How can we work more effectively with others?
In order for our team to be successful in our vision* it is vital that we work effectively with other people across the organisation. Over the last 6 months we have worked collaboratively with others, sometimes successfully, other times making mistakes and for this reason we are keen to learn from our errors and change to make sure we are working more effectively with others.
*Our vision is that Macmillan innovates for service users, with service users, by discovering the needs of people living with cancer and delivering what matters to them.
We have identified 5 areas to make us more effective when working with other teams:
1. Allow time to set up projects
We haven’t used a formal process to kick work off and we don’t allow ourselves time to get up to speed with all the work that may have happened before a project lands with us. With one project this meant that as we rushed the scoping phase we had assumed documents created had been tested but later realised they hadn’t so we had to go back and redo work.
We learned that we need to allow ourselves more time to set up, scope and get up to speed with a project before starting more work on it.
We have decided to always scope at least a week of set up time when we start a new project.
2. Be clear about what we are asking of others
Over the last few months we have kicked ourselves several times for not being clearer about what we are asking from others. From not providing a date for feeding back to not giving clear enough workshop activity instructions this has all led to poor outcomes/outputs. We are learning more about finding the right balance of giving enough clear details without being overwhelming or patronising to others.
We learned that we need to find a better balance of giving enough information without making it overwhelming.
We have decided to use a clear agenda template to help us articulate our aims and expected outputs.

3. Pick our battles
We can’t fix everything and it is important we pick those ‘battles’ where our energy is best spent. At the moment, we are a small team of 4 people and have had to become better at prioritising where we spend our energy.
We have learned that we can’t work on everything that sparks our interest or everything we are asked to work on, as we will become too stretched and the quality of our work is at risk.
We have decided to use our Design Values and Theory of Change to help us prioritise work and make decisions about where we focus our resource. (More about our Design Values and how we created them in our next post!)

4. Understand and draw on people’s different areas of expertise
There are over 1500 people working at Macmillan and many more volunteers, that’s a lot of knowledge and experience for us to navigate and bring together! We have experienced how when we don’t involve the right people early on this can lead to a project being derailed or delayed.
We have learned that it’s important for us to include the right people at the right moments of projects to ensure they feel involved and avoid the feeling that things are happening to them and not with them.
We have decided to take time to think through our key stakeholders and we have begun to have conversations with our stakeholders to understand more about their drivers, knowledge and where we might collaborate within the Double Diamond process. We are capturing some of this in our stakeholder map which we will continue to update as we learn more.
5. Encourage others to document and communicate work
We know that communication is key in the workplace. Within Macmillan we, like many organisations, have people join and leave often. This means that work, knowledge and decisions can easily be lost as people move in, out and around the organisation. We need to ensure that our process and decisions are documented so that we don’t waste time re-doing work.
We have observed that for others, documenting and communicating work to relevant and concerned parties isn’t always a natural thing to do.
We have decided to encourage teams to do more regular ‘stand-up’s’ to support with communication across teams, encourage others to use our weekly update template and continue to work with teams to visualise things like journey maps.

This is just the start of us understanding how we can collaborate better with others, do you have any tips to share with us?
Next week we’ll be posting about our process for creating our Design Values!
Written by,
Nicola Marti - Iterim Senior Innovation Consultant
