Newham Council
Embedding digital skills and knowledge to create a sustainable digital function.
As part of our long-term role as Newham Council's Digital Partner, we embedded permanent council staff into our delivery teams, upskilling them in agile techniques and transformational ways of working.
Our work helped transform the landscape of digital services across the Borough, whilst ensuring internal teams had the skills to continue delivering change without third-party support.
£9m+
Annualised savings and revenue-generating opportunities
80%
Reduction in manual intervention for Council Tax cases.
01
Upskilled, multidisciplinary digital team able to take services through an agile Discovery-Live process independently.
01 The challenge we faced
London Borough of Newham is London’s fifth largest borough,serving 340,000 residents. The Council sought ways to reimagine services for the digital age, ensuring they meet the needs of residents, visitors and businesses.
With one of the most diverse populations and some of the biggest budgetary challenges, the Council had great ambitions to transform into a place where people choose to live, work and stay.
The Council’s challenge, however, was an environment in which waterfall delivery was the prevailing methodology. The right capabilities, capacity and methods were not in place to transform the rigid, inflexible services offered to residents.
Rainmaker were asked, as the Council’s digital delivery partner, to embed a new culture of agile delivery and share knowledge to enable ongoing delivery of digital services.
These Digital Services were to have the twin goals of 1) improving the financial position of the council (either through revenue growth or cost reduction); and 2) improving the customer facing services available to residents.
02 Tacking the problem
Rainmaker integrated seamlessly into the Newham Digital team as the Council’s strategic digital partner, deploying two agile squads to take service through a Discovery-Live transformation.
First, however, our teams conducted an organisation-wide Discovery to identify key digital opportunities that would create the most benefit for the Council and citizens.
20+ summary business cases were produced and prioritised according to benefit (both financial and experiential). Rainmaker prioritised these in collaboration with the Council before undertaking more formal Discoveries into each of the service areas - with wide-ranging impact from Homelessness Prevention, to Council Tax & Benefits Management, Permit Refunds, and Repairs & Maintenance Services.
This development cycle was characterised as Business Analysis-led, yet human-centred; the design of the solution focussed on the need of the users (both residents and council staff) but no work would progress unless it was expected to have a net-improvement in the Council’s finances.
Critically, and in line with Rainmaker’s core belief in enabling organisations to operate independently and without a reliance on third parties, we incorporated at least one of Newham's digital team into our multi-disciplinary teams for each project, providing opportunities to learn 'on-the-job' (from discovery to live) whilst shadowing Rainmaker experts.
03 Key skills we used
Delivery management
Service design
User research
Financial analysis
Business cases
Prototyping
Development
Service standard implementation
Knowledge transfer
UX/UI
“You’ve led [Digital Services] brilliantly and I am delighted with where we are … mature, well structured, excellent delivery.”
Head of Digital Services
London Borough of Newham
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