Creating our final recommendations

We met in the London office for a collaborative session to create our recommendations and options for alpha.

We landed on 3 focus areas:

  • pre-ESFA
  • data
  • QA

We believe that ESFA need to address these focus areas in order to tackle the root cause of the problems.

Pre-ESFA

Our hypothesis is that operational colleagues will be able to simplify funding delivery, enabling ESFA to increase capacity to deliver more funding.

Our options for alpha are to:

  • build on the previous Funding Principles work and explore the inclusion of case studies and providing training
  • conduct a pilot study to improve ways of working between ESFA and DfE during grant design
  • explore creating guidance and templates for the process of onboarding a grant

Data

Our hypothesis is that a single source of truth will lead to increased accuracy and faster funding delivery through reduced duplicative quality assurance.

Before an alpha starts, we recommend an end-to-end usability review of the Funding Data Service (FDS) and Calculate Funding Service (CFS) to understand how we might better meet user needs.

Our options for Alpha are to explore:

  • how payments data can be brought into FDS and fed through to the process of delivering funding
  • how FDS might centrally serve and maintain data for use later in the process of delivering funding
  • the transfer of live data between tools for example FDS to Excel or Excel to SQL

Quality assurance (QA)

Our hypothesis is that operational colleagues will be able to simplify quality assurance, enabling ESFA to increase capacity to deliver more funding.

Our options for alpha are to explore:

  • how to centrally log QA activities, error identification and their details
  • creating a set of outcome-based QA approaches that can be utilised across the organisation without specialist skills or a reliance on key individuals
  • standardising the QA approaches across one funding stream

Writing our discovery report

Our discovery report is one of our key artefacts. At a huge 135 slides, it covers:

  • what a discovery is
  • what the service is
  • what existing work took place before our discovery
  • our approach
  • for each journey stage: -- the steps -- users and their needs -- key pain points -- what we found through user research -- what we found through business analysis -- opportunity areas
  • recommendations and options for Alpha

Our discovery peer review

At the end of Discovery in the Department for Education, there is an informal review called a peer review. This consists of team and discipline-specific calls to understand more about the discovery and approach, as well as a 2 hour review.

We built a story on LucidSpark, assigned team members to voiceover particular sections, and wrote narratives that told the story of what assessors were looking at on the screen. During the review, this took around an hour.

We then had an hour for questions which explored considerations in relation to the service standard and our next steps.

The peer review assessors are currently writing their report and recommendations. We are thankful for their time.

Playing back our discovery

Following our peer review, we turned to preparing for our playback. We wanted our slide deck to be different to our earlier presentations, which have features slides very heavy on information.

In the spirit of Russell Davies’ blog on doing the hard work to make it clear, we challenged ourselves to use short sentences for slides, and to use our voiceover to explain the detail.

We invited a service designer from outside of the discovery team to our editing session. This outside perspective helped us to make our presentation structure clearer and challenge whether some slides were necessary.

Our playback was well received, and we answered good questions that probed how we came to recommendations and what they could mean for the organisation.

Revisiting our journey map for the last time

We recreated our high-level journey map with key insights to help new joiners learn about the service. We asked ourselves ‘what would we have liked to know at the start of the discovery?’

We have highlighted:

  • stages
  • steps
  • users
  • technology
  • pain points
  • change initiatives
  • opportunities

Reflecting on our discovery

We held a retrospective to look back at our discovery. The 3 key lessons we learned were:

  1. Discoveries need more in-person collaboration – we only met once.
  2. Review knowns and unknowns throughout the discovery using a better method.
  3. Challenge the scope at the beginning and regularly review it through the discovery.

Next steps

Our recommendations will be circulated and discussed with senior management teams. They will decide which alpha to prioritise as well as which recommendations should be taken forward by existing teams.

We’ve also written handover notes for people who take over from those moving on to new projects.

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