Dog Licenses

An overview of the currently inactive Dog Licenses project

Project Overview

The Dog Licenses app is a tool for applying for, renewing and looking up a dog license in the City of Boston. The app is owned by Animal Care/Control.

App is currently located here: https://www.cityofboston.gov/animals/licenseapp/

Yearly maintenance needed on this app: Dropdown for previous year needs to be updated yearly around the turn of the new year (January 1) so that people can reference a license number from the year prior.Dropdown for year needs to be updated yearly around the turn of the new year (January 1) so that people can reference a license number from the year prior.

Project Purpose

Improve the existing business process(es) associated with applying for new dog license or renewing/looking up an existing dog license.

Current process:

Tracking: Essentially the cityofboston.gov sends Animal Care and Control an email, and staff manually enter information from that email into Chameleon.

Chameleon is a software used by Animal Care and Control to track the licenses - all info that is submitted. Theoretically shares information nationally with any groups that also use the software and/or with major sites for lost pets, etc.

Form Submission: Custom asp.net form app.

Payments: Connects to Invoicecloud payments API - payment data sent via invoicecloud.

Desired process: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_0Rju6iKR0aWXl0SzI1bUJ4LWc

Project History

05/07/2019 - Reilly checked with Susan Hynes - Susan couldn’t find any contracts in Peoplesoft financials for Chameleon or Chameleon beach

Animal Care and Control mentioned that Georges/Enterprise worked with Chameleon, so Jeanethe check with Joe/Goerges on this. Georges said the only one he knew that worked on a connection for animal licenses was Jeff Ng who helped connect cityofboston.gov to invoice cloud a few years ago. More on this here: See line 20 here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P6aBfR0rlltQgrCupTcvCvO70HzViQe6HxI3IiJWLXA/edit#gid=1207577308

Project next steps

Things to explore:

• General discovery with Alexis/Animal Care and Control

• Explore use of chameleon (https://chameleonbeach.com/), i.e. software used by Animal Care and Control to track the licenses - all info that is submitted.
• Explore automation of manual entry of information from emails (cityofboston.gov) into Chameleon. Can this be automated?

• Discrepancies between what is asked in person or via mail versus what is asked online. Note: There are differences - Example: We don't prompt for the aging population to get a discount like we do in person and via mail.

• Explore fee waiver use cases (e.g., do seeing eye dogs get fees waived?)

• Online payment. Is this another opportunity for Stripe? Currently connected to Invoice Cloud, but users get kicks to invoice cloud landing page.

• Explore merits of moving to Drupal or something else like forms, relative to keeping the app separate?

Existing issues/obstacles:

• 'Breaks' from time to time due to miscellaneous issues

Existing assets:

• We have feedback from constituents from feedback emails and customer satisfaction survey which is a Seamlessdoc > needs to be pulled/analyzed.

Project Plan

Jeanethe is on deck to set up a time with Animal Care and Control for next steps

PHASE I: DISCOVER

• List of internal users and roles

• List of external users groups

  • Anyone needing to get a dog in Boston licensed, which

• User journey map

• For each group, a list of their needs, and whether/how they are being met by existing processes or technology

• Summarized insights from interviews with users (internal and external)

• Summarized information and supporting documentation on existing processes and technologies and any constraints they impose

• Survey of existing solutions (digital or not, in government or other industries)

• Metrics to determine what success looks like

• Hypotheses you will test during the prototyping phase

PHASE II: PLAN

• Project scope

• Preliminary project timeline, including milestones, deliverables, and resources needed at each stage

PHASE III: PROTOTYPE

• Define minimum viable prototype to test with users

• User testing plan and script

• Summarized findings from user testing

PHASE IV: BUILD/BUY

• Build vs. buy recommendation with supporting rationale

• If buying, summarized information on the vendor selected

• List of expected phases of implementation (e.g. staged releases or alpha version)

• Documentation on the technology or processes involved

• Plan for collecting and incorporating feedback

• Plan for publicizing the product

PHASE V: IMPROVE

• Notes from retrospective

• Feedback from users post-launch

• User metrics

• Plan going forward