How continuous digital improvement leads to content customers

Our ambition to ensure continuous digital improvement in how we work has led our software developers to transition to agile methodology and more user testing. The objective is for our digital products to perform at their best for our grant holders. Our Senior Developer, Matt Andrews, shines a light on how it all works.

Continuous Improvement is at the heart of how we work digitally at the Fund. Over the past few years we’ve moved away from traditional waterfall project strategies, towards more agile methods to deliver our digital products (e.g. our website, our online application forms, and other services we offer grant holders).

We iterate on these things in short “sprint” cycles and are constantly testing ideas with users so we can verify that the changes we’re working on are adding value.

One side-effect of this Continuous Improvement methodology is the idea of delivering things that aren’t ’finished’ yet. Rather than make users wait until the entire product or service is complete and release it in a big-bang launch (often characterised by delays, unexpected errors and painful transitions), we aim to deliver small, but working, pieces of software, which we can gradually build on, and measure to determine what needs improvement next.

This can sometimes conflict with security.