Brighton and Hove City Council - Digital Housing Case Study transcript


Hi I’m Jamal Langley. I’m from Brighton and Hove Council. I’m a Project Support Officer.

I would say the most useful thing I’ve learned is user research and user testing. I found that something I’ve just started to apply to my work for instance, I do a bit of data testing, and it's collecting data for central government - the staff have to collect the data. I realized that they were struggling with it, so I sat down beside them and started learning how they were collecting the data and what could be done to improve that. Before I knew it, I was applying these principles. So, it’s something that I’ve really benefited from.

The biggest problem for us has been our IT provider. There's been huge delays. What was meant to be due last year has taken an additional year and we're still looking at a deadline some months in the future. One of the benefits of that though is that it's given us a lot more time to apply these principles that were looking at, that you've taught us so for instance we've been able to apply more user testing to understand our customers more and then put those principles into the final project.

We're working in a partnership so it's about splitting the work between our partnerships. I’m meeting up with them more than we could, and we've actually put pressure on them and now that they're actually, getting to the problems and we're getting some solutions.

I think the great success has been working within the partnership. What we used to do individually now we do collectively. It's saving us huge amounts of money and also, time.  And also, working in partnership we can learn from each other. So with the Sussex partnership there's five local authorities we’re involved in it, and we used to work with them loosely but now we're coming together and it's just it's beneficial to us all.