GDS and Agile – Creating Success for the Innovation Funding Service

Agile working (with a small a)

For our partnership with Innovate UK, the GDS Standard gave us the opportunity to practise UX in a long-term agile environment.

Working collaboratively with Innovate UK, we took the service from the initial Discovery phase – researching and understanding true user needs behind the service – through to an Alpha proof of concept phase across the course of nine months. The whole process through to the service arriving in public Beta took just over 18 months with a multidisciplinary, multi-agency delivery team. Key to the success of this project was the relationships within the blended team of multiple suppliers – each providing key specialisms and working seamlessly towards the same goal.

But adopting an agile approach is not just about speed. Improving the velocity at which we can deliver only creates greater benefit if we’re sure that speed is moving us in the right direction. The real benefit of agile UX means we adapt our priorities and processes to best deliver the goals of the project.

Sometimes as an agency, you encounter projects more driven by the format of the end deliverables than the findings of the research itself. The beauty of agile working for a curious UX-person is the ability to use different methods, skills and outputs where they will deliver the most value.

Rather than being tied to set (often time consuming) deliverables, the outcomes of our work are directed in the most useful way to influence the service for the end user. What this means in reality is rather than research always leading to a prescribed weighty document – there is freedom about how you approach each activity. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do post-research is go and listen more to the call centre handling problems to gain more context around an issue. Or sketch something on a whiteboard next to your developers for immediate implementation. Or go and petition a senior leadership team to re-consider a fundamental part of their existing process.

Delivering a service for both internal and external users

When developing IFS our focus was on all users of the service, both external citizens applying for funding and the full range of internal teams needed to support the process – from full time administrative staff through to occasional independent consulting experts. In addition to meeting the needs of the different businesses and time-poor tech start-ups applying for funding, we needed to help Innovate UK digitise their own processes.

Our development focused on both the front-end and back-office. Although there was much work to be done improving the process of applying for funding from Innovate UK, the biggest value can be seen in dramatically reducing the administrative costs of awarding funding, and allowing more of this funding to be efficiently delivered to innovative research projects.