Goal 1: hold a workshop to refine and validate our journey map and process map
We held a series of workshops to validate the business process map with stakeholders.
We also investigated the role of spreadsheets within ESFA and found that digital systems are effective when setup properly, but this can take time. Even after a digital system is set up, verification processes using spreadsheets take place to ensure correct sums of money are paid.
Working with spreadsheets can be quicker than using the digital systems, which leads to them being the preferred option under some circumstances.
Many payment instructions for funding are created using spreadsheets and sent directly to business central for processing, rather than through the Funding Services' digital systems.
There’s a combination of funding that falls into this category:
- funding calculated by the ESFA which doesn’t use the digital system
- funding for which the finance data is directly provided to payment teams by DfE (this also doesn’t use the automation provided by digital systems)
This data can often be outdated and incorrect, meaning by the time the payments team is ready to make a payment, a considerable amount of manual work is required to correct and transform the data into a format which can be used by the finance systems.
Next steps
The data gathered for grants differs depending on the age group the grant relates to. The next steps of this work are to capture the specific process around each grant by age group.
Goal 2: conduct user research with grant managers
We conducted user research sessions with grant managers, but recruiting people was tricky. We asked stakeholders for a list of suitable people to approach but found that often the people we contacted weren’t involved in the process.
We conducted in depth interviews and found that grant managers were not familiar with the term ‘onboarding grants’. This is important because we need to mirror our users’ language.
Grant managers simply see ESFA as the means to deliver a grant and don’t think about ‘onboarding’ to the service. We discovered that many found the process unclear and would’ve liked more guidance at the beginning. They also felt that grant management involved a lot of time emailing back and forth and would prefer to supply information in a standardised way up front.
Next steps
The user research is following the life cycle of a grant and after analysing the grant manager interviews, we will move on to research with Funding Policy Implementation (FPI) colleagues in the next sprint before moving on to research with Operational Excellence (OpEx) colleagues.
Goal 3: identifying emerging areas of interest
We’re beginning to see some topics crop up repeatedly.
These topics include:
- the opportunity for guidance for grant managers during grant onboarding
- ideas relating to coaching grant managers when designing a grant
- creating more transparency around grant onboarding, particularly the change gateway process (we know that work is being done in this area)
- the constraints that prevent ad hoc grants from being systematised which leads to more work when issuing payments
- constraints around erroneous payment data that leads to more work through reconciling payments
These areas are not our final recommendations and are subject to change.
Sprint 5 goals
- create process maps that group funding streams by age group and verify with stakeholders
- identify and prioritise opportunities
- analyse and report user research with grant managers who have onboarded their grants into the funding service
- revisit our questions and assumptions log to see what we can answer