David Durant

The Modern Tools for Housing programme is the development of a suite of software products developed in collaboration between HackIT and Hackney Council’s Housing Department to support our staff and our tenant and leasehold residents. It currently covers housing repairs, home management, housing finance and support for our arrears collection team.

Highlights from our workstreams this week.

Managed Arrears – Silvia – workstream DM

• Celebrations:
  • Completed screen for Worktray, Notification and Search page.
  • Integrated the screen into the Finance application.
  • Positive feedback from superusers on the User Interface (UI) for rent statements – post, email and print.
  • Any specified period rent statements pdf production works available, provided data is in the database.
  • Sign off on Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) for Send File by Email.
  • Gov Notify Application Programming Interface (API) setup and tested for Send File by Email.  Files now appear on encrypted links for download.
• Challenges:
  • Testing in development with a small dataset
  • Finding an alternative to Tenancy API for customer email addresses as it is unmaintained
  • Writing Unit Tests for edge cases
  • Getting ready for User Acceptance Testing (UAT) sign off for Send File by Email
  • Figure out how to integrate the property page with Finance as they are using two different APIs.

Finance – Kate – workstream DM

• Celebrations:
  • New QA Emilia joined the team!
  • The release of the LH estimates MVP and Data Migration into Staging so the users can begin testing the functionality.
  • We made good progress in our transition over to Jira. Our backlog still needs a lot of refinement before we are in an organised agile flow, but the progress feels great.
• Challenges:
  • Another issue was raised in regards to an incorrect PRN, however this was picked up quickly and a fix pushed to production.
  • The Finance team’s velocity means the SoWs can only run for 6 weeks in order to keep the SoW costings around the £250k mark, which means we have to write SoW’s more frequently.

Manage My Home – Yvonne – workstream DM

• Celebrate:
  • Welcome to our new QA- Hannah Maher – known as H!
  • Team bonding session in a ‘User Manual of Me’ workshop – which was fun and helped us get to know each other better. Team feels like it’s in a really good place now and they have all the tools to start picking up delivery momentum once they have more capacity.
• Concerns:
  • New FE dev dropped out at the last minute
  • Still not delivered anything (mainly due to capacity issues and learning agile)

Repairs – Sarah – HackIT workstream DM

• Celebrations:
  • Legal disrepair alerts are now being displayed
  • The team coped really well this week while we were a developer down
• Challenges
  • Some performance issues related to the cautionary contacts sheets API
  • The Purdy onboarding features won’t deliver any value until they’re all ready, so we’re going to have a period where we don’t release much

Another busy week in MTFH. Our two new QA engineers started this week and I’m looking forward to chatting to them on Monday. Partly I’m keen to hear about their conversations with our TA about how they’ll be contributing to the programme but I’m also going to ask them to write up the status of each workstream’s tech and data documentation as part of their onboarding. I’m keen to know how easy it is for new starters to get up to speed with our technology.

The Repairs online team has hit the ground running. I’m looking forward to hearing from them next week about standing up their existing open source product ASAP so we can show it to people and get ready for the integrations we need to do.

The recruiting for the new Repairs product team Product Manager has closed and we’ll be interviewing this week. We’re looking for candidates for the other roles to start being sifted and pointed to us for interviews in the near future. At the same time we’re finalising the makeup of the MMH product team next week and will then start looking for a Product Owner for that team very soon.

We’re still having some issues finalising some people’s roles in the programme – more discussions this week. We’re also finding the same thing as every other organisation at the moment – recruiting is hard. We’ve had two potential new starters drop out within two days of their starting date this week.

Our Finance workstream has been laying our plans for at least four releases over the next three sprints. This is great as we’ve been blocked on releases for that team for some time and really want to get into the cadence of doing at least one release every week. We’re also going to be revisiting the Finance SoWs this week to get our next round of work signed off.

In Managed Arrears we’ve paused the release of our next SoW until two further pieces of work have been completed. Firstly we need to reprioritise the roadmap following the introduction of new requirements to support our colleagues who look after arrears for our leasehold properties. Secondly, we need to do further work to complete mapping out the relationship between Managed Arrears and our new RentSense – our new 3rd party AI product which recommends to our Arrears Officers which residents to communicate to have how.

Finally – it’s going to be a sad week for the programme next week as our Delivery Manager for Manage My Home, Yvonne, is leaving Hackney to take up a Senior Delivery Manager position at BBC News. Yvonne has done a fantastic job working with the MMH team – first with our previous agency partner Amido and now Nudge. In both cases she was an exemplary servant leader – coaching the team in all the best practices of self organisation. She’s going to do an amazing job at the BBC. We should know on Monday who her replacement will be and I’ll introduce them next week.

