Fellowship Status Report

Code for America is

partnering
with Salt Lake County to build technology solutions to improve services and strengthen the relationship between the county and its citizens,
with an aim to lower the rate at which citizens fail to appear in court, for supervision and treatment appointments in addition to lowering the recidivism rate. To
accomplish these objectives, we pursue three workstreams - build, measure, learn - to iterate quickly and ensure our decisions are data-driven and user-focused.

Phase V - Iterative Development Sprints Part 2 (06/15/2016 to 08/05/2016)

Workstream

Goals during this phase

Build
agile development

Iteratively implement features to improve case manager use of ClientComm

Focus areas: direct client access, administrative improvements, refine ClientComm v.3

Measure
data-driven
decision-making

Refine metrics on usage, client journey, client success

Target use goals (by end of Fellowship):
35+% of clients per case manager communicating via ClientComm
80+% of onboarded case manager using ClientComm daily

Learn
user centered
design

Research interface workflow for client-facing ClientComm access

Catalogue client experiences with ClientComm

Week ending 07/22/2016

This week included a major push through to Version 3.5 of ClientComm. Included in this roll out will be modifications to the
notifications flow that was rolled out last week, as well as templating, tagging, and color attributions to clients. Templating
will save case managers time by enabling them to begin to store their most common phrases and messages as templated.
They can then simply select to include them in order to send out a message to a client in a more efficient manner, with less
typing. Tagging is, well, tagging. Weve heard from case managers who have loaded their whole case load onto ClientComm
(often well over 100 clients), that keeping track of them and sorting them can be difficult. Tagging (and color grouping) will
enable organizational methodologies to be developed, both visually and otherwise.
These changes will be rolled out when we come to Salt Lake County next week. These major feature roll outs are also the
precursor to ClientComm Version 4, which will represent a major overhaul of some of the main workflow mechanics to
further streamline the tool and better integrate it within case manager workflow. At most recent count, weve set up 4
training and office hours sessions where case managers can come to learn about the new features, provide feedback, and
help us brainstorm strategies for future improvements. In addition to these events, weve also selected a number of case
managers to interview. These case managers were selected based on their monitored use and fall into a number of
representative categories that allow us to gain soft data on how ClientComm is being used by these respective populations.
In addition to these meetings, we will also be holding a brown bag lunch with Information Systems personnel over at
County, to talk about our process and how user centered design can be incorporated into other technical work.
An update on ClientComms current success levels: Well over 400 clients are active on ClientComm at any given moment.
This represents roughly 15% of the total pretrial and probation population. In addition, use on ClientComm has seen some
fantastic spikes recently (clientcomm.org/stats) and we encourage you to follow along. We are approaching 500 messages
sent per week and, if we stay in this trend, we will likely have facilitated over 10,000 messages by late September. A back of
the napkin sketch would estimate that this equates to roughly 1,200 case manager hours saved communicating with and
reaching out to clients.
If youre not done reading yet, fear not! Weve got a few great new longer form posts on our Tumblr. Last week, Ben wrote
two neat pieces on the Tackling Homelessness event at Code for America last week (
link
) and Kuan wrote about a close our
survey feature we implemented to save case managers time in providing us with feedback on the ClientComm project (
link
).
Workstream
Build

This weeks accomplishments

Next weeks objectives

Notifications logic was refined

Templating now allows users to store
common messages
Color tagging lets user group clients by
color

Finalize UX designs for message

management
Build message templates and survey page
Create UX for suggesting an unknown
number to another case manager

Measure

Implement small updates to the admin

dashboard statistics, including
notifications use tracking

Further research into summary statistics

needs in future admin board builds

Learn

Received a ~25% response from survey

to case managers using ClientComm

Observe case managers using ClientComm

Get feedback on paper prototypes of new
features and user interface

Thanks as always,
Kuan and Ben, Code for America, Team Salt Lake County