Rebuilding Bromford in Minecraft

By Vicky Green 

During our last set of Lightning Talks , our colleague Nic Webb opened up a new world of possibilities by introducing how ‘Minecraft’ could be used to plan buildings and communities. We looked at the work by Ordnance Survey and OS Open Data and explored some fantastic maps created in New York City.  These inspired us to set ourselves a challenge to fire up Minecraft and have a go.

So we did… and four of us looked at it for a few minutes, each taking the controller to try and make sense of it all.  It was then we realised we actually need experts! Someone, who could create worlds with skills and speed!

Taking advantage of the Christmas School holidays, I enticed my 12 year old son and his mate to come into the Lab with talk of google glass, drones and unlimited play on Xbox! It was an easy sell…

The two boys soon set to work, they decided to build our Lab in Minecraft before beginning a more detailed project recreating Exchange Court - our central office.  They began by photographing the building, finding floor plans and created focal point of the building within an hour!

To get an aerial view of the building our experts flew the Lab drone over Bromford....

At work in the Lab Lounge....

Their speed was ridiculous and huge attention was paid to the internal and external detail of the physical building.  These guys work fast and collaboratively.  One does the mining, the other builds – they work seamlessly together and know exactly what they are doing! After all, this is play to them!

We asked the lads what they thought about what we had asked him to do. They told us that they really liked that they had a real building to work on.  It made it more interesting and felt like a challenge. 

Rather than being cooped up in their bedroom, they were developing in the open.  Colleagues of Bromford stopped and admired their work, which did wonders for their confidence.  What they have managed to achieve in 2 days is fantastic – we know that no adult in our building would have been able to create this.

Taking shape: Exchange Court rebuilt 

So what did we learn from this experiment?

1)     Minecraft not only is a great platform to build on, but it is a place that encourages collaborative work.  It encourages  the gamer to use logic, creativity and use real space awareness. What does this mean for the future of work? 

2)     Bring in the experts – now we realise that we can’t just recruit an army of 12 year olds, but you can learn from them. 

3)     Develop in the open – unlock the potential of the bedroom gamers, let others see their work to build their confidence.

Our next challenge is to test this in a community. We've identified an Older Persons community that is currently not making full use of the facilities and building. What would happen if we engage younger people to work with residents to map their existing community and rebuild it in Minecraft?

Will the collaborative nature of the experience spill over into the offline world?

People have to watch each others backs in Minecraft and support each other. Exactly the behaviours we want to unlock in our communities.

Follow this link to view the work of OS Open Data 

UPDATE 29/01/2015

Since the original post James (Vicky's boy) has created a video walk-through of the Bromford minecraft building which Nic shared at the last lightning (or lightening) talks. Thought you guys wouldn't mind a peek either. 

Alternatively, you can follow THIS LINK to view the lightning talk in full. 

Peace! Tom

Top Tips On Using Drones

By Vicky Green 

When the Lab first purchased a drone, we were expecting questions, especially with the negative press surrounding them.  

Are they a fad, or something that can really help with efficiency and customer focus?

We were soon approached by our surveyors who had spotted the drone in the Lab and wanted to do a much needed roof inspection of a 50ft building.  Without any roof access it would mean erecting scaffold around the regency property at a cost of thousands of pounds. 

Using drones for video recording is a complex area for any organisation. People are worried by the privacy aspects , much as they were in the early days of Google Street View. 

As a result we identified really early on that we wanted to work with someone of expertise who had the right credentials to ensure we were doing the right thing by our customers. So after much scouring we found team of enthusiasts who had turned their talent into a business.

If we saw how they did the test - perhaps we could train our colleagues to do their own inspections?  

On the day we realised it was so much more than that.

We worked with the specialists who made sure the take off areas were safe – we spent the first hour just planning how the drone could do its job safely! A previous test was cancelled due to high winds. 

With a surveyor from Bromford in control of the flight path and checking images taken, we were able to execute the test with ease - the lack of wind and plenty of sunshine helped enormously.

So what did we really learn?

One thing that hadn’t occurred to us was the local interest a drone would have.  We had pedestrians taking photos, local enthusiasts rocking up to compare sizes of their drones, neighbours popping out to view the aerial shots of their roof spaces.

