Sprint 10 Update

In our final sprint of this first phase the Placecube development and QA teams completed the build and testing of the last waste service form, as well as 3 of the 4 planned integration connectors. Following some further investigation, and discussions with Northumberland CC, it was agreed to put the connector for Mayrise waste management system on hold for now, and investigate the potential to deliver the work directly with the council in future.

Unfortunately, due to some sickness absence, our last Show & Tell session had to be postponed for 10 days. Once we were able to reconvene Dave (our Technical Architect) provided a demo of the 'New Bin / Household Requests' flow, which was the final service to be completed by the team. This form covers several different scenarios - reporting missing or damaged waste containers, of different types and sizes, as well as requesting new or additional containers for the household.

As had been previously requested, Dave showed in more detail how the form templates structure and content can be easily configured to meet differing local needs, using the Digital Place platform Form Builder and Rules. Digital Place v3 includes Liferay DXP 7.4 which brings a range of improvements to the Form Builder which make these types of changes more straightforward. Placecube has built on top of these improvements, developing features like the ability to pass the values of fields to later pages in the form, and to use them in web content on the form. Dave also provided a more in-depth technical view of the 'Garden Waste Subscription' service - sharing how the API calls work and data is transferred between the various systems during the end-to-end process.

Work continued on documentation in this sprint, with the updated draft 'User Research Review & UX Insights Report' circulated for review and feedback by the LA partners. We also started drafting the Service Adoption Playbook and the end of Phase 1 Report.

The delivery team have finished active sprinting for now - so our current plan for wrapping-up Phase 1 is to:

• Hold a final Retrospective session.
• Finalise all the documentation:
  • User Research Review & UX Insights Report
  • Impact Monitoring & Evaluation Plan
  • Service Adoption Playbook (Implementation Guide)
  • Phase 1 Report (inc. the approach we've taken, our lessons learned and recommendations for Phase 2 and other similar projects etc)
• Publish (or link to) all the final outputs on our project site.
• Publish all code outputs on Placecube’s Bitbucket repository with an open source license
• Resolve any issues found during testing of the Digital Place platform V3 upgrade, then provide LAs with access to the new low code services in a UAT environment.
• Plan service implementations (inc. configuration and testing) for each LA partner, depending on their local requirements and timetable (supported by Placecube).
• Continue discussions about Phase 2 work and development of a proposal for further funding (to be submitted to DLUHC in the Autumn) with Dorset Council as the lead.

The date/time of our final Show & Tell session (covering all of the work and outputs completed in this phase) is still to be confirmed however, due to the summer holidays, it's likely to be held in early September. Please do get in touch if you would like to attend this, or follow our project Twitter account for updates.  

This project has been funded by the DLUHC Local Digital Fund.