Open Digital Planning: Month 2

As we wrap up our second month as part of the Digital Planning Improvement Fund, the scale of work for Open Digital Planning is becoming clearer. It’s an exciting time as we begin to see both the challenges and the opportunities in transforming our planning data and processes. We’ve got a fantastic team ready to make things better for both staff and customers.

Successes This Month

A key highlight was a workshop with our digital and planning staff to help prioritise areas of work. While we’re still analysing the full findings, we’ve already prioritised data cleansing, with a future plan to boost the digital and process maturity of our team.

Some of our staff also attended training provided by Open Digital Planning (ODP), which was very well received. We’re also actively recruiting for a new role within Planning, specifically focusing on digital innovation to support this project.

On the data front, our Adur and Worthing Conservation Areas data has passed verification checks in CSV format, meaning all data fields are present and correct. The consistent structure across both areas means they should be ready for upload soon after final checks. We’re also making progress on updating the data structure for Article 4s in GIS, in preparation for their update.

A significant internal success was completing a legacy project to upgrade to the latest version of Uniform. Our team is already keen to explore its new functionality and find better ways to use the system.

Finally, we’ve started additional mapping and discovery with our building control team. The goal is to link all elements of planning together and identify how this work can help our teams collaborate more effectively.

Challenges We’re Facing

It’s not all smooth sailing. A primary challenge identified from our workshop feedback is the extremely limited capacity of our planning staff due to their Business As Usual (BAU) work. This makes juggling digital transformation, data cleansing, and ODP uploads quite tricky. Similarly, planning staff have found it difficult to make time for ODP training due to their BAU commitments.

The recruitment process for our new staff member, intended to help with these capacity issues, is also taking time. Initial discovery suggests that Tree Preservation Orders (TPOs) will be the most time-consuming dataset to upload. Additionally, external projects being prioritised at the last minute for other service areas have diverted some of our digital and design team’s time away from this project.

What’s Next?

Looking ahead, we’ll be doing additional discovery for engagement software (for our Local Plan) and other ODP products, a task carried over from last month. We’ll also be performing final checks before uploading our Conservation datasets, and continuing with the preparation of Article 4 data. The next big data task will be to start the TPO data cleansing work.

We’re also working on the HMLR Land Charges programme, which aims to improve data quality, and this will run concurrently with our ODP project. Lastly, with the summer holidays and annual leave impacting team resources over the next month, we’ll need to anticipate and plan around this.