The Client
Leading Lives provides high quality social care support for people with learning disabilities, autism and complex needs, and they operate through a team of hundreds of care workers across the East of England.
The Brief
With a large and multifaceted IT project underway with external developers, senior figures at Leading Lives felt quite disconnected from the work. They felt unsure whether the project was heading in the right direction, that priorities were in the right order, or even whether the project would deliver on their care workers’ needs.
So they asked us to help them better plan for its delivery, to reinvigorate their internal stakeholders and to come up with ideas for a much-needed part of the system: ways for care workers to better support clients at home or in day centres.
Project phases
1. A Design Sprint run alongside care workers that identified the core challenges in service delivery and client support. This included huge overheads in updating client records, clashing teams overwriting each other’s work, and a sense of wasted effort.
Mid-fidelity concepts showing a mobile view that allows care workers to see their assigned social care visits, and record their interactions with clients.
Mid-fidelity concepts showing a laptop view allowing care workers to see their assigned social care visits, review their upcoming schedule and comment and assign tasks between other workers.
2. Prototypes and user testing for a new concept for care workers to log client interactions quickly, communicate with their colleagues, and assign and manage support tasks.
Central here was the idea of moving away from paper writeups to clients having a ‘living running record’. Interactions and needs could be logged at the touch of a button, with the details completed later. This allowed the care worker to focus on their relationship with the client.
Example output from our roadmapping workshop for the larger care-worker client-support system.
3. A Roadmapping Workshop with care workers, developers and product leads to set a phased approach for work on the existing system. This organised product themes / workstreams by phase (new features, usability improvements, data management, internal engagement etc), according to the value delivered by each, the technical dependencies involved and more.
The roadmap allowed Leading Lives – and their board – a better sense of the project timeline and resources involved, and gave them the clarity they needed.
