OUR PROJECT

Colchester were continuing to develop a trial canvas application for our Waste & Neighbourhood Teams working within our community, enabling them to receive and manage tasks on a smartphone, in real-time, out in the field.

Adoption was rapid with 71 task types being managed within Responder (our name for our alpha version of the app) and a total of 50,014 tasks managed, in the first 12 months across 2020.

Our experience of building the application and user feedback, meant that we had some progressive ideas around how we could make Responder even better and optimise it as a fully supportive task management application for not just Waste & Zones but any task management requirement.

We started to look at how we would plan our approach for Responder2 (called “Task Smart”), and this coincided with the announcement that funding applications were being accepted under Round 5 of the Local Digital Funding for Beta phase, please click on the following link for our Local Digital Project.

Colchester applied with Maldon & Tendring District Council as partners, and were successful in securing funding for our Responder2 (Beta) application Task management tool for neighbourhood services staff – Local Digital and we start to deliver the project from January 2022.

We are re-engineering Responder2, as a templated task management application. With standard modular components and formulas, that can be configured out-of-the box by the end-user using the Microsoft Principles of low-code. It is important to keep costs low, and with this in mind we will be basing our model, on the standard Microsoft 365 accounts across F3 and E3.

The standard modular components support application development within this licensing model, with options for enhanced functionality, as the model opens up a full range of capabilities for a fully progressive development roadmap.

Once the final version 1 of the Responder2 (Beta)  standard template model for task management is productised; Then it will be packaged up and made available to other authorities, for downloading and configuration to meet their own needs.

The first phase of development began in January 2022, and the partnership is currently in the process of setting and prioritising our in-app functionality and level of customisation.

Which in turn will drive our model design and lock down our version 1 components, that will make up Responder2 :

Gallery – allows you to see and navigate data via a template of screens

Screens – visualising data on devices (mobile, tablet, laptop)

Cards – area of screen showing records from data sets such as SharePoint lists e.g. Task Type or Status fields

Controls – how we interact & visualise our data records e.g. drop-down status field with multiple values

Properties – Each control has properties and we can set status field values for position on screen and size etc.

Function – Allows us to interact and change properties e.g. if status field set to complete, then change text to green