Task management tool for neighbourhood services staff

The project is awarded £286,000 of funding through Round 5 of the Local Digital Fund to conduct a beta phase.

The team held a dedicated project introduction session with their Local Digital Collaboration Manager, Tom, to discuss agile ways of delivery. They agreed on an approach to working in the open, and talked about the value in ensuring the user story is always attached to feature development.

Tom has arranged to visit the team in person to see the MVP tool in use, particularly how it will cope with the challenges of locating-specific sites in a rural/urban setting.

One example of this is that there are lots of challenges with UPRN’s as a way of directing staff to an incident. The Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) is the unique identifier for every addressable location in Great Britain. An addressable location may be any kind of building, or it may be an object that might not have a ‘normal’ address — such as a bus shelter or an electricity substation for example. Accuracy is not always guaranteed by this system and often residents are unable to access this data to share with the local authority.

In a recent project meeting, the team looked at early designs for the MVP using the Microsoft Power App tool, Canvas.

They ran through the ease of designing components that can be rapidly iterated into a prototype interface design, based on wireframes created in MS Word.

The three local authorities involved in this project (Colchester Borough Council, Tendring District Council, Maldon District Council) all use the Microsoft Enterprise system. This could make design, development, testing and iteration a quick and effective process, enabling the rapid development of tools to meet their user needs.

The team is now eight weeks away from delivering the first release of the Task Smart App. They are working hard on finishing off the location and mapping parts of the app and are excited to get them in front of users at the end of the month for the next round of user testing.

They have also worked with the partner consultants at Foundation SP to package the app using environment variables, so that organisations using the app will find it simple to set up the back-end in their own environments. This promises to make something complex and time-consuming much quicker and simpler.

They’re also making good progress on supporting the use of the app in places with no network connectivity. Their users will be using the app out in the field on their mobile devices and, as they cover a large geographical area, there will be times where they do not have signal.

The three local authorities working on this project — Colchester, Malden and Tendring — have designed and implemented a virtual centre of excellence, where all the developers across the authorities take part in specific training on MS products. This is proving effective in mitigating the effects of stretched resourcing, which is a common problem amongst local authority software development teams.

Using the MS suite for low code in development has many advantages but also some constrictions. The team are committed to documenting and sharing them at their regular Show and Tells. Watch the project’s latest Show and Tell video.

The new features of Task Smart app will be deployed over the summer.

The team is working through one of the most challenging aspects of the project: overcoming issues raised by trying to balance the best possible features within the app, while keeping to an affordable licensing model.

It’s a critical time and everyone has an eye on the upcoming delivery date, considering what they can deliver for version one and what they can improve for version two after launch.

The team is keen to keep pushing the TaskSmart model to get the best possible experience for app users. They are still working on task filtering by keeping a flexible model and offering multiple choices to users to help users to get to the tasks they need quickly and without working through multiple app screens.

As a fitting end to Local Digital Declaration Month, the project team proudly launched the Task Smart App.

Built on Microsoft’s Power BI platform, this application meets the needs of the user by delivering an intuitive user journey that ensures quality reporting and monitoring of problems across the Street Cleaning service team.

After the project was funded £350,000 as part of the Local Digital Fund Round 5 in 2021, the application is now live with Tendring and Malden as delivery partners.

The Task Smart App has now been rolled out to most of the Neighbourhood Teams. Positive feedback has been received from services, with just a few issues identified around devices and user needs. The next step is to test ‘Response to Inspection of Trees and Dangerous Trees’ as these are time bound tasks.

Following the user acceptance testing (UAT), the aim is to roll-out the app to the Greening Team and also to complete internal testing. Once happy with the functionality, the Task Smart app will be released to pilot users. The team is aiming to start the pilot on 10 October.

In September, Local Digital and Colchester Borough Council published a video case study on the Task Smart app. In the video, you can hear from users and developers at Colchester’s recycling centre following the app’s launch to neighbourhood teams.

There are also ongoing discussions to understand how Microsoft can amplify this Canvas App across their platform. The majority of local authorities use Microsoft and, if they have the right E3 licence, should be able to use this tool at no extra cost.