Fellowship Digital Services: Beta Phase Sprint Notes 1 – 2

This beta project is focused on enhancing existing digital services and implementing a new platform at the RSA called Circle, to help improve how Fellows engage and contribute to the RSA work and collaborate with other Fellows.

What happened in Sprint 2?

There are three sprints leading up to an important date, 14 May 2022. This is the date we will launch a Private Beta, at the RSA’s Fellows Festival.

During Sprint 2 we undertook to conduct a deep dive into Circle and to shape the plan for the private beta phase. However, at the start of Sprint 2, the requirements for the use of Circle for Fellows engagement during the upcoming Fellows Festival changed slightly. As a result, we focused most of Sprint 2 on adjusting the priorities, bringing some activities to earlier on, while pushing others to a later date.

The Circle Deep Dive

During Sprint 2, we joined Circle and started to test the features and platform functionality. We met with a representative from Circle for additional support and to ask questions around some essential features such as accessibility and automated moderation.

dxw highlighted some accessibility concerns regarding the compatibility of Circle with screen readers. Circle has reassured us that they are currently investing improvements to accessibility and will update the RSA on their roadmap for these improvements.

Roadmap Iterations

The roadmap is a high-level plan to help guide the work of the beta, working alongside a Sprint and project plan. During our first Sprint, the team discussed the problem we are solving in beta and the vision we are working towards. The first version of our vision is as follows:

A clear and compelling offer, personalised content and a joined up digital experience for Fellows. Enabling and encouraging higher levels of engagement from Fellows and allowing them to make connections and contribute to a diverse range of social impact initiatives.

During Sprint 2, the team discovered that the expectations related to launching the private beta and the involvement of Fellows in testing Circle during the festival, were slightly different than identified during our inception. The new priorities included opening the possibility to participate in the private Beta testing to more Fellows than originally anticipated and allowing them to use Circle as a communication tool during the festival.

This means we will be onboarding more Fellows onto Circle and encouraging them to engage within the platform earlier on. To make this possible, we have been reviewing and iterating our priorities to re-adjust them. For instance, we decided to bring forward the content migration and creation necessary prior to the festival, while postponing the Single Sign-on integration.

Planning Private Beta

During Sprint 1 we identified all the work that needs to happen, and we have made a start on it.

We started by drafting and reviewing the user journey for Fellows who will take part in the private beta testing programme from the Fellows Festival onwards, as well as the smaller group of users who will participate in testing prior to the festival.

We are currently identifying the activities based on the user journey and will be planning our next steps during Sprint 3. We will first focus on what needs to happen before the festival, and then move onto planning the Private Beta phase testing.

In parallel, we will start progressing the tasks we have already identified. We will also continue to simultaneously build and implement the public beta, in preparation to roll-out the new services to all Fellows by the end of September 2022.