Combining Contractor workflows
Thames Water uses several different contractors to help manage their infrastructure and this can cause issues with the ways of working and tracking efficiency. As Thames is moving to a centralised system, the workflows must follow.
Leakage Management
Problem
Currently Thames has several different contractors that report leakages in different methods. Some of which are still paper based or use systems that main database struggles to talk with. I was asked to come into solve this issue from service design through to product release.
Process
The project was initially a 12 week pilot/ proof of concept with possibilities after of improving the platform. Within the first 12 weeks we shadowed users of the product and identified the pain points and areas where the app could make their lives easier on a day to day.
During this period I went on various walk alongs and meet ups with the engineers to fully understand their shift workflows.
All features that we built on this product were identified through the end users giving this platform a level of recognition throughout the business making discussions and uptake much easier throughout the project.
Approval process
Jobs that were found by technicians needed to be approved by supervisors before being sent to the planning hub. This required a new view for the application for both mobile and desktop. Desktop would be a platform for all supervising levels whereas the mobile view would be for direct managers
This required visits to the depots and mapping out the current workflows through a service map. This was then adapted by the architecture team at Thames to optimise the real-time nature of the product.
