Supporting Reigate and Banstead Council with a Data Improvement Plan

Client: Reigate and Banstead Borough Council
Date: Nov 2021 - April 2022
Work: Data Maturity Assessment and Data Improvement Plan

Ambitious to make better use of data and insight

Reigate and Banstead Borough Council has ambitions to make better use of data and insight in the development and delivery of its services. It has invested in a data and insight team at the heart of the council and has a clear programme of work for this team.

The council approached us to work with them on some deliverables within the data and insight project. In particular, they asked us to support them to develop a Data Landscape Map and a Data Improvement Plan.

Data Landscape Map

To develop the Data Landscape Map we invited desk-based staff across the authority to complete a data maturity assessment using our Data Maturity Assessment Tool. We followed up with a series of workshops and interviews with key staff including staff who do not regularly use computers to gain a full understanding of the “as is” state at the authority.

We also facilitated a workshop with the data and insight team where they took a deep dive into the detailed results of the data maturity assessment and raised questions to be explored in the interviews.

We presented the council with a discovery report synthesising their strengths and areas for improvement.

Data Improvement Plan and Roadmap

We worked with senior leaders to understand the strategic goals for the authority and how data and insight could unlock or underpin these. We compared these goals to the findings in the discovery report and identified the most effective steps the authority could take to move from where it was to where it wanted to be.

We presented these findings in a Data Improvement Plan with an associated RoadMap for the council.

Six months on

Six months following the presentation of the report things are going very well at the authority. The data and insight team has been able to showcase the value of their work through nine exemplar projects and is moving onto financial sustainability projects. 

The council has been developing an internal data community, a data catalogue and rolling out PowerBI dashboards to enable teams to work more effectively with data.

Robert Steele is Data and Insight Manager at the Council he said:
“Data Orchard has excellent domain knowledge, attention to detail and they were appropriately resourced for our needs. Following their work with us we have a well-supported data movement. We have a strategy endorsed by senior management who have committed resources to our corporate team. Many staff were influenced during our work together, including service managers, to the extent that we’ve since found them more receptive to working together on improvements in their service areas. We were very satisfied in Data Orchard’s work.”