Draft_SOO_25_June.docx

STATEMENT OF OBJECTIVES

Digital Women’s Entrepreneurship Initiative 2018

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this statement of objectives (SOO) is to development and release to end users a Digital Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This SOO is predicated on the fact that the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) stakeholders understand User Experience (UX), design thinking, and agile project management. For example, job responsibilities within the SBA have been redefined according to agile and/or human-centered design roles, and stakeholders are comfortable enough with modern technology concepts and are ready to start delivery of a digital service product by developing an MVP.

In order to achieve this goal, quality partners must be able to establish and execute a framework for user centered design, usability research, and agile implementation. It is expected that the selected contractor will follow the U.S. Digital Services Playbook to help SBA build an effective digital experience that servers the public’s need. See playbook.cio.gov for details.

OUTPUTS

The resulting contract will be considered successful when the following outputs have been delivered:

· Refine/validate product vision and salient characteristics as listed in appendix 1

· Identification of hypothesis building and testing, user research, and success metrics

· Build and launch initial learning resource prototype by January 31, 2018

· Determination and documentation of what is necessary to scale the solution, if successful, or a plan to pivot to a different solution if unsuccessful

· Usability research with end users to determine whether success was met;

· Delivery of refined prototype/scalable product with at least three defined learning paths by March 1, 2018

PROBLEM STATEMENT

The SBA wants to reach more entrepreneurs in rural and underserved markets without adding more brick and mortar locations. Entrepreneurs lack access to an essential set of online learning resources and consolidated knowledge base. The federal government lacks a way to deliver a modern complete learning experience that includes networking among cohorts and peer-to-peer learning. This problem is particularly acute for women owned businesses, which only account for 31% of the nation’s privately held businesses and who have less access to cohort-based learning programs. Other resources in the market lack an experiential learning approach which is both engaging and encouraging to women owned businesses. The SBA’s current online learning options are a collection of aging content, lacking modern best practices for online courses with present accessibility issues. Currently there is no scalable way for the agency to build and deliver up-to-date learning experiences or to integrate this content with other services, such as virtual counseling or a peer-to-peer platform.

BACKGROUND

The agency’s current learning center (sba.gov/learning-center) has a collection of Adobe Flash based presentations, which feature lightly animated content. These courses are experienced as a slide presentation with a static curriculum and a narrator who orally dictates the same content. These courses are hosted using Amazon Web Services and presented or ‘wrapped’ by a thin ReactJS frontend website. An example, How to Write a Business Plan, can be found here (sba.gov/course/how-write-business-plan).

The course content itself has not been deeply updated or revised in several years. The staff available to maintain this content has been limited and restricted by a historical lack of technology support.

The current learning center does not offer a blended learning experience. It lacks any sort of connection between participants taking courses or any peer to peer learning or support. It is very narrowly focused on courses only and does not provide learning paths and related content.

A federal team made up of Small Business Administration, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Treasury have conducted initial research into what a new learning environment for women entrepreneurs should entail. See appendix 1 at the end of this document for a summary of proposed salient characteristics.

SCOPE

The scope of this effort is limited to the activities defined under the following four functional areas:

Functional Area 1: Discovery and Design Objective: The SBA and contractor will collaborate to determine how the problem will be solved through digitalization, utilize user centered design techniques and product management methods to create an initial product vision, product roadmap, and scope of the learning resource prototype and MVP. The SBA developed salient characteristics (appendix 1) should be considered in the discovery, design and delivery of the Digital MVP.

Tasks:

· Conduct discovery to determine a digital solution to the agency problem and end user goals for this activity

· Create hypothesis statement(s) that can be tested by the release of the prototype and MVP

· Create a product vision and initial scope for the prototype, MVP and final product roadmap The successful solution, at a minimum, shall also include the following best practices as highlighted in the digital service playbook:

Understand what entrepreneurs need The contractor begins this digital service project by exploring and pinpointing the needs of the women who will use the service, and the ways the service will fit into their lives. The vendor shall continually test the products with end users to ensure delivery is focused on meeting women entrepreneur needs.