We talked to local residents who spoke of the time, noise and inconvenience of having scaffold towers erected and most importantly the feeling of being unsafe at the thought of someone climbing up a tower.  They also pointed out that many scaffold companies install alarms on their towers, which could also potentially lead to call outs when activated. 

Also our surveyor would have to spend increased time on site liaising with the scaffold company and residents.  This compares with a drone survey in less than two hours.

So, was the thought of having a drone fly past your window really an issue for customers?  

We found that it wasn’t.  Local people were interested and actually chuffed to bits that they saw something different and interesting!

We did of course write to all the residents before completing the test, advising them to close windows and curtains if they wished to.  And to be fair some did, but lots didn’t – they chose to watch the flight instead and enjoy it! One customer was even disappointed when arriving home finding that he had missed all the action.

Do Drones get the Lab approval?

We are in the process of receiving the full images, so it’s too early to say whether the test passed or failed. We want to be able to identify close up the condition of the roof.  We will share the results as soon as we have them.  We had a great company to work with, so the legal issues were dealt with and they were flying experts! 

Our Top Tips:

1-     Make sure you get the legal stuff right or hire a company who know what they are doing, do your homework on the rates they charge!

2-     Make sure you do right by your customers and community.  Keep them safe and respect their privacy – let them know what is going on!

3-     Be prepared for fans.  People are interested, so let them be a part of it.  Simply sharing a sneak preview of how it works makes a difference.

4-     Be flexible as you may need to rearrange – people crashing their drones and bad weather can limit use.

5-     Be clear on why you are doing it – it’s not just about saving money, think about if it will lead to a better customer experience and less inconvenience to those who live there.

Watch this space for more drone tests in the future. 

How Customer Journey Maps Fan the Fire for Change

By Tom Hartland 

Standing, mind reeling in front of wall to wall post-it notes, best describes my first month at Bromford. I’d joined the Lab and had a new tool to try out, customer journey maps - and they were going down a treat.

The principle is simple.

Start by summarising each stage a customer interacts with your product or service on a post-it note and plot the journey left to right. Build up the image with post-its for people they interacted with, systems encountered and attitudes and emotions the customers might feel at each stage.

Using this tool we’ve helped teams examine how a customer feels when interacting with nearly all Bromford’s offerings. There hasn’t been one session without a breakthrough moment. Granted, some felt like an uphill struggle to get there but others really fanned the fire for change from the start.

Now the heat has died down a little, we can say what worked and what didn’t.

It may sound obvious, but encouraging colleagues to think from a customer perspective is a real strength of using this way of thinking. Products and services can be developed with the best of intentions but over time more regulations, personalities or new systems requirements have influenced the way they are delivered, usually presenting a more complex route of engagement for customers. Journey maps, like other design thinking tools, can be the catalyst for stripping out unnecessary layers in a process, as we’ve seen in the on-going redesign of Bromford’s complaints process.

Quick hits are frequently uncovered when evaluating our services in this level of detail. These are the things that can be implemented quickly for minimal cost or disruption, yet cumulatively may improve customer experience dramatically.  For example, we used journey maps with the Opportunities Team to examine how customers attending our work clubs might feel. We stepped back and picked out particular pain-points, most of which linked to inconsistency and long waiting periods for customers. In lab sessions since we’ve developed a documented service offer, detailing a level of professionalism in the access and level of advice customers can expect. 

Requiring colleagues to empathise with customer’s attitudes and emotions is a mixed bag of tricks. Sometimes it was the focal point, other times we nearly missed it off completely (i.e. the same emotions prevailed across the service). Going forwards I’ll try structuring this as a graph, like I’ve seen in other versions. This way we can capture the main peaks and troughs in customer experience rather than list lots of text.   

It’s important to frame the context in which journey maps will be used as they prompt lots of discussion and can take a while to complete. Be sure that they’re the appropriate tool for the job; scope the issue beforehand as much as possible. Also, completing journey maps for so many areas of the business has allowed us to illustrate linkages between teams – a useful tool in designing the future of our services.

All in all the customer journey maps have been a very worthwhile exercise, kicking into gear both long and short term changes.  The challenge for us lab rats it to draft up test plans and strike while the iron is hot – especially for larger issues which need proper investigation and not just plastering over the cracks, but this is the next stage of our process and we’re still (for the most part) figuring it out.

We’ll be sure to let you know the next big breakthrough!