Greenwich Community Directory

The project is awarded £350,000 of funding through Round 5 of the Local Digital Fund to conduct a beta phase.

The team kicks off their work with delivery partner, TPX, which will initially focus on prototyping the user journey of Adults and Older People.

Greenwich have begun to add greater detail to their delivery plan, including establishing regular sprints for both their in-house team and TPX. Their focus is improving the user experience of their Community Directory and the reusability of TPX’s Scout and Outpost products, making it easier for more councils to adopt and customise these.

The team have also created a microsite to share their previous and upcoming shows and tells with others in the community.

The Royal Borough of Greenwich are looking for local authorities who want to join forces and build a reusable community directory product that better meets the needs of residents, service providers and staff.

Find out more in their latest blog post.

The project team is now prototyping the end-to-end journey for the adults section of the Community Directory. In the coming weeks, the team will also be working closely with an interaction designer to develop proof of concepts which will determine the feasibility of the project and the next steps to take.

The project team has been re-visiting prototypes around ‘support for adults’ based on staff feedback and workshops completed internally. The aim is to finalise their prototype to test with residents in the coming weeks. The prototypes on ‘support for adults’ will first be shared at an event with Primary Care staff at the end of this week.

Another highlight for the team recently was that they were able to effectively refine their objectives for the current phase of work. The team is going to use their clear vision and objectives to review their delivery plan and implement timescales for the rest of this phase.

Conversations are continuing with a range of councils to form partnerships and many are interested in using Greenwich’s solution for their own community directories.

The team have been working to finish the technical work on their proof of concept which will connect the Outpost backend structures with the LocalGov Drupal frontend for the directory. The team will deliver a Show and Tell later in November to share what they’ve been working on — keep an eye out for a date for this very soon!

The team have also continued positive conversations with other local authorities about adopting the Outpost tool as part of their community directories

The team are continuing their work with TPXimpact, and have recently created a proof of concept to demonstrate how Outpost could be integrated with LocalGov Drupal, which the team will be using for their front-end interface. You can find out more by watching their latest Show and Tell.

The Greenwich project team delivered a Show and Tell where they received good feedback for their service provider engagement plan. They have agreed on their design direction and made progress on their first components. They used Emulsify with Storybook to build a Drupal component. They plan to re-run an online testing workshop, focusing on click-testing and site usability.

The Greenwich project team have confirmed some of the component designs — such as the footer, which has been built using LocalGov Drupal. They are now starting to think about the Children & Families and Local Offer sections.

The team also held an Outpost community meet-up, which was attended by colleagues from 7 public sector organisations. The group talked about the upcoming developments to Scout and Outpost and how they will prioritise that in the future, as well as how to work more openly, and how to solve the problem of keeping information on directories up to date.

During the final two weeks of May, the project team has accomplished several key milestones. They finalised the user journey for signup and login, adopting a simplistic approach and utilising the native functionality within Outpost.

Additionally, they have actioned scoping activities to define the design and expected behaviours of the search component. The team has also organised a workshop to establish their strategy for quality testing, particularly focusing on automated testing.

During July, the project held workshops with senior colleagues in Adult and Children Social Care teams to gain feedback on user experience (UX) and accent colour. The clear preference was corporate red, and they’ll use layouts and imagery to differentiate from the main council website. They have also focussed on simplifying the behaviour of various website components to speed up delivery.

The team recently held a well-attended meet up for the Outpost/Scout user community to address the challenge of keeping listings up-to-date. The group formed a number of ideas which will be refined in the coming weeks.

Alongside the refinement, the team will focus on building small components to populate page templates and begin content transformation for service descriptions.

The project team is making progress in transforming the service listings content, having completed over 160 out of 400 listings.

Progress is being made with the design system components and all content types have been set up in LocalGov Drupal, ready to be populated with components.

The team is giving significant attention to governance, emphasising stakeholder engagement, and preparations for the upcoming go-live phase.

A recent Show and Tell session took place, and you can access a playlist of the session on YouTube:

The Greenwich project team have now completed several key tasks including the manual transformation of over 400 service listings to meet modern content standards. However, breaking some of these listings into multiple entries isn’t a sustainable solution, especially for Children’s/Local Offer content, so a solution is being explored.

While refactoring the Outpost Docker image, a new bug was discovered, but the project team is currently working on a fix.

In the final two weeks of September, the project team has undergone changes with a new Delivery Manager and a push to improve the Design System process. They held their regular Show and Tell session, offering updates on data migration and showcasing progress on the Directory for the MVP. This content will soon be available on their YouTube playlist.

Process changes were agreed for Design System contributions, emphasising increased collaboration between designers, front-end developers, and back-end developers. Joint planning sessions with the website team are also upcoming to align priorities.

The data migration task has been finalised, with around 332 listings revised, excluding those not meeting agreed standards or outdated ones. Despite a brief pause to resolve a bug in the Outpost container, the team plans to resume when Chris returns next week. In the meantime, they are introducing a rich text editor to Outpost for basic formatting in service descriptions.

The team continues their work to ensure accurate data display in LocalGov Drupal for all service listings on the directory. In the upcoming sprint, their focus remains on building front-end components, particularly completing the Basic Information page, and progressing non-product tasks to advance the MVP.

Over the last 2 weeks, the project team has achieved the following:

• Continuing the build of the first version of the new directory — Hannah has addressed a few minor bugs in the header and progressed with the grid template for page layout. Niall has been actively working on the footer whilst Finn successfully completed the upgrade of the website to Drupal 10, ensuring long-term support.
• Writing new content — Alysia’s been writing new signposting guide content about mental and physical health, in collaboration with colleagues in Public Health. This content will be on the new directory while the rest will go on the main council website.
• Collaborating with other local authorities — Alex organised the fifth Scout and Outpost community meet-up, with other local authorities who are using the same product. The event included demonstrations of new features and discussions about future product support.
• Working on our team processes — The team established a new ‘definition of done’ for development work to ensure a shared understanding of task completion and better task management.
  They emphasised the importance of following sprint goals to maintain focus.

In the next sprint, the team plans to:

• continue developing front-end components
• advance their Drupal work, particularly focusing on the ‘all listings’ content type
• work on finalising technical tasks for correctly hosting Outpost on their AWS platform