Income Management System (Beta)

The GOV.UK Pay as a viable alternative e-payment provider discovery project receives £52,103 from the Local Digital Fund and delivers a recommendation for further discovery into income management and e-payment systems.

MHCLG awards £80,000 for previous discovery exploring income management and e-payment systems from the Local Digital Fund and the project explores how the Barnsley-built system could be scaled for local government.

The project receives alpha funding from the Local Digital Fund. The project delivers the alpha phase and produces prototypes for an improved system, as well as recommendations for taking the project into beta phase.

The project hosts a workshop to generate ideas for beta, which form the basis for their proposal of how they wish to take the project into the beta phase. The project also attends a Continuous Funding Model interview and is awarded £350,000 from the Local Digital Fund.

The project is undergoing procurement activities with the view of kicking off their beta stage in June 2021.

The project is busy preparing the Income Management System (IMS) codebase for reuse, making sure that the code is not specific to Barnsley Council and can be easily adopted by other councils.

They also held their first meeting where they discussed fears and hopes for beta and defining the MVP including:

• What is the minimum level of value that the Future IMS must offer? What must the user be able to do?
• What contexts do we think organisations are likely to pick? Small, low risk, standalone services with one cost centre code?

Glen Conroy from Dorset Council also presented at Digital Leaders Week, where he spoke about the project and their plans for Beta. Watch a recording of the presentation on YouTube (skip to 23:50 minutes).

After holding their first meeting, the project held their second workshop to define the private beta scope. They are starting with private beta 1 — an open source solution that any council in the country will be able to pick up and reuse.

There are 2 stages to private beta 1:

• Stage 1: Make sure the open source code base ready for anyone to use (started)
• Stage 2: Get others (i.e. private beta participants) using the code

The project also updated their page on Local Digital Pipeline.

Finally, the project officially kicked off their 1st sprint, where they planned the tasks that need to get done in the first 3 sprints, and agreed a delivery plan for their open source private beta.

The IMS project team is taking an alternative approach to their private beta tests.

They have taken inspiration from other teams in government and are hosting a ‘model office’. A model office is a simulated work environment, allowing the team to test a solution in a realistic way.

The IMS model office will be shaped around four aspects:

• The functional elements of the new IMS
• Ways of working within your organisation
• Working with other organisations using the IMS
• Expectations from a supplier of a managed service

The model office approach is intended to minimise the input required to enable as many Local Authorities to take advantage of these benefits as possible.

Three sessions will be remotely hosted by the IMS team in January. Each session will last three hours in duration, enabling testing authorities to upload their own data into the model office and test all facets of the system end-to-end.

The project team plans to set up a monthly user group for Finance SMEs, in recognition that the project had been technology-focused to date and would benefit from being more user-centred in its approach.

The developers have tested an end-to-end transaction on the Dorset build and identified a number of issues to resolve.

A coordinated comms approach has been planned for both Barnsley and Dorset for when they switch over to the open-source model.

Governance for the project still needs to be agreed with a decision on the open-source licence for the code. The core code is expected to remain static, although the partner councils would like a licence that will enable them to maintain control over the core code yet remain flexible should additional development be required. An MIT licence has been suggested, which the team have agreed to discuss.

The 17 August 2022 marks a landmark occasion in the LocalGov Income Management System project as they launch the open-source version of the LocalGov IMS on the project’s Github repository.

The release of the open source version of the LocalGov IMS on the project’s GitHub repository has been covered in an article by UK Authority.

In the article, Glen Conroy (ICT Operations Manager, Dorset Council) states, “Local Gov IMS will help the smooth running of processes in any council, ensuring the flow of payments from citizens and around the council is seamless and efficient.” Read the full article.

The team’s developers focussed on Barnsley’s migration to Local Gov IMS, and dedicated time to designing a refund mechanism for GOV.UK pay transactions. The team also spent time exploring how they engage with councils that request access to the IMS codebase, and how they can learn from their experiences, to encourage adoption by others.

On Thursday 22 September, the team hosted a successful inception session to design the supported version of the Income Management System. Representatives from Barnsley, Dorset, Lewisham, Brighton and Hove, and Southwark were in attendance.

The project team has now begun to track the number of councils that have engaged with the project and/or pulled the open-source version of the code from the Github repository. This data will be used to launch engagement activities with a view to onboard these councils.

Development work has focused on the creation of a bootstrap prototype to assist in resolving accessibility issues identified in the accessibility audit. The plan is to transition the entire user interface to Bootstrap which will take an estimated three to four sprints.

The team have also resolved a bug which means they can now clearly identify when an import to the system has failed.

Work continues on standardising the address formats used across all areas.

In the last sprint, the Income Management System project team held discussions with Medway Council and provided a demo of LocalGov IMS alongside Barnsley Council colleagues, who shared real examples of how they use the system.

They have also spoken with the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) and will be attending their Public Finance Live event later this month.

In the next sprint, they plan to continue conversations with Medway and potential support providers, as well as attend the CIPFA event.

The Dorset project team have been involved in ongoing discussions with councils, technical experts and third-party organisations. These discussions have three key themes: council adopters, support and governance.

Looking forward, the team focus will be on improving the technical documentation to support conversations and the alignment of the three identified themes.

The Dorset project team’s main focus has been assessing user feedback gathered during prototype testing. They’ve also considered UX/UI recommendations following the feedback. Some of these recommendations are set to be introduced into the design, while others won’t due to business process requirements or technical limitations.

In the coming weeks, the team plans to explore and clarify the final elements of the quote-based journey to enable user stories to be written, refined, and estimated by the team.

In terms of quality assurance, the team has started accessibility and mobile device testing, which has highlighted a few issues that will be addressed in the next sprint.