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How to use this guide

There are no hard and fast rules for using the information and activities in this book, but the tips below might help...

Deliver at your own pace

The activities are modular, so you can deliver a service as fast or slow as you need. If you work intensively at pace, you could test the ideas for your service or policy within 2 weeks. Alternatively, you could spread your work out over a longer period. The activities in this guide are grouped into 3 stages and there are other things to do too: 

  • The first stage, Understand your problem, might break down into 4 half-day sessions. 

  • Following this stage, it is likely that you will need gather more evidence. How long this takes will depend on how easy it is for you to access existing evidence and how much primary research that you need to conduct yourself.

  • The second stage, Make sense of evidence, might break down into 2 half-day sessions. 

  • The third stage, Create ideas to test, might also break down into 2 half-day sessions.

  • Prototyping: you can then mock up the features of your service or policy and test them with people

  • Build: once you are sure that the service or policy is needed and that people will respond to your solutions in the way that you expect you can build it with confidence.

Work where you want

The activities in this guide have been updated to enable your team to collaborate remotely if necessary. The techniques for organising information are largely the same regardless of whether you are physically present or remote. However the collaboration tools need to be different:

Use the book in any industry

The examples in this book sometimes focus on education and people that work in government. But don’t let that put you off! Everyone can use these techniques, no matter what industry you work in.

Dip in and out

You do not need to read this book from beginning to end. It is designed around the tasks that delivery teams often need to do during the early stages of their work. So use as many, or as few of the chapters, as and when you need.

Change the timings

Facilitating workshops is a personal thing. The style of the activities in the book is quite fast. You may want to adapt the activities to suit your own style by changing the suggested timings.

Read the references

This book could not have been written without the knowledge and experience of delivery experts from government and business – do use the further reading suggestions to see their advice in more depth.

Help improve this book

This is only the latest version of the book. If we work together we can make it even
better! Tell us what you think by completing the feedback form at the bottom of each chapter.

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