Digital Service Design Team Weeknotes — 27 April — 10 May
Welcome! These weeknotes are brought to you by Emily, our Grants & Investment System Support Manager, and Melanie and Rachel, our two new secondees.
Melanie and Rachel joined us in April for 6 months as Subject Matter Experts, to share their knowledge and experience with the team as we continue to build the new Investment Management Service. They are both Investment Managers from the London & South area team and have both previously been Business Delivery Assistants. Melanie also supports the Memorial Fund, and Rachel joined the Fund as a Finance Administrator.
Our headline this week is the launch of large grants, a huge piece of work and a great achievement for the whole team! We’ve also been busy designing the new legal contracts and looking ahead to grant payments.
Launching Large Grants UK-Wide
We are now set to launch large grants UK-wide on Thursday 13 May. As mentioned in the previous weeknotes, we are launching this service using Salesforce Experience. We have been working at speed to deliver this, collaborating to produce journey/flow diagrams which help us identify needs of applicants and staff throughout the process, and then build functionality accordingly.
As one of our values, providing an accessible service is extremely important to us. We have dedicated time to ensuring that the service remains accessible, despite a tight build time and shorter proposed life (before we build fully in Funding Front End in a few months’ time). This includes things like: ensuring that the page can be magnified to up to 400% without interactive components being covered by labels; ensuring each page has a clear, descriptive name and a heading; and using assistive tech to ensure that every form field, dropdown and input has a clear label.
Applicants have been working offline to gather the information needed for their large grant application and we will be inviting them to input this in the new service from Thursday. We have designed content for communications guiding them through registration and, as they are submitting directly through a Salesforce portal, the process will also feel fluid for staff then picking them up in the back end for assessment.
Legal Agreements for all grants
This sprint we’ve also been designing the content for the legal agreement for small and medium grants. The legal agreement replaces the permission to start, grant notification letter and terms of grant, by incorporating all the information from each document into one clear email. Working closely with Legal, the template for the legal agreement for small grants has been completed, and work is well underway on the template for medium grants. We will then focus on the legal agreement for large grants, ready for decisions following the 28th May applications deadline.
The new legal agreement will need to be accepted and signed by grantees, replacing the signatures required at permission to start. As a result of this we’ve been mapping the potential different journeys for those who will be signing the legal agreement and making decisions on how we obtain signatures.
Grant payments
Linked to the legal agreement work, we’ve also been mapping the journey from notification of award to first grant payments for small, medium and large grants. This is because the legal agreement journey triggers the first payment for small and medium grants. Mapping this journey allows us to see where we interact with grantees and helps us plan what content we need to create as a result. We’ll have more updates on this work in the coming weeks.
