From global events to local road runs…
Across Argyll and Bute we host hundreds of events every year. What most people don’t realise is that before an event gets the green light to go ahead a huge amount of work has already gone on behind the scenes, for our customers and across many council services.
In the past this has involved a mountain of paperwork, a clunky approval process with legacy systems and it wasn’t an ideal way to work for anyone. A new, better, way of working had to be found.
But where to begin? The team in Roads and Infrastructure started by mapping out the entire process, every step that had to happen from when an event application was registered through to approval or rejection. This could involve colleagues from the events team, licensing, venues, legal, refuse, traffic management and more. The team then turned to the Customer Support Services team to find out if there was a way to improve the overall process with a digital solution.
The development team then got started, reviewing the entire process and looking at how to turn it into a seamless online experience. After months of work across teams, public consultation and build the result is an entirely new way of working – simple user friendly forms with prompts, guidance, save functionality and notifications for customers. A comprehensive back end system that shows every event application, status, notifications and prompts for different teams. The entire process is now easy to manage across the council and we’re already seeing great results with 110 applications made since it went live last year and the decision time reduced from 119 days to 50.
Take a look at the new system.
This is Connect for Success in action: Learning Council. Maximise Useful Technology. Employee Empowerment. One Council, One Place. Agile.
