The challenge

The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) is a central government department, with responsibility for inspecting services providing education and skills for learners of all ages. Ofsted also inspect and regulate services that care for children and young people.

Ofsted required business analyst resources to help support ongoing system and process developments across the business to improve their operations. We entered into a call-off contract in January 2017 with the option for extensions every 12 months to continue providing business analyst support for a diverse range of projects as required. To date the contract is going and we have delivered several successful outcomes some of which are listed below.

£10 million of savings identified and delivered

The response & outcome

Over a two year period we have been able to develop our understanding of Ofsted and their customers and to use our operational, commercial and change management experience to support a wide range of projects.

To date our partnership with Ofsted has included the following projects:

  • Improving the pre-inspection process: Providing support analysing the current operational delivery ultimately leading into the development of a high-level blueprint for Ofsted in 2020. The approach included Value Chain Analysis to understand current processes, systems, constraints and ideas for improvement, followed by workshops and interviews. Pre-Inspection was subsequently identified as a key area for further investigation. We reviewed the current options for improvement, scoped out possible changes, and produced a project proposal to be presented to the Transforming Together Board.
  • Developing standards and documentation: The Operational Change team required support in the development of Business Analyst standards and documentation required to support the substantial levels of change within Ofsted. We designed and developed the required documentation templates including a Value Chain map, Options Appraisal, Gap Analysis, Roadmap for change, and Customer Journey map.
  • Developing commercial solutions: The Commercial Team required help formalising, documenting, and developing underlying solutions for their business. We established the Business Requirements for the Commercial and Contracts Management across three business areas.
  • Improving citizen engagement: We undertook Contact Discovery work to help Ofsted with the development of previous work carried out in reviewing the way they manage citizen engagements across the organisation. This work involved understanding who the citizens are, preferred channels of contact, how Ofsted handle contacts and associated processes, and understanding the types of contacts received, volumes and trends. We produced a Programme Plan, Cost and Resource Model, Service Catalogue (describing Ofsted services from a citizen perspective), and Target Customer Journey and Value Chains.
  • Scoping a new Customer Relationships Management (CRM) system: Ofsted were looking to review the use of CRM within its main Contact Centre. Staff from teams using CRM were engaged through a combination of group workshops, service scoping interviews and shadowing sessions to understand how they use CRM and the challenges they face in its use. We captured the business processes in a service catalogue and identified seven drivers for change themes. We produced a Discovery Outcome Report that detailed our findings, including high-level business requirements and identified potential improvements activities, and produced a set of recommendations.