The process behind our problem prioritisation and ideation workshops

Posted on 15 July 2024

Over the last month our team ran several workshops.

We aimed to:

consolidate, prioritise and better understand the top problems across the digital services that facilitate the early career framework (ECF) policy reforms
ideate on solutions for these problems

This consisted of five problem workshops and two ideation workshops.

How we approached the problem prioritisation exercise

We achieved this by looking at:

Our user groups for the service are the following:

In these workshops, we voted for each problem on:

Once the voting was complete, we were able to see which of the problems we should treat as a higher priority based on the scores.

Schools experience duplicative and confusing registration
The data that internal teams require is not always available, e.g. for eligibility changes
The ECF digital services have introduced rigid and inflexible rules and validation for lead providers
Schools have difficulties making changes to participants, LPs, and ABs
Schools experience difficulties accessing the service
LPs find it difficult to complete their tasks due to a lack of data, and do not have confidence in the data they receive
Appropriate bodies cannot take actions in the TRA AB portal to submit data efficiently or always correctly
Appropriate bodies have dependencies on other ABs to manage changes in an ECT’s transfer
ABs can’t view the data they need to in the ‘check data’ and AB services, and when they do it’s often misaligned with other data
Lead providers have varying levels of digital literacy and varied systems and processes
Internal Teams do tasks that end users should do, but can’t/won’t
Internal teams can be siloed, with little common language, yet depend on each other for everyday tasks

As a team, we then ideated possible solutions for these problems at the end of each workshop. This was the starting point for the ideation exercise.

To further ideate on how to solve the problems we had identified, we:

gathered all the solutions the team came up with for ideation
kept them colour coded to show which user group and problem the solution was in response to
grouped them loosely into large categories e.g. communications or data
further filtered the groups into more specific solutions e.g. Improving and fixing the data model/ Researching comms with users and how we communicate changes
conducted a scope exercise with our product manager to determine which of the solutions were: in scope for our services MVP, out of scope for MVP and completely out of scope for our service
began the process with the wider team and discussed if everyone agreed with where the solutions were placed in terms of scope and if they had any other solutions to add
finally, voted on the solutions we deemed in scope against their feasibility, impact they’d have on all our users, and how far they met the service’s core purpose

We were able to end the workshop with a clear idea of our high level solutions allowing us to move forward with road mapping for our MVP.

Based on our analysis of problems & needs, we considered 26 ideas and narrowed it down to 10 for MVP:

improve and fix the data model
improve how schools accounts are created and the rules around them
show the right data over the Lead provider API (e.g. a teacher’s induction start date)
have the right rules and validation in the digital service to represent the policy and meet the needs of users
rename and restructure services and key terms for users or parts of the service
improve the API documentation
create improved ways for schools and lead providers to make changes to ECT and mentor records, rather than support or developers
make the journey of registering ECTs and mentors with DFE more intuitive for schools and help them understand their wider responsibilities
join and improve finance and admin tooling for internal users
create timelines for participants