Photo of the crater lake of Tiwu Nuwa Muri Koo Fai courtesy of @PaulBromford!
So Simon and I have been flying solo for this last fortnight, with Paul on his travels in Southeast Asia (follow him on Twitter, @PaulBromford to keep up to date with where he is in the world. WARNING: holiday envy will ensue) and Katie on jury service. Rather than kicking back and relaxing here in the Lab, Simon and I have been cracking on with both existing projects and starting some new ones as we start to see the pipeline of work from Bromford 2.0 trickle through. Here’s a brief summary of what’s going on:
Starting Well
Simon held a ‘lessons learnt’ session on Thursday to discuss what went well, what we could improve on and discuss further ideas for this test as we move into the next stages. Overall, it is a really popular test, however, there is still more work to go before we can launch something into business as usual, so the pilot will continue and we’ll be making some amendments to this as we go forward.
Personas
We have gathered all the relevant data we need to build our test and will shortly be starting customer interviews to help us with this project. Keep up to date with how this is going via our Trello board, under the Test thread.
Foodbanks
We held an inspiration session with Damian Carter, Engagement Manager, following his idea for redesigning the way Bromford engages with food banks and the DWP as Welfare Reforms continue and the roll out of Universal Credit accelerates. Such reforms will drastically change the way both Bromford and its customers engage with the DWP and as a result of this session, we will be designing some tests aiming to address some of these changes and encourage more collaboration as opposed to enforcement.
Blockchain & Distributed Ledger Technologies
This test is gaining momentum and we will shortly be holding a design session with our ICT, Income, Finance and Locality Teams to look at how we will deploy this and identify some customers who would be willing to work with us to test this concept. This is a really exciting development and we are keen to see how this progresses!
Shared Ownership
Michelle went along to a session with Kirsty Darby from our sales team with The Mortgage Place, looking at how we can improve the customer experience for our shared ownership properties. This was a really interesting discussion which we’ll be looking further into, particularly as Bromford 2.0 work starts.
Robots
We’re still keen to look further into robotics and A.I as a means of helping our customers and making processes more efficient. We’ll hopefully be going to visit the Bristol Robotics Lab, part of UWE, over the next few months, as well as some other avenues we are exploring, so stay tuned!
In terms of this coming week, it’s another busy one! As well as keeping on top of the ever growing list of tests and pilots, Simon and I are attending the National Housing Federation conference, being held at the ICC in Birmingham on 19th and 20th September. Simon and our Insight Manager, Carole Clark, are speaking at a breakout session titled ‘S15: Transformative and Innovation Showcase’ at 2pm on Wednesday 20th September, which will focus on how we combine qualitative and quantitative data to drive insight driven innovation. If you are attending, come check it out and say hello!
We’ll be blogging about our time there over the next few days anyway, but in the meantime, you can keep up to date with all the goings on via Twitter using the hashtags #natfed17 and #YLE17.
Have a good week!