Scoping our Needs Assessment Project — the importance of scoping well

To give you a brief background, this month we were given a project to look at developing a Needs Assessment for our Crisis and Emergency Response teams. The overall problem seemed to be that our teams did not have a synchronised way of doing a needs assessment and that having this would benefit our ways of triaging and prioritising support for people we are supporting when responding to an emergency.

Identify the problem

Our first action was to get to the root of the problem that we were assigned to solve. We had a workshop with our Operations Manager, Eleanor Stack, to draw out what some of the pain points looked like, what had been done so far, and what the must-have, could have, should have, and won’t have would look like of this solution.

MoSCoW framework we started to fill out in the workshop

Through some touch points with other team members, we were able to quickly identify that currently, in the absence of a needs assessment, support was being prioritised based on assumptions and that there was minimal consistency in how we were approaching prioritisation across our different regions and emergencies.

Identifying the core problem we wanted to solve was crucial to help us better understand what the capacity of this project will look like, and how we will then approach our work.

A vision

During our discussions, we wanted to understand what our stakeholder’s vision was, to factor this into how we would be approaching the project.

This included getting a better idea of what the form would look like, e.g. having it digital but with the ability to work offline, working across different devices, integrating with our business management system, easy to use, information governance compliant, trauma-informed, etc.

Understanding the expectations from this could give us a foundation to further explore the importance, relevance, and feasibility of each of these different features in our discovery.

What does success look like

Now we had the problem and vision, we had to think about what success would look like if we delivered this project well. Drawing this out from the problem, we knew we wanted there to be consistency in needs assessments, relevancy to emergencies, improvement in prioritisation of support, confidence staff have when responding, to name a few!

Capturing what our success measures, outputs and outcomes may look like

However, what we also started to realise was that if we wanted this needs assessment to work, there would be a dependency on the staff adopting this form. This meant that we had to view the project as developing a service, rather than a stand-alone product.

We could develop a needs assessment form, capturing all the requirements our frontline staff have to better prioritise, triage and signpost in an emergency; however, if we have not embedded how teams will be adopting this use in our work then we would fundamentally be unable to meet our success measures.

It is critical to capture these dependencies as products do not work in silos and can be dependent on several other factors that could go missed.

Out of scope

We also wanted to capture what was out of scope for this project, to ensure that our stakeholders were fully briefed on not just what we would be delivering, but also what this work would not include.

At this early stage of this project, we knew that there could be several features added to the needs assessment, such as maps and dashboards, but we caveated that these could come as a follow-on piece as our initial work would look at developing the core requirements for frontline workers.

Capturing what is out of scope can align expectations with stakeholders and give an opportunity to consider what future work from the project could include.

Playback

We wanted to make sure that now that we had built out the scope of the project that everyone involved was on the same page. All of this information was pulled into a 2-page document and shared with our stakeholders to confirm our expectations before we began our discovery.

What next?

Since having our scoping document confirmed by our stakeholders, we have been able to begin designing our project approach and planning out what we need to include in our discovery phase, which is now well underway. Keep an eye out for our future blogs which will go into the details of the insight we find during our discovery and how we will embed these into the needs assessment prototype that we will be developing.