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
- First S&T
- 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.
