# Date the work was done
March 2021
# Introduction
While the work on the pre headteacher board (HTB) part of our service was ongoing, we started to look at the post HTB stage in order to design and build and end-to-end service. Post HTB was part of the service that the team knew the least about as previous research focussed mainly on the pre HTB stage.
At the time of creating our designs our primary users, delivery officers, were under a lot of pressure to help academies and trusts deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Because of this, we decided to see where we could do desk research to inform our decisions on our post HTB designs.
Once we had a better understanding of this stage, we would put an initial design together and then test it and iterate it as we learn more.
# Delivery officer trackers
Through previous research, we knew that delivery officers create their own trackers or task lists to manage their work.
With the help of our subject matter experts (SMEs) we contacted delivery officers from each of the 8 regional delivery directorate (RDD) regions to ask them to send us any trackers they use within their teams.
We gathered trackers from 7 regions and then started analysing them to see what the similarities and differences are between how different regions work and what tasks need to get done.
# Findings
- pre HTB involves more analysis and looking at data on the school and trust
- post HTB is more transactional than pre HTB and delivery officers receive and clear legal documents as their main tasks
- post HTB involves more tasks for the school, trust and solicitors to do and delivery officers help keep them on track
- recording dates is important to help keep projects on track
- there are slight differences in language, for example some regions say ‘post academy order (AO)’ and some say ‘post HTB’, both mean the same thing
- more experienced delivery officers find post HTB very intuitive and don’t need trackers because they know what to do
- we were able to identify what tasks always need to happen and what tasks will only apply to some situations
- there are some tasks that happen after the school has converted that delivery officers need to do
- delivery officers are expected to RAG rate their projects but once it’s RAG rated there isn’t any information for them to view why it’s been rated a certain way
# What else have we learnt
We also learnt that some conversion projects are handed over to another delivery officer for the post HTB stage. This meant we would need to include a way for the ‘new’ delivery officer to have the information they need to take the project forward.
These things included:
- having access to the application form
- having the school’s unique reference number (URN)
- access to a ‘handover proforma’ that would allow the first delivery officer to give the second delivery officer relevant information