We’re developing the Patchwork system some more at the moment, and so we’re going to be using this blog over the coming weeks to ask you some questions about how you think it should work, and hopefully provide you with some feedback on how we’re going to act on what you tell us as well.

We’ll be inviting you to share your thoughts by adding a comment to an individual blog post whenever you’ve got something to say. If you’d rather share your thoughts in private though, just email feedback@patchworkhq.com, which will come straight through to us here.

We’ll be starting with some specific questions about different parts of the Patchwork system and how you think they should work from next week. In the meantime though, if there’s anything you want to share about how Patchwork works at the moment, do let us know.

Looking forward to hearing what you have to say!

Hard to believe that we’ve now been piloting Patchwork in some teams in Lichfield District for nearly 6 months – but we have, and we’re now starting to evaluate it and see what we need to do to better improve the tool.

The first step in this was to get users from both the Let’s Work Together and Supporting Families projects – from all organisations – together into a workshop to start trying to find out their views of patchwork, how they’d used it and whether they’d found any problems.

And so it was in the first week of April we got together a mixture of careers advisors, social housing officers, school nurses, positive activities workers, housing officers and people from the Local Support Teams in a room along with our external evaluation team. Over the few hours of the session, everyone was encouraged – anonymously – to provide their feedback and make their suggestions for what could be improved.

I was lucky enough to sit in on the session and hear first-hand the comments of users – all of whom had to continue to provide excellent service to clients whilst trialling the tool for us. Fortunately any  nervousness I had beforehand about what they might say was unfounded. There was universal agreement that Patchwork as a tool was easy to use and practitioners could immediately see the benefits of it, not least because some of them in the room had actively been involved in designing it. We discussed whether the users wanted it, and the good news is “This pilot – practitioners have immediate buy in”, and the message was “we don’t need systems to talk to each other, we need people to talk to each other”. They told us how easy it was to add clients and maintain their own contact details – and how simple and user friendly the whole thing was. One practitioner said how he was surprised at how easy it was to add clients – “it only takes about 30seconds” – at which point another added, “yeah, I just added four before coming over here this morning”.

It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. The biggest problem staff had was around talking to the clients themselves about the tool and getting their consent to be added. We discussed at length why this might be and it seems there’s no single answer; it ranged from some client’s fears of “big brother” type technology to some young adults worrying that their parents might be made aware of the services they were using. But this reveals there’s work to be done to simplify what approval is needed before clients are added – and providing material to help practitioners answer some of these challenges when they’re raised.

We also talked about where next for Patchwork and the main message was around linking it to the Troubled Families agenda coming from Communities and Local Government and other central government departments. Practitioners recognise that a child or young adult is deeply affected by their family (however that term can be defined) and we discussed whether this could be built in – “it’s the piece of the puzzle that’s missing”.

There’s lots and lots to work through to see how and whether this can be done, but the team are already going away and discussing what this might look like, what it means technically for the tool and – perhaps most critically – what it means for information sharing.

We’re still evaluating – looking at the anonymous data to provide some stats around how Patchwork’s been used; talking to more and more people about how they used it and what they thought; and trying this all together in terms of any changes that need to be made in moving to version one of the tool.

As we work through these things, there’ll be more updates here.

Well it’s been a busy couple of months of planning and engagement in Brighton & Hove, which has given me plenty to share but little time to do so! So what’s been going on?

As in Lichfield, we’re taking a open and collaborative approach in Brighton & Hove. Having designed a prototype app, we want to work with practitioners to refine and develop it. So I’ve been out and about, meeting front-line staff to introduce them to Patchwork – getting them to think through how it may or may not meet their needs – and what more we can do in the future to make sure we are supporting them to do their jobs even better.

Responses have been positive, with many feeding back that Patchwork would fix a problem for them. It was a particularly gratifying moment when I was sat in a meeting of pastoral staff in schools listening to somebody explain that all they really needed was an easily accessible, visual picture network of people that support a child, complete with contact details. Just what Patchwork provides!

But this project isn’t just about technology. It’s also about service design – understanding how technology complements or supports best working practices. And so the last couple of months has been spent trying to understand the context of multi-agency working. How do practitioners here currently work? How do they share their involvement with a case? How can technology improve behaviours? And what might need to change?

