BEIS

Overview

This was my first project working for cloudThing, and boy did they throw me in the deep end! The Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial strategy approached us to create a proof of concept for an advanced CRM and briefing tool. Their hope was that such a tool would allow the department to communicate more effectively, by keeping track of communications both internal and external, calling upon a range of data sources to figure out networks, national information, and public sentiment in the process.

Finding the root of the requirements

Beyond a simple demonstration of what the CRM technology could offer, the department was keen to tell a captivating story that would encourage senior leadership teams to invest in such its continued development. As such, I made it my mission to understand a typical user journey for the department when a senior civil servant or minister would engage with business and community leaders.

I pressed the members of the digital team who had commissioned the project to grant me access to a range of individuals from across the department, with varied experience levels and differing involvement in our example user journey. After running several hours of interviews with these staff members, I drew up some prototypical personas that summarise the roles and responsibilities of these individuals.

These interviews also provided me with a greater level of detail to understand what activities took place during each high level step we’d identified in our example user journey.

A clickable prototype to capture the imagination of leadership

Using the information and artefacts gathered during user workshops, I iteratively assembled a rough and ready prototype to address some of the user needs. In the prototype, we presented a view of an activity feed containing potential engagement triggers, including announcements of grant funding and regional job creation. From here, a user could see associated entities, such as:

• Individuals, including employment history (scraped from LinkedIn), engagement history (scraping from calendar events and emails), news events (using keyword searches).
• Businesses, including public funding history, notable news articles, responses to policy green papers, and social media sentiment (based on evaluation of social media posts about those businesses).
• Regions, including ONS statistics on employment and investment in the area where businesses and individuals are based.

Keep the briefing brief

The prototypical design imagined a piece of software that would be used by individuals across the team. Private secretaries and assistants planners could review the data brought in automatically and refine the visible information. External communication officers could highlight key talking points and issues from past communications that would be important for ministers to know, and the simple, mobile-friendly interface would allow a senior civil servant or minister to quickly refer to the most important briefing information en route to the meeting.