LGSS Digital Blog

Service design for local government

Blue Badge – club together, pay it forward

It’s the end of a busy few months. At LGSS Digital, we’ve been working hard to release BadgeAble, our first application developed with all three of our partner organisations.

The challenge

For those not in the know, the Department for Transport gave notice that they were replacing the previous Northgate Blue Badge Information Service (BBIS) with an online form and badge printing supplier. This left councils with a gap in the middle for case management. 

Two years ago, we worked with Cambridgeshire County Council to develop an automated Blue Badge digital service and as a result, already had a live, user centred, service in place.

We conducted some further user research and identified ways we could support increased channel shift and easier administration for discretionary applications in the back-office. 

We were able to reuse our service design, along with some additional capabilities we had developed, to form a new multi-tenanted service that we could implement for all of our partners. 

Building things with customisation and flexibility also means we can also support any future partners with the same need. And crucially, we can do it in next to no time, and without charging huge fees or licence costs.

Getting involved

As a Head of Service I don’t often get the chance to be involved in the detail of project delivery – tending to work at a programme or strategic level and empowering my amazing team to crack on with things and generally be brilliant.

But for the blue badge application, given its span across multiple partners as well as our first multi-tenanted product, I was shipped in by our Digital Programme Delivery Manager to act as Product Owner. I have to be honest and say that I really enjoyed this role. It has helped me to appreciate my team in so many new ways, while also affirming that our agile approach and supportive culture are the right way to go.

I also thought that I would end up having to balance the priorities of competing interests from 3 different organisations, but I can honestly say that it has been an absolute pleasure to work with the different service leads from our 3 partner councils.  I put this down to a collective focus on user needs and a genuine passion to get things right (not to mention an immovable timescale – which always helps sharpen the focus!)