Goal 1: complete phase 1 of user research
Our primary research goal for Phase 1 was to understand the experience of policy colleagues who design funding when it comes to designing funding with the funding service. A secondary goal was to understand the funding services’ perspectives of their interactions with policy.
We’ve completed research sessions with:
- 3 members of the Funding policy implementation team
- 3 members of the Service delivery team
- 5 members of the Operational excellence team
- 6 policy colleagues who design funding
We used inductive and deductive coding to analyse the research outputs.
Goal 2: complete factfinding with subject matter experts
In this sprint we spoke to subject matter experts from the Funding policy unit, the Operational excellence team and the Funding policy implementation team.
The information from these conversations has helped us to further develop and contextualise our understanding of how grants are currently designed and operationalised.
Goal 3: complete audit of existing content
We’ve completed our content audit of existing relevant guidance and documentation.
For each piece of content we’ve recorded:
- the author
- the intended user
- the intended purpose
- the format
- how it’s accessed
We’ve also added notes on high level content considerations such as structure, language, accessibility and cognitive load.
Goal 4: complete analysis of findings from phase 1 and prepare to play back to stakeholders
We brought together our findings from user research, factfinding with subject matter experts and our audit of existing content. We analysed the findings and found the common themes.
We prepared a LucidSpark board to share with our main stakeholders.
Goal 5: update the as-is journey map
The Onboarding grants discovery team produced a map of the as-is grant design journey. We’ve added further findings on the pain points at the parts of the journey within our scope.
Goal 6: establish the opportunities we want to test solutions for in phase 2, and prepare for ideation workshops
From our findings, we’ve identified the opportunities where we could make an impact.
We've framed our opportunities as 'How might we' questions. A 'How might we' question is a design thinking method for framing problem statements.
'How might we' questions:
- start with insights you've uncovered
- are broad - to generate as many ideas as possible
- avoid suggesting a solution
- are focused on a desired outcome
- are phrased positively
Our opportunities are How might we:
- ensure that policy colleagues designing funding (PCDFs) can quickly identify and connect with the right people in the Funding service at the right time?
- ensure that there is early engagement between PCDFs and the Funding service?
- ensure that PCDFs have the information they need to design funding that is less complex to operationalise and deliver?
- enhance the methods of engagement between PCDFs and the Funding service, as well as other stakeholders, to add structure, facilitate collaboration and record decision making when designing funding?
- capture and share lessons learned from previous grants to improve future designs?
We’ve mapped these opportunities to the relevant parts of the as-is journey.
In our next sprint we plan to hold ideation workshops. Ideation is the process of generating a broad set of ideas, with no attempt to judge or evaluate them. An ideation workshop is a safe space for this to happen. We’ll be coming up with ideas for solutions to the opportunities we’ve identified. We’re inviting research participants who expressed an interest, and stakeholders.