Delivering a transformative learning hub for Prince's Trust in just twelve weeks

Prince's Trust

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The client

Prince's Trust

The Prince's Trust charity was founded to support young people in the UK, no matter their background or challenges, and is specifically focused on giving everyone aged 11 to 30 the chance to find and embrace new opportunities.

With the pandemic limiting the charity’s ability to deliver in-person advice and coaching to young people looking for employment, they approached AND Digital for a blended digital and personal approach that could provide inclusive, effective skills training and guidance on starting a new business.

In one of the most challenging circumstances for young people looking for work, when COVID had effectively shut down the recruitment market, the charity wanted to work quickly to deliver the new platform and pilot website. We worked with the Prince's Trust to deliver the capabilities and online hub for booking courses, tracking training progress and, through integration with Teams, delivering the educational content itself.

The ask

Speed without compromise

A new remote learning platform in 12 weeks

With the Prince’s Trust eager to deliver an effective pilot proposition as soon as possible, the timeline was tight from the outset. But despite the challenging targets, the AND Digital and Prince’s Trust team worked together to deliver, in just 12 weeks, a blended learning delivery website to help young people build in-demand skills and access new opportunities.

The project kicked off with an intense, week-long Discovery phase to allow us to understand the charity’s goals and the needs of the young people they support in greater depth. This thorough investigation gave the team a clear picture and shared focus on the ultimate goals, as well as helping to define the MVP for go-live.

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The process

Delivering a game-changing platform

To facilitate a fast-paced, iterative build process the AND team brought in an agile coach as needed to build the Prince’s Trust in-house expertise. 

The AND team and the agile coach taught the Prince’s Trust how to adopt many agile processes ‘on the job’, and helped begin the process of embedding this new methodology into the business. Not only did this facilitate the quick development required for the project, but also laid the groundwork for long-term agile team processes to support the Prince’s Trust’s strategic digital transformation plans.

Using the newly-embedded, hybrid methodology of scrum and Kanban, this ‘Scrumban’ project was able to focus on rapid delivery (through scrum) and continuous visualisation of the user experience to fully inform prioritisation (through Kanban).

The technical build focused on implementing a modern, headless CMS platform using Contentful, a flexible, extendible market-leading software for content development. The application architecture also used Laravel and VueJS. The platform was fully integrated with the charity’s existing Teams and Oracle back-end systems, and was completed via a robust test and release process, even in the face of an ambitious deadline.

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Upskilling

Empowering Prince's Trust engineers and product teams

Equipping the Prince's Trust for the future

Throughout the build phase, both pair- and mob-programming approaches were employed to upskill developers in key technologies such as Vue.js and Contentful. The close relationship between AND Digital and Prince’s Trust throughout the project only served to further cement developer and project manager skills, as well as gaining essential buy-in from senior stakeholders of the work we were doing together.

With a clearly defined vision, and an upskilled collaborative team, all working remotely, AND were able to lead the project through the process of Guide, Build and Equip to deliver a scalable, trackable solution. The 12-week project not only provided a front-end that could test the delivery of two different types of courses, but also allowed the Prince’s Trust team to track success, using Google Analytics, and provided a platform that has the potential to roll out nationally, and service hundreds of young people.

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Key outcomes

A content system for the future

The deployment of Contentful has given the charity a platform through which they can both continue to expand the content they are delivering and evolve the type of course they can offer. 

The Prince’s Trust is now equipped with a robust, scalable platform for enabling remote and online learning, potentially opening their services to thousands more young people across the country, and giving them the scope to be far more responsive to any changing needs that may arise in the future.

Although not designed to replace the face-to-face services the charity provides, the blended learning hub gives users and trainers the tools to augment and enhance learning. This blended approach allows face-to-face and expert-led, one-on-one advice to work in parallel with structured, trackable online learning modules, and allows users and trainers alike to access services regardless of location or circumstances. This paradigm-shifting capability is part of a wider digital transformation programme for the charity, and will offer opportunities to deliver far more content to a greater number of young people, with greater efficiency than ever before.

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