Equal Experts UK Limited

Rapid Service Design

The transition to cloud-based digital services to Government Digital Service standards, benefits from a lightweight, value-oriented, ​incremental​ service design process. By combining user needs research, opportunity mapping and journey mapping, our techniques like low-fidelity, visual prototypes help us create​, test, validate and implement an evidence-based approach for service design decisions.

Features

  • Use evidence to validate the feasibility of service design ideas
  • Provide greater transparency of ideas
  • Provide greater transparency of organisational processes and pain points
  • Prioritise ideas collaboratively, prioritised list of potential value generating ideas
  • Collaborative design techniques and training in design thinking
  • A rapid mechanism to realise ideas
  • Design sprint process forms the basis of future design templates
  • Rapid design testing
  • Third party organisational view
  • Respond to urgent new requirements quickly, eg for Covid-19 solutions

Benefits

  • Investigates and understands the organisation and its stakeholders
  • Explores organisational remit, culture, environment, people, processes
  • Explores organisational communication mechanisms, stakeholders, user groups
  • Helps clarify and understand strategic metrics and governance
  • Create, test and evolve a rapid design model and template
  • Design sprint process explores and structures multiple design templates quickly
  • Ideate to uncover opportunities for innovation
  • Prioritises requirements to maximise business value and return on investment
  • Builds your internal capability to own the service design process
  • Fails fast, prevent swasted investment by testing service designs early

Pricing

£250 to £1,500 a person a day

  • Education pricing available

Service documents

Request an accessible format
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at solutions@equalexperts.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 12

Service ID

2 8 2 8 8 0 1 5 1 2 6 0 8 6 2

Contact

Equal Experts UK Limited Louis Abel
Telephone: +44 7968 157766
Email: solutions@equalexperts.com

Planning

Planning service
Yes
How the planning service works
To build detailed knowledge of the context and domain for any project, an initial phase of planning, definition and knowledge transfer will generally take place at the start of an engagement.

We have found that this takes place most effectively through a short time-bound inception to develop a shared understanding and agreement on vision and objectives across a broad stakeholder group. This covers the business, technical and user aspects of the project and the outputs may include user personas and scenarios, key user journeys, as-is and desired business processes, a prioritised backlog of user stories, technical constraints and vision, and a release roadmap and plan. The techniques and principles applied are also used on an ongoing basis throughout the course of delivery, to ensure the solutions developed are fit for purpose and meet real and changing user needs.

This initial inception phase can be contracted separately if required.
Planning service works with specific services
No

Training

Training service provided
Yes
How the training service works
For every client, we aim to transfer and embed knowledge of technology and process innovation. Our consultants help improve our clients’ internal competencies and build long-term sustainable capability, as they migrate to modern cloud-based products and services. We tailor particular practices to address specific organisational constraints – we recognise that every organisation is different and there is no “one size to fit all”.

The depth of experience of our consultants means they are mature, pragmatic, and have an approach grounded in hands-on digital experience. This is key to our ability to help with training, upskilling and building knowledge of new ways of working within client team members. All our consultants are selected based on their demonstrated understanding of how intelligent and innovative uses of technology are being put to work to provide competitive advantage across industries. Passing this expertise and understanding to our client team members is a key, and unique, advantage and value provided throughout our engagements.

We tend not to offer classroom-based training as our consultants are happy to share their knowledge throughout a project. They take responsibility for helping individual client team members adopt new practices and ways of working.
Training is tied to specific services
No

Setup and migration

Setup or migration service available
Yes
How the setup or migration service works
In addition to ongoing development and operation of live cloud-based services, we can help with the initial set up and migration as part of a transition to cloud. We look for opportunities to automate processes (for example, test, deploy) that will yield real benefit and high ROI. Our approach helps to address integration, dependencies and risk early. We capture actionable metrics to measure and manage progress towards meeting the agreed success criteria and KPIs identified for building and operating the service. The highly collaborative, interactive processes we follow foster continual learning and improvement of services. They help to establish and evolve the overarching service design, management processes and the team capabilities.

We can ensure projects hit the ground running through our experience in designing, configuring and setup of many continuous delivery and automated cloud deployment environments. These techniques allow software to be repeatably and reliably deployed and tested through each stage into production on the cloud. We have substantial experience when it comes to the tooling required for continuous delivery and automated software deployment, greatly facilitating the software set up, build and migration process, which increases programme productivity and reduces project risk and cost.
Setup or migration service is for specific cloud services
No

Quality assurance and performance testing

Quality assurance and performance testing service
Yes
How the quality assurance and performance testing works
All our consultants have extensive experience of both manual and automated testing, including performance testing, continuous integration and delivery into production environments at scale. With all clients we actively encourage the adoption of robust and meaningful automated test coverage, delivery and test techniques, to reduce risk and safely increase delivery velocity. We are happy to work with a clients existing quality management system (QMS) where appropriate.

Security testing

Security services
Yes
Security services type
  • Security strategy
  • Security risk management
  • Security design
  • Security incident management
  • Security audit services

Ongoing support

Ongoing support service
Yes
Types of service supported
  • Hosting or software provided by your organisation
  • Hosting or software provided by a third-party organisation
How the support service works
Our operational philosophy is “you build it, you run it’”. The delivery team responsible for the development of a live service usually also takes responsibility for its operation. We have found that development teams which support their own products are motivated to deliver higher quality, more robust and maintainable code.

When a service is live with real users we expect the delivery team to provide 2nd line (infrastructure, in conjunction with hosting support agreements) and 3rd line (applications) support during business hours. We can agree an appropriate model for 24/7 on-call coverage if required - see our G-Cloud On-Call Support offering for details. We typically establish an on-call rota with delivery team members assigned on a weekly basis.

Our experience is that digital services are never really finished and that it is important to retain some level of investment to allow the addition of new features as the needs of customers (both internal and external) change. Our design of the end-to-end service can include establishing Service Level Agreements for ongoing service evolution and operational support (ensuring agreed levels of service availability).

Service scope

Service constraints
N/A

User support

Email or online ticketing support
No
Phone support
Yes
Phone support availability
9 to 5 (UK time), Monday to Friday
Web chat support
No
Support levels
We provide an engagement manager on all G-Cloud engagements with responsibility for ensuring customer objectives are met, and for addressing any issues with service delivery. Our engagement managers act as an escalation point, and can be reached via phone or email, to respond to issues beyond the control of the team providing the service. Engagement management is included within our service pricing.

When a service is live with real users we expect the delivery team to provide 2nd line (infrastructure, in conjunction with hosting support agreements) and 3rd line (applications) support during business hours. We can agree an appropriate model for 24/7 on-call coverage if required - see our G-Cloud On-Call Support offering for details. We typically establish an on-call rota with delivery team members assigned on a weekly basis.

Resellers

Supplier type
Not a reseller

Staff security

Staff security clearance
Other security clearance
Government security clearance
Up to Security Clearance (SC)

Pricing

Price
£250 to £1,500 a person a day
Discount for educational organisations
Yes

Service documents

Request an accessible format
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at solutions@equalexperts.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.