Central Government
Redesigning Funding
A three year project to bring a redesigned central government funding service to Beta, working in an embedded team with the Department for Levelling Up, Home Buying and Communities (DLUHC)
Role: Design Lead Client: DLUHC Date: 2022-2024 Visit: Funding Service Design
The problem
Funding services provided by Central Government were difficult for applicants, expensive to administrate, and built on a large number of disparate tech platforms. We were tasked to bring consistency, repeatability and efficiency with user centred design by turning the process of funding into a service
My role as Design Lead was to
Decide and communicate to a new team how they’ll work together over the course of the project
Establish a design process to provide repeatability and predictability to what is a politically volatile and often changing part of government
Help the team understand how their work fits into a wider context,
Create and commission artefacts such as blueprints, process diagrams, and journey maps.
Design, deliver, and facilitate participative design workshops
Giving feedback and direction of design work
Provide high level design support and direction to my multidisciplinary team
Mentor and build the capability of team members at all levels
This project was a Government Design Service Standard Beta, using established principles, conventions and components.
What I did
I began the project as Service Design Lead, tasked with
Producing a design process and direction
Making sense of the problem domain (this is involved drawings, a lot of drawings)
Later in the project I lead the team designing an onboarding process for new funds who were coming on to the service.
I was just one person in a huge team of people, so I want to give credit and attention to the many people who were, and still are working on this project, there are too many to name.
The Funding Lifecycle
The Funding Lifecycle is the process all funds must go through to successfully complete funding, we mapped the lifecycle and made sure our service supported and augmented it, to maximise the impact but also minimise the risk and disruption of onboarding to our new service
Onboarding funds and figuring out their needs
Closing applications, and beginning assessment
Making the necessary tech and design changes to the product to deliver a fund
Finishing assessment, and checking the process went as expected
Publishing and promoting fund details in the form of a prospectus
Publishing the results of funding decisions
Allowing applications to begin, and supporting the people making applications
Reporting on the progress of the projects funded, feed learnings into knowledge base
Key moments
Developing a vision
I diagnosed that as we worked sprint by sprint we moved quickly but began to diverge without a single vision. I designed and delivered a series of product vision workshops where together the teams fed into a high level vision and strategy for the service to help direct us to our goals
Building relationships
Through a series of collaborative workshops we built relationships with other teams and services that were vital to our success. We created an environment where honest and open discussion could happen and we found shared goals, enabling the change we needed to achieve our outcomes
Measuring performance
Until the first performance measures were taken all we had to go on was the promise of following a user centred design methodology. When the first fund went live and we started seeing how the products performed in the wild it was both a massive thrill and a welcome relief
The results
During my time on the project we met and exceeded several key KPIs, including
Time taken to make an application
Time taken to assess an application
Time taken to prepare and train assessors
We onboarded and delivered several funds, maintaining a low level of support contacts and a high application success rate.
We established an iterative workflow to ensure that new funds had their needs met, and that all future funds would benefit from the learnings.
We built interest in the work, with regular show and tells and blog posts, winning over several key stakeholders and collaborators.
What happened next?
As with all the best supplier engagements, we worked ourselves out of a job. The project is now fully staffed by civil servants, a transition we had always planned for. The service continues to operate, going from strength to strength, and is starting to see real change in the way policy teams think about, talk about and deliver funding.
“The client trusts and admires his approach to design and stakeholder management. He can handle our toughest stakeholders with grace and we honestly wouldn’t have gotten this far without him.”