Open Digital Planning: Month 1

Our first official month has started, meaning we begin to capture and monitor our progress and funding usage.

We attended lots of really useful sessions designed to upskill and get the new cohort collaborating. These included introductory training on Content Design, Impact Measurement, Procurement and AI. There were a couple of data drop-ins, a show and tell and a general meeting.

Digital Planning Maturity Assessment

One of our first tasks was to complete and submit a Digital Planning Maturity Assessment (DPMA). This guided us to assess the Planning teams level of confidence and capability in the following areas:

• Digital and design skills
• Technology and products
• Data and insights
• Procurement
• Leadership and governance
• Culture and ways of working
• Citizen engagement and working with others

All of our areas came out as “emerging” capability — which wasn’t a surprise to us, but it can be quite difficult to accept that there is a lot of work ahead. After submitting this to the ODP team, they followed up with an action plan. This suggested areas we can work on and crucially some actions with inspiration and resource links. As a team we voted on the parts we would prioritise during the next few months and submitted this back to our community leads at ODP.

Welcome Event

Some of our team made it to the welcome event in Tower Hamlets. One of the things that surprised us was the diversity in job roles that attended, it wasn’t just planners, it was a varied group including digital folk, data people and project managers. This was good to see, as one of the points evident was that working in a multidisciplinary team is the most likely way to get the best results out of this project. The ones that struggled fed back, that they have a siloed way of working, so this bodes well for us, as we are already working this way.

It was evident we are not ‘behind’ other councils, everyone was in a similar boat, and struggling with similar things, a big one being TPO data accuracy. Making connections and feeding back to ODP, it is clear we can use the tools at our disposal, like Slack to build on the connections and networks and learn from one another.

Internal Discovery and Workshops

One of our Business Analysts worked with various Planning team members to map out their end-to-end processes and ways of working. This started to give us a fuller understanding of the scale of the work.

We then set to work on a data discovery, digging into the size of some of the datasets we are due to publish openly as part of this work. We started to get a feel for data quality, quantity and format… it isn’t all digital!

Our next steps included a workshop to discuss and dot-vote on the transformation work ideas we had previously identified and digging in further to the dataset work.

Challenges

The challenges we identified this month are core to the project. They include being able to release staff from business-as-usual roles to work on projects and dependencies on other departments internally causing delays.

Another challenge that we haven’t finished scoping is the scale of non-digital records. This is mainly Tree Preservation Orders (TPOs). There are currently lots of unknowns around how we will tackle this.

What’s next?

• Workshop to prioritise areas of work and form a delivery roadmap
• Test upload the first dataset and data cleanse Conservation areas
• Revisit the 101 training sessions videos
• Recruitment process for additional Planning resources to help capacity issues
• Additional discovery for public engagement software (for Local Plan) & ODP products

We hope you will join us on our Open Digital Planning journey over the next 12 months and witness digital improvements and transformation.