Putting Agile-ity and the WoW factor into our flagship UK Poverty report
Alice through the looking glass or poacher turned gamekeeper. These are some of the feelings I’ve had while leading the analysis for JRF’s flagship report on UK Poverty. Why, you ask? Well because I also led on the production of the DWP’s National Statistics publication on the same data just before I left the Civil Service.
I wanted to compare and contrast the more traditional production methods I used at DWP with the processes we have used, where we have actively experimented with new and innovative ways of working (or WoW), as well as setting out some of the challenges and benefits to working this way.
Let’s start with the analysis — the DWP publication is mostly an established set of tables. At JRF, we have our outcome areas of more people wanting to solve poverty, more and better work, a better social security system, and more decent affordable homes. We hope that our publication is part of the ways we can get more people to want to solve poverty. We then decided to organise the analysis to look in-depth at work, social security and housing. We allocated the areas around our set of talented analysts, asking them to discuss with our policy experts some of the best areas to look at. We ran the project as a series of week-long sprints (based on Agile best practice), with meetings to present conclusions at the end. These sessions generated a lot of questions that were then considered in the next sprint.
The benefit was that we were able to ‘follow the data’ and generate innovative new analysis, like on disability and poverty, barriers to work, or situations of poorer young adults living with their parents. The challenge was trying to pull all this work into a coherent publication, which took a lot longer than we expected. I do think the publication is a lot more interesting as a result of this, though. Both the National Statistics publication and UK Poverty are politically independent, but being able to work closely with policy experts and senior managers at JRF to craft the text was another difference — one of the National Statistics rules is that access to results before release is limited is to very few individuals who even then are only able to see the results just 24 hours before publication!
The final contrast is how all of JRF are actively involved in the production of the report — in DWP the web-team and press office played critical roles in getting the report out, but (perhaps understandably) there was little discussion of how the publication would feel from a user’s perspective or how we could get the messages out to as wide an audience as possible. At JRF, we have thought really carefully about how we can make the publication valuable for as many people as possible, building up different ‘personas’, for example an MP or charity campaigner, and thinking about what they’d want from our publication. Out of this, in addition to the full report, we are releasing ‘chapterised content’, e.g. a stand-alone material on housing and poverty, as well as a special UK Poverty framing toolkit to make sure campaigners can talk about our analysis most effectively.
I have hugely enjoyed working on the report and am hugely appreciative of all the hard work of colleagues in jumping into new ways of doing things. I’d love to hear what you think of it — we already have a lot of ideas for next year’s report, for instance in hearing more voices from people with lived experience of poverty, but please do let us know what you’d like to see, and also if there are new WoWs you think we can use. You can contact me below or at peter.matejic@jrf.org.uk.
