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Service Standard assessment report

Make Changes to Approved Research

Service description

Health and care research is regulated by a combination of UK-wide and devolved review bodies. Different types of research require different approvals. Make changes to approved research allows researchers and research sponsors to describe and submit any changes they want to make to their research after the research has received regulatory approvals. Some changes to research just need to be notified while others require approval from review bodies. The service will route the change to the appropriate pathway and the back-stage part of the service will manage the receipt and approval part of the process by the relevant review bodies.

Service users

• researchers research teams who run and manage research projects and need to make changes to their research
• sponsors and their representatives who oversee research and agree changes to research
• delivery teams the organisations and teams that deliver research and need to implement the changes
• reviewers approval specialists, committee members and other review bodies who need to review and approve changes to research
• staff operational and support staff who need to process approvals, manage committees, and manage support requests.

High level user needs this service aims to meet

• as a researcher I need to make changes to my research and notify my sponsor and delivery teams so that my research can continue to run safely and efficiently.
• as a sponsor I need to understand what has changed and what impact this may have on the research so that I can support researcher teams and sign off changes before they are submitted.
• as a member of the delivery team, I need to be notified of changes and have up to date documentation so that I know which aspects of research delivery I need to change.
• as a reviewer I need to understand which aspects of the research have changed so that I can provide regulatory review, ethical opinion and issue the approval.
• as a member of staff, I need to manage reviewers, review meetings and report on service performance so that approvals are issued in good time and research can continue to run smoothly.

Things the service team has done well:

• made a good start on performance measures for the service
• made changes during Alpha to ways of working in response to lessons learned and had a good understanding of capability and capacity they would need to deliver private beta
• the design and test iterative cycle for the prototype was a team sport to get the most value out of each sprint
• used a hypothesis driven approach where they gathered and prioritised their assumptions and tested those. They presented these findings regularly with leadership, product team, developers, and business analysts
• the team has conducted user research with a wide spread of both front stage and backstage users and have pulled together a good understanding of their various user groups and their needs

1. Understand users and their needs

Decision

The service was rated green for point 1 of the Standard.

Optional advice to help the service team continually improve the service:

• it is important that the team make an effort to carry out face to face user research with their various user groups to gain contextual and ethnographic insight which will help them design a service that meets user needs
• currently in the private beta user research plan there is no mention of observing users using the live service. The team should plan running private beta tests of the end-to-end service with real users, including support options
• some of the persona specific user needs are not solution agnostic. make sure you are focusing on the users problems and not the potential solution

2. Solve a whole problem for users

Decision

The service was rated green for point 2 of the Standard.

Optional advice to help the service team continually improve the service

• consider the impact on the users of not importing the existing data into the new service

Optional Advice about Data Migration Approach from Lead Assessor

• the team have decided not to carry out data migration from existing legacy systems due to technical feasibility and complexity, but this would be reliant on the user of the Make a Change service to upload documents required for the review and approval service.
• it is important to understand the impact on the user experience of doing this and the level to which it will create an additional pain point while resolving others with the new service versus the cost and effort of building software on legacy services to control what changes are made to documentation

3. Provide a joined-up experience across all channels

Decision

The service was rated green for point 3 of the Standard.

Optional advice to help the service team continually improve the service

• the team might benefit from mapping the wider ecosystem and the entry points into the system
• more refinement, which the team acknowledges, on the entry point and start page

4. Make the service simple to use

Decision

The service was rated green for point 4 of the Standard.

Optional advice to help the service team continually improve the service

• the team might benefit from mapping the wider ecosystem and the entry points into the system
• more refinement, which the team acknowledges, on the entry point and start page
• the team is using GOV.UK design system but is developing some additional patterns to reflect the needs of review committees. They might benefit from speaking to departments who have their own design systems that focus on the needs of internal users (Ministry of Justice might have helpful insights)
• make sure a user centric approach is taken to dual running on the end-to-end journey if incremental implementation to ensure it does not make it more complex for the user

5. Make sure everyone can use the service

Decision

The service was rated amber for point 5 of the Standard.

During the assessment, we didnt see evidence of:

• a documented understanding of the assisted digital journey and how this service will support those users
• we appreciate based on user types it is challenging but the team need to continue explore assisted digital during beta by looking at universal barriers to digital take up and where users may need digital support to use the service
• more user research with a broad range of accessibility needs

6. Have a multidisciplinary team

Decision

The service was rated green for point 6 of the Standard.

7. Use agile ways of working

Decision

The service was rated green for point 7 of the Standard.

8. Iterate and improve frequently

Decision

The service was rated green for point 8 of the Standard.

9. Create a secure service which protects users privacy

Decision

The service was rated green for point 9 of the Standard.

Optional advice to help the service team continually improve the service

• while the panel welcomes that the team has already identified fraud vectors. the team must develop a full threat model which goes beyond fraud and cover all threats, countermeasures, and mitigation
• it can be useful to add anti-personas (hypothetical users with an interest to disrupt the system) alongside existing per
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