NISCC: “We want a thriving and resilient social care workforce continuously evolving to provide the best care to service users now and in the future”
Client: NISCC Northern Ireland Social Care Council
Project Outputs: Graphic representation of NISCC policy proposal & policy system map
The Challenge:
In July 2020, the Northern Ireland Department of Health and NISCC agreed to a programme of work to advance the department's priorities in building a sustainable social care workforce. The programme consisted of building a shared vision for the promotion and recognition of the Social Care Workforce and proposals for a Qualifications Based Register, a Career Structure and a Continuous Professional Development Framework for social care workers.
The project:
NISCC decided to partner with the Social Design Institute to bring social design methods and practices into the proposal to advance the sector. With this goal in mind, a series of workshops were designed to assist NISCC in identifying workforce needs and visual ways to share their policy proposals over a period of three months. Phillipa and I were brought into the project to execute the previously agreed upon project plan. The initial project plan consisted of five workshops: persona co-design, social care career pathways, proposal improvement, proposal prototyping and proposal visualization.
My Role:
I was brought into the project as a workshop designer, but also to add an employee experience perspective to the design process. Every week, Philippa Rose, my colleague in the project, and I discussed and agreed our approach and briefed each other on relevant insights found while analyzing and synthesizing information. While Phillipa managed the client relationship, I was in charge of the development of workshop activities and synthesization of information. We both participated in client meetings and facilitated the planned workshops.
Design Process:
We were brought into the project after the first workshop, Persona co-design, was already completed. Therefore, our first goal was to meet the team, the client and review the work already done, so we were able to define our course of action.
Creating personas & mapping pathways
We quickly realized the need to re-do the persona co-design process as the work completed so far could be better described as an interview process. We then took the 25 “personas'' identified by the client, condensed them into 4 personas and proceeded to propose continuing the first workshop by validating, complementing and modifying the personas in a co-design workshop. Our goal was to keep the voice of the social care workers present throughout the design process.
During the workshop, one persona was iterated on and an additional set of personas were identified by the client as missing in order to really capture the perspectives of such a diverse sector. We proceeded to identify relevant insights and the client conducted further interviews in order to gather data to co-develop these new personas.
Also, in the workshop, and in order to not affect the timeline initially proposed in the project plan, we developed existing and aspirational pathways so we could deepen our understanding of social care workers experiences & identify best practices and areas of improvement.
Infusing personas’ needs into the policy proposals
We communicated the insights and gathered learnings to the client and proceeded to facilitate our second workshop. In this case, we co-created aspirational statements in order to convey how we would like social care workers to think and feel in the future. Afterwards, we proceeded to work in small groups, identifying considerations for three policy proposals from the point of view of the social care workers personas. This lead to exploring user needs, risks, ideas for content and ways to engage with each of the three proposals.
Summarizing proposal content into a cohesive value proposition
In between sessions, we had meetings with the client to check our progress, get feedback about the sessions and respond to any client needs (e.g. templates to further conduct research) or process suggestions.
In one of those meetings, the client shared that they were looking for ways to condense the content of the proposals so it would be easier to write them. We brainstormed different ways to help them do so and came up with a modified version of the value proposition. We also pointed out to the client the importance of identifying the needs, gathering feedback from the wider ecosystem (e.g. employers and learning providers) and deepening our understanding of sector power dynamics, dependencies between policy proposals and its impacts in the future.
Visualizing the policy proposal
The design process inspired us and the NISCC team to work together on more activities that could be beneficial when writing the proposals. By this time, we would have been working with the client for over one month beyond what we were supposed to and we were trying to manage budget constraints. Therefore, we decided to put together a menu of workshops & activities, suggesting some, but ultimately letting the NISCC team choose the combination of activities they consider most critical.
The NISCC team chose an exercise to help them present the proposals visually. We focused on helping them to find metaphors and identify the core concepts of each proposal that the graphic designers could use to represent them visually.
Bringing their organisational strategy together
They also chose an exercise to condense the different elements of their strategy at once. We work asynchronously in a shared Miro board and allow the NISCC team to give it a go at the first version. We were looking to understand how they thought all these elements were connected and how they imagined. The final map condensed their ultimate goal, the policy intent, the social workers needs, stakeholders supporting policy intent, policy instruments (existing, in development and recommended), and left space for the NISCC team to add stakeholder needs.
Project Outputs
The personas, value propositions and journey maps created in the previous workshops, along with the templates and materials co-designed with the NISCC, were rebranded to conduct further research. We also cleaned up and organized the shared Miro board and created a recap story of our collaborative design process (what, why and how) for further reference.
We assisted Bobbie, the UAL team graphic designer, in a set of feedback sessions to further refine and create consensus over the final proposal graphic representation. Finally, to wrap up the project, we ran two feedback sessions; one with the client and one with our internal team.
Policy System Map
A system map condensing NISCC workforce development strategy. This Policy system map had the intention to be used internally to keep the social care workers at the center of the policy design, avoid duplication of efforts, align internal teams, connect policy and identify gaps.
NISCC Visual Workforce policy proposal
A visual metaphor that represents the core concepts of the NISCC workforce development policy proposal
Self Reflection & Learning Outcomes
Adapt & pivot: I was brought into this project after it had already started, with the project plan already decided and the design process approach agreed. Therefore my role was to execute on it. However, as the project progressed and insights were discovered, the project evolved & changed. I learned from this project to adapt activities, incorporate insights and enrich the project while keeping time and budget constraints in mind.
Prototyping & testing: In the initial plan, it was determined to run a workshop to prototype & test the policy proposal with social care workers and the wider ecosystem. However, due to priorities set up by the client and the project constraints, it was it was pushed until there was no time to complete this portion, or even empower the client to do it on their own. It was unfortunate that we were not able to do this step and a lesson learned for me to prioritize this work earlier in future projects.