ESFA and Methods: Allocations Discovery / User research · ESFA and Methods moved forward to Alpha...
3
ESFA and Methods: Allocations Discovery / User research Background The Challenge The Solution In April 2017, the EFA & SFA merged into a new single body called the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA). It is an Executive Agency of the Department for Education (DFE) and is accountable for the allocation of funding for the education and training sector, providing assurance that public funds are properly spent, achieving value for money for the tax payer and delivering the policies and priorities set by the Secretary of State. The ESFA had already identified several areas of duplication including Allocations, a yearly process by which funding is allocated to education providers. Allocations involves the interpretation of policies into written specifications which in turn leads to data requests and the definition of the calculations required to fulfil the specification. The organisational merger meant there were 3 different teams that managed Allocations and they did this in 3 different ways. Methods was engaged to undertake a Discovery exercise. Working closely with ESFA stakeholders, they modelled the services provided based on user needs. Specifically, the Discovery process aimed to: • Engage widely to understand the activities that are necessary to allocate funding, from three unique user groups’ perspectives. • Identify common capabilities the ESFA required to deliver an allocation service. • Understand the needs of the users of the service and how they interact with the service. • Understand how the capabilities are currently delivered by the Agency, by who, and on what technology • Understand where the business constraints lie. • Make recommendations on how the capabilities could be delivered in the future, with a focus on the technology. The Discovery approach. The ESFA allocates £56 billion of funding to 20,000 education providers “Bringing together organisations inevitably highlights duplications and challenges.” commented Clifford Smith from DfE “From a technology perspective, one system was approaching end-of-life and 50% of the funding was being managed on excel spreadsheets. Whilst this was accurate it was in no way efficient. However, culturally, we also spoke different business languages with terminology which had completely different meanings depending on whether you came from EFA or SFA.” “Ultimately we were looking to stabilise and have a system that would be fit for purpose for the next 10 years” D R I V E S D E L I V E R S CUSTOMERS SERVICES CAPABILITIES TECHNOLOGY
Transcript of ESFA and Methods: Allocations Discovery / User research · ESFA and Methods moved forward to Alpha...
ESFA and Methods: Allocations Discovery / User research
Background The Challenge
The Solution
In April 2017, the EFA & SFA merged into a new single body called the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA). It is an Executive Agency of the Department for Education (DFE) and is accountable for the allocation of funding for the education and training sector, providing assurance that public funds are properly spent, achieving value for money for the tax payer and delivering the policies and priorities set by the Secretary of State.
The ESFA had already identified several areas of duplication including Allocations, a yearly process by which funding is allocated to education providers. Allocations involves the interpretation of policies into written specifications which in turn leads to data requests and the definition of the calculations required to fulfil the specification. The organisational merger meant there were 3 different teams that managed Allocations and they did this in 3 different ways.
Methods was engaged to undertake a Discovery exercise. Working closely with ESFA stakeholders, they modelled the services provided based on user needs. Specifically, the Discovery process aimed to:
• Engage widely to understand the activities that are necessary to allocate funding, from three unique user groups’ perspectives.
• Identify common capabilities the ESFA required to deliver an allocation service.
• Understand the needs of the users of the service and how they interact with the service.
• Understand how the capabilities are currently delivered by the Agency, by who, and on what technology
• Understand where the business constraints lie.• Make recommendations on how the capabilities
could be delivered in the future, with a focus on the technology.
The Discovery approach.
The ESFA allocates
£56 billion
of funding to
20,000 education providers
“Bringing together organisations inevitably highlights duplications and challenges.” commented Clifford Smith from DfE “From a technology perspective, one system was approaching end-of-life and 50% of the funding was being managed on excel spreadsheets. Whilst this was accurate it was in no way efficient. However, culturally, we also spoke different business languages with terminology which had completely different meanings depending on whether you came from EFA or SFA.” “Ultimately we were looking to stabilise and have a system that would be fit for purpose for the next 10 years”
DRIVES
DELIVE
RS
CUSTOMERS
SERVICES
CAPABILITIES
TECHNOLOGY
Methods’ approach to gathering insights:
User Personas and Needs
During the workshops and follow up activity there was a strong focus on what users experienced currently, and what they wanted from the future.“The purpose for this was to elicit what the Allocations teams needed from an Allocations service to support their work, and improve their experience. During the discovery process we created a set of common personas to help frame and inform the work. These were based on our interviews across the organisation and created a personal lens through which we could view our engagement. They are included as a way of adding the human element to understand their areas of pain and concern in current delivery.” Gavin Stephenson Business Analyst, Methods.
Agile Methodology
To allow the Methods team to be responsive to any changes, they used a formal Agile methodology which focused on a cycle of sprint planning, workshops and interviews (including daily stand-up meetings), and retrospectives. At the end of each Sprint, the subsequent approach is adjusted and adapted based on the results of the previous Sprint and according to the needs of the next Sprint. Scheduled ‘retrospective’ sessions enabled Methods to bring the work into focus for both parties, providing the opportunity for full inspection and reallocation of priorities as the project evolved.
Documentation 1-to-1s Groups Workshops User Research
Context
To gain a full picture of the situation it was important to add context to the Discovery process, including:
• Policy Context. Planned, significant policy changes would impact upon the volume and the types of allocations the agency will need to make.
• Business Context. Allocations forms an integral part of ESFA’s wider Provider Digital service and, as a staff micro service, is reliant on upstream information, which has dependencies with downstream contracting and payment services.
• Technology Context. Current technology was a bespoke allocation application called TheStore. Methods also needed to consider the wider strategic architecture roadmap and the ongoing transition to one network infrastructure.
EFSA and Methods: Digital strategy and capability mapping
London16 St. Martin's Le-Grand, London EC1A 4ENT: 020 7240 1121
Manchester231 - 233 The Rise,Deansgate, M3 4ENT: 020 7240 1121
SheffieldElectric Works Sheffield S1 2BJT: 020 7240 1121
[email protected] www.methods.co.uk
The Result - identified challenges
Recommendations• Form multi-disciplinary delivery teams with
standardised allocations procedures, to reduce the Quality Assurance steps needed to resolve trust issues.
• Accurate data at source would deliver efficiencies by removing validation steps, enhancing user experience.
• Create common language, definitions and terminology
• Celebrate innovation and success.
Wider Impact
Working on the Allocations process with Methods has provided ESFA with the catalyst required to bring the newly-merged organisation together. Not only are they realising technical and process-driven efficiencies,
The Discovery process surfaced several challenges and pain points from both user-experience and technology based.
UX
Trust in quality of some data sources is low. This had led to a complex, duplicated process
of quality assurance and the creation of large teams to
support that process.
CapacityTeams are at full stretch with no capacity to innovate, with
unplanned events having disproportionate impact.
IntegrationAllocations process is not
integrated into a data pipeline with upstream and downstream
processes.
User experience is reduced.
Performance and efficiency is poor with systems
crashing and excel very slow due to large datasets and
calculations. A lot of time was spent on manual processes.
Quality assurance is performed at 3 points by 3 teams and is the
biggest blocker to an efficient automated allocations process
there has started to be a cultural change through more collaborative working and the introduction of Agile methodologies.
• Education providers will potentially have notification of their allocation earlier enabling them to plan more effectively.
• There will be less queries as the new system will be 100% transparent, therefore freeing up ESFA time.
ESFA and Methods moved forward to Alpha and delivered the recommendations.
“From a cost perspective, this project is relatively small, but in terms of impact it’s massive” said Clifford Smith from ESFA.
“The potential is vast. The next step is to produce an allocation statement online in real-time.”
EFSA and Methods: Digital strategy and capability mapping
