As we mark the first anniversary of Foundry, it’s a perfect time to reflect on our journey, celebrate our achievements, and look forward to the future. Foundry was established with a clear vision: to deliver value early and often by working on small, quick opportunities that solve real problems for the business and our customers. Over the past year, we have made significant strides in transforming how we work, and we are excited to continue to share our story with you.
What is Foundry?
Foundry is an innovative approach to delivering value by focusing on solving problems quickly and scaling solutions for broader impact. Unlike traditional project management, Foundry emphasises outcomes over outputs and not only involves users throughout the process but places them in the driving seat.
The primary goal of Foundry was to create a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement. We wanted to empower our staff, involve services in the design and implementation processes, foster a curious mindset and build digital skills across the organisation. By identifying pain points and addressing them with process changes and efficient solutions, we aimed to improve citizen and staff experiences while delivering value for the organisation.
Key Achievements and Deliveries
Over the past year, Foundry has delivered 14 solutions in collaboration with various service areas, stopped 4 initiatives that were not delivering the intended value, and introduced the ‘4 pillars of Foundry’ to clarify and simplify the Foundry offer and the value it brings. The ‘4 pillars’ have enabled the Foundry to introduce new services such as ‘end to end service reviews’ and ‘digital workplace,’ focusing on staff training and empowerment to use digital tools effectively. The team has collaborated with Adult Social Care and Planning services to map and redesign services comprehensively, aiming to address issues faced by Birmingham’s residents.
Here are some of our notable achievements:
- Automated Redaction – Achieved a 95% accuracy rate, helping the Disrepair Litigation Team clear backlogs and reduce fines liability to the council by £60K per month.
- Digital Mail indexing – Using AI communications mining and robotics to automatically read and index mail has reduced the time required for manual processing (approx. 3 FTE).
- Occupational Therapy communications – Replacing letters with emails and text messages as well as signposting to drop in clinics has resulted in ongoing financial savings in print and post, staff time savings (5 hours+ staff time savings per week) and a reduced waiting list for people needing this service.
- Efficiency Gains – Various initiatives have resulted in substantial time and cost savings, such as reducing the time taken to complete an Equality Impact Assessment from 15 to 10 hours, saving approximately 236 hours of senior officer time per month.
- Cultural impact – collaborating with services frequently motivates them to enhance creativity, review practices, improve efficiency, and reform internal processes. The Disrepair Litigation team is the best example of this and worked to completely eradicate their backlogs by eliminating painful processes.
- FoundryEVENTs – The team launched FoundryEVENTs including a Summer FoundryLIVE and a January FoundryBUILD. These events, in collaboration with our tech suppliers and Birmingham City University, aim to bring people together to solve problems in a hack environment and showcase the Foundry way of working.
Lessons Learned
Throughout our journey, we have learned the importance of collaboration, user involvement, and continuous feedback, learning and adapting our approach. By revisiting the value proposition regularly and stopping work that is no longer valuable, feasible, or desirable, we have ensured that our efforts remain focused and impactful. We have also recognised the value of stable teams and the need for a library of reusable tools, templates, components, and integrations.
What we are going to do next
As we look ahead to the next year, we are committed to continuing our journey of innovation and improvement. Our future plans include:
- Scaling solutions: We will focus on scaling successful solutions to maximise their impact across the organisation.
- Building internal capability: The Digital & Technology Services will be investing in training for staff to include upskilling in emerging technologies such as AI and data science. We also aim to build internal capability and skills to become self-sufficient in delivering automation initiatives through Foundry.
- Delegating ownership and creating toolkits for Foundry’s Pillars: We will continue to empower teams to own the Foundry’s four pillars. We are planning to create toolkits to enable teams to kickstart, embed and adapt the Foundry approach.
- Innovation and citizen involvement: Experimentation and innovation initiatives with technologies that can have a direct impact on our citizen’s experience of Birmingham’s services and involving them in Foundry.
- Working more transparently: We will start to be more transparent and share openly what we are doing within Birmingham’s digital Foundry as we continue experimenting, refining, and adapting our approaches to find effective ways to deliver value for the council and our residents.
Conclusion
The first year of Foundry has been a remarkable journey of transformation, collaboration, and learning. We are proud of what we have achieved and are excited about the future. As we continue to innovate and improve, we remain committed to delivering value early and often, solving real problems for our business and customers, and making a positive impact on our organisation.
Thank you for being a part of our journey. Here’s to another year of success and innovation with Foundry!
Save the Date: FoundryLIVE This Summer
We are thrilled to announce that our next FoundryLIVE event will take place this summer! FoundryLIVE is designed to digitise council staff by inviting super users and digital champions to participate and share expertise. This event is not just an opportunity to showcase our achievements but also a call to action to continue driving forward with passion and purpose.
Join us for three exciting days of innovation, collaboration, and inspiration. For two days, we will run Hackathons where we will be looking at turning small problems into real solutions as well as working with partners and students from local universities to experiment with new and emerging technology. Our conference on day 3 will feature keynote speeches, panel discussions, hack playback and success stories and more!
We’ll be sharing a registration link with details of the agenda very soon, follow #DigitalFoundry #FoundryLIVE25
