From Flintstone to Full Solution in 9 Weeks (Offer Letters)

In the charity sector, large programs are quite rare, so let's look at the most common type of digital project, which usually lasts about 9 to 12 weeks. For example, an education charity needed a solution to generate offer letters for successful applicants of a specific, high-value course. Like many projects I've worked on, this problem had existed for years. Several solutions had been attempted, but none were completed or adopted. Initially, the goal was described to me as, "we need a system for offer letters." Previous attempts involved extending the student administration system, using low-code technologies, and customizing their SaaS CRM product. Despite these efforts, none succeeded, and all took more than a year.

Using a Flintstones approach, we rephrased the goal before starting the project to "we want to get offer letters out within three weeks of accepting the applicant." The existing process took an average of 13 weeks to generate an offer letter, causing applicants to accept offers from other institutions before receiving theirs from this establishment. To put this in context, the lost revenue for each missed opportunity was around $80,000.

Rephrasing our success criteria in business terms gave us the opportunity to build and test a small solution with a subset of internal users to prove we could issue offer letters faster—without committing to the full project spend. We quickly identified one of about 10 internal administrators who was keen to try something new. It was difficult to find time with Judy because she was under a huge amount of stress most of the day, chipping away at an impossible backlog.

To avoid adding to her problems, we recorded the screens on the two PCs she used for an hour or so. From this, we saw that a fairly simple solution would solve the problem. We didn't scope or specify the solution—it was just obvious that a very simple application would dramatically reduce the 80 to 100 clicks and copy-paste actions necessary for Judy to produce and email one letter to a successful applicant. We also developed a proxy measure for success for the pilot, which was to cut the minutes required to administer one offer letter by 80%.

Within seven business days, Judy had tested a better solution on about ten of her applications. For all other applicants, she reverted to the normal process. Even this rudimentary solution, which was not integrated into any backing systems, had a dramatic impact. Of course, Judy was not responsible for managing the temporary (spreadsheet-style) integrations during the pilot – that was our job. Judy used the system as if it were fully integrated, just like its namesake, a Flintstones car.

By the end of the three-week Flintstones Pilot, Judy was using the new solution full-time and churning through her backlog at a great pace. Because the success was so obvious, the sponsor approved our work to continue and scale the solution by integrating it into backend systems. We had planned for this eventuality before we started the project, so we did not have to wait for those integrations to be created for us. By the end of the fifth week, Judy was using the system full-time and was reliably getting her quota of offer letters out in less than three days.