Foundry

The Foundry is Birmingham City Council’s collaborative innovation hub, empowering staff to rapidly redesign services, solve problems creatively, and build digital skills for a smarter, more efficient future.

What is the Foundry?

The Foundry is Birmingham City Council’s collaborative hub for service transformation, user-centred service improvements, transformation and innovation. It has been designed to bring together colleagues from every part of the organisation to creatively solve problems and challenges, improve services, and deliver change quickly. The Foundry is different because it puts service professionals in the driving seat of change, empowering colleagues to lead initiatives and build digital skills, with the support of DTS. By blending creativity, technology, and teamwork, the Foundry transforms ideas into reality, helps deliver savings, and builds a digitally confident, future-ready workforce.

Unlike traditional project management, which can be slow and cumbersome, the Foundry focuses on tackling small business problems rapidly, delivering value at pace, and scaling up successful solutions across the council. It’s a smarter, more dynamic way of working—making a real difference for both staff and residents. We want to work with you, so get involved and be part of positive change.

What we have delivered:

Pre-planning advice online form and process
Redesigning with Commisioning of Care form
BCC Intrantet
Data Protection Impacts Assesments (DPIA)
Digital mail indexing
Housing Rota
Introductory tenancy process
Automated translations

Why Foundry came to life:

A short narrative of the problem:

Help close the budget gap
Drive financial sustainability
Empower staff and build digital skills
Modernise services and improve customer experience
Embed a new way of working
Build internal capability and reduce waste

Foundry follows a simple process:

Submit an idea: Share your challenge, problem to solve or opportunity with us
Gateway review: We work with you to understand alignment and value of solving the problem
Build zone: DTS works with you to change or improve processes or create a minimal solution that can meet your needs
Iterate and improve: We refine based on feedback

Why this approach
works:

Starts with the user’s experience
Builds things quickly and tests them
Breaks down silos
Reduces waste
Helps council teams work smarter, not harder

Foundry Conference Pack March 25 Download

Foundry
Pillars

The pillars are the basic offer of the Foundry. They are the services DTS can provide to help services improve, transform and innovate.

Digital Workplace – Upskilling staff and leveraging Microsoft 365 and open technologies.
End-to-End Service Redesign – Deep dives and rapid reviews to improve user journeys.
Solving Common Problems – Creating reusable tools, including AI tools, and Centres of Excellence.
Ideas Engine – Enabling services to propose and co-deliver innovation initiatives.
Foundry Events – hackathons that unite staff, students, and partners to rapidly test tech and solve service challenges in days.

Foundry
Principles

We value principles over rigid methodologies, giving teams a framework while allowing flexibility. This approach empowers teams to be creative and experiment.

Transparency and Open Collaboration: Work openly, share progress regularly, and co-create solutions with service teams and stakeholders.
Value-Driven Prioritisation: Focus on delivering the highest value first, using evidence and user needs to guide decisions.
Continuous Improvement and Learning: Regularly reflect, learn, and adapt ways of working to improve both outcomes and team performance.
Empowered, Multi-Disciplinary Teams: Enable self-organising teams with autonomy to experiment, adapt, and own their work.
Outcome and Progression Focused: Prioritise meaningful results and learning over perfection; celebrate progress and experimentation.
Sustainable and Balanced Pace: Maintain a healthy work rhythm, balancing delivery with team wellbeing and resilience.