Helping staff do more in the community with product development

We started the project by holding a two-week hackathon with key project stakeholders, user groups and audience types.

 The hackathon analysed the existing journey and identified gaps and pain points. Having access to the relevant people over a short period of time enabled us to make efficiencies in immersion, idea generation and scoping.

Following this, we mapped the ‘ultimate’ experience taking into consideration the emotional mindset that volunteers may have, the physical interactions that they will encounter (using a mobile device/laptop/forms) and the communications they need to make with the bank and the charity or other employees.

The result of our work was a prioritised backlog of improvements and initiatives that we then implemented in an agile delivery process. This first phase was focused on improvements to the employee experience looking specifically at ways to increase hours logged, and expanding the commitment to skills based volunteering based on user needs.

Our team is now looking at the next phase of VMS development which will focus on improving the administrative processes within the system. This will make it easier for Lloyds’ VMS team to match mentors with mentees, and to automate communications with everyone involved with a volunteering activity. We’re also implementing a user feedback survey, enabling us to make on-going improvements to the internal platform development based on user needs.