6 months into Lead UR Role
TL;DR This post covers my reflections 6-months into the new UCD-Lead / Lead User Researcher role
I love continuous development… I really hate formal reviews! However it has been a hectic time so reflecting on the challenges and my progress over the last 6 months is hopefully helpful, not least to unpick some challenges and things I might do differently going forward too.
Thoughts about the new role
This role and the projects have been much more complex than I expected!
Positives:
- It was a considerable change for me - after 12 years work on ‘frontline research’, to move into a more strategic role focussed on capability development
- I’ve learnt loads about how things work from an ‘organisational perspective’, rather than ‘what happens from the delivery teams perspective’
- The Central UCD Teams are really brilliant, great personalities, brilliant experience and have diverse perspectives
- Finding some greenfields to work in: starting projects from scratch, defining the goals and timelines
- Working with the team and UR Leadership community to shape and prioritise our roadmap
- The focus is on quality and outcomes rather speed/quantity
- Interesting player/coach mix - leading discovery and alphas vs. UCD Maturity coaching
- The support and guidance available from colleagues in the team, as well as new training opportunities
- Found time to contiune to support DHSC as an UR Service Assessor
- Working on technically complex projects, and working with lots of teams and stakeholders
- It’s not been quite as stressful as Covid Testing, projects are given the time they need
Challenges:
- Coordinating change across disporate groups and teams can take a lot of time. E.g. to understand their needs and taking them on a journey: reflection, alignment, action planning, delivery, etc. It can easily take 3-6 months before change and positive outcomes happen on these workstreams.
- So many project - taking on too much……. stemming the tide of requests. Needing to practice better prioritisation and saying no to more requests! Finding ways to automate things!
- Choosing which battles to fight has never been more important, defining clear roles and responsibilities (e.g. local UR leads should do this bit, or the central team will do that)
- Being dropped into a politically complex NHS programme ‘100-day discharge challenge’. Due to delays in starting the work there was no time for actual discovery. Saved the project by running a complex follow-up survey with Qualtrics for 150 Trusts/CCIOs. It worked out well for the project but was very stressful, and it didn’t provide much benefit for the Central UCD Team or UR community
- Feeling a bit disconnected from frontline… turning this around to believe (and demonstrate) how what we do in the Central UCD Team for the professions and organisational strategy has a direct impact on patient care. “Better capability, better delivery, better outcomes”
- Going from having a large team of contractors to manage, into having no direct reports. I.e. there are no ‘juniors URs or URs to delegated directly to’ - everything must be done through leadership, influencing, pursuasion of the community and colleagues!
Projects
UCD Maturity
I’ve hosted the UCD Maturity Community of Practice (which enables peer-support between teams), chaired UCD Maturity workshops, and provided UCD-coaching and guidance to teams as required.
Challenges:
This project was really difficult to get started. Picking up work that hasn’t been looked at for several months since the agency who created the maturity model rolled-off. A few teams had done workshops to test the UCD model, but this was 6-months before I joined!
Since joining the team, I faciltated meetings of the Community of Practice (CoP) every 3 weeks. We started with some reflection activities to learn about what colleagues wanted to get out this community, and create a shared agenda from their.
The CoP identified lots of challenges/blockers to rolling out UCD-Maturity workshops to all teams:
- It’s difficult to build engagement across ‘non-delivery’ teams
- Lots of teams are still sceptical: what is UCD about? what benefits? a 3 hours workshop?
- Teams unavailbility: summer holiday, mourning of the Queen, challenging delivery schedules
- Competing agendas: product maturity/product mindsets, engineering maturity, etc.
- Organisational merger / team restructures
The Community of Practice, and UCD Maturity Faciltators are great! very supportive of each other!
One push-back we get is there is a risk we are preaching to the converted. UCD maturity reviews are not mandated, so some teams are many miles off the UCD-grid, and are not volunteering up to being involved at all. To scale things up we do need more consistent encouragement from senior programme managers/directors as well as champions/practitioners within teams to offer up the idea of doing a workshop.
Also to get these teams onboard we need to provide stronger evidence for how UCD Maturity workshops benefit teams. So we aim to run an evaluation study/survey with all the teams/colleagues who took part to understand the benefits.
Positives:
- UCD Maturity Community of Practice growing, including interest from outside UCD
- UCD Maturity Training - attended by 15 colleagues
- Workshops - we’ve run workshops with 5 teams since I joined
- 1 face-to-face workshop has been planned
- Interest from external teams, NHS organisations and consultancies
- 5 more teams are planning workshops
- Positive feedback from the 3 most recent workshops!
- Teams who work on Data/APIs commenting “Good to see how UCD can apply to their work too!”
- 2 teams who took part recently, being very proactive and creating the action plan without any support
Acting as an SME for UCD/UR within the Central Ops team
I’ve helped launch the UR Lab!