Modern Tools for Housing – Programme week notes 11/3/22

The Modern Tools for Housing programme is the development of a suite of software products developed in collaboration between HackIT and Hackney Council’s Housing Department to support our staff and our tenant and leasehold residents. It currently covers housing repairs, home management, housing finance and support for our arrears collection team.

Highlights from our workstreams this week.

Managed Arrears – Silvia – workstream DM

• Celebrations:
  • To start to build a new application, and follow the agile methodology
  • Clearer overview of tasks and assignments
  • Finalised and built the User Interface(UI) for the user stories
  • Started building the use cases to send email with rent statement attachment via gov notify
  • Had User Acceptance Testing (UAT) sign off for letter issue date bugs fix
  • A bug in the MAA system was brought to our attention on Friday morning which was immediately resolved by Felipe.
  • Being able to wire up the Frontend with Income Application Programming Interface (API).
  • Being able to integrate MMA into Finance Application.
• Challenges:
  • Understanding the existing data structure and integration.
  • Understanding the requirements for wiring up the frontend with the Arrears and Patches API.
  • Using the Search API for find data between MMA and Finance correctl.
  • Prepare backlog items properly in terms of Acceptance Criteria, description – thanks to Elaine & Burak’s hard work we’ll be in a better place with this in the next sprint.
  • The flow of data wasn’t as clear as it could be so we’ve completed a component/data mapping exercise.
  • We still have some bugs in the product and these are creating some problems for our users. We need to make sure we devote time to fixing the most important ones.

Finance – Kate – workstream DM

• Celebrations:
  • The data migration and Leasehold estimates on staging for UAT with good initial feedback
• Challenges:
  • Some team members being off due to sickness caused a slight delay in some progress.

Manage My Home – Yvonne – workstream DM

• Celebrate:
  • First S&T
  • Ways of Working workshops and changing how work organised
• Concerns:
  • Lack of FE Capacity – it’s a single point of failure that needs addressing
  • Yet to release with new team (mainly due to capacity issues and upskilling)

Repairs – Sarah – HackIT workstream DM

• Celebrations:
  • Released value to users 3 times this week!
  • Enabled multi trade variations
  • Resident safety meeting regarding follow on’s risk assessments was really interesting and there are areas of opportunity to explore
  • We’ve found a solution to make the Purdy onboarding stories smaller
• Challenges
  • We weren’t able to UAT legal disrepair flags – Rolled over another week
  • The contact centre reporting bugs in the UI when raising repair
  • Fitting in supporting Made Tech for Online Repairs

Lots of great stuff is happening in our individual workstreams as ever. I highly recommend that you read the individual weeknotes listed above.

Not much newsworth at the programme level this week. The latest Repairs statement of work was approved at the steering group meeting on Friday while the ones for the Finance and Manage My Home workstreams have been carried over for further discussion.

We’re looking forward to both our two new QA engineers and the MadeTech Repairs Online team starting work on Monday.

The Product Manage internal recruiting for the new Repairs product team closes this week and we’ll be continuing to recruit for other roles across the programme with a particular focus on the 2nd front-end developer for Manage My Home.

The Modern Tools for Housing programme is the development of a suite of software products developed in collaboration between HackIT and Hackney Council’s Housing Department to support our staff and our tenant and leasehold residents. It currently covers housing repairs, home management, housing finance and support for our arrears collection team.

Highlights from our workstreams this week.

Managed Arrears – Katie – workstream DM

• Celebrations:
  • Large parts of the NoSP work already completed
  • Work on Rules Engine and Components Library started
• Challenges:
  • The team had a few challenging moments with the Ruby on Rails framework, which have now been resolved

Finance – Kate – workstream DM

• Celebrations:
  • The data migration update on staging’ this is a big step forward, as it includes millions of rows of data that can now be tested by users
• Challenges:
  • Waiting for ADR sign off to enable progression on a number of tasks

Manage My Home – Yvonne – workstream DM

• Celebrate:
  • Really getting into the swing of working in sprint formats
  • Great workshops for the team to understand how they’re working, their pinch points and what they want to do differently.
  • Julian returned this week – welcome back Julian!
• Challenges:
  • Only one FE Dev is meaning a much slower pace.
  • One service designer/Ux designer is also meaning a slower pace

Repairs – Sarah – HackIT workstream DM

• Celebrations:
  • Removed Wick village TMO flags
  • Deployed: New priorities surveying and planned maintenance, syncing to the new contact details API, bulk cancelled over 600 out of date jobs, jobs can be closed without paying operative bonus
  • Introducing a simple but structured release strategy
• Challenges
  • We weren’t able to UAT legal disrepair flags
  • Lots of questions about online repairs and how we need to ensure it fits with our needs
  • Bugs reported by operatives on Monday

The biggest news this week came from the Manage My Home team where they were able to confirm that the product is now being used by over 500 staff members across more than 40 Hackney Service Area teams. This is a great achievement and a testament of all the hard work put in by both the current team and our previous partner agency for that service, Amido.

