View corresponding Expression of Interest

Digitisation of Bereavement Services

Full Application: Not funded at this stage

Applicant details

Council name: Bath and North East Somerset Council

Stage: Discovery

Partners involved: Bristol City Council

Summary of the proposal

The processes within B&NES Bereavement Services for burials, cremations and memorialisations are inefficient and outdated meaning the service is unable to maximise income generating opportunities. A discovery project would uncover ways to build capacity and create efficiencies to both improve the customer experience and support the growth of the service.

Both national statutory forms and local memorial / interment forms are paper based. Data is rekeyed into two separate legacy databases. No data is shared between the two databases, nor beyond e.g. with Funeral Directors who mediate part of the process. Processes are inefficient and lack resilience. There are also legal constraints which need to fully understood. This includes investigating how current laws are applied and how changes could be applied to support a national digital solution for registering deaths, burials, cremations & memorialisations.

Many customers who are burying or cremating loved ones do not live locally. We would like to understand how these customers would prefer to interact with the service e.g. self-serve online for at least some of the process. However, the current forms and website will not support self-serve in current format. There has never been formal customer research in this area. If carried out, this would inform how the future service should be delivered from the customer point of view.

There is no interaction or relationship with the B&NES Registrars service and we would like to investigate what the opportunities might be for sharing customer data and information to support business growth in Bereavement Services.

Approach

This project will be led by B&NES but will be resourced by a combination of internal B&NES staff and external partners procured through the Local Digital Fund. Bristol will also have input but B&NES will be responsible for establishing the multidisciplinary team to carry out the Discovery research.

We will organise work into Agile sprints and establish regular standups, show and tells, planning meetings and retrospectives.

Through an initial Inception Workshop with key stakeholders from B&NES & Bristol Registrars and Bereavement Services we will identify links and common opportunities and fully establish what a successful outcome would be for the service. This will also help to prioritise service goals and problems.

Key tasks and dates will include:

Deadline	Event / activity	Milestone
18 December 2018	Project kick off meeting	Project started
11 January 2019	Inception workshop with partners	Consensus on common opportunities, problems and prioritisation
21 January 2019	Core team established, people allocated to the project	Multidisciplinary team ready
21 Jan 2019	Data collection and analysis
23 Jan	Build user personas Map Current user experience	Users for research identified
22 February 2019	Plan research Form hypotheses for user research 1 Carry out user research to test hypotheses	User research 1 complete
20 February 2019	Form initial process improvements Plan research 2	Initial processes produced
01 Mar 2019	Product options analysis Service Blueprint first draft Key benefits identified Co-design workshop	Product options outlined
06 Mar 2019	Co-design workshop
08 March 2019	Plan research Form hypotheses for user research 2 Carry out user research to test hypotheses	User research 2 complete
16 March 2019	Iterate processes	Process produced
22 March 2019	Processes tested	Process finalised
29 March 2019	Write up and share the project findings: Business case User research report Recommendation report	Discovery outputs produced and shared

Benefits to local government

Other in-house Cems and Crems teams are struggling with similar paper based processes and inefficiencies which prevent a focus on customer needs. They also restrict the ability to increase income and reduce costs.

Allowing a means for customers & Funeral Director to self serve will reduce the need to staff to be involved in data capture and some processes altogether, freeing them up to support those customers who cannot use the internet or who are elderly.

There will be a Reduction in print and post costs

Reduce the cost of lost / missing paperwork and rework from difficult complex forms being incorrectly completed by customers and funeral directors

Reduce duplication and re-keying of data into disparate databases

Facilitate increased sales opportunities and released capacity to focus on valuable work e.g. improving and monitoring site safety.

A redesigned solution could be offered wherever local councils are still delivering this service or considering options when re-negotiating contracts with delivery partners.

If the project were to move to Alpha stage, any solutions would be created using open standards to enable full sharing. Contribution to a standard set of processes and patterns for the service.

Relevance to others

We have been in discussions with Northumberland to investigate the potential opportunity to join up and to cover both the initial death registration process (their project will cover Registrars including births and marriages) and the subsequent bereavement services process. Although approached separately we will continue to share outputs and collaborate on the connections and synergies between Registrars and Bereavement Services. Particularly where there is an evident interface and potential to improve data sharing.

We will include Bristol and Northumberland in show and tell meetings and outputs (using conferencing where appropriate) and seek input and feedback from all relevant stakeholders.

We will share outputs using suitable templates and easy to access documentation (e.g. via googledocs and sheets). We’ll post updates to Slack and provide links to relevant shareable data and user research outputs.

We will gather financial and qualitative information from project partners and other organisations to explore potential savings and benefits across other authorities. In addition, we will look at data on authorities currently delivering services through a partner and implications for investigating an in-house delivered service for those contracts under review.

Expected impacts

We would expect this Discovery project to provide the following:

Identify the real issues with the current customer experience, particularly online with journey mapping and user research outputs
Identification of a new and improved customer experience and what the business benefits of this are
Identify staff time savings
Identify reductions in postage, printing and other costs
An understanding the constraints and implications of change to customer experience and processes
Detailed understanding of the implementation of the desired outcomes at Alpha stage

We will produce:

Output	Action
Business case	Cost (time and money) likely to be saved through automating processes and providing online forms Cost (time and money) likely to be saved through improved automation and digitisation of paper based processes Cost (time and money) and likely causes of, delayed invoice approval and payment to contractors. Cost / benefit analysis of potential changes to existing LOB systems and how laws are applied
User research report	We will publish all outputs in a suitable summary format for sharing. Clear identification of issues experienced by range of customers Willingness / ability of users to move to online communications, any likely blockers to this.
A summary report & recommendations	‘To Be’ user journey maps Solution and technology options Data sharing opportunities Suggested approach to progressing to Alpha

User research and engagement

The users are the recently bereaved – who have buried, cremated or memorialised a loved one

We will carry out research using a variety of methods including:
Create user personas, empathy maps
Face to face interviews
Carry out surveys/questionnaires
Analytics analysis
Observation
Analysis of existing feedback
Review and gather feedback on current website offers

Main objectives will be to:

Understand the needs of users of the service
Understand how external factors (e.g. policy) impact the service
Understand the scope of the problem
Test initial findings and begin to consider potential solutions
Understand internal/external constraints
Identify the skills required to explore and develop the solution further
Help communicate the vision for the service

Additional support

Advice and assistance from MHCLG when required – e.g. how best to share and get feedback on outputs.

Continued access to platforms e.g. Notify

History of funding

None

Feedback

Assessor comments:

This application showed high regard for the Declaration principle of prioritising user needs. It also shows a good grasp of the other principles.

The application does not reference explicit costs savings, however, it provides a breakdown of where in the current process the pain points are and savings can be made. In addition, it details a plan for collecting information from project partners and other authorities to explore the potential for potential savings and benefits.

There are explicit mentions to how the experience is going to be assessed and improved for both service users and operators, with explicit mentions to user research and improving service delivery on a local and potentially national level.

Agile terminology is used throughout the application, with mentions of having a multidisciplinary team in place for project delivery and following agile ceremonies. References to partnering with other organisations and using Slack to work in the open demonstrate the applicant’s willingness to work out loud and collaborate further.

Listed outputs are well detailed with explanations for what is expected to be included in each of them. Additionally, the outputs map well onto the key dates and milestones plan. It demonstrates a good understanding of how the outputs need to be produced and effort required for each of them.

There are references to this project investigating how the national digital solution could be introduced to replace the current paper-based offer. This suggests potential benefits to all councils offering bereavement services.

The project delivery is very focussed with realistic timelines, but there is some detail missing on how they will procure the required skills in time.