What a discovery is and why we do them
The Communicating allocations discovery team have a written a design history post to explain what a discovery is and why we do them.
Why we’re doing this discovery
The Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) is an executive agency of the Department for Education (DfE) responsible for funding education and skills providers in England.
Currently, some education and skills funding is delivered by DfE rather than ESFA. In 2022, a review of ESFA recommended that “the department should work towards transferring the responsibilities of the management of the £8 billion of funding to education settings currently led by teams across DfE into the new agency (ESFA).” New grants are also regularly set up as part of new policy initiatives.
Transferring or setting up new grants to be delivered by ESFA involves onboarding the grant into the funding service. The current process for onboarding a grant is handled on a grant by grant basis. This makes it expensive and time consuming to onboard a new grant.
The scope for this discovery is to look at how grants are currently onboarded, and to make recommendations for improvements. The funding service has secured funding via a business case for the next 3 years, which includes this work. Previous work has been done in this area and insights from this will be used to inform our discovery.
This discovery embodies the ESFA behaviour of being “user centric” - putting users at the heart of what we do. We’ll be conducting user research with as many users as we can. It’s also an example of being “collaborative”, as we’ll work closely with colleagues from across ESFA and DfE.
How we work
We work in an agile way, which includes working in 2 week periods called sprints.
The delivery team working on this discovery is made up of digital professionals, including civil servants and contractors. The roles in our team are listed below.
Product manager
A product manager sets the direction and priorities for the delivery team.
Our product manager also covers the delivery manager role. This means they are responsible for setting up the team’s agile ways of working and removing any blockers.
2 User researchers
A user researcher helps the team learn about the people who are experiencing the problem – the users. They carry out research using a range of methods.
Business analyst
In the discovery phase, business analysts research and understand existing processes.
Service designer
Service designers design the end-to-end journey of a service. In a discovery, a service designer is looking at the existing services that exist in the problem area, and the journeys users take to currently do the thing they’re trying to do.