Qualtrics (expert user and IG lead)
As the IAA “Information Asset Assistant” Things that i’ve been working on:
- Reviewing the IG protocols and enhancing these to meet the needs
- Resolving technical issues that teams have that cannot be resolved within the team
- Interfacing with software supplier and customer support
- Resolving issues regarding IG/Cyber, with Enquires team and corporate teams
- Fixing problems with really complex surveys and contact databases
- Training, coaching and a shoulder to cry on for survey makers
- Working with Qualtrics team to improve support for our researchers
Incentives
- I’ve supported the rollout of the new incentives portal
- I’ve lobbied for the needs of UR community, to be represented in incentives policy, getting finance directors to approve policy changes
- I’m Lobbying for NHSD UR community at the X-gov ALB Payments Committee meetups
- I’ve drafted new policy on incentives for healthcare staff (non-citizen research), which is being piloted
Knowledge management
This project has been much more complex than I expected
It’s hard to put a price on the value of knowledge and documentation right?
“Why spend any effort writing processes for UCD? when you could instead hire someone else to write some code for a health service?”
“How do we know that standard procedures are useful? Our teams survived for the last decade year without a ‘playbook’”
These are interesting perspectives, and I guess there are a few benefits to having a low-documentation culture, it encourages creativity!!
I’m sure across the business have over:
- 100 ways to create a research consent form,
- 100 different persona designs,
- 100 survey variations,
- 100 research plans,
- 100 show and tells decks.
ALL DIFFERENT!
IG processes are not consistent across teams, and without any standardisation/or ‘good practice guidance’ the quality and success of UCD across teams has become massively variable (good and bad)!
Some teams do improve what they are doing gradually over time but it can take many years. For new teams starting from scratch with no healthcare or government research experience, it can be very daunting.
Every product team that wants to hire a researcher, and for every contractor that arrives, and every time someone leaves we get the same questions.
“What do we need to do?” “How do we do this?” “Where is this? I can’t find that?” “How did we do this last time?” “Is there a template?” “Who knows what projects are happening?” “Has this work been done before?” “Where are those previous insights?” “What do we put things when we leave?”
As I joined the team in May, we didn’t have any Standard Operating Procedures/templates for research delivery; so it is a very long road to turn this around!
With the pandemic forcing everyone to remote work, we’ve been going through a fair bit of creative destruction with teams throwing out their old ways of doing things and finding new solutions.
However, as things with Covid calmed down, more teams are getting back into the offices to gain the benefits of face-to-face collaboration. There are increased opportunities for cross-team information sharing.
Work on knowledge management completed:
Before I joined the team:
- Discovery completed
- Gap analysis of guidance content completed
- Prioritised 4 areas of focus (ethics, safeguarding, consent, IG)
After I joined the team:
- Expanded scope of priority documentation (UR lab, research panels, UCD, discovery, alpha, surveys)
- Improved structure and usability of the Sharepoint sites/sub-sites
- Proposed and piloted a new information architecture
- Started collecting examples of documentation off teams
- Created and shared new guidance based around researchers needs (e.g. staff incentives policy, f2f research policy)
This project is a long-haul and as a team we’re chipping away at guidance and documentation. It takes some perservance. We’re continuing on a slow path towards documenting our UR/UCD procedures ahead of the merger with NHSE/HEE in 2023. It is going to be really important for scaling UR/UCD in an organisation with low UCD awareness.
It has also been great hearing positive feedback from UR colleagues and external Re-Ops colleagues about how impressed they are with the guidance and onboarding materials available for NHS Digital UCD colleagues.
Panel Management strategy
- Discovery - done
- Alpha - done
- Private beta - happening now
I’ve previously written and presented about this project I’m leading to consolidate the many research panels we have into a single NHS Staff panel, with the benefit being a consistent data collection, standard IG processes and communications.
It has been an enjoyable project, with dozens of teams engaging in the discovery and design workshops I facilitated during alpha.
After some gnarly technical problems, which we needed to engage the Qualtrics XM community to resolve, we are now ready to roll out on the panel to internal teams!
Assuming the private beta goes well we’ll advertise the panel more widely and launch it properly for all the researchers later this year. I wrote a blog post about this work, but gave in when comms told me they already had 15 teams lined up to write a post.
Regarding the work on a ‘Citizen Panel for Health’, which would bring together the many citizen contact lists that have grown across teams, unfortunately this has had to be paused due to re-prioritisation of the backlog.
There is some interesting work still happening in this space with the UKHSA Insights team and we are waiting to see how their project goes over the next few months before starting on what would we be a very similar project.
My goals for next few months
- Rolling out the Staff Panel and UR Lab
- Try to get the blog post published about the panels work
- Keep positive about the UCD Maturity work. It was difficult to start but now has some momentum!
- Say no to more requests! Backlog is fully booked up till Jan/Feb
- Speed up our knowledge management / BAU process for guidance and SOPs/templates
- Complete the Anti-Racism Allies training & Diamond Power Index 360 review
- Keep positive, in consideration of the organisation merger
- Get back into winter trail running (frosty toes running rather than frosty toes sitting at home!
- Take a good break over New Year