5 April 2022 to 19 April 2022: Support triage and progress update build
The weeknotes for this sprint are from Adam Lee, Software Engineer and Emily Fuller, Grants and Investment System Support Manager. We will focus on the build of functionality which allows grantees to give a progress update for their project, as well as information around the new support triage process.
New support triage process
Following the launch of the new Investment Management Service (IMS) in March 2021, we have established a support channel for both internal staff and external users (applicants and grantees). As the service has grown, with more applications being submitted and more projects managed using the new system, we have taken the opportunity to review how the Fund supports its users.
Most support requests come to the same place, centralised using Hornbill ticket management software. Both internal staff and external users can email a dedicated inbox, which then converts their issue, feedback or query into a support ticket. Alternatively, external users can complete a form online, which feeds into the same channel. From there, a team of staff are lined up to offer guidance or troubleshoot issues. Our customer service team offer frontline support for routine issues or questions. Any system maintenance or error queries are then escalated to the Digital Service Design Team (DSDT). A second escalation point lies with the Knowledge Hub and process team, for support requests that are policy driven, rather than queries on how to use the service.
Support is also given through Business Support staff in area and country teams. Users will use area/country phone lines, shared inboxes and their Investment Manager as their first point of contact. We are now looking at ways we can collate issues raised through these channels to ensure that we are able to prioritise work and fixes based on frequency of requests.
Progress update arrears portion
From the technical side of the team, we are excited to deliver the first end to end task of the frontend Payment in Arrears journey. This development spanned the creation of both the Project Update and Approved Purposes tasks that require a user to provide the information necessary for payment. Users will complete a page-by-page form, providing information, documents and details about their project’s progress -dynamically generated based on previously provided information pulled from Salesforce.
The questions answered by the user inform the form path to retrieve further information, such as requesting further details around risks and procurements, as well as how they would like to share this information — be it a direct file upload or through further manual form entry.
Once a user has completed the required tasks, they are presented with a ‘Check your answers’ (as seen in the screenshots above) page to review all the information they have provided and allow them to make any necessary adjustments. The user’s progress through their list of tasks is also tracked and indicated to show the tasks they have remaining.
Coming up
In the next coming sprint, we will be focusing on two of the next important parts of the journey. The first is the integration of the completed portions of the funding frontend arrears journey with Salesforce. This will allow the data collected from the user action form to be reviewed by an Investment Manager and actioned appropriately. This work will ensure that the front-end can communicate with and normalise the data into a format that can be received by Salesforce — validating the work completed by the salesforce staff on our team.
The second is to begin the implementation of the Payments portion of the journey, which includes providing spend reports and evidence, alongside updating the bank details for the organisation to facilitate payments upon authorisation. This includes designing the underlying data architecture and backend solution that will support the visual design that is presented to the end-user.
We will be looking to begin testing the functionality built within the next sprint, before pushing it to our live instance.
