Goal 1: develop a map of our key stakeholders
We started to map out the key teams involved in grant onboarding and what these teams are responsible for.
This will help us to:
- understand which teams feed into the grant onboarding process at which times, and how they do that
- understand who we need to keep updated with the progress of our discovery and how best to do that
- fill in key knowledge gaps and answer questions around areas that our research up until this point has not been able to -know that we’re talking to the right people with the right expertise.
We liaised with senior leaders for some of these teams to help us determine who we might need to speak to for user research. A big thank you to Colin Stronach, Ingrid Beckett, Richard Stewart and Louise Robinson for helping us with this.
Goal 2: review prior research around grant-onboarding and the complexities of grant management
So far we have reviewed:
- previous grant on-boarding discovery work
- work done within Design Lab
- previous user research with key funding service stakeholders
- discovery workshops with senior stakeholders around grant on-boarding and management
We also had discussions with key stakeholders who have been involved in previous work to gain an understanding of and share insight around the grant landscape.
We pulled together journey maps from existing work for our foundation and remade them in LucidSpark.
Our key takeaways
Our key takeaways so far are that:
- previous work has been about planning grants, there's been little work around onboarding grants into the funding service
- each grant is onboarded and managed in a bespoke way; there's no standard process.
- there's no overall view of how a grant can be onboarded to ESFA or how a grant should be managed
- there are no existing overviews of user journeys
- colleagues often don’t know what tools are available to help them and there is no written guidance to help them make decisions or take actions around onboarding
- we don’t have a joined-up view of where the pain points are for people involved with on-boarding or managing grants
Key artefacts
We've been documenting what we know, what we think we know, and what we don’t know about grant onboarding. We've tracked this in 2 key documents that are continually being revisited.
We've created a list of assumptions (what we think we know), that will be explored through the discovery.
We've created a list of questions to which we don’t know the answers. This will inform a research plan and help us ask the right questions when we engage with people from across the funding service.
Goal 3: begin to map the current as-is business landscape
This draft as-is business process diagram shows our current understanding of how grants move through different functions within the funding services.
Sprint 2 goals
Next sprint our goals are to:
- identify key knowledge gaps
- create a user research plan
- begin to map existing user journeys informed by user research