These conversations have been incredibly helpful in understanding the current landscape – both good and bad. But what’s also become apparent is that services are not always aware of the common challenges that they all face in communicating with one another.

Workshop with front-line practitioners

Based on this feedback, we felt is was time to bring together practitioners, from across services and agencies – children’s centres, youth services, housing, health visitors, school nurses, community safety, police, probation – to surface and share these challenges, outside of their silos. So we recently held a workshop with over 65 frontline practitioners to start discussing these issues openly.

An activity about how practitioners share their involvement with a child, revealed interesting responses about the ease of establishing contact and developing relationships with other services:

“There are issues around finding out who the officer is for a given family”

“Difficult to establish who is working with a client. Clients can be unclear who is their worker and from what agency they come”

“Their relationship is very important to us. But we are not informed or contacted about service involvement with a client”

“I’ve had children in my care who were on the child protection register and I didn’t even know about it”

“Other agencies value their input more than they value the input of other agencies”

“The fact there they have a relationship with a client is sensitive information in itself”

Allowing practitioners to share some of their struggles openly was important and cathartic. It helps us reach a collective understanding of the challenges and is a necessary step to an acceptance of shared solutions. With these challenges in mind, we looked at what Patchwork might have to offer. Gez, Patchwork’s Product Manager, gave a walk through of the prototype app.

As expected, there was no shortage of questions and suggestions,

“can you limit information that some people are able to see?”

“can you see other practitioner’s profiles?”

“are you able to group family members together/see familial relationships?”

“ are you able to see how recent contact is between a client and a practitioner?”

“is there a timeline of involvement with the child?”

“could you add in task list and assign tasks to practitioners involved in case?”

“is there an email notification every time something changes on one of your cases?”

Lots for Gez to take away and think about for V1, while the rest of the team gets on top of our next steps.

Turning the app live! So the next key milestone is to turn the app live! We’re hoping once practitioners use it for real, they’ll be able to tell us more of what they want, and what they don’t. It’ll also give us a better sense of the user experience of Patchwork. The app will be turned live late in February and tested throughout March and early April.

Working through information governance issues. We’ve spoken before about our issues with information governance. The pilot in Brighton & Hove is helping us come to a clear and unequivocal understanding of what is and isn’t allowed.

Legal advice has established that it is appropriate for Patchwork to allow practitioners to share their involvement with a child’s case without explicit consent, to others who are providing support to a child (except if sensitive information is being shared). For some services, for example substance misuse and mental health, disclosing their contact with a child is problematic as the involvement is sensitive information in and of itself.

These services have therefore been precluded from the testing phase while we continue to work through these issues. Over the next couple of months we’ll want to really get to grips with this and work closely with those services and consider how Patchwork could evolve to accommodate them.

Working with children and families. A final important strand will be talking to children and families. Practitioners have fed back that they want to be reassured that children and families feel OK about Patchwork. It’s a concern for us too, so we’re going to be speaking to some families about how they feel about the people working with them using Patchwork to help co-ordinate their support better.

So, all in all, a productive and constructive start but lots more to do!

Image: nebarnix

Already almost at the end of January and 2012 is racing by.

It’s been a busy return to the office post-Christmas and last week saw FutureGov hosting the first cross-council Technology Strategy meeting. This brought together colleagues from Staffordshire and Brighton to start talking about some of the big issues and areas of focus for Patchwork that will be worked through over the next few months. The aim is to make sure our partners are deeply involved in the process of determining the development of the technology behind Patchwork – as well as sharing their experience and expertise.

For a first meeting, we got a lot covered – and made some fairly fundamental decisions. Despite languages such as Ruby on Rails being in no way commonplace in local government, we agreed that Ruby was here to stay. Linked to that conversation, there was unanimous support for Patchwork to be externally hosted  in the longer-term, either in the Cloud or another form of secured storage. Cloud itself is definitely seen as part of the future for both partners, although the details of the commonplace concerns over security are not fully worked through yet but we are beginning to work with a range of cloud providers to ensure we can make cloud a reality sooner rather than later.

