Digital Service Design Weeknotes - 2–15 June
This has been an important sprint for us. We’ve deployed the minimum viable service for legal agreements and payments on grants up to £10,000, which means we now have a live end-to-end service that runs from pre-application through to grant payment.
This is a huge milestone for our team and the Fund, and it is the culmination of lots of multi-disciplinary working and collaboration within and outside our team. We made time in the sprint to come together and celebrate this achievement.
Since we paused work on this service to prioritise COVID19 response funding back in March 2020, we’ve been in catch up mode. That caused our timings to be tight, and we’ve had to make difficult trade-offs and decisions on a daily basis. We’ve been working at a high intensity for over a year, and we’re feeling and seeing the impact of that both in our work, and in ourselves.
So, this sprint marks the beginning of a month-long change freeze for the service and the team. That doesn’t mean we’re all taking a month off, but we are taking a moment to slow our pace to something more sustainable and to set ourselves up for the next phase of this project.
Regrouping as a team
We’re taking the opportunity to spend time together as a team and getting to know newer members of the team.
We’re also spending time as disciplinary groups. Team members in our user-centred design roles of Content Design, User Research, Service Design and Interaction Design have spent time together shaping their practice and their working relationships through a series of discussions. This has also provided a great way for our newer team members to get to know the rest of the team and to share new ways of working.
We’re having more expansive conversations about how we do things, so that we’ve got a shared base to start from as we enter the next phase of the project, and as we continue to inspect and adapt our working practices as we go. We’ve had some initial conversations about how we refine our backlog and what our process is for design, and we have further conversations planned around these topics as well as how we test our work, and how we prototype.
Strengthening our infrastructure
Our pace of delivery, and the continuing strain on our legacy software, has meant we’ve sometimes needed to build up some technical debt so that we can ship a minimal service.
We’ve made sure to clearly document those decisions within the team, and capture the work needed to address the debt later. During our change freeze, we’re going back over those documented decisions and placeholder tickets to prioritise and resolve some of our most ‘expensive’ technical debt — the things that pose the greatest risk to the stability of our service, or that present the biggest obstacle to efficient continuous iteration.
Our team infrastructure is not just code. We’ve also invested time this sprint in:
- How we document our work over time, through things like our Content wiki and Interaction patterns
- How we provide and manage user support
- How we review and critique design work
Preparing to scale
The Fund continues to adapt and respond to the needs of the sector. Over a year on from the start of the coronavirus pandemic, we are now seeing immediate term responses to urgent needs, and more explorative and innovative long term responses to the broader changes happening at a much higher level.
Many of those responses involve new or adjusted funding programmes, all of which ultimately need to run through the new service we have built.
In the first phase of our project, we focused on moving the Fund’s core strategic funding framework programmes onto the new service and reducing their dependency on legacy software.
As we come out of the change freeze at the end of June, we’ll enter a new phase of the project which will start to establish the service as a platform to enable the Fund’s strategic aims and ambitious innovations. We’re doing some work as a team to think about what that phase looks like, and to explore the opportunities and problem spaces it will present.