In delivery of this effort the contractor shall:

1. Early in the project, spend time with current and prospective users of the service

2. Use a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods to determine people’s goals, needs, and behaviors

3. Survey an inventory of existing digital resources provided through SBA and other agencies and in coordination with SBA, determine which resources (if any):

· can be repurposed for this solution, which resources

· can be licensed content from private sector providers

· can be newly created content

4. Develop and test mock ups or prototypes of solutions with real people, in the field if possible

5. Document the findings about user goals, needs, behaviors, and preferences

6. Share findings with the team and agency leadership

7. Create a prioritized list of tasks the user is trying to accomplish, also known as "user stories" to be utilized in the agile development process

8. During development, continuously user-test the MVP to ensure it meets user needs

Functional Area 2: Development of prototype and Minimum Viable Product

Objective: Through the use of agile software development methods a prototype and minimum viable product will be developed and released to end users.

Tasks:

· Utilize an agile development method to write and manage epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, using appendix 1 as a guiding resource

· Conduct iteration retrospectives, release planning, backlog grooming, and other common activities associated with iterative design and agile methodologies

· Implement best practice methods for automated testing and code reviews

· Work with the agency to develop or manage continuous integration, code management processes, security, 508 compliance, privacy or any other agency policies that need to be incorporated in order to release the product in a live environment

· Test solution with end users and conduct user research activities

· Create and track metrics to determine whether the delivered solution meets end users’ needs and solves agency problem statement to some degree.

· As a result of the feedback provide recommendations on what should be modified in future versions of the product The successful solution, at a minimum, shall also include the following best practices as highlighted in the digital service playbook:

Address the whole experience, from start to finish The contractor ensures we understand the different ways women will interact with our services, including the actions they take online, through a mobile application, on a phone, or in person. Every encounter — whether it's online or offline — should move the user closer towards their goal.

In delivery of this effort the contractor shall:

1. Understand the different points at which women will interact with the service

2. Identify pain points in the current way users interact with the service, and prioritize these according to user needs

3. Design the digital parts of the service so that they are integrated with the offline touch points people use to interact with the service

4. Develop metrics that will measure how well the service is meeting user needs at each step of the service

Make it simple and intuitive Successful delivery of this contract requires that the services of and products delivered will not be stressful, confusing, or daunting. Therefore, the contractor shall build and release a digital MVP that is simple and intuitive enough that users succeed the first time, unaided.

In delivery of this effort the contractor shall:

1. Use a simple and flexible design style guide for the service. Use the agency’s standards

2. Use the design style guide consistently for related digital services

3. Give users clear information about where they are in each step of the process

4. Follow accessibility best practices to ensure all people can use the service

5. Provide users with a way to exit and return later to complete the process

6. Use language that is familiar to the user and easy to understand

7. Use language and design consistently throughout the service, including online and offline touch points

Use data to drive decisions At every stage of a project, the contractor shall measure how well our service is working for our users. This includes measuring how well a system performs and how people are interacting with it in real-time. These metrics shall be reported to the Program Managers to find issues and identify which bug fixes and improvements should be prioritized. Along with monitoring tools, a feedback mechanism should be in place for people to report issues directly.

In delivery of this effort the contractor shall:

1. Monitor system-level resource utilization in real time

2. Monitor system performance in real-time (e.g. response time, latency, throughput, and error rates)

3. Track concurrent users in real-time, and monitor user behaviors in the aggregate to determine how well the service meets user needs

4. Provide metrics which may be published internally

5. Provide metrics which may be published externally

6. Use an experimentation tool that supports multivariate testing in production

Functional Area 3: Retrospective: What worked, what didn’t, what to do next

Objective: Following the development and release of the MVP, the government and contractor team comes together to understand from a project viewpoint to identify improvement actions.

