Discovery about business improvement for Skills for Care

We were asked by Skills for Care to conduct a discovery project to help them better understand the digital tools and processes used by staff to manage people, projects, finance and risk across the business. 

A large proportion of Skills for Care staff work in geographically dispersed teams. This has sometimes resulted in teams following processes and using tools in different ways. As a consequence, pockets of best practice (and less good practice) have developed across the organisation over time.  

Skills for Care wanted to better understand this range of behaviours and processes, to inform their programme of business improvement.

We conducted a number of user research activities with teams across the business, including: 1-2-1 user interviews, stakeholder interviews, two experience mapping workshops, a user experience survey and a remote design studio. 

We made a set of recommendations and proposed a roadmap for business improvement. The roadmap suggested a programme of interrelated activities, including high priority strands of work that would have immediate impact, as well as longer term pieces of work to support business improvement. 

The focus of our original brief was the digital tools and processes used by staff to manage people, projects, finance and risk. But our research also revealed insights about wider processes and culture. And while many of our recommendations were about the specific digital services and processes used by Skills for Care staff, some of our highest priority recommendations focused on these wider cultural issues as the enablers of digital transformation and business improvement. 

“One of the main reasons Skills for Care values working with Lagom is that Discovery work is done in partnership with you not done ‘to’ you. Lagom also provided us with knowledge transfer around their ways of working and processes so we could learn from them and upskill as an organisation. It was a pleasure to work with Lagom.”

Victoria Garnett, Head of Agile Delivery, Skills for Care