New ways of working in BRC community education
The British Red Cross community education team is passionate about delivering first aid and humanitarian education. We respond to learner needs and aim to empower communities to build resilience through a range of learning routes including direct delivery in at-risk communities, online education resources and self-directed learning such as our first aid apps.
Our team has been through a real journey over the last few years, emerging into 2020 with a new service design, a new name, a new head of education and a new way of working…
Pre-Agile
In the past, at times, it felt as though the (then Crisis) Education team worked in a bubble of its own. Often, if I told colleagues in my office my role, they had never heard of my team or our work — although there was no question around the quality and need for our work, this was demoralising and prohibitive to cross service support and promotion. The restructure of our team created an opportunity to overcome some of the challenges and inefficiencies we, as a team, had been facing.
Traditionally we would work to long term static goals and set outcomes that we had committed to months or sometimes years in advance. We had clearly defined responsibilities according to our role and work was assigned accordingly. In such a large organisation this would often lead to delays and blockers as a piece of work needed to be passed to different teams once completed, for signoff or input, meaning work was not completed in a linear way and waiting to receive feedback on a whole piece of work held the risk of large changes being needed.
So, what is Agile?
The introduction of ‘Agile’ to the product development team has been a bit of a whirlwind, especially with the external context of Coronavirus. Agile principles centre around; outcomes over outputs, skills over hierarchy, reflective working, allowing space for priorities to flex and change, and always being led by audience need. Although this way of working has come from digital teams traditionally, it has proven a valuable tool in other sectors too, allowing teams to respond quickly to changing environments and release products iteratively to ensure that audience need is being met rapidly. This is something that has been so valuable over the last few months for us, creating the space to respond rapidly to, and provide educational support during, a number of recent events.
Making the leap
With the introduction of an Agile framework came a host of new learning, including a whole new vocabulary — squads, sprints, retros, stand ups are now the norm in our team’s working days, and I often need to remind myself to make sure that I am speaking a language that others in the organisation will understand!
We began this new way of working, with this new team, in March — it has been interesting to say the least! Some members of the squad I have never met in person but, have spent more time with them over the last few months than family and friends. Agile working has fostered a very open, honest, safe space in which to work, helping us bond quickly, learn from our mistakes and adapt to the current climate.
We have been empowered to try new things and have found space to understand what works for us and our service. Even as a new team you can’t go wrong — every time we do or make something, we reflect on what went well and how, as a team, we can improve for next time, creating a safe space for innovation and new ideas. This is implemented within daily stand-ups and fortnightly retros, where we reflect on work done so far and look at how this can lead to benefits across the team, service and organisation. This promotes constant improvement and development at a pace I haven’t experienced before, especially in such a large organisation.
We have also been adapting to the cumulative and collective responsibility of tasks — all mucking in to overcome barriers, complete tasks and meet deadlines, has become normal. Though at times it has been challenging to try out something completely new with the team, the benefits we have experienced have already demonstrated how well this framework works for us. Some of our achievements so far include:
- releasing First Aid Champions early to support teachers and parents with first aid education during lockdown
- switching our face to face workshops onto a digital platform
- developing a Kindness Curriculum to build resilience for young people during lockdown
- creating resources to support young people talking about the BLM movement and encourage families to have discussions around race
- creating new space on the BRC website for resources supporting those that have suffered from loneliness during the pandemic
Sticking the landing
One of the most immediate and obvious benefits we have come across working in an Agile fashion has been the response to our change in communication style — feedback has been overwhelmingly positive as we have reached out to other services and demonstrated our work, our plans and our progress. It’s great to shout about what we’re proud of and it has made a big impact — helping us and others recognise what a great team we are and the importance of the work that we are doing. We hold fortnightly demos for the Community Education team and those in the squad and monthly ones for partner teams. These demos help us celebrate achievements, keep others informed and involved, and ensure we are including the right people across the organisation at all times to help amplify our work and realise the best outcomes for our learners.
We have worked on creating much stronger communication links and have started conversations that are sparking inter-team collaborations. At times the content of the communications has not been the primary focus but instead, the fact that we are propagating an open and transparent view of our products and plans has been all it has taken to get things off the ground. More engagement means more people contributing to the same goals. Understanding what each other do and what we want to achieve drives collaboration towards achieving that vision.
Opening these communication channels has also allowed us to capture insights, experience and ideas from the numerous experts across the organisation from the get-go. Additionally, we have been able to better understand the focus and priorities of our colleagues in other services and find opportunities for cross-service collaboration.
Working in small ‘squads’ allows us to work quickly in a democratic fashion. People take the lead on small bitesize pieces of work, but support others where needed, meaning investment across the team and avoiding the need for ‘sign offs’. Now people’s skill sets are used to share learning and capability with others in the squad, increasing capacity and reducing reliance on specific individuals.
A small squad however doesn’t mean isolation or ‘getting your head down’. We have representatives from other teams in the squad, subject matter experts from other services — feeding in insight and experience and, squad partners — helping align us with the rest of the organisation, ensuring that learning and strategy are shared and that direction of travel and strategic decisions are sense-checked by us all.
The verdict
With this new structure and way of working, I know that the community education team is an exciting place to be. Agile is still new to us and although it has brought lots of benefits so far, we are also aware that we need to continue to evolve and adapt as we embed it, continuously finding ways to improve. However, looking back at where we started in March with a new team, I’m really proud of how far we’ve come — producing some amazing products, responding to a global pandemic, building bridges in the organisation and making Agile work for us.
