The benefits of benefits mapping
Eloise Taysom - Senior Business Analyst at GDS
Context
Providing a service to citizens often involves an eligibility check. Generally, this is a laborious manual process where the citizen sends in paper forms to prove eligibility and the service provider checks this evidence. This is time consuming and expensive for government bodies providing services. The data that service providers use to prove eligibility is usually already held in other parts of government, but accessing it is difficult. Personal Data Exchange (PDE) is a team in Government Digital Service who are trying to solve this problem. We’re building a simple and secure way to query existing personal data held by government departments. PDE is currently in Alpha.
Process
At the start of this work, PDE was exploring the problem that data access and sharing in government is difficult and expensive. Solving this issue is a big challenge, so we had to work out how to focus our efforts and how to deliver the most impact. One of the ways we did this was to use benefits mapping. This involved mapping out the benefits that we could deliver and the changes we need to bring about to deliver these benefits. We found that going through the benefits process was useful both for refining our scope and for communicating our vision to stakeholders. In this article I will give an overview of what the benefits mapping process looked like for us.
A benefits map links drivers to strategic objectives in a series of stages:
drivers -> project outputs -> enabling changes -> intermediary benefits -> end benefits -> strategic objectives
We started our benefits map by listing out all of the drivers behind PDE that we’d identified in discovery through user research. We also listed out all of the benefits we could bring, sorting them into medium and long term, and linked them to our two strategic objectives:
- To improve and standardise the service experience for citizens proving eligibility
- To increase the efficiency of accessing personal data to conduct eligibility checks
The last stage was linking the drivers and benefits with enabling changes that would realise those benefits. In the first iteration of the benefits map, we left out project outputs because we didn’t want to define the solution too early.
Outcomes
Our first benefits maps were very useful in team discussions about work we should prioritise. We used them to help trade off design decisions by identifying which project outputs would deliver the most impact against our strategic objectives. There are three user groups that we’re trying to benefit: citizens, government bodies providing services and government departments providing access to their data. Therefore, we also used the first benefits map to identify which elements applied to each user group. This meant we could map the critical paths for each user group where the most benefit would be realised. I also went through the drivers with our user research to work out which drivers we had the most evidence for and which needed more research.
By this point our benefits map was big. We had 15 drivers, and 13 enabling changes. Although this was useful for team discussions, it was difficult to read for anyone not involved in the project. Therefore, we decided to iterate on the map and produce a ‘condensed’ version.
Here we refined the drivers to four main points which were well supported by research and areas we could deliver high impact:
- Manual eligibility checking is time consuming and expensive
- Data sharing agreements are time consuming and expensive to set up
- There is pressure to digitise government services
- GDPR will impact data sharing practice
This paired down version has been particularly useful in communicating our vision to senior stakeholders and focusing our roadmap.
Next steps
Now we’ve got a benefits map we will continue to refer back to it and refine it where necessary as the project progresses. At the moment, we’re using it to help define how we will measure the benefits of PDE. Against each benefit we need a metric. These metrics will determine what data we collect through Alpha to baseline against. Once in Beta, the benefits map will help us to form a benefits realisation plan to ensure our products and services are delivering on the intended benefits and changes for our users. Overall, I would recommend the benefits mapping process as a way to tackle a complex problem, engage a team in a joint vision and communicate clearly with stakeholders about the benefits you’re bringing to your users.
