Rainmaker Solutions
Lightning Sprint: Design sprint methodology and rapid prototyping
Built on Google’s proven Design Sprint methodology, Rainmaker Lightning Sprints allow you to bring ideas to life in just five days with a prototype you can touch and feel, and test with users. We enable you to test hypotheses, see what works, and make positive change faster than ever before.
Features
- Rapid (5 day) immersive user-centric process to accelerate transformation
- User led service design: understand, sketch, decide, prototype, validate
- User focussed testing and iteration with real users engaged throughout
- Rapid prototype development including accessibility
- Technology-aware service design with users at the heart (WCAG2.1)
- Clear benefits of full implementation from rapid prototyping
- On demand team that can deliver outcomes in 5 days
- Hugely influential with challenging stakeholders and complex environments
- Based on Google Design Sprint Methodology
- Clear definition of Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Benefits
- "5 years effort achieved in 5 days” Central Government Department
- Increases organisational leadership buy in
- Clear benefits outlined to drive the case for change
- Greater probability of project success as users are heavily engaged
- Technology aware design, leading to lower cost and feasible implementations
- Knowledge transfer and upskilling of in-house resources
- Outcome focussed methodology, Digital by Default
- Rapid Discovery and Alpha progression (Lightning Discovery)
- Significantly increases users' and organisation's engagement with proposed changes
Pricing
£37,500 a unit
Service documents
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Framework
G-Cloud 14
Service ID
9 4 6 1 8 3 0 2 7 5 1 1 9 9 3
Contact
Rainmaker Solutions
Tenders Department
Telephone: 0330 223 4407
Email: tenders@rainmaker.solutions
Planning
- Planning service
- No
Training
- Training service provided
- Yes
- How the training service works
-
At Rainmaker, we ensure our clients' teams learn a great deal throughout our engagements.
Our assignments usually include working in a joint team with our clients. We actively help to coach and train your staff throughout our engagements, through a collaborative and transparent approach. We like to colocate with your staff, and invite any member of your organisation to join our collaborative online workspace to work and create alongside us. We passionately 'work out loud', utilising the latest technology and embedding a co-creative approach within the team.
Often we use a phased workload approach with clients, gradually reducing our team size as we upskill and transfer knowledge to members of your team. Digital literacy assessment is a significant part of our approach and we always ensure we are inclusive when performing training.
We help you improve not just your understanding of any given service, its problem, and its solution, but also how to be a digital leader, inspire a digital culture, and promote strategies more broadly in your organisation.
Learning doesn't stop at co-working: we also offer more formal training and coaching approaches. We can provide end-to-end training, refresher courses, knowledge banks for training materials, digital tools, and mentorship. - Training is tied to specific services
- No
Setup and migration
- Setup or migration service available
- No
Quality assurance and performance testing
- Quality assurance and performance testing service
- Yes
- How the quality assurance and performance testing works
-
Rainmaker will provide quality assurance and performance testing using a Service Design approach to accurately understand your business needs, and to align your business – internally and externally - with a value creating, innovative service.
Through service design research, insights and use of design-driven methodologies and co-creating alongside the business, we’ll design, test and build robust services that users need. The iterative design and usability testing will be a key integrated ongoing process, which will help your business achieve long-term, lasting, business transformation.
Delivering a minimum viable product helps gain consensus on the viability of the product or service, and allows user feedback to define and prioritise future deliverables.
We'll establish and manage an appropriate level of testing in terms of quality and capabilities of the service in line with program delivery plans, validation and verification of systems against user and business requirements.
Performance testing ensures that the system performs adequately under anticipated loads and to determine how the system recovers following abnormal load. Performance and stress testing ensures systems are not compromised. Automated testing enables consistency, and can be supplemented by end user testing for specific use cases that cannot be simulated.
Security testing
- Security services
- No
Ongoing support
- Ongoing support service
- No
Service scope
- Service constraints
- NA
User support
- Email or online ticketing support
- No
- Phone support
- No
- Web chat support
- No
- Support levels
-
Users engaged in the lightning sprint will be supported throughout the process as part of the engagement.
No user support in the sense of email/phone/chat/ticketing is applicable to this service.
Resellers
- Supplier type
- Not a reseller
Staff security
- Staff security clearance
- Other security clearance
- Government security clearance
- Up to Developed Vetting (DV)
Standards and certifications
- ISO/IEC 27001 certification
- No
- ISO 28000:2007 certification
- No
- CSA STAR certification
- No
- PCI certification
- No
- Cyber essentials
- Yes
- Cyber essentials plus
- Yes
- Other security certifications
- No
Social Value
- Social Value
-
Social Value
- Fighting climate change
- Covid-19 recovery
- Tackling economic inequality
- Equal opportunity
- Wellbeing
Fighting climate change
Rainmaker doesn’t operate fixed offices, meaning we are able to keep our core environmental impact to a minimum. We cement this through a series of sustainable decisions throughout our business operations, to ensure we look after our communities.
We offer all colleagues access to a Cycle2Work scheme, encouraging them to reduce carbon emissions wherever possible. We also promote remote working to reduce our carbon emissions from commuting and business travel. Where travel is unavoidable, we commit to offset carbon emissions either directly with the travel provider or through a third party scheme.
We have also actively chosen to extend the operating life of all technology devices, rather than replacing on a regular cycle. By replacing only at the point of need, and not maintaining surplus hardware stock, we are reducing the consumption of new devices. When devices do need replacing, we return factory-reset devices to the manufacturer for recycling.
