Bespoke Development

Our purpose is to support our colleagues to flourish and deliver Queen Mary’s vision: to open the doors of opportunity.  We do this by working with leaders and teams, to diagnose and respond to current and future organisational and individual needs.

To do this, we use the Diagnosis – Intervention – Evaluation model.

To read about this in more detail and see some worked examples, open this PDF: Diagnosis-Intervention-Evaluation Model [PDF 137KB]

You can also find a shorter summary here: To train or not to train? [PDF 88KB]

• Diagnosis
• Intervention
• Evaluation
• How can OPD support you?

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Diagnosis

1. What are you aiming for?

This is what you want to see in an ideal world.  Keep it positive!  Avoid ‘I want people to stop doing/saying…’ – what do you want to see?  What’s currently working well that you’d like to keep or expand on?

2. What are you seeing which is different?

This is the ‘surface level’ issue or problem.  It may have come about from colleague or student feedback, or from quantitative data (e.g. email response times). 

3. How is this measured or evidenced?

It’s very difficult to know if anything has changed if you can’t describe where you’re starting from! 

Some measures are very easy, for example:  How much time or money does it take to do a particular task?  What does your customer feedback say?  What were your Staff Survey results on a given topic?

If you’re not measuring, how do you know there’s a problem?  What is the impact?

4. What behaviours underlie this problem – what are people doing?

What does this problem look like in practice?  What effect is it having?  If your problem is more abstract – ‘I feel like people aren’t…’ – what observations make you feel that way?

To get the details, you might need to speak to the people involved – the people the behaviours are impacting on, the people carrying out the behaviours, and their managers. 

5. What is causing this behaviour?

There are four main causes of a particular behaviour:

• Knowledge: For example, of policy, processes or technical details.
• Skills: Such as customer service or giving feedback
• Motivation: Does your team understand what’s in it for them? Are they demotivated by slow processes, constant change, or a lack of knowledge?
• Environment: This can be physical (e.g. workspace or equipment) and/or social (team culture).

There’s usually more than one cause, and they can influence each other!

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Intervention

The most appropriate intervention will always depend on the underlying cause.

Knowledge & Skills interventions include:

• Reviewing and improving processes
• Creating job aids and references that colleagues can use on the job
• Job shadowing and knowledge sharing within teams
• Off-the-job activities (such as training or e-learning) to embed new skills or processes

Motivation & Environment issues usually can’t be resolved by learning or training.  Interventions here might include:

• More transparent two-way communication from managers
• Proactive response to bullying or other inappropriate behaviour
• Recognising and rewarding positive behaviours and high performance
• Improvements to the physical environment or equipment used

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Evaluation

Applying an intervention is an iterative (repeatable) process.  If you’re trying something new, it’s a good idea to decide how long you’ll put it into practice for before reviewing your progress. 

When evaluating, return to the measures you identified during diagnosis and use them to get an up-to-date picture of the situation.  You can also gather information in other ways: for example, by speaking to the people directly impacted, and their stakeholders or customers.

After you’ve reviewed what your intervention has changed, you can decide to:

• Adopt the intervention permanently and make it part of your ‘business as usual’.
• Adapt the intervention to make it more effective, and try it out for another trial period.
• Abandon the intervention and return to the diagnostic phase.

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How can the OPD team support you?

Stage	We can support you to...
Diagnosis	Work out how to measure a ‘baseline’ of present behaviours which will help you to evaluate your interventions later. Consult with stakeholders to identify what’s really going on, and what might be causing the challenges you’re facing Create an ambitious but realistic target to aim for
Intervention	Choose the best intervention(s) to address underlying issues Identify the best resources, methods and/or providers to meet your needs Adapt existing learning materials to meet local needs (as appropriate)
Evaluation	Identify the best ways to gather information Talk through next steps: adopt, adapt or abandon? Decide what changes need to be made if necessary

Working with your team – tailored to you.

If your team or area has a development need, please contact opd@qmul.ac.uk with a brief outline. A member of our team will be in touch to discuss the situation in more detail and agree on a way forward.