Goal 1: identify knowledge gaps

We’ve created a Questions and assumptions tracker and invited our stakeholders to help us either answer our questions, or tell us who can.

We carried out an exercise to regroup and prioritise our questions. We looked at whether they were ‘must know’ or ‘nice to know’, and whether they could be answered by business analysis or user research.

Principles for when we reach out to stakeholders

Our service mainly involves internal users who are stakeholders and actors in the service. We have been told that these users are time poor and have been through a similar exercise to our discovery before. 

We also know that our senior stakeholders want to help with how we communicate information about our discovery to the wider organisation. 

During our discovery, we will need to make sure we are making the best use of our stakeholders’ time. 

Therefore, we will: 

  1. Know our stakeholder - what department, their role and any previous recorded videos. 
  2. Ask clear and concise questions, having referred to our question and assumptions tracker to make sure we’re asking the right outstanding questions. A discussion guide or a conversation plan will help to keep the flow of the meeting. 
  3. Consider whether the conversation we’re having might be user research. 
  4. Share questions asked and top take-aways with team after a meeting. 
  5. Be explicit about what will and won’t be covered in the meeting as well as giving context about the discovery. 
  6. Request recording the session before the interview starts, ensuring they’re comfortable with recording. 
  7. Start and finish meetings on time and follow our speedy meetings approach. 
  8. Inform our stakeholders beforehand if the team is joining the meeting.

 

Goal 2: plan user research

This sprint we completed our review of previous research, in order to inform our research plan.

Key themes

Service complexity and lack of standardisation

The existing funding service is described as a “complex landscape”. There is no golden path for onboarding or grant management.

Lack of knowledge and no documented processes

Guidance is not documented. Dependencies are found through conversations and meetings. It’s common for the process of onboarding a grant to be arduous.

Existing roles

Grant management is not a profession and policy colleagues are not grant delivery experts.

Data replication

Data is replicated for every new grant and there is a lack integration through the service. Users have to double check work or come up with workarounds.

Research questions

  1. What are the steps involved in onboarding? What are the most difficult parts of onboarding?

  2. What are the steps involved in calculating funding allocation? What are the most difficult parts of calculating funding allocation?

  3. What support is available to Grant managers?

  4. Who are the different types of users involved in onboarding and calculations?​ What are their expectations of onboarding? What are their expectations of calculations?

  5. When do grant managers think onboarding to ESFA begins? What work do they do before working with ESFA?

Goal 3: map existing user journeys

We’ve started to map the existing user journeys in LucidSpark. We’ve invited stakeholders to review and comment on the map.

We don’t currently know for certain what happens at the point where ESFA is approached to understand how the grant would be onboarded. Our current assumption is that each of the 13 functions of the funding service analyse the grant and add their assessment to a document for decision – do nothing, do minimum, do maximum, do later.

Sprint 3 goals

Next sprint our goals are to:

  • continue to map existing user journeys
  • complete the next iteration of our stakeholder map
  • complete the next iteration of current business process map
  • conduct user research with grant managers who have on-boarded their grants into the funding service, to both inform our view of the service and to understand pain points

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