What we learned from Disco(very)
A Product Managers reflection — via the medium of disco
At the start of 2020, we ran a 10-week Discovery phase to look at how the current flood warning service and supporting systems are designed, supported, and delivered. We followed the GDS (Government Digital Service) Discovery process, which focuses on:
- identifying potential end users of a service and what they’re trying to achieve
- understanding constraints that may affect the service, including departmental and agency policy intent
- looking for opportunities to improve things
Before starting our research, we created a problem statement to help us frame the challenge we face, what our goal is and to provide a solution agnostic way of describing the issue.
How can users at risk of flooding (or other hazards), receive relevant, useful, and timely warnings so they can take appropriate action? What are we not currently doing to meet these needs?
This short blog is a Product Managers reflection of what we learnt in the Discovery phase for the NeXt Warning System (XWS).
Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough (user research)
We already had a good understanding of who are users are based on previous research for the Flood Information Service on GOV.UK, which is part of the same user journey for XWS.
We held over 50 one to one interviews with a variety of user groups, held 3 workshops focusing on policy, business and technology needs, analysed over 6000 survey responses and held meetings with colleagues across government from 8 different departments to understand their alerting needs. We toured the length at breadth of the country, meeting users in Maidstone to Norwich to Cumbria.
Though this extensive user research we discovered over 70 user needs, 40 current pain points with the existing service and over 20 challenges that need to be overcome to meet these user needs and address these pain points. In the 10 weeks, we also had three major flood events Storms Ciara, Dennis, and Jorge. These provided excellent real time feedback and learning on the issues we were uncovering. We took the opportunity to observe how our flood warning information is used during real flood events.
By speaking to colleagues from across government we were able understand the systems and services they operate to provide their own alerting capabilities and look for overlaps with the flood warning service. We discovered that all these services fundamentally want to provide the same core experience — issuing a message to an audience in a location via user defined channels.
Last Night a BA Saved My Life
We completed Discovery with a small team of 5 — a Project Executive, a Product Manager, a Business Analyst (BA), a Project Manager and User Researcher and with a budget of £80,000.
It simply wouldn’t have been possible without a passionate and empowered team, allowed to work in the ways that worked for them. We supported each other and were flexible with pitching in to help key pieces of work across the 10 weeks.
Time-boxing our Discovery focused us and forced us to be ruthless with our research and with our work — if something wasn't helping us answer our problem statement then it wasn’t important.
It was an exceptional piece of teamwork delivering work that will stand us in good stead for designing and developing a new alerting system in the future saving lives and livelihoods across the country.
“I know we’ve got, a long long way to go…”
The Discovery found clear areas for improvement and provided recommendations on how we can build a next generation (flood) warning system to support the needs of our users, the business and wider government.
We recommended moving to the Alpha phase where we look to test ‘how’ we might meet the user needs we have found in Discovery. By continuing in a low risk step by step approach, we can test the various products and delivery permutations and carry out essential additional user testing throughout the Alpha phase.
Testing our most challenging assumptions and approaches in Alpha will allow us to find and rectify bottlenecks with our services and systems before we commit to our final design. These prototypes will allow us to find problems in the key parts of the system as early as possible so we have time to decide how we will solve them.
By the end of Alpha, we will be able to decide which of the ideas we have tested are worth taking forward to Beta, if at all.
Celebrate good times
To top off a successful Discovery, we were also nominated for a Defra Group Award in the “Getting it right” category. The Defra Group awards celebrate the departments’ people and the exceptional work they do. Nominations for each category where whittled down to just thirty-five shortlisted nominees who went through to a vote open to all Defra group staff to select this years’ winners. The “Getting it right” category was all about:
Celebrating an individual or team demonstrating professional excellence with consistently high standards in everything they do. They display good business judgement and a rigorous focus on achieving business objectives to time and providing excellent value for money.
We are enormously proud to say that our Discovery project won!
The NeXt Warning System Discovery Team, delivered an outstanding Discovery report that highlighted key areas where we could improve our current flood warning service, all during an unprecedented period of flooding which provided excellent real time feedback and learning on the issues they were uncovering.
For any discovery sceptics out there, I hope this blog helps renew your faith in the discovery phase, its adaptability, and its ability to make things happen. Have a clear goal, a small passionate team, a non-negotiable end date, and be prepared to work flexibly towards your goal — and don’t forget to celebrate a job well done!
