A new 'start-up' Inward Investment service for Barnet

We are proud to have been working with the London borough of Barnet this year to help them launch a ‘Minimal Viable Product’ (MVP) version of a new Inward Investment service.

What does this mean and why have we taken this approach?

Instead of going through the formal steps that would be associated with launching a new council service, we worked with Jamie Robinson, Head of Economic Development and teams across Barnet taking an agile philosophy to approach the new service as if it was a ‘startup’.

The Inward Investment service is now based within Barnet’s new Business Support team, which is headed by Oli Pinch.

What does approaching the new service as a startup mean?

It has been about doing five principal things:

**1** Identifying what will be central to the service’s value proposition - in this case two things: firstly, a marketing brochure that can be shared with interested businesses and act as a way to test out what could feature on a future website, and (2) a new ‘property search’ function that will enable interested businesses to get a broader look at what space is available in Barnet beyond what is advertised on commercial real estate sites.

We hosted a stakeholder workshop with a cross-council team to generate core straplines to attract target businesses, the central message being: Be Part Of The Growth Story.

**2** Designing internal processes and systems that can support how to engage and take potential businesses through the process and land them into the borough. Ensure these processes include all departments that are involved and can benefit from inward investment and intelligence from different standpoints: including Insights, Planning, Property and External Funding teams.

**3** Instilling a straightforward agile framework to evaluate where you are against where you want to be and define the next round of features, tools and needs.

**4** Tracking value in real time so that you’re able to understand performance, and communicate value and performance across the organisation.

**5** Giving the service a home so that potential features can be captured and new iterations can be championed from a department that sits at the centre of the authority.

I’m delighted to be able to share that the service has recently been soft launched and is receiving a healthy level of enquiries.  You can see the inward investment brochure here.

Here are some takeaways we think will be useful for other authorities considering this approach:

A. Make space in the middle of organisations for autonomy.  It worked because Barnet’s teams are empowered to follow up on opportunities and because teams are able to work together without having to always go up the reporting chain.

B. The MVP focus sometimes leads you to produce completely new deliverables that weren’t expected - this can mean that there needs to be constant expectation setting with the council to explain that elements might take longer than envisaged and help them balance needs.

C. It is crucial that data is carefully structured so it can be migrated easily from workaround tools into formally scoped systems. Think about ‘master data’ from the word go!

Further reading on this: our friends at Inner Circle recently wrote a good piece in the Municipal Journal about the importance of taking a start-up mentality.

Local, Unitary and Combined Authorities - please let us know if you’d like to speak with us about how we can set up an MVP of an Inward Investment - or any other service - for you.