One of the Funding service’s strategic themes is to ‘grow the grant value we support’ - which includes delivering new grants. Funding has to be operationalised to be delivered by the Funding service. The current process for this handles grants on a case by case basis. This makes it expensive, complex and time consuming to operationalise and deliver new funding.
This alpha follows on from the Onboarding grants discovery. The discovery identified the steps involved in operationalising a new grant in the Funding service, the people involved, and some of the challenges.
Our how might we question is: 'How might we enhance our engagement with policy colleagues designing funding to help make it less complex to operationalise and deliver?'
The previous discovery was broad in scope. While it gave a good overview of the current process for operationalising a grant, in our first few days we realised we still had a lot of questions, gaps and assumptions about how we currently operationalise funding, specifically around the current engagement that takes place. We intend to fill in the gaps, to enable us to make recommendations to answer our ‘how might we’ question.
How we work
We work in an agile way, which includes working in 2 week periods called sprints.
The delivery team working on this alpha is made up of digital professionals, including civil servants and contractors. The roles in our team are listed below.
Product manager
A product manager sets the direction and priorities for the delivery team. They manage and report to stakeholders.
User researcher
A user researcher helps the team learn about the people who are experiencing the problem – the users. They carry out research using a range of methods.
Business analyst
Business analysts research and understand existing processes.
Content designer
Content designers make things easier for people to understand and use.
Service designer
Service designers design the end-to-end journey of a service.
Updates on our progress
We will have regular show and tells to update stakeholders on what we’ve done and what we’ve learned. We’ll also add posts to this design history.