Beta luck next time

A year on from March 2020, there are endless articles about what we were all doing a year ago and how we have all fundamentally shifted and changed since then. I am going to write about a small piece of my world which changed, our investment service beta.

This time last year, as we all locked down and started working from home, the first ever service designed, user focused glimpse of the future of investment services at the Fund was open to applications. The beta service we opened in Scotland covered Lottery grants of £3,000 — £10,000, and instead of going through our legacy system, went through the new Investment Management Service or IMS. Launched in January, the intention was that it was going to show us if all our planning, research, designing, listening and building had created the right service for real people.

Around eight weeks passed, we had even got six new applications in! We knew many tens more had registered and were likely to put in applications. But the world it was launched into was about to shift fundamentally, and our approach with it.

The service we had launched was for Lottery grants following the process set out in the Strategic Funding Framework of the Fund. When the Fund stopped the ‘open programmes’ to focus on supporting the sector, the beta was shut with all of the rest of the rolling grant schemes. We focused the effort of the whole team onto emergency funding initiatives up until the autumn.

Since autumn we have restarted, this has included revisiting our assumptions and looking afresh at the technical design and delivery. We took the learning from the emergency grants processes and the new approach from the Fund. Alongside this we revisited our timetables for delivery and the linked budgets and benefits. Not everything stayed, in some cases we have thrown things out and started again. We have not been able to do training face to face for staff so we have had to bring in extra support.

And now we are back almost to where we were a year ago. Once again the beta is open, this time in Northern Ireland as well as Scotland to help us get more applications into the real thing. Things have shifted and changed for users, for the team delivering it, and across the world since the first one. It is not the same beta re opened, it is a different beta that has learnt from what we launched before and responded to what has happened since. I am excited to see how this one fares.