As we move into gathering feedback from the users in both Brighton and Lichfield District, we agreed we would need to find a way to make this as visible and transparent a process as possible. Taking a user-led approach means that we want to be driven by the needs of frontline staff, and children and families, where we can – again within the limitations of Information Sharing and what is technically possible. There’s more thinking to be done about how we can start to do this with users from two different geographies, particularly in the potential scenario where their needs conflict and prioritisation of the development roadmap is needed. However we all agreed the importance of having as many channels for feedback as possible, making sure that we let users know what happens to their requirements whether they end up in the tool or not.

For me, Friday’s meeting was crucial element of co-design. We’re not only working extremely closely with the end users, but we’re also actively discussing the broader technology issues with our partner local authorities. These are things that the frontline staff my never see or indeed need to be aware of, but completely shape the direction of the product and how it will operate in the future. It was great to see two partners, both at similar stages of piloting, who are so engaged in the conversation.

No doubt the best bit of our job is getting to talk to and work closely with our partners. Friday a very good day indeed.

Image: Paolo Marconi

Talking to a room full of child protection practitioners at the launch of our work with Brighton and Hove City Council recently, I outlined the story of Patchwork to date.  The response was great – I couldn’t have hoped for more enthusiasm and participation from everyone there.  We had a full house and even a potential fire hazard at one point, until we made more space for the nearly 90 practitioners that turned up.

It was a proud moment sharing our journey with Patchwork so far and it’s clear that designing the app with practitioners instead of at them has led to a product that meets their needs.  No one questioned the point of Patchwork – all the questions were asking what it does and what more it could do (answer: plenty!).

As you can imagine, a lot of the questions were about information security.  Is it open to just anyone?  How do you stop people randomly searching for others?  And of course people wanted to know if they could upload their case notes and use it as a multi-agency messaging system.  This is where my heart sinks a bit.  Technically can we do that stuff?  Of course!  In reality will we be able to do that stuff?  Right now it seems a couple of years off.

The problem is Information Governance.  I don’t have the background to go into the detail of it, but our work on Patchwork has introduced us to a moral maze (or is that a legal labyrinth?) of Information Governance issues.  The law (or is it policy? or guidance?) is confusing to say the least, but more confusing is the way that the public sector’s policies seem set up to prevent good working links between different agencies – health, police, local councils, voluntary sector, housing associations, private companies, fire service and even individuals like parents and carers.

This post is not a rant about how bad the policies are, or how the law should be changed.  It’s a call to local authorities and other public sector agencies to invest in their Information Governance teams.  Investing in anything right now is a tall ask but if there’s anything that can save money in the medium to long term it’s having an all-star, red-hot Information Governance team.

I know what it’s like – you see ‘Information Governance’ on a budget line and think ‘That’s got ‘cut’ written all over it’.  After all, who really knows what those guys do?  Didn’t we just invest in Sharepoint?  Wasn’t that supposed to solve all these problems and mean that information is flowing round the organisation like a well oiled machine? (How’s that working out for you by the way?).

Here’s what a top-notch Information Governance team should be doing:  working out how local authorities can share information with other agencies (and vice versa) without compromising people’s privacy and security; thinking about how to work with cloud computing and the security and information implications of having data hosted outside of the council; helping staff in services understand how to use the web safely; helping you figure out how you can stop investing in big expensive systems and start running lightweight web-based apps.  I’d like to see more suggestions in the comments…

Most local authority Information Governance teams are only a couple of people strong if you’re lucky, and those we’ve encountered in the NHS seem to be about the same.  They’re overworked, under-resourced and operating in a world that is rapidly dying.  No wonder their default position is to say ‘no’ and to operate an approvals-based system that leaves you guessing at what might satisfy their standards.  They don’t have time to work together to find solutions and ways to break through the barriers, they only have time to highlight risk.  Furthermore they work in a field that is tabloid heaven.  If something goes wrong it’s their responsibility (legally) and their name in the Daily Mail.  The fear of blame is endemic in the public sector and leads to restrictive practice all over the place.  But that’s another post for another day.

