Technology that empowers collective action around building climate resilient properties

Energy and Resources

Challenge

RBC came to Endava with the challenge of designing and codifying a Bushfire Resilience Rating and recommendation model into a self-assessment app that homeowners could use to measure their homes risk and provide recommendations on what actions to take.

Outcome

Our client’s goal

The Resilient Building Council (RBC) has spent ten years researching and building a Bushfire Resilience Rating and recommendation model to identify what actions could measurably increase the resilience of people's homes and better protect them come severe weather conditions.

RBC came to Endava with the challenge of designing and codifying the model into a self-assessment app that homeowners could use to measure their homes risk and provide tailored recommendations on what actions to take. The path to resilience needed to be intuitive, informative, practical and tailored to the home so that homeowners felt assured that implementing small changes could immediately enhance their home's resilience. It also needed to be built with a robust technology infrastructure that could scale to add value across the resilience ecosystem.

Group of people happy for common achivement

The approach taken

As RBC was a start-up and this was the first product to market in a new market space, we applied our venture design and product discovery approach. The approach emphasises building hypotheses, testing them and iterating until the initial hypotheses have been validated. Our approach leveraged the power of co-design coupled with agile delivery and quality engineering to iteratively design and build out a robust platform that can scale. This was done with experts in the RBC team and over 1,000 community members with a lived experience of the 2019-20 Australia Black Summer Bushfires.

The results were a creation of a self-assessment, rating and recommendation app that could easily be used by homeowners without expert assistance whilst producing the quality of assessments that experts could provide.

Partners built on trust

By working with Endava, RBC gained access to our cross-functional product capabilities, which encompassed expertise in strategy, innovation, design, delivery, technology, and operations. We effectively became RBC's technology team, wearing many hats to co-design, validate and build the product and provide strategic advisory on the growth of the new venture. It was a partnership built on trust, within a creative environment, driven by a shared commitment to RBC's mission and the meaningful impact of building communities resilient and adaptive to climate change.

Outcomes like no other

The build strategy was established through a 5-week discovery that shaped the overall product strategy, proposition and roadmap and allowed for the commencement of the app build to be almost immediate; overall allowing the client to see deliverables that worked with their deadlines.

The team worked to develop the assessment framework, by leveraging cost-effective, highly scalable, and reliable AWS technologies. The entirely serverless full-stack application adheres to modern standards, enabling rapid content iteration. This system seamlessly scales to accommodate a growing user base while maintaining low operational costs.

Within the first month, the application was used by over 4000 users with minimal Marketing. The design and usability of the app has been said to provide a quality of output from Homeowners that is on par with a professional assessment that would generally be quite costly. Users can complete the self-assessment in its entirety on their very first go and obtain immediate and actionable feedback for their homes