Minimal Viable Product

Criteria for MVP

The scope of the existing user journeys was too wide for a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) as per Agile methodology. Therefore, we needed to limit our focus.

In devising an appropriate MVP, we wanted to identify a subset of user journeys from the roadmap that would:

• Deliver maximum impact, most rapidly for the users
• Be readily testable so that we could fast-track iterative improvements
• Be relatively quick to build
• Leverage existing design, functionality and code from parallel projects
• Generate sufficient data to legitimise the reporting component
• Be capable of isolation from existing processes in the NCC to limit disruption during rollout

Identifying MVP

With these factors in mind, the rent journeys were selected for MVP because rent enquiries:

• Represent around a third of all calls to the NCC.
• Can be directed to a small team of agents for testing purposes as they have a hotline number; whilst continuing to allow other agents to answer queries on the existing system.
• Income Collection uses a hunt line and so patch list / callback functionality is not needed to be implemented straight away for rent calls, reducing build time. A hunt line means that the it rings every number on a list automatically until someone picks it up.
• Will generate enough data for interrogation via reporting software.
• Are suitable for channel shift so we can begin baselining metrics.

MVP User Journeys

We needed to make sure that our MVP did not offer fewer features to callers than the existing service. Therefore, at a bare minimum, it needed to deliver the following user journeys:

• Paying rent
• Ringing with a rent transaction query
• Setting up a standing order or direct debit
• Requesting a printed statement
• Wanting a refund
• Requesting a rent card

This was supplemented with the ability for agents to enact the above as well as the following:

• Identify and DPA-validate a caller
• Log a call type and reason
• Write automatic and manual notes to both CRM and Action Diary
• Add contact details
• Send out links via SMS or email

In addition, Team Leaders with the correct permissions will be able to generate reports on rent queries eg frequency of call types over a time period. And Administrators will be able to set up new users.

These features align to epics in Agile methodology and were created as such in Jira software. We then broke each epic down further into User Stories.