A Building Safety Platform for Local Government
Weeknotes charting our progress to help a local authority manage their building safety information
Sprint Zero — Week 1
Week end 12/03/21
Following on from the work the team delivered in September last year (here and here), we recently got the go ahead to put this into operation and develop it further.
This first week has been our ‘sprint zero’ where we got all our proverbials in a row, met with and aligned our thinking with our stakeholders, and re-evaluated last summer’s problem statement.
What did we do this week?
- Met with the whole team on Monday to do alignment and admin-y stuff.
- Met with Barry, one of Southwark’s building safety surveyors, a key stakeholder and potential user or the service, to learn about how Southwark is currently collecting external wall system (EWS) data.
- Met with DELTA FORCE at MHCLG, to discuss the transfer of EWS data from local authorities to central government.
- Met with another London borough to share our work to date and what we are looking to do.
- Met with partners at VU.CITY to re-run the building identification survey from their model of London.
A key priority, now, is to get a grip of the numbers
- how many buildings in Southwark are over 18 metres?
- how many of those are used (fully or partly) for residential purposes?
- how many of those are owned by us (the council), housing associations or are privately owned?
- how many building owners have been sent the EWS questionnaire? And how many have replied and been entered onto DELTA?
- What is the data quality for those buildings that have a completed EWS? Did they answer all of the questions or is there any key data missing?
- Also, are these assumptions the same across all stakeholders, or does everyone think something different?
What we plan to do next week
- Get a grip of the numbers.
- Establish our regular ceremonies, including our fortnightly show and tells (Invitation to follow).
- Start booking in users for further research and/or testing.
- Continue prioritising our priorities.
Sprint One — Week 1
Week end 19/03/21
What did we do this week?
- Continued to get a grip of those numbers — how many buildings are there, where are they, are they in scope, who owns them, are they already on DELTA.
These numbers are often different, depending on who you ask, so we’ve been liaising with MHCLG and our in-house GIS/LLPG team, and interrogating OSMastermap data.
- Interrogated DELTA to better understand the underlying data model we’re trying to build upon.
What we plan to do next week
- Iterate on the building owner’s self-assessment form.
- Iterate on the database model, to better support the provision of our data to DELTA.
- Continue to have various conversations around the council, to try and prioritise our backlog of features and potential features.
Sprint One — Week 2
Week end 26/03/21
What did we do this week?
- Steph and Andrew made good progress working on the database model.
- Michelle and I spoke with the head of building control, to ensure that what we are working on at the moment, will be appropriate for other uses in the near future, such as building control. Salient points being that ‘it’ needs to be flexible, scaleable and universal.
- We’ve started sketching ideas for how we can make the admin dashboard add more value to users. We’ve heard that users, in the council, would like to be able to filter buildings by various criteria including what the building is used for and its tenure. Providing some sort of status that indicates whether the building owner has completed an external wall system survey, and whether the data has been uploaded to MHCLG’s Delta system, would also be useful.
- We’ve also jotted down some early ideas for what each individual building record, or ‘building passport’, could look like. While our initial focus is on building safety data — specifically, the external wall data — we’re also thinking about how this could be broadened out to provide a view of other types of information about a building, perhaps in different sections of the passport, e.g. building control and planning data. In the safety section, we’re also looking at what else could be included as well as the responses to the EWS survey, such as information about whether the building has been served a s235 notice, applied for building safety funding, and their fire risk assessments.
What we plan to do next week
- Have further sessions with VU.CITY, Southwark and MHCLG to confirm numbers and ensure that everyone has confidence in them.
- Hopefully complete the database model.
- Complete the building owner’s self-assessment (EWS) form.
- Begin user testing.
- A technical spike to find and integrate contact email addresses for building owners.
Sprint Two— Weeks 1 & 2
Week end 09/04/21
What did we do this week?
On the 8 April, we had our first Show and Tell, which was well attended, with people from MHCLG, the Health and Safety Executive and colleagues at Tower Hamlets.
A recording of that session is available, together with the presentation deck.
However, a quick summary of progress is…
- Received the latest data set from VU.CITY, identifying those 18m+ buildings.
- First proper research sessions with users, which helped validate some of our assumptions, but identified some additional needs.
- Prototyped the concept of a building ‘passport’ and what could be accessible on this ‘passport’ to make it helpful to users.
What we plan to do next week
- Develop new dashboard features.
- Hopefully complete the database model, ready for the VU.CITY data.
- Begin work on developing building passports.
- Continue user testing and prototyping.
- Contact the Geospatial Commission.
Sprint Three— Week 1
Week end 16/04/21
This week we said goodbye to Michelle, who has taken up a position at the Ministry of Justice. Very sad to see Michelle leave, but we’ve been left in a healthy position, and Miguel has joined us a delivery manager.
What did we do this week?
This week was light on user research, but a very heavy one for our developers, Andrew and Stéphane.
- Tested the dashboard and ‘passport’ with an officer at Tower Hamlets.
- finished the last bit of the EWS form- the materials loop, where they can be added, deleted, reviewed, etc.
- reworked the “check your answers” section for a clearer summary of the answers.
- added viewing/filtering on EWS Survey status (completed/not received) and status in DELTA (present/not present).
- lots of UI tweaks on the admin interface (visual + removing non-essential features).
What we plan to do next week
Have our second show and tell.
Sprint 3 — Week 2
Week end 23/04/21
What did we do this week?
On Wednesday, we had our second Show and Tell.
A recording of that session (minus the first few minutes) is available, together with the presentation deck.
Although a quick summary of progress is…
- Received and imported new VU.CITY data
- Finished the form side of the app
- Improved the admin interface (filtering/bulk actions)
- Started prototyping on how to transfer the form data into DELTA
Next week we will…
- Progress the BSP — DELTA flow
- Continue user testing to validate this flow
- Contact the Geospatial Commission and Ordnance Survey
- Go live with the Notify integration
- Implement user feedback on the admin (i.e: Warn admin users about the cost of bulk-sending letters — £0.39 per letter)
Rather than write separate notes, I’ll just update this post every week (ish).
If you have any questions, queries or feedback, please get in touch. I’m at jack.ricketts@southwark.gov.uk
