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A new way of working

Posted by
Zach Moss
Published

At the end of last year, we decided on a new process for updating our advance decision form.

Our previous update cycles were too long, and we realised we were suffering from a bit of inertia when it came to making changes to the form.

We had some helpful sessions with Caroline Jarret (a forms expert) who helped us design a new process.

The new approach:

  • is realistic about what we can do given our team size and other priorities
  • doesn’t let big problems delay making small changes
  • thinks about the form as one thing (not online and paper)
  • can be embedded as a new core piece of work we do

Fighting inertia

The work we did with Caroline explored some of the challenges we face when trying to maintain and improve a high quality, robust and trusted advance decision form.

Some interesting questions we’re grappling with:

  1. It’s important to recognise our bandwidth - what do we genuinely have capacity to work on?
  2. Don’t hesitate to fix the small stuff
  3. Factor in cost of changes - both print and software development costs
  4. Big policy/practice issues with advance decisions aren’t worsened by better quality inputs into the form
  5. We need to think about how we communicate changes to users and organisations who use our form
  6. How to define a ‘breaking change’… or better put a ‘destroy old stock’ change to the form

As with any big new change in process, it’ll take time to embed and also we’ll no doubt change this process as we go. But sometimes starting is the hardest bit!

Communicating changes

We have thousands of people using our advance decision forms every year. We also have organisations who’ve white-labelled a version of our form.

This means being open about this work and communicating the changes we make are an important part of the process.

We need to work out how users think about updates to the form, and we need to clearly communicate to our partners that they may need to update their own forms so they’re using the latest version.

We’ll be using these team notes as a way of documenting the new process and updates to the form.