After outsourcing the running of its prime teacher recruitment website, the Department lost the means to keep on top of emerging user needs, instead becoming reliant on outdate SLAs to update content and unable to guarantee reactivity.
Without expert in-house capability, the website lost its attraction, became unwieldy and saw declining value for money as the digital world moved on whilst the website was still being managed at arm’s length in a classic client/supplier fashion.
Those who can, teach
The Department for Education outsourced the development of its Get Into Teaching website over 10 years ago. As an extension of the ‘Those who can, teach’ marketing campaign; the website looked to inform, support and convert all users to apply for teacher training.
In order to interact with the website, users were forced down a one size fits all approach with the same high level of data being requested irrespective of which service the user wished to sign up for. This resulted in massive levels of disengagement and drop off as users pondered the value exchange.
The Alpha stage
DfE introduced a small agile team to run an Alpha in 2019 with the aim of trying to deliver a more improved service but lack of empowerment, little senior advocacy and conflicting key stakeholders meant the team was unable to successfully exit the Alpha phase.
Transform was asked to bring in a Delivery Manager to lead an 8 week Alpha and deliver a service prototype which demonstrated its ability to meet user needs.
After successfully delivering an Alpha within 8 weeks and passing the GDS service assessment, Transform was asked to deliver a user-centric, secure and scalable Beta digital service. However, for the new service to be adopted successfully within the department, we recognised that the business needed to transform too, or would continue to follow an outmoded model - working in silos and not focusing on the needs of users.
A shift in culture
In parallel with delivering the digital service, we introduced a change management process, engaging with colleagues across the organisation to articulate the vision and how we’d work with the business to adopt new ways of working.
We implemented a programme of regular communications, show & tells and workshops and helped the organisation shift from a culture of siloed working to one of greater cross-team collaboration, adopting a more agile-minded approach to data and insight-driven decision making.
The Transform-led delivery team successfully delivered a user-centric MVP within 3 months and within 9 months passed the GDS Public Beta assessment.
Our work for Department for Education extends beyond this project. If you're interested in hearing more about our wider experience, please get in touch.