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BPP | Apprenticeship COACHING TRANSFORMATION
Transforming apprenticeship coaching efficiency through human-centered design
Work in progress
🚧 This case study is a work in progress 🚧
Please bare with me whilst I join the dots and tell my story.
Drop me a message and I can talk you through it in more detail
My Role
Senior Service Designer
Key Skills
Service Design, Digital Transformation, Change Management, AI Innovation
The background
What is an apprenticeship coach?
An apprenticeship coach at BPP guides learners through their studies with tailored, proactive support delivered at the right time and level. For BPP and their apprentices, the coaching model is a critical component of apprenticeship success.
Coaching is about as human of a role as they come, heavily reliant on a trusted, open and empathetic connection between the coach and their apprentice. But what happens when various challenges get in the way of a human coach being their best human self?
In this article we'll address the escalating list of challenges that coaches faced in their day-to-day roles and explore how the Product & Technology team helped to utilise Human-centered Design & technology to allow the human side of coaching to shine bright.
The background
Transforming apprenticeship coaching efficiency through human-centered design
When the project was initiated, it came to the P&T team almost at a point of crisis. Calls for help were coming from various schools and various teams within the business. In summary this is what was being shouted down:
- "The report platform is too unstable"
- "We're getting too many support tickets"
- "We can't support this for much longer"
- "We're losing coaches and can't lose any more"
- "Clients are complaining, we need to act now"
Naturally most fingers were being pointed in the direction of a legacy platform called Global Tracker, who's job it was to help coaches write and submit their progress review call notes. But judging from the calls for help above, it doesn't sound like it was working all that well.
We needed to find out what was really happening here.
The discovery - Problem space
Problem space
The Service Design team led the efforts of an 11 week discovery piece, working very closely in collaboration with a multi-disciplinary product & tech team and a large group of stakeholders across the business and various schools.
Discovery goals:
- Map & understand the AS-IS progression tracking service across all schools within BPP
- Design and define the near and far service vision
The team racked up well over 7000 post-it notes from over 60 hours of interviews, workshops and discovery activities across the various actors across the various schools.
Through the power of many hours of synthesis and a series of internal workshops, the problem space was distilled into some core problem areas for the coaches within the AS-IS service:
In words, here's a way to summarise the challenges that we discovered the coaches were facing:
Constant time pressure + repetitive manual tasks + multiple inefficient systems + growing backlog of data entry
= Human error, bad data, increased stress & lower quality of service
At this point, it was fairly clear there was some work to be done...
Problem space
Storytelling
It's all well and good if the core discovery team understood the problem space like the backs of our hands, but what was really important was that our stakeholders across the business could also understand the problems from within the service.
We produced and played back a series of illustrated storyboards to the key stakeholders, scattered with QUAL and QUANT research insights and direct quotes from the various actors.
Discovery
Solution space
With the problem space nice and clear and our stakeholders believing our work was credible, it was time to start problem solving.
Using a set of How Might We statements, we ran internal ideation sessions to start to draw out initial ideas from core team members
Discovery
Iterative concept co-creation
Discovery
Concept validation & prioritisation
Discovery
Development - Planning
Delivery
Results
"The early signs are really encouraging, particularly how it's making our lives easier on time spent on day-to-day admin, which means we can focus on what we actually want to be doing, which is having those really good quality coaching conversations with our apprentices."
"It improves consistency, and it gives us more as coaches, more time to focus and learn a progression."
"We expect the volume of significant technical issues that we had with Global Tracker will now be significantly reduced with Progress Tracker coach assist."
"it's saving coaches around roughly 15 minutes [per call], maybe more"
