Digital

Finding out what people need to learn about cloud

November 9, 2021 by Stewart Hamilton No Comments | Category Cloud 1st, Digital Scotland, Digital Transformation Service

Blog by Serena Nusing, senior service designer, and Mark Daniels, senior user researcher, Digital Transformation Division.

The Cloud First programme within the Digital Directorate aims to support the Scottish Government and Scottish public sector in their journey to cloud ensuring they’re able to realise the benefits of cloud. In this blog, Serena Nusing, senior service designer, and Mark Daniels, senior user researcher, share with you their approach for exploring cloud learning needs.

Why we started this research project

We see many teams across the Scottish Government and the public sector struggling to get organisational buy-in for moving to cloud. There is a lack of understanding of what the move to cloud requires and a consistent approach on how to go about it is missing. Many departments and organisations are new to cloud and gaps in resources, skills and knowledge block them.

Who we engaged with during the project

Over the course of our research we engaged with around 42 participants, from across 11 different public sector organisations. We decided that we wanted to recruit a focus group made up of actual users. In particular, outlining different job roles and responsibilities we needed to see represented in our participants. Based on this, we looked to recruit a mix of roles both generalists and specialists.

Generalists included, staff working in:

• legal
• finance
• procurement
• policy
• governance boards

Specialists included, staff working in:

• delivering a cloud service
• project/service delivery teams eg product owners, business analysts, delivery managers, etc
• technical delivery teams eg technical architects, developers, engineers

We also looked for a mix of age, gender and ethnicity as well as their background in cloud.

How we involved users in the research

We started by facilitating a workshop with the Cloud First Team and our technical partner to get all the assumptions out and to document their experiences so far. Then, we ran 3 workshops with our user focus group. We ran each workshop twice – to offer different time slots for participants to sign up to.

The workshops asked participants to complete the following tasks in groups:

• mapping responsibilities and journey mapping
• completing learning personas and scenario mapping
• co-design where you imagine the best possible help and support

After each workshop we ran a session to make our own sense of what participants had told us to:

• look for bigger themes
• highlight gaps
• set a focus for the next workshop

We also asked participants to complete a survey anonymously to recommend changes to our research approach.

What happens next

We’re now in a process of working with the Cloud First team to document and analyse all the insights from the workshops. We’re looking for common themes emerging across the sessions and exercises.

We then intend to playback our insights and user needs to the research participants. We’ll then hold follow-up sessions with stakeholders, looking at the user needs we’ve determined, to brainstorm ideas and agree priorities.

Lastly we’ll look to assign ownership to these needs and ideas, identifying who will help us take them forward and how we’ll approach this.

If you want to learn more you can get in touch with the Cloud First team.

Tags: cloud, cloud 1st, learning, research, scottish government

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