The point is that it’s easy to blame Information Governance teams for not being progressive enough or for constantly blocking innovation.  But good information governance is essential to keep services running in a web-enabled world, and it’s the last thing that should be running on a shoestring.  It’s time to invest in professionals who know their stuff, have in-depth knowledge of web technology and security, and have time to support the organisation in how they use technology and use it right, not whether to use it at all.

If this post had any influence at all we’d see 400 councils rushing out to recruit their own Information Governance teams.  But in reality a district probably doesn’t need its own team, and in many ways even a county doesn’t.  It would be way more interesting to see local authorities and other public agencies investing together in a shared Information Governance resource, perhaps at county or city level.  They could afford more and better advice and the advice would be applicable to a region rather than a fragmented agency-by-agency basis.  That would put organisations on an equal footing and create the conditions for multi-agency working to be successful.

Meanwhile, back at PatchworkHQ we’ll be spending the next 6 months trying to work through the information governance issues associated with letting practitioners from different agencies just see who else is working with their cases.  The title of this post is a quote from a social worker who refuses to let the absurdity of current Information Governance rules dictate her practice, and we’re fortunate to work with many others who feel the same.

Onwards!

Image: Derek Baird

Following our recent announcement of our on-going partnership with Staffordshire County Council and long-time supporters of Patchwork at Lichfield, we’ve been working hard with the councils and partner agencies to build on the work already done to develop and test Patchwork with practitioners.

Earlier in the year we had a bunch of users in Lichfield signed up to both help us design, but then also trial the tool as part of a proof of concept – to test the functionality and see whether there’s benefits in using Patchwork longer term. We wanted to both see whether the technology worked, but also to find out whether practitioners found it useable and useful in their work.

We’ve spent the last few months working to get a longer pilot in place with strong evaluation behind it as an opportunity to really test the tool in live operation. So we’ve been working with Lichfield and our partners across Staffordshire to get this up and running so that we can measure the success of Patchwork with more cases. During this period, we’ll be asking the users some questions around how easy they find it to contact the right people in partner agencies when working with complex cases – both before and after the introduction of Patchwork. The aim is to quantifiably illustrate the value we believe the app brings given our experience so far and the anecdotal stories we now want to more rigorously capture.

This is now happening, with users from multiple agencies currently being given access to the application to play around with. Throughout the pilot, and in particular at the end of this next period of testing in 3 months, we’ll be talking to them about what they liked and didn’t like, and using this to develop the prototype into a full blown product.

As if this weren’t keeping us busy, we’re working across the county to design a roll-out of Patchwork to the other districts and boroughs, working with partners in the Fire & Rescue Service, the NHS, Staffordshire Police and a range of other organisations including the community sector, to try to extend the benefits of Patchwork across the county for the long term.

With the Patchwork team nearly complete (for now at least!) and the second site now up and running down in Brighton, it’s full steam ahead!

If you’re interested in hearing more, you can follow our tweets, or sign up for the blog updates here or the Patchwork newsletter. Also, if you would like to talk about bringing Patchwork to your council, do get in touch.

Anyone who has spent any time working in local government, and particularly safeguarding children, will be all too aware of the challenges faced by professionals in trying to stitch together cumbersome local public services to solve complex social problems. Umpteen different organisations each one with their own priorities, unique cultures and sets of rules and regulations. None able to solve these challenges on their own, all equally burdened by the weight of policy, structure and bureaucracy that often (mostly) prevents them from operating in the most effective and efficient way possible.

Our background in local government combined with a geeky enthusiasm for the power of the web, made us think that, in a world of real time communications, web technology could be used to improve information sharing and create the space for human relationships – offline as well as online.

Photo: Suburning

Over the course of two years, having been encouraged and guided by a diverse and generous group of experts who responded to our call for help, we set about testing our theory that design and digital technology might provide a route to solving the communications challenges faced by practitioners and their clients.

With the support of early partners NESTA (who continue to be loyal supporters of the project) and after some very enlightening insight in Westminster, we have spent the last year researching, designing, developing, prototyping, testing and implementing our technology supported approach to service change in child protection with our partners Lichfield District Council.

While based in Lichfield, the project was also supported by Staffordshire County Council and others like South Staffs.  They have shown their continued commitment by recently investing in the project along with NESTA and the Nominet Trust.

