Week 19 - Farming, poop and doing better kick-offs 🐄 💩

Hi, I’m Mieka Webber. 

I joined MadeTech last week as a User Researcher and was excited to team up with the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) on a slurry and nutrient management discovery. 

What is slurry you might ask? - It’s poop. Yep. Animal poop! 

Slurry management 

29 million tonnes of farming livestock slurry is produced in England every year. If not stored properly, slurry can be a serious source of environmental pollution. Unfortunately, despite much work over the decades to address the problem, investment in good slurry management practices is not always built into business planning, particularly beef, dairy and pig farming. 

DEFRA has been doing a lot of great work to understand the different user and stakeholder groups involved in slurry management. For the next phase of their work, DEFRA has asked us to join their team exploring farmers' needs, pain barriers and policy intent for good slurry management, as well as opportunities to encourage improved practice. 

Setting up a discovery

Admirably, DEFRA is eager to learn best practices around user research and co-design and want the project to feel more like an agile embedded team and less like a client/consultant relationship. So the first week was all about getting to know the team at DEFRA, establishing agile ceremonies and ways of working, and reading through all the documentation shared with us. 

However, there were some teething problems. Which is usually the case when trying something new.

Striking the right balance between team-building meetings vs protecting time to read through documentation was challenging, and, at times, DEFRA felt like we weren't collaborating as part of one team. 

Thankfully they fed this back to us, and we were able to take some positive actions to improve things:  

1. Discussed preferred working styles of each member of the team and agreed on roles and responsibilities, assigning discovery tasks to leads, contributors, reviewers, and sign off. 

2. Scheduled in all the agile ceremonies (standup, sprint planning, retros, and backlog grooming) 

3. Presented our understanding of the problem space, research goals, assumptions and a research plan to the DEFRA team and iterated based on feedback 

4. Scheduled additional workshops to sense check and collaborate on the research goals, assumptions and plan with the wider stakeholders team. 

Kicking off differently next time 

My main lesson learnt from my first week is that it’s important to recognise that, in many instances, our clients may not have agile working experience or know what’s involved in a discovery. Some coaching or an introduction to these disciplines may help establish a positive, balanced client relationship. 

I would have liked to have gone into the kick off meeting talking about how we approach discoveries, and some pre-prepared material or a checklist could have been useful. For example, slides on what a discovery is, and some FYIs on the steps we take to understand the problem space and identify the needs of our stakeholders.