Scottish Enterprise – creating a voice for user research
Scottish Enterprise is the country’s main economic development agency. Its role is to
- Deliver economic growth for Scotland
- Provide tailored support and access to global industry network
- Encourage and secure international investment in Scotland
- Help Scottish businesses grow
- Support projects that improve Scotland’s economic performance
How we helped Scottish Enterprise
Functional assessment of the research team
Part of our successful bid to work with the Scottish Enterprise user research team was to complete a functional assessment of the teams’ experience, skills and organisational effectiveness. We invited the team members to make a self assessment and used this as a basis for more detailed assessments of individual and team outputs and outcomes. These findings helped us shape the subsequent training.
Hands on user research training
We designed and delivered a custom user research training program based on the needs we’d found during our functional assessment of the team. We ran two intensive sessions. Each of of the sessions was over two days with a combination of discussions, understanding methodologies and how to apply them in practical ways.
The team had varying levels of skills and experience and via daily retrospectives we could quickly see what was and wasn’t working and apply quick changes for subsequent sessions.
The team left with a unified understanding of what they should be doing when and how. The sessions also helped strengthen the sense of joint enterprise and support the team had developed.
Service Standard Assessment training
We followed the user research teams’ progress on an emerging service they were planning to take through a Digital Service Standard Assessment. We provided advice and support on the methods that would help generate the necessary evidence for an assessment and the media/collateral that would be useful in the assessment.
With the current phase of work complete, we conducted a Service Standard Assessment and provided feedback and guidance to equip the team for the real thing.