Consular appointments discovery – looking outside the department

This is the last in a series of three blog posts discussing the discovery phase for our consular appointments transformation. See the posts on who, what, how and identifying user needs.

As part of our discovery phase for the consular appointments service, having done a fair amount of navel gazing we also wanted to look at what was happening outside our department. What could we learn from others, what technical resources were there that we could benefit from, and could we give something back in the course of our own service development?

Looking at the market

I started out by reviewing a wide range of appointment services and providers on the internet, to see what I could learn about their interaction design, schedule management and configurability. At the outset I didn’t appreciate quite how widespread online appointment services are, but that changed as I came across examples for beauty salons, personal trainers, doctors, golf instructors, electronics repairs, therapists, banks, language schools, and resources such as a room or a single desk. Yep – you name it and someone, somewhere is probably offering a way to book it.

Then of course there were other government departments to talk to, to see what I could learn and – hopefully – re-use if it met our users’ needs. I spoke to HM Passport Office about their alpha for passport appointments, and the Department for Work & Pensions who are running a pilot for booking training sessions offered by job centres. I talked to the London Borough of Redbridge about their experience of handling appointments, and spent some time with members of the Ministry of Justice digital team who run the service for booking prison visits. I’m particularly grateful to Mat Harden from the MoJ who talked me through their code and has open sourced the calendar interface. Mat also invited me along to usability testing sessions so that I could witness first hand how users are interacting with their service on desktop and mobile.

This research gave a valuable insight into the market as a whole, both inside and outside of government, which in turn helped me make more informed decisions about suppliers

Taking it forward

Having wrapped up the research the next decision, in keeping with the experience of the Chevening transformation, was that old chestnut: build or buy?

On the one hand, given the numerous examples I had come across, this seemed to be a clear case of buying commodity software. On the other hand, we had some particular configuration and security requirements in mind, and I was also keen to pay only for what we needed. I was conscious of my experience in a previous job where the company paid for expensive licenses for a CRM tool but only used a fraction of the capabilities, and I had already come across several suppliers who offered appointment booking – but only as part of a wider casework tool. The consular team already have casework functionality covered, and we certainly did not want to pay for something we did not need or plan to use.

So, keeping an open mind, we decided to send our requirements to both Software as a Service (SAAS) suppliers and custom software houses on G-cloud. We received expressions of interest from both kinds of company, and in the end appointed BookingBug, a SAAS supplier with a tight focus on bookings and a level of configurability that could meet our needs. The Department for Work & Pensions are also working with this supplier, so the configuration, process and assurance work we are putting in place will benefit both departments. We are also planning on using the open sourced MoJ calendar interface in the user journey, and will be extending it to work with the AngularJS framework which BookingBug uses – as well as adding new functionality such as handling timezones.

With the procurement finished our discovery phase has drawn to a close, and we are now underway developing the alpha version of the new service. I’ll post an update on our progress in a few weeks.

Follow Mark at @markbarlow