Sprint 2 wrap up
We started the week with a sprint review in which we talked through what we had done in the past two weeks with some of our stakeholders. We agreed that we had partially achieved what we set out to do and had learned lots on the way. We have...
created an overarching hypothesis
refined our opportunity tree to reflect any new or refined user needs and added evidence where we have validated solutions that would help to meet those user needs from our second round of research
gathered feedback from users on a range of content types, exploring proactive and reactive content, and interaction with our ransomware prototype
made progress in understanding the existing cyber security content landscape.
We highlighted that we are still finding it challenging to (1) engage with low digital maturity schools and (2) understand what content might be be useful in the context of Plan Tech, due to not having a live service to work with.
Rolling assessment
On Tuesday we met with our GDS assessors - Paul Kelman, Tom Adams & Andy Jones - for the first of three sessions in a rolling assessment. The aim of the session was to provide an overview of the Alpha, from where it sits within the wider portfolio and programme, to the detail of what we are aiming to achieve.
It was a great opportunity to talk through the problem and get some objective feedback. Some interesting questions were raised around the 'whole problem', which we'll work through with the SLT in the coming days.
Sprint 3
Reflecting on our Sprint 2 findings, we decided to focus the next sprint's work on two areas:
- bridging - supporting conversations between technical and non-technical staff, and
- scalability - validating whether findings the more reactive topic of ransomware are equally applicable to more proactive topics
Our sprint goals
- Demonstrate what content will help support conversations between technical and non-technical users.
- Extend and validate ways content might be presented and accessed for all other topics.
The team quickly got started planning user research, auditing content and ideating. We had a full-team ideation session, which lead to a whole host of different ideas. We knew we wanted to focus on a proactive topic, and landed on password security as the topic for this sprint's prototype.
We decided to stick within cyber security for this round of research because of the level of knowledge within the team, the existence of a live "service" (Standards) and available content. We're considering the shift from a reactive topic to a proactive topic to be a step on the way to full validation of findings, later in Alpha, using a non-cyber security topic.
Alongside this, the team progressed investigation into technical solution options, including attending a productive conversation with the programme's tech leads, in which we gained clarity on the direction our investigation should take. We are now focussing on validating whether the department recommended Azure + Contentful stack meets our needs, and only if not, will we dig deeper into alternative options.
We also spent some time interviewing cyber security SMEs, including reps from the Sector Cyber and Capital ICT teams, to ensure we take advantage of the knowledge these teams have gained from working with schools in the area of cyber security.
Timeline extension
The more we dig into this topic, the more uncertainty and complexity we have found. With this in mind, we began discussions about potentially extending Alpha to ensure that we have enough time to build confidence in the solution we ultimately recommend. On Friday a two sprint (4 week) extension was approved.
Next week...
- Within our UR plan we’re hoping to speak to some groups of users - teams consisting of SLT and technical roles - to further explore their relationship, how they work together and what sort of content would aid communication and collaboration.
- We'll revise our UR participant SoW to cover the extension
- We'll continue to make progress in the background on developing a way we can use the Com-B framework to analyse research findings to discover positive behaviours we might want to encourage, and appropriate interventions that would help encourage these.