Tasks:

· Conduct a project retrospective activity that analyzes data gathered during performance around goals, timeline, budget, major events, and success or failures

· Determine what roadblocks were mitigated and which ones still exist that need to be addressed.

· Provide or update the Product Roadmap for scaling the MVP through continuous design and agile processes to provide other learning experiences.

· Ensure all system documentation, user stories, acceptance criteria and test scripts are finalized.

Functional Area 4: Operations Support

Objective: Address open issues, deferred features, and product roadmap of how product can and should be improved in the future.

Tasks:

· Address open issues, deferred features, and product roadmap of how product can and should be improved in the future

· Triage the backlog of customer complaints, bug reports, and system health indicators — cross-reference with the results of usability tests and usage metrics. Make key improvements and changes that would address underlying issues. Prioritize critical concerns.

· Periodically conduct discovery activities followed by implementation, then validation.

Appendix 1 Salient Characteristics

Educational content related

1. Learning paths (Three of which will be chosen to be completed initially)

a. Entrepreneurial Leadership (include in March launch)

b. Opportunity Identification (include in March launch)

c. Opportunity Assessment (include in March launch)

d. Marketing

e. People - Becoming an Employer

f. Innovation - Creating the Curve

g. Access to Capital

h. Social Capital

i. Selling

j. Operations - Process mapping and connecting to technology

k. Technology

l. Organizational Design

m. Physical Resources

2. Business educational materials and tools aimed at women entrepreneurs who want to expand their business, regardless of current business state.

3. Pedagogical approach emphasizing experiential learning with a peer-to-peer component throughout

4. A focused set of entrepreneurship topics, shown through research to be relevant to women, grouped by learning path with an ordered set of materials within each path

5. Interactive templates and worksheets related to learning path

6. Interactive instructional materials to introduce each segment, e.g. animated videos, infographics

7. Skills assessment of the entrepreneur to identify areas that need development and growth

8. Real world business owner testimonials in various engaging formats

9. Adapt exiting content--when possible tailor to women entrepreneurs

10. Scenario-based gamification/badging, i.e., games that challenge assumptions and provide decision making guidance relevant to each participant’s own business

11. Recommended learning path prerequisites when sequencing is desired

12. Resource library for templates and reference materials, populated with government and private sector information

13. Certificate or award for completion, knowledge checks and a leader board

Delivery platform related

1. Use/configure exiting commercial or government learning solution

2. Ability to incorporate government furnished media within learning path

3. Live content delivery capability (hosted live online events) and recorded for future viewing

4. Ability to choose serial and/or asynchronous learning

5. Ability to recommend related learning path and content (i.e. after learner experienced A and B system now recommends experience X)

6. Support for skills assessment

7. Ability to virtually connect learners

a. Within a session to ask questions of peers also taking the learning path and discuss topics

b. Outside of sessions for general discussion of issues and ideas

c. Teams of people who are solving a specific problem (includes sharing documents)

8. Ability for a teaching assistant to provide feedback to a learner

9. Gamification support

10. Social media like mechanism within and outside of learning path for learners to comment

11. Ability for learners to provide feedback on the value of the content

12. Dashboard of learner achievement

13. Accessible from all devices and platforms

14. Learning can be downloaded and processed when not connected to the internet

15. Transcripts

16. Modern user interface that is intuitive and simple to navigate, interactive and experiential

17. Support for a wiki/resource library

18. Search function to support searchable content and discussions, able to distinguish type in results

19. Capability to police, moderate and facilitate discussions

20. Document sharing

21. User accounts, secure login and data protection

22. Virtual environment for business counseling

23. Virtual environment for mentoring

24. Technical helpdesk (for system use not help understanding the learning content)

25. Content management system

26. Follow up mechanism to track business outcomes of entrepreneurs (i.e. performance management - tracking of business outcomes after taking class)

27. Innovative built-in system training for end user (screen tips, etc)

28. Training for system owner

29. Product will be accessible and 508 compliant