As members of CarbonNeutralBritain we are also actively seeking ways to minimise travel with our clients to reduce our climate footprint, and dramatically reduce the number of in-person meetings.Covid-19 recovery
Our Covid-19 response included supporting people and communities to manage and recover from the pandemic’s impact, as well as establishing new ways of working and delivery of physical and mental health support services. Rainmaker provided critical, urgent support to organisations and businesses to manage and recover from the impacts of Covid-19 through expert advice, guidance, and tooling set up for a number of local authorities to enable remote and hybrid working, and supported the rollout of digital tools for organisations impacted internationally.
We have demonstrated this through both client engagements and our company culture:
- For Surrey Heartlands, we worked with CCGs, trusts, healthcare providers and charities to develop a portal for organisations to publish, market and track attendance to virtual wellbeing services, connecting vulnerable residents with critical mental and physical health services.
- Our charity, The Buffalo Foundation, has supported communities severely affected by food shortages, furlough/redundancies, and changes in living conditions.
- Publicly released Remote Working Guidance in April 2020 and made this available publicly, enabling others to adopt a more flexible approach to working location to protect staff.
- Internally, we increased our support of staff through additional confidential calls, giving staff the opportunity to discuss worries and concerns related to the pandemic with additional support from independent HR Advisors.
- We also regularly remind staff to look out for each other in terms of stress response to the pandemic and continually consider their own mental, as well as physical, health
- To support a distributed staff network, we introduced changes that improve remote working and foster collaboration and community across the company. These include Monday check-ins, regular socials, virtual Rainmaker days, and guidance on using digital tools effectively.Tackling economic inequality
Since our inception Rainmaker has remained committed to transforming economic inequality.
We’ve done this at the very heart of government; Rainmakers were involved in the creation of GCloud - the open, transparent marketplace for Government to buy digital products and services - that disrupted the public sector procurement landscape, significantly reducing procurement costs and offering increased agility, value and achievement of outcomes. Over 4,200 suppliers are listed on GCloud, with £7bn+ services bought to date.
We have been advocates of supporting innovation, disruptive technologies and driving the adoption of new solutions to deliver better value for money and higher quality services for over a decade.
We have also earned an enviable reputation for helping organisations become genuinely adaptable and enabling, through disaggregation and disruption of monolithic silos, introducing transformed supply chains that bring lower cost, greater diversity amd or higher quality goods and services to clients including MHCLG, IOPC, FSA and Birmingham City Council.
Furthermore, we know that the strength of any collaborative supply chain comes from shared values and principles not just at a commercial level but also between staff, customers and end-users.
Our long history of collaboration with other organisations as prime or sub-contractor to solve challenging problems has resulted in robust processes, values and principles that guide our engagement with clients and partners and outline how we collaborate throughout the engagement and beyond. Our experience includes:
- GDS’ Global Digital Marketplace, working as equal partners in a multi-supplier contract
- London Borough of Croydon, leading five other suppliers to develop and transition to a new service model.
Ultimately, Rainmaker exists to make a difference. We recognise and activity play our part in tackling social inequality wherever we can.Equal opportunity
Since our inception, we have been committed to creating opportunities that truly transform lives and outcomes, whilst bringing brilliant minds into our workforce.
In the UK our current focus is firmly on unlocking the incredible resilience and thinking of our children looked after within our care systems, and enabling better opportunities to enter the workforce with skills in user research, service design, policy reformation and digital service delivery.
In South Africa, our focus remains on tackling the inequality that forces many young people to become stuck in a cycle of violence, crime and drugs. Through our academies, we actively intervene with education and sporting at key times to divert the course of the young person’s life and create new generations of brilliant minds in our industries. We do this through our active support of The Buffalo Foundation, a charity established by our founders and for whom we cover all operating expenditure.
Beyond our charity work, we actively support all Rainmakers involved in mentoring young people from disadvantaged backgrounds with opportunities to place mentees into secondments and contract roles, whilst also influencing staff, suppliers, customers and communities through the delivery of the contract to support disabled people by leading by example, ensuring our teams demonstrate the brilliance that enables diverse teams to deliver exceptional outcomes.
Finally, as signatories of the Tech Talent Charter, continuing to use (and contribute to) the Open Playbook to increase inclusion and diversity in the tech workforce, we're promote and advocate equal opportunity within our own workforce. We are also members of the Disability Confident scheme, ensuring we eliminate conscious and unconscious discrimination from our recruitment and supply chain practices.Wellbeing
Rainmaker is committed to supporting the wellbeing of staff, associates and our clients throughout engagements. Our supportive, enabling culture is incredibly important to us and healthy team members are firmly at the heart of this. Mental health is openly discussed throughout the organisation, ensuring that staff feel able to take time off work to address mental health challenges. If the need arises, we support individuals to access services to address specific concerns. We have also introduced regular (weekly) online meetings to check in with and see how life - not just work - was going, to preserve our feeling of camaraderie and connectedness.
We encourage participation in charity events such as London to Paris cycle events which, as well as doing good in communities we support, has the additional benefit of promoting physical health and wellbeing amongst staff. We provide access to coaching and training plans to support staff that wish to take on a physical challenge. Such large challenges aren't always for everyone though, and we regularly promote the benefits of getting outdoors and staying physically active - especially with a distributed, remote workforce.
Whilst Rainmakers are used to working from any location and all capable of working from home, the impact of working alone is something we keenly monitor and mitigate. We've actively introduced opportunities to physically get together to refresh the bonds between individuals by providing opportunities for co-working days to encourage staff to meet up. We run regular all-staff 'Rainmaker Days' where we encourage participation from teams across all of our clients.
Pricing
- Price
- £37,500 a unit
- Discount for educational organisations
- No
Service documents
Request an accessible format
If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format,
email the supplier at tenders@rainmaker.solutions.
Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.