The Age of Discovery
The last few months have been busy for the new Digital Design Team at the National Lottery Heritage Fund. We have been doing ‘discovery’ work together. Earlier this week we held a workshop where we looked at the discoveries we had made. During this we realised this process has involved not only finding out more about the service, but also about each other and the organisation we work for.
What is discovery?
The Discovery phase in an Agile project is the point at which the team reviews what they have found out, and checks if they have enough evidence to support the work they plan on doing next (alpha phase). Its about understanding our users and the context they work within. We want to know what they are trying to do through our service and how they are doing that. Usually its quite a discrete research question that gets asked in discovery. As a new team doing new things in the Fund, our discovery needed to be a bit broader.
Context for Discovery
Our team is a mix of staff who had some experience at the Fund and new colleagues. This meant we had to discover how everyone likes to work, and new roles and responsibilities and how we all fitted together. Understanding where this team and these roles have come from and what they will be expected to deliver also formed a key part of this process.
The Fund launched a new Strategic Funding Framework in January 2019 and changed some of its structure and ways of working alongside this. This meant that part of the discovery we undertook was to understand the Fund for the first time, or to revisit our existing assumptions . This work involved understanding the landscape and context the Fund operates within. We needed to learn what the Fund is here to do and what the issues and opportunities are for the Service Design Team.
We also needed to learn who the key users of the service are, both internal and external. We identified some of the hard constraints, both policy and technological, for delivering a new service.
Research
More traditional discovery work also formed a huge part of the work undertaken, with User Researcher Jo Arthur focusing on what the experience of applying for and processing an application for a small grant was like. This covered both the external and internal users perspectives and in total 74 hours of research have been done, reaching 63 people, across grantees, potential applicants, previous applicants and colleagues. We also all undertook service safaris, so we could experience being applicants, road mapping, service blueprinting and engaging with our stakeholders.
Where to go next?
From all this research we have pulled out around fifty key insights, then grouped them into themes. Then we worked out which of these themes we felt were our highest priority for addressing. Finally we looked at what kind of activities and actions we can take to address these.
Now we have some ideas we will be workshopping a design sprint. This will work these actions up in more detail so we can test them out. We will be sharing what we come up with colleagues internally in the coming weeks, before we share them more widely.
