The UK's innovation accelerator for cities, transport & place leadership.
Connected Places Catapult hired a design agency to carry out research into the future skills needs of the aviation industry.
The agency’s qualitative field research gave them an insight into people’s feelings, thoughts, perceptions and ideas. But they needed to do desk research to add detail and precision (for example facts and figures) that interviewees did not know or share.
They started by defining the question they were trying to answer: ‘What are the current and future skills the aviation industry needs, and how are they being taught and learned?’.
To answer this question, they needed to find out what:
When the project kicked off, Connected Places Catapult sent the design team some recommended reading. This included critical analyses of the current system and existing strategic plans for the future. The team prioritised the documents to make sure they would read the most relevant things first.
When the project kicked off, Connected Places Catapult sent the design team some recommended reading. This included critical analyses of the current system and existing strategic plans for the future. The team prioritised the documents to make sure they would read the most relevant things first.
They set up their research framework on the virtual whiteboard Mural. It consisted of 3 tables:
Each table had headings:
The team assigned 2 people to do the desk research alongside other tasks. Their framework let each person see at a glance what the other was doing. This stopped them picking up a source document the other had already started reading, preventing duplication of work.
They wrote each piece of information they found on a virtual sticky note and put it in the relevant column of the right table.
To begin with they used colour to differentiate types of findings. But because they didn’t agree a colour code in advance, it became confusing, as different people used different colours to mean different things.
They soon abandoned this scheme. Instead they used colour to show whether a sticky note had been copied over to another board that they were using to do a thematic analysis of their findings.
It took 2 people 5 days on and off to gather all the information from 5 documents of around 80 pages each.
Gathering and processing information in this way:
When Connected Places Catapult started working with a design agency on a project about aviation industry skills, one of the first things they did was stakeholder mapping. This helped them decide who to talk to as part of their research.
They kept the exercise short and simple, and ran it in 15 minutes during the project kick-off meeting. Not every activity needs time set aside in a dedicated session! They used online virtual whiteboard app Mural.
At the start of the session, the agency clarified the definitions of key terms like ‘stakeholder’. You might assume that everyone knows what a stakeholder is, but it is surprising how often our definitions differ enough that confusion creeps in if we don’t say it out loud!
Connected Places Catapult had already told the designers that they would need to speak to people from 3 main groups of stakeholders:
The stakeholder mapping exercise put specific people and organisations from these groups into one of 3 categories:
The kick-off meeting itself included some of the stakeholders, from the local airport and a local college. Yes, it is useful to ask stakeholders who the other stakeholders are!
After the kick-off meeting, they met again to review the list of potential people to talk to, and how best to get in touch with them.