Speaking of great teams, the Product Manager role for the new Repairs product team, a key pilot part of HackIT 3.0, was advertised internally on Currents on Friday. If you’d like to apply for the role you have until 17/3/22 to do so. We’ll be finalising the discussions about potential internal moves for other roles in that team this week. Following that we’ll be doing external recruitment starting as soon as next week!

In addition to the new roles in Repairs we should be finishing staffing up the new Manage My Home team soon to get them back up to full speed as well as hopefully bringing in both a Service Design and Business Analyst at the programme level. The BA in particular is going to focus on finding paths to enable us to start removing the remaining interim spreadsheets introduced after the cyber-attack and also looking into clearer ways for the programme to be able to express the value to users that’s provided by each of our newly released features.

Even that’s not everything related to new people coming into the programme. On 14/3/22 we have two new QA engineering specialists joining to help all four workstreams ensure that they deliver the highest quality code.

Meanwhile, the must be an auspicious date as it’s the same day the our new partners in the programme, MadeTech, will be starting the delivery of Repairs Online. This is our implementation of a free pre-existing open source system that will enable residents to raise repairs directly without needing to call the call centre.

Finally, it’s our steering group on 11/3/22 so we’ll be prepping for that this week including make sure that the new SoWs for MMH, Repairs and Finance are circulated in advance so we can have them approved at the meeting (they’re all in good shape and should be sharable on Monday).

The Modern Tools for Housing programme is the development of a suite of software products developed in collaboration between HackIT and Hackney Council’s Housing Department to support our staff and our tenant and leasehold residents. It currently covers housing repairs, home management, housing finance and support for our arrears collection team.

Highlights from our workstreams this week.

Managed Arrears – Katie – workstream DM

• Next Show and Tell: 22nd February 2022
• Celebrations:
  • Large parts of the NoSP work already completed
  • Work on Rules Engine and Components Library started
• Challenges:
  • The team had a few challenging moments with the Ruby on Rails framework, which have now been resolved

Finance – Kate – workstream DM

• Next Show and Tell: 8th March 2022
• Celebrations:
  • Establishing Jira processes to allow us to start using it for our next sprint.
• Challenges:
  • ADR sign off pushed into next week due to key Senior Technical Lead being on annual leave.

Manage My Home – Yvonne – workstream DM

• Celebrations:
  • Had a really good workshop where we explored our roles and responsibilities, identified gaps and now looking at how we close them. 
• Challenges:
  • Learning and doing means pace is slower
  • Not enough BA, Front end, service/UX design or QA capacity

Repairs – Sarah – HackIT workstream DM

• Celebrations:
  • Adding legal disrepair flags is almost ready
  • Really positive meeting with the trade union
  • Making good progress mapping out risk assessments for operatives
• Challenges
  • We weren’t able to release new features this week as planned
  • Teodore, one of our software engineers, is leaving

There’s a lot of other work always going on in the programme that isn’t directly related to the delivery being done by our four workstreams. This week that’s included the following.

• Lining up conversations with our new partner Mobysoft to ensure that we’ll have all the technical integrations in place for when our Arrears team starts to use their product RentSense in April
• A number of conversations with the new team in Hackney working on reviving the pre-cyber-attack service called Single View. We’ve been explaining to them some of the reasons why previous decisions related to their product were made and showing some of the reusable components and APIs that they’ll be able to integrate with.
• We’re set to have our first technical integration meeting with MadeTech to help line up their team which will be joining us shortly to introduce the resident-facing service Repairs Online

Meanwhile, other work that our teams are doing that’s not mentioned above includes the following.

• It’s “statement of work” (SoW) time again. This is how we chunk-up the work we do in order to gain spending approval through our governance process. This time around it’s unusual that all four teams will be writing SoWs at the same time so we’re going to have to coordinate carefully to enable them all to be approved before the next steering group meeting on 11/3/22.
• We’re now fully lined up with approved job descriptions so will begin the process for recruiting into the long-term HackIT 3.0 Repairs product team next week
• The Delivery Manager community at HackIT is going to be spending a bit of time observing each other’s teams – potentially leading to an “Agile health check” document that could be used by teams in retrospectives. We’re lining up someone to watch some of our sessions.
• We’re just about to confirm the introduction of two QA engineers who will be joining the programme soon – working across all four workstreams.

Finally, speaking of quality assurance – we’re going to be reviewing our programme QA requirements (accessibility, privacy impact, data retention, etc) to make sure they’re all up to date. At the same time we’re going to review our regular meetings and documents to make sure everyone understands the purpose of each one and that we’re not spending time on anything we don’t definitely need.