The magic of a multi-disciplinary team

We've recently launched our new purpose-built LGPS Funding Risk Monitoring (FRM) solution. This began, as many of our initiatives do, with a desire to put more advanced funding analytics in the hands of our clients – transforming the user experience.

The initial development was one of our most important for several years, spanning nine months and has seen our specialist LGPS digital team grow from two members to a multidisciplinary team of 15. Growing a team whilst delivering a complex, high-quality proposition at pace is no mean feat, and we’ve learned a lot along the way.

Many LGPS funds share broad aspirations around digital transformation, but these can be challenging to deliver.

In our recent articles, we talked about the importance of user experience and how a component-based architecture helps support an improved experience, but there are also other considerations we’ve needed to take into account along the way.

The adventure begins

To develop our FRM solution, we conducted extensive user research and analysis. This involved interviewing stakeholders, reviewing industry reports and regulations and identifying what factors might most impact our clients. We then created a detailed project plan, which included our approach to the architecture of the system including all its technical components, milestones, and deliverables. We had a very clear vision of what we were targeting and a plan to deliver it.

This approach worked well initially, keeping us aligned and on track. But as we progressed, we started to encounter some challenges.

Over time, we found it increasingly time-consuming to prioritise a large plan containing multiple interdependencies on other teams, and it became harder for individuals to keep track of all the moving parts. In addition, as we got into the detailed work of delivering a robust solution, we saw that our systems development experts wanted to get a stronger understanding of funding risk (without undergoing years of actuarial training) to help them recommend technical systems that were fit for purpose.

We quickly acknowledged that as well as having a clear vision and plan, we needed to adapt how we went about engaging all the people involved and the way they all worked together.

To overcome these challenges, we decided to focus our efforts on two main areas.

1. Building a multidisciplinary team

We decided that building a high-quality solution required a 100% dedicated LGPS-focussed client applications team. Whilst all the expertise we needed was already within the firm, we couldn’t be successful if those people had their primary focus on other activities and so we’ve invested significant effort in building a team specifically focused on LGPS applications. As our team grew from two members to fifteen, each new member brought unique skills and expertise to the project, but we saw that these experts had very different perspectives and spoke slightly different languages, so communication became a key focus. Holding regular meetings, buddying up people with complementary skills and having clear responsibilities to support good communication flow have been key in ensuring we’re all working towards the same goal.

2. Changing our ways of working together

In addition to building a dedicated team, we've also taken a more agile approach to working. Using shorter development cycles has allowed us to share progress and seek feedback more regularly. This has helped us adapt to changes in requirements or new insights gained during the development process and allowed for iterative learning within the team. Previously, where our plan was quite rigid, we can now accommodate changes more easily. Importantly, we’ve also been able to share prototypes and wireframes with LGPS officers along the way and get direct feedback ensuring that the solution addresses their needs.

The recipe for success

Ultimately, our team's success in creating FRM was made possible not only by a focus on user experience (“building the right thing”) or on a component-based architecture (“building the thing right”) but by going about this in the right way with the right team.

We’ve learned some valuable lessons along the way. Being courageous enough to try out new things, such as sharing ideas quickly or combining the right blend of highly-skilled experts in a single high-performing team (not only in technology but importantly those with deep LGPS knowledge), yields great results but is a careful balancing act.

Nevertheless, this balance has helped us to be more flexible and adaptable whilst staying focused and aligned. This has resulted in a great solution providing a user-friendly platform that has simplified and streamlined the process of monitoring funding risk. In fact, this has been recognised beyond our teams and clients and our FRM solution is a finalist for “Best Public Sector Digital Project“ in this year’s Digital Technology Leaders Awards.

Whilst this is great news, we’re not a team to rest on our laurels. We’re already hard at work on the next wave of digital developments and we’ll be excited to share these with you as we progress.

If you have any questions on anything covered in this blog or want to see a demonstration of Frontier’s new FRM solution, please get in touch.