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Introduction

The Greater London Authority (GLA) distributes grants to a range of different causes across London. £10bn worth of these grants are distributed by their Open Project System – a service originally designed to manage housing and land based grants, before expanding to include additional regeneration, environment and skills focused grantmaking.

As the service grew, more and more requirements were layered into it, adding more and more complexity, to the point where users and administrative staff were struggling to use the service. The GLA asked us to investigate these issues in more detail and outline our recommendations to fix the service.

Challenges

We were asked to conduct an 8-week investigation to understand:

• where was the service doing well, and not-so-well
• what were the underlying problems causing these issues
• what additional needs did users have, that weren’t currently addressed by the service
• how could the GLA address everything we identified.

Our team conducted a three-pronged investigation by conducting:

1. a heuristic evaluation of the service design, investigating the overall service offering, its core features and user journeys – which previously, no single person had complete oversight of

2. user research with users and stakeholders to see and hear how it was performing – to understand, validate and refine the actual issues users were facing

3. a detailed technical analysis of the underlying technology, code base and development practices – to understand how stable, secure and sustainable the existing service was

Solutions

We identified 125 user needs the service must meet, and 14 high-level pain points with the service, spanning digital strategy, product management, usability and technology. Examples included:

• the existing corporate grantmaking strategy hindered scalability and sustainability
• siloed feature development led to a fragmented service.
• a steep learning curve increased adoption challenges and costs for staff and users.
• a significant amount of software development time was spent fixing previous work.

Once we had a solid understanding of the issues and requirements, we then explored a number of routes to overcoming these, including:

• fixing the existing service
• adopting an off-the-shelf solution
• developing a new bespoke solution

Our analysis included:

• a detailed analysis of existing solutions on the market,
• analysis of the benefits, risks, dependencies, timescales and resourcing requirements for each approach
• a SWOT analysis of each approach, with detailed recommendations for delivery.

Results

We recommended a two-phased approach to resolving the challenges:

1. stabilise the current service–the overall solution will take time to realise, so we recommended 5 steps to make the existing more secure, stable and reliable while this was ongoing

2. define an overall direction for grantmaking at the GLA–the current siloed approach was contributing to many of the issues, the GLA should take a heuristic approach to grantmaking across the organisation so that decisions being made can be more widely beneficial and complexity be diminished.

Our recommendations immediately acted upon:

• the steps to stabilisation were prioritised by the development team, and the service is now running more reliably
• an overall ‘Head of grant giving’ role was created at the GLA, to manage a holistic view of grantmaking across the organisation
• the follow-up, organisation wide, consolidation of grant making services across the GLA is now well underway.

“Within the project team and in the wider organisation, we have learnt [from Marvell] that things need to be looked at as a service rather than in silos. Having it mapped out, seeing the whole ecosystem…it’s been a key learning”

Nahida Miah
Head of grant giving, Greater London Authority

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