Fellowship Digital Services: Beta Phase Sprint Notes 5

In this Sprint, we conducted a team workshop evaluating the end-to-end service user journey for Fellows, discussed developments in Fellow recuitment for the Beta and reviewed the first draft of the Community Guidelines. We also hosted our second Show and Ask, where we presented our plans for the upcoming phase.

A reminder of the project's focus: this beta project is focused on enhancing existing and implementing a new technology at the RSA called Circle, to help improve how Fellows engage and contribute to the RSA work and collaborate with other Fellows.

For further detail see Beta Phase Sprint Notes 4

What happened in Sprint 5

Following the RSA’s Fellows Festival on the 14th May, we spent most of Sprint 5 on mapping out the overall service blueprint, user journey and private beta plans that bring together all three areas of the service - Explore your RSA, Fellow Spaces and invites to Engage. We made good progress during a team workshop with the dxw, RSA, Netcel and Salesforce stakeholders where we looked at the end-to-end service from the perspective of the users (Fellows) and technology considerations.

We also focused this sprint on considering recruitment needs to find Fellows to take part in the private beta testing, plans for content review, final draft of the Community standards and preparations for our 2nd Show & Ask session which took place on the 26th May.

Team Workshop: end-to-end service view

During the session, we looked at the end-to-end user journey prepared in advance of the session and asked participants to add key considerations for each part of the journey which we then discussed in more detail. Despite the very productive discussion, we managed to complete only the first part of the session’s goal - to form a clear view of the full service from the point of view of the users (Fellows) and technology considerations. We also agreed the parts of the service, such as the pre-fellowship stage, that are out of scope on this phase of work which was very helpful.

We held another session to look at the prioritisation. In this session, we discussed further considerations needed before we can proceed with agreeing the plan. To maintain the delivery pace and deliver the identified user testing with Fellows, we'll need to agree the priorities as soon as possible during Sprint 6.

Recruitment and onboarding of Fellows participating in beta testing

Our core plan to recruit Fellows to participate in the private beta testing was to present the project and deliver a demo during the Fellows Festival. While we managed to get good engagement from Fellows during the Festival, this wasn’t with as many Fellows as anticipated due to the Festival participants not having enough time to stop by in between the sessions on the day as we hoped. Consequently, we decided that to ensure a diverse group of Fellows will test the service and provide feedback, we’d explore other channels to recruit more Fellows. Other RSA teams and stakeholders have been approached and different options discussed. We managed to slightly increase the number of Fellows registering their interest. 

We now need to make a decision about the deadline for registration and the date for onboarding Fellows. It’s important we balance the need to have a diverse group of Fellows to test the MVP version of the service and the timeline to iterate the service before moving to rolling the service out in a couple of months.

Alongside the steps to recruit more Fellows, we’ve been busy with identifying and mapping out the different research activities we’d like to engage the participating Fellows in based on the user journey that we walked through during the team workshop mentioned above. These plans will be further detailed and iterated during Sprint 6.

Community standards and content review plans

We drafted Community standards and posted them in Circle to collect feedback from the RSA stakeholders. We now have a nearly final version of the draft and will be soon posting them in the Circle space for the soon to be onboarded Fellows. We agreed that the Fellows will be encouraged to review the Community standards as part of their onboarding process and to leave their feedback using the commenting on a post function in Circle. We also started to plan a workshop with key RSA stakeholders to review the types of content that exist already and that need to be created for the service. We’re aiming to deliver 2 one-hour long sessions with different stakeholders involved in creating and managing content on the RSA side. 

Show & Ask 2

We delivered our 2nd Show & Ask session with Fellows on the 26th May. Following the feedback received from a Fellow that joined the previous session, we managed to slightly pivot the plans for the session a day in advance and include a more interactive activity for the Fellows joining the session to complete within Circle during the Show & Ask. In addition to that, we presented our existing plans for this phase, project context and delivered a demo of Circle, seeking feedback from the Fellows.

Next steps

We have 5 sprints left before we start rolling the service out. The core focus for the upcoming sprints will therefore need to be onboarding Fellows participating in the private beta testing, planning and delivering the user testing sessions with Fellows to
get their feedback, and making interactions to have an MVP version of the service ready for the start of the rolling out process within the next 5 sprints.