Discovery - NeXt-Warning-System/project GitHub Wiki

The NeXt Warning Systems (XWS) Discovery took place over 10 weeks between January and March 2020.

The Discovery report outlines our findings and proposes recommendations on how we can build a next generation flood warning system to support the needs of our users, the business and wider government.

• Full Report
• Discovery Summary

The below list shows the most impactful findings we discovered. These will need to be validated in the Alpha stage of the project.

• We need to simplify our registration processes to ensure more users complete the flood warning registration journey (only 52% of people who start, finish the journey). The user journey for maintaining existing accounts needs to be dramatically improved for our users
• We are not currently supporting our biggest registered user base - Extended Direct Warnings users (of which there are around 1.2 million). We need to develop a mechanism that allows those users to manage their flood warning service in order to provide them with a more coherent, discoverable service
• In previous flood warning related projects, the needs of internal users have largely been ignored. Their experience has an impact on external users. In particular, the message sending process for Duty Officers causes issues related to timeliness and message accuracy. We should investigate how any future warning system can integrate with new forecasting and telemetry systems to provide an automated way of issuing low severity, or rapid responding flood warnings
• Feedback from our users (public, partners etc.) is not being used as effectively as it could be to inform the assessment of warning quality. We believe that Duty Officers could have a better “line of sight” to the feedback the messages they send get from users
• There is a lack of clarity from our users on our existing flood warning codes and messaging. Users are often confused as to the related severity and impacts of our existing 3 tier warning service.
• The Targeted Flood Warning Service is a much underused service. We need to invest in ensuring that TFWS is promoted more to our users with complex needs and improvement on the system should be undertaken to make it more attractive to users currently serviced by FWS. This would allow the public warning service to be made simpler and more efficient in the long term
• The inability to update our flood warning service in real time is a potential reputational risk for the business. Although some systems are able to process real time changes to the flood warning service, others are not and need to be updated on a regular “schedule” (currently quarterly). This has impacts on our users, internally and externally, and we aren't providing the best service we could
• We need to work better as an organisation to collectively build our flood warning service (and in fact any alerting service). Our services should be based on a deep understanding of our user needs, and be flexible to changes in those needs