How Rapid helped Westminster City Council manage their residential properties more efficiently

Challenge

Westminster City Council owns and manages over 30,000 residential properties across London. These properties must meet minimum standards to ensure the health, safety, and well-being of the tenants. Westminster City Council also must keep the residents informed of any work taking place and allow them to track the progress of outstanding issues.

To conduct the remedial work, Westminster City Council relies on third-party contractors or in-house teams, depending on the nature and urgency of the task. However, managing the communication and workflow between these parties was a challenge for Westminster City Council, as they had to use multiple systems and manual processes that were prone to errors and delays.

Westminster City Council realised that they needed a digital solution to streamline their operations and improve their service delivery. They approached us at Rapid to help them design and implement a customised solution that would integrate with their existing systems and automate their workflows.

Approach

As with most of our product builds, we conducted a discovery phase, where we held workshops with all the stakeholders involved in the remedial works process, including the council staff, the contractors, and the residents. We collaborated with the council and identified the key personas, their goals, challenges, and data needs, and mapped out 15 different processes that could be optimised with a digital solution.

Using our low-code platform, we were able to build (in an agile manner) multiple prototypes of mobile applications and management dashboards using live data from Westminster City Council systems. Working in partnership with the council, we tested and refined the prototypes with the end-users, ensuring that the user interface was intuitive and supportive of their objectives.

The final solution is a comprehensive application that allows Westminster City Council to manage their residential properties more efficiently and effectively.

• Assign and track the remedial work tasks to the contractors or in-house teams, with clear accountability and visibility over each action.
• Sync the data between the different systems, ensuring a single source of truth and avoiding data duplication and inconsistency.
• Communicate with the residents via SMS or email, informing them of the work status and allowing them to provide feedback.
• Monitor and analyse the performance of the remedial work process using interactive dashboards and reports.

Impact

Estates delivered meaningful results for Westminster City Council, with 250–300 actions being processed through the application every week, improvements in the overall transparency between the council and residents, and increased customer satisfaction. Moreover, Estates helped the council reduce their central costs by approximately 10%, as they saved time and resources by automating their workflows.