In Lichfield we have spent time working closely with practitioners, ensuring that we understood their needs. Through this process, we have been able to start small, building a prototype web app and approach to change that supports the most pressing needs of those people looking to support families in Lichfield and beyond.

Patchwork provides an opportunity to better connect professionals (and soon their clients), surfacing the often large and opaque network of professional support around a family and ensuring those professionals have a means by which to find one another and connect. By better joining up the dots, Patchwork improves information sharing within and between agencies by supporting better human relationships. The implementation of this web app is supported by a change team working hand in hand with councils to map out current practices and move towards more joined up ways of working.

Today we are kicking off the next stage of the Patchwork project with our new partners Brighton and Hove City Council. Very much in the spirit of the open approach to both technology and service change, again we will be working closely with Brighton to understand the needs of practitioners and their clients and build on top of the current app to best meet their needs.

This is the beauty of an open approach to web development and service change. Where once technology was fixed and change pre-packaged, we are now able to listen, learn and iterate to make sure that the approach is right and the impact on service outcomes greatest, as people feel they have a stake in the technology and an interest in helping to make it a success.

This morning Brighton & Hove Chief Executive John Barradell will address a 70 person multi-agency gathering to launch the Working Better Together Patchwork project, asking staff for their support in designing and delivering next generation children’s services.

Programme Manager Paul Brewer is up for the challenge. “The interviews we did with practitioners in the lead-up to this project made it very clear that many things get in the way of working together effectively with families. It’s difficult to know who’s involved and build the network up.  It’s even harder to maintain good quality multi-agency networks and ensure well co-ordinated support and intervention.

We believe our front line staff are best placed to design new and effective ways to work together, which will be supported by the Patchwork tool we will help shape.  We will design, build and test the tool together with FutureGov and will place an emphasis in the project on assessing benefits to front line practice and outcomes for children.  We believe FutureGov’s exploratory and collaborative design approach is the way forward and presents far less risk to the organisation compared to the large systems procurements of the past.”

Sat watching the case of Baby Peter unfold on the television last year, as with the vast majority of you I’m sure, I was left feeling hugely saddened, frustrated and powerless to help prevent such events from ever happening again. I am not a social worker nor do I work for any one of the numerous agencies involved in the extremely complex and challenging world of child protection.

However, it did get me thinking about where I might be able to provide some support, specifically around how we might be able to draw on social technologies to contribute to safeguarding children.

Two years on and a lot of work from a lot of generous, creative, supportive people later, today we are announcing the next phase in the development of what was previously known as the Safeguarding 2.0 Project.

Today we can announce that we have raised £280,000 start up investment in Patchwork – the safeguarding app. This will allow us to take Patchwork from prototype to product over coming months. The investment comes from a collaboration of councils in Staffordshire (Staffordshire County, Lichfield and South Staffs, as well as their colleagues at the Improvement and Efficiency Partnership West Midlands), NESTA and the Nominet Trust.

For us, the fact that the local government sector itself is investing in Patchwork is a big deal. This is not common. Patchwork is a start up – a “dot com”. A collection of councils coming together to invest in a public service dot com start up shows just how innovative the local government sector can be, with Staffordshire at the forefront of trialing innovative approaches to solving persistent social challenges.

This is also true of NESTA (with us from the start) and Nominet, both keen to plug the ‘start up gap’ in helping to take a proven approach to scale, overcoming the inevitable barriers of getting to market faced by small start ups – in the hard to navigate and slow moving world of government even more so.

I will save the detail on the what and how for a follow on blog post, but I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you. Thank you to all the people who have believed in us on this journey of open, uncertain innovation.

People like Jon Kingsbury, Carla Ross and Philip Colligan at NESTA; Nina Dawes, Nick Bell and Steve Winterflood at Lichfield, Staffordshire and South Staffordshire councils respectively; the team of people who have driven the project, in particular my colleagues Carrie Bishop, Ian Drysdale and Kathryn Wheatley, but also others like Eliot Fineberg, Andrew Bruce and Friday, a highly skilled and committed swat team. And above all the many great people in Lichfield and Staffordshire who have given generously in helping us to develop something that we hope can start to make a difference.