integrated with OS maps which reduces rework. It also enables anyone to use and contribute to the shared code.

The teams continued to have conversations with more councils interested in adopting the products.

The two project teams spent 11 hours in workshops run by MHCLG, as they worked through high level project alignment. During one workshop, they covered:

• a review of the project to date
• functions and roles within an improved delivery structure
• the vision for the project, which will inform the phase of work from September/October onwards

You can watch a recording of the project’s eighth show and tell on the Unboxed website.

The BOPS team created a new open source ‘draw site boundary tool’. The basic tool was originally developed by Open Systems Lab, the delivery partner for RIPA. They packaged this up and shared the code on Github so that the BOPS team (and delivery partner Unboxed) could develop a new piece of BOPS functionality to simplify the communications between planning officers and applicants.

This means that applicants and planners can propose a redrawn site boundary, rather than a planning application being returned as invalid and requiring a completely new submission. This development work marks a recent high-point in cross-product collaboration.

The RIPA and BOPS team held three Showcase events this month. During the second event they presented their first end to end demo of a householder LDC application. 

The showcases resulted in 17 councils signing up to be in the next cohort to develop and implement the tool.

They also held a Show and Tell on 16 September – watch the recording.

Additionally, the open source boundary drawing tool is now in use in both RIPA and BOPS, and has code contributions from the two different delivery partners.

The Digital Planning team at DLUHC launched the RIPA/BOPS EOI to find 5 new councils who wish to join the project team to design and implement new development management software products.