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Introduction

Lambeth, Bath & North East Somerset and Bracknell Forest councils were experiencing a range of issues around their building control services, such as:

• inefficient back office systems
• unclear workload management
• lack of adaptability to regulatory changes
• issues with poor quality data and processes

They decided to team-up and investigate:

1. if these assumptions were applicable across the country
2. what other blockers were hampering building control services for local authorities

Their in-house team needed some specialist support to help them understand their users and their needs from the services, so they asked Marvell Consulting to help.

Challenges

We first worked collaboratively with them to define the key questions to answer, for example:

• ‘What is involved in obtaining Completion Certificates?’
• ‘How many councils had separate plan and inspection functions?’
• ‘Who are the different users that are involved in the end-to-end building control service?’

We then identified and engaged with a representative sample from over 300 local authorities, and their varied roles involved in delivering building control services. This was achieved using a number of methods, such as:

• mapping out the overall service offerings, and key user journeys
• conducting a survey of building control officers across England to get a national perspective of problem areas and to test our initial assumptions
• holding over 2,500 minutes of interviews with building control officers and customers of partner councils’ services

Solutions

Our extensive research allowed us to develop:

• personas of 6 user groups, outlining their goals, needs, information sources and pain points – segmented by levels of knowledge, experience and availability
• an overview of 12 high-level pain points, including:
–inefficient manual processing throughout
–fragmented communication with customers
–difficulty extracting reporting data
• 80 different user needs the service must meet, across 11 themes, e.g. applications, inspections and reporting

We then validated our concerns, for example, that local councils struggle when competing with private sector ‘approved inspectors’, because:

• they’ve a more effective cost recovery model
• recruitment and retention of staff is challenging
• a lack of transparency and joined-up systems and communications

Based on our findings, we recommended:

• reconsidering the cost recovery model imposed on building control in councils, creating an unrealistic competitive barrier with the private sector.
• improving transparency and empowerment for customers.

Results

Our analysis developed a comprehensive understanding of what users need from building control services, where there are pain points with current tools and processes, for instance:

• 24% of surveyed users wanted better management and search of documents and 17% wanted a back office system that is more streamlined and user-centred
• apathy and fear of change will be key considerations for managing change
• And, possibly somewhat surprisingly, cost wasn’t a significant driver of satisfaction rating.

Alongside the requirements and dependencies different user groups have, the working group of councils are now able to define the requirements for the next phase of the project with the confidence that these are based upon solid evidence and actual findings, rather than assumptions and guess work.

“You’ve been brilliant. All the work that you’ve done has been fantastic!”

Catherine Neal
Head of Operations & Innovation, London Borough of Lambeth

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