With phase 3 of the SAVVI project (Scalable Approach to Vulnerability Via Interoperability) underway, we are delighted to be working with three partner projects as they deploy the SAVVI Playbook. We have appointed an engagement team to help those projects on-board SAVVI, and to test out our SAVVI Engagement Service.  We can use what we learn, to scale up how we engage with many more projects who want to use the SAVVI Playbook to tackle vulnerability and hardship.

SAVVI Engagement Service

The SAVVI Engagement Service is the way SAVVI works with partner projects to tackle vulnerability. The engagement service is a capability provided to vulnerability projects in order to:

  • Add value to those projects
  • Learn from those projects to improve the SAVVI Playbook
  • Capture content that can be shared via the SAVVI Catalogue with other projects and reused
  • Inform a national conversation to accelerate and unblock vulnerability initiatives.

The Engagement Team

To do this, SAVVI has established a series of roles in its engagement team: 

  • The SAVVI Coach: The SAVVI Coach is knowledgeable about the SAVVI Playbook, and leads the relationship with a project.  The Coach can call in other roles from the SAVVI Engagement Team as required. 

In phase 3, Andrew Humphreys from RedQuadrant has been appointed into this role to support partner projects. 

  • SAVVI Information Governance: The SAVVI IG is an information governance expert and can advise on how to use the SAVVI Information Governance Framework, so that data is used and shared lawfully, ethically, and transparently. 

This role is currently being supported by Nailah Ukaidi, founder and Director of Nyela IG Consultants (NIGC), a specialist Information Governance and Data Protection consultancy.

  • SAVVI Tech: The SAVVI Tech is an IT and Standards expert and can advise on how to deploy the SAVVI Data Standards and related standards and terminologies alongside the project’s existing data systems.

This support, in phase 3, is provided by Porism Ltd, led by Mike Thacker and his team.

SAVVI Products and Services

Baseline Assessment: As part of the service, the engagement team, led by the SAVVI Coach, will work with projects to map their baseline information in terms of the SAVVI playbook.

Planning: The SAVVI Coach can use the ‘Baseline Assessment’ to draw out where the SAVVI Playbook adds-value to the project and propose practical activities to implement the SAVVI process

Championing: Where a project meets a blocker, the SAVVI Coach can lead the work to describe the problem and propose options back to the SAVVI Core Team who can champion the issue on behalf of the local sector.

Learning: The SAVVI Coach, involving other SAVVI Team members as required, guides the project through its SAVVI implementation and documents its learning journey, which helps improve reusable content and the SAVVI process and standards.

The Partner Projects

The three partner projects that SAVVI has been funded to support in phase 3 are:

  • MoJ BOLD Programme:

BOLD is a ‘Shared Outcome Fund’ project, led by the MoJ, with a number of departments as partners.  The project has been awarded £20M over 3 years.  The project is working to perform data analysis as evidence for policy, by sourcing and linking data from various public sector organisations.  

The four main workstreams focus on the following outcomes: providing support to victims of crime; Homelessness and Rough Sleeping; combatting the misuse of drugs; and reducing re-offending

Priorities for SAVVI and BOLD are navigating the complex ethical, legal and regulatory requirements for data sharing, establishing suitable ways of working with vulnerability data and discovering what data is available and how to access them, particularly from local sources.

  • GMCA Data Mesh Project for Supporting Families:

GMCA has come forward to be a SAVVI Phase 3 project that is aligned to a data accelerator programme that initially focuses on the implementation of the Supporting Families programme at three GM local authorities (Bury, Rochdale and Trafford). GMCA is currently mobilising with the three local authorities in scope for the project and will use the SAVVI playbook to help with this engagement.

GMCA is establishing a Data Mesh as the data architecture underpinning the sharing of Supporting Families data. A data mesh is an analytical data architecture and operating model where data is treated as a product and owned by teams that most intimately know and consume the data. 

SAVVI and GMCA, with its partners, will work together on developing common data terminologies, cataloguing data products and operationalising data standards across the three localities.

  • Wigan Council’s Vulnerability data Repository:

During the pandemic, Wigan used data to support vulnerable people by designing and deploying a data repository to contain and match data from multiple sources about potentially vulnerable people, and record support activities, and outcomes.

The Council is now ready to build on the experience of the repository and rework it to cater for a range of vulnerability settings.  This may include creating a single Wigan identifier for people that can be used to connect operational datasets. Much of Wigan’s vulnerability data work has focused on strategic analysis but it wants to deliver more operational benefits.

The Council is now running pilot projects and considering a number of vulnerability topics to implement the SAVVI playbook, e.g. Supported Families, Assessment of Domestic Abuse, Changing Futures, Welfare during the current cost-of-living crisis, vulnerability to flooding.