At first, our scope covered voluntary conversions only. This gave caseworkers in the Regional Casework Services team to tool to complete the conversion of a school that applied to become an academy.
After passing our private beta assessment in November, we were asked to broaden the scope to include involuntary conversions in time for us to move into public beta in January 2023.
New users
From learning about caseworkers and their role, we know that delivery officers carry out very similar jobs.
They work on school conversions and academy transfers. Where caseworkers complete voluntary conversions, delivery officers take a conversion all the way through the process, from application to advisory board and on to opening.
Caseworkers currently handle the majority of voluntary conversions. Delivery officers focus on the involuntary conversions.
Initial sketches
With what felt like a good understanding of the basic requirements, we quickly created some potential ideas and sketches to test.
Initial research
We'd done all our research so far with caseworkers. We have a really good understanding of their needs.
We knew that delivery officers had very similar roles and assumed their requirements and needs would closely match caseworkers.
However, we'd done no research with them yet.
We only had 4 sprints between the private beta assessment and our public beta launch date. That meant we were limited in what we could do and how much detail we could go into. Especially when that time period included Christmas, with Bank Holidays and personal holiday time reducing our capacity.
Our user researcher quickly organised a round of research with 4 delivery officers.
Each delivery officer had a 1 hour research session that consisted of an interview and concept testing using Lucidspark and the prototype.
We also got in touch with a delivery officer who was willing and able to answer questions. As a design team, we worked closely with them to check our understanding of the process and the accuracy of any tasks and guidance we changed or created.
What we wanted to find out
We were particularly interested in understanding if the:
- project list made sense to delivery officers
- delivery officers understood how to create an involuntary conversion
- single worksheet replacement land issues task made sense to users
- language used in the task list was recognised by delivery officers
- funding amounts and task relating to funding were any different
Research findings
Following a round of interviews with delivery officers, we discovered what worked well, and what areas we needed to iterate.
What worked well
There were several things that the research showed worked well and gave us confidence, including:
- chronological, monthly order of the projects in the project list makes sense to delivery officers
- information to identify a project in the project list (URN, school name, trust name, local authority, project type and conversion route) were all seen as useful
- users understood how to create an involuntary or voluntary project by using the green buttons, however delivery officers don't create their projects in the current process
What we learnt
There were many things we learnt about delivery officers and how they carry out involuntary conversions.
Things we learnt included:
- users want to be able to see and overview of all the projects they're working on at once on the project list. This could be as many as 20 projects
- users were unsure if the project list showed project they were working on or all projects in the system
- users did not feel there was a benefit to a list of projects that had been handed over to caseworkers
- not all users knew what a UKPRN was or where to find it
- users expected to see the school or trust name generated as once they entered a UKPRN or URN. This would help them feel reassured that they had created a project for the right school
- there was some confusion about why there would be a handover comment if the project is not being handed over to another user. Users said they'd leave that blank or mark it as not applicable
- users mentioned a "Form 7". We need to look into what this is
- users did not seem to know exactly when an involuntary conversion should complete. Most users stated that the conversion date should be 9 months from when the Form 7 had been issued
- the target date is normally set in KIM by someone who created the project (this is a different person to the delivery officer)
- content in the error message for the provisional conversion date is inaccurate and misleading
Differences in language that caseworkers and delivery officers use
There are many differences in the way delivery officers use and understand language.
- there differences in the way delivery officers refer to or name SharePoint folders for the school and trust
- some are folders are called "SAT (single academy trust) or "MAT" (multi-academy trust) folders
- some are called "Trust" folders (if it's a standard trust)
- some are called "Sponsor" folder (if it's trust with sponsor status)
- users were confused by the way roles are referred to in the build
- not all delivery officers are familiar with regional casework services team and role name changes
- some regional delivery officers still know the caseworkers as delivery officers and their team as the Operational Delivery Team
- regional delivery officers call themselves delivery officers or project leads (project leads is a hangover term from a previous incarnation of the teams)
- some delivery officers who recognised the term caseworker wondered why they would be assigned to involuntary projects (they're not)
Delivery officers do more than just complete projects
We also learnt that delivery officers carry out may roles and responsibilities.
- when they are delivering a projects, they are a delivery officer
- each delivery officer is responsible for managing the relationship with a trust or many trusts, known as a trust relationship manager
- some delivery officers also manage relationships with local authorities
Users felt that being able to log who the trust and local authority manager is in the service would be useful in case of any issues in the project that would mean that person needed to be contacted.
Designing for delivery officers
Due to the time constraints, we had to deliver something quickly.
With the roles and processes being so similar, we felt that the quickest way to deliver something of value for delivery officers would be to give them a very similar task list to work through.
We would make changes to it to suit their needs and reflect any critical differences in how they converted a school to an academy.
How we changed the task list for delivery officers
To accommodate the change in scope, we duplicated the existing task list and edited the duplicate to try and meet the needs of delivery officers.
Creating different kinds of conversions
Delivery officers are now able to use our build to create a voluntary conversion that they will hand over to caseworkers, and create an involuntary conversion that they will continue working on after advisory board.
Right now, that's something a user has to do by entering information into a form in our product.
The project exists in Prepare's product, but data can't yet be passed to Complete's product.
The goal is that this will happen in future iterations and this manual re-creation of a project in our product is a temporary solution.
How the involuntary task list is different to the voluntary task list
Changes on the involuntary conversion build include:
- delivery officers now able to create voluntary and involuntary conversions
- handover with regional delivery officer task now optional
- language describing the interaction or relationship with a school or trust changed to trust only
- process conversion grant task altered to reflect different funding available to involuntary conversions
- inaccurate descriptions in the error messages have been corrected
What we'll do next
We'll continue to prioritise changes we need to make before the service launches its public beta in January 2023.
The essential thing we need to do before public beta begins is make sure that the product is able to support both delivery officers and caseworkers to complete typical involuntary and voluntary conversions.
We're confident in our build for caseworkers carrying out voluntary conversions, and we're learning more about what delivery officers working on involuntary conversions require all the time.