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Running a cross service discovery

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Between June and November 2023, a multidisciplinary team did a discovery to explore the problems we faced over 2 years of delivering Teacher CPD services.

The problem

Teacher CPD services were built quickly and in parallel with a developing policy. There was only a short window for an alpha and private beta to meet deadlines. This led to lots of support issues and bugs with our services.

We needed to understand the problems across the service line from a range of perspectives.

What did we focus on and why?

The discovery aims were to:

  • consolidate what we learnt from the last 2 years of running the services
  • provide evidence to inform prioritisation and design decisions
  • develop a new vision and strategy to deliver against our broad principles
  • uncover ways to deliver more efficiently

We expected the review’s findings to focus on the technical space. This turned out to be only part of the picture.

The review spanned every area of the programme; the policy, the current state of the services, and our ways of working. The scope included:

  • consolidating our understanding of NPQ and ECF policies
  • validating our current overarching service design and architecture
  • reviewing our service vision, principles, purposes, narrative and blueprint
  • interviewing as many of the key stakeholders and digital teams as possible
  • analysing pain points and mapping them against causes and dependencies
  • exploring opportunity areas and recommendations to understand the pros and cons of different approaches
  • making recommendations and agreeing how to separate the NPQ and ECF services

What did we learn?

We learnt that:

  • the end-to-end ECF service journey does not meet our user needs, follow the business rules or the policy intent
  • there are many bugs and issues that are exacerbated by the current shared data model
  • poor data quality hampers our running of the NPQ and ECF services
  • the data model makes analytics and gathering insights difficult
  • team structures in the CPD programme make sharing knowledge and managing dependencies difficult
  • given the level of policy changes and ongoing techincal issues it’s difficult for the teams to make improvements to the services

What are we doing now?

We’re combining changing our services with changing how we work as a programme. Here are our priorities:

  1. Separating NPQ from ECF

    Analysis and planning are underway to separate the 2 services in the autumn of 2024. Making NPQ a standalone service will make funding changes, and the addition of an SENCo NPQ, easier to deliver. Removing NPQ elements from the remaining ECF codebase will also make it easier to rewrite the ECF service.

    This will enable the NPQ team to make improvements to their service without relying on changes to the ECF service.

  2. Updating our vision and strategy

    We’ve updated our vision and strategy for the CPD services. We plan to update the ECF product strategy shortly.

  3. Understanding problems around induction data collection

    We’re prioritising discovering more about how induction data is currently collected with our TRA (Teaching Regulation Agency) colleagues for February 2024. Its findings will feed into a discovery on how we can improve the ECF service beginning in April 2024, and the subsequent alpha and beta phases.

  4. Reviewing our programme ceremonies and working in the open

    The Programme Team are running regular planning sessions to discuss prioritisation, resourcing of work and to identify dependencies. We’ve introduced weekly sessions to keep everyone aligned as we progress through NPQ separation. We’ve also started holding regular show and tells to increase knowledge and collaborate on ideas about solutions across the programme.