Sprint 5 Update

Our ability to progress the work in this sprint was somewhat impacted by the limited availability of several team members. This was due to both planned annual leave and, unfortunately, some unexpected sickness absence. However, despite there being a few challenges, the rest of the delivery team continued to press on with their various tasks.

Martin (our Business Analyst) gathered more information about each of the partners reporting requirements. Several example current reports have been shared with us now and Martin will continue to work on this in the next sprint, alongside starting to explore and map the 'New Household Request' and 'Request New Bin' processes.

Bal (our User Researcher) progressed with her initial review of the 'Report Fly Tipping' process in this sprint. She will complete this in the next sprint, as well as providing more detail, and any clarifications needed by the development team, on the UX insights gathered and design recommendations that have been made so far.

Dave (our Technical Architect), and the Placecube development team, continued building out the new front-end forms, with an initial version of the 'Request an Assisted Bin Collection' forms (that works for a customer logged-in to their existing account or for residents without an account) ready to share at our last sprint update session - albeit with a couple of bugs which inevitably showed up again during the demo - why do they always do that?! We believe the bug may be linked to a specific browser set-up so will be testing this in the next sprint.

The development team have also continued building the first platform integration connectors and have made good progress with the ones for the Bartec and Webaspx Waste Management systems. We're expecting to complete these in the next sprint and will then begin work on the ones for Yotta Alloy and Echo. In addition, the Waste Connector framework has been enhanced to enable councils to select which specific back-office system they use. (Note: Placecube have also recently developed another integration connector (for the Whitespace system) as part of a separate project underway with Lewes & Eastbourne councils).

The ongoing development of a first draft of the 'Monitoring and Evaluation' plan (which will be used to measure project impact / success, and capture learning, after this phase of delivery has been completed) continued in this sprint. We've been having some interesting discussions about how to keep this as simple and straightforward as possible, whilst also trying to demonstrate the full potential impact and wider benefits of the project - more on this to come later!

Our current plan for Sprint 6 (which is a shorter sprint than usual, due to the Easter break) is to:

• Continue building the front-end forms for the next highest priority services (i.e. Garden Waste Subscriptions) and bug fixing. 
• Complete building the integration connectors for Bartec and Webaspx. 
• Continue mapping the processes, and identifying service differences, for the next services/features on the priority list (which are 'New Household Requests' and 'New Bin Requests', as well as investigating the associated reporting and customer comms requirements). 
• Continue the User Research / UX review work - focused on completion of 'Report Fly Tipping'.
• Continue with the development of our Project Impact Monitoring & Evaluation plan.

Our next Show & Tell update session will be held online at 2pm on Tuesday 26 April, so please do get in touch if you'd like to attend.  You can also follow our Twitter account for regular project updates.
 
This project has been funded by the DLUHC Local Digital Fund.