What?
As the CSP placement was drawing to a close, our focus began to shift towards delivery, evaluation, and making sure the final product had met its brief. Our principle stakeholders were the intended audience of students and newly qualified physios, and it was important to make sure their needs had been met to a satisfactory level. It struck me that my previous experiences of project-based working had never been this holistic, and I had never had to consider stakeholder engagement or evaluation before. This was all new territory for me, and initially I didn't really see much value in it and thought it would just add delays to our already tight turnaround time.
So what?
As the Long Covid project was intended to be an educational resource for students and new graduates, people-development skills were a key element of the project from the start. Our corporate brief served as initial guidance, but we couldn't rely on this alone to tell us what our audience's learning needs would be. In order for the final resource to be successful in its intended purpose, needed to establish what these learning needs were, tailor our content and delivery methods to fit them, then evaluate whether or not we had been successful.
Whilst this would be a useful process for developing the project itself, it would also help to develop my own skills in assisting others towards achieving their learning goals. I had some minimal experience of teaching prior to this placement, but I had never thought to seek feedback before even developing teaching material. By going through the initial engagement and evaluation processes, I began to appreciate how they can help to structure a project in to a more effective learning process. These skills would be transferrable in a number of contexts, such as formal tuition, clinical mentorship, and service improvement projects.
Now what?
Our initial evaluation from students helped guide us to confirming which topics they felt we needed to cover, and which they were less interested in. As a result of this I realised that there are logistic benefits to obtaining initial feedback as well as it helping to guide quality, as this stopped us from spending time unnecessarily on unpopular topics, and from going in to more depth than was necessary.
To better understand what was needed for both ourselves and our audience as stakeholders, I went back to my previous learning about the "Key Ingredients" for project success. We had some simpler "ingredients" to consider such as Time (6 weeks), Cost (work-hours, resources), and Risk (balancing progress with resource limitations). The more complex ingredients we had to consider were the Benefits (What do we hope our audience would gain?), the Scope (What could we actually deliver given the limitations?), and the Quality (How can we be sure that the audience got the Benefits they wanted?).
By going through the process of initial stakeholder evaluation, I realised how its not really possible to assess the scope of a project without first defining its benefits, and these in turn couldn't really be defined without engaging the end-users from start to finish. I was beginning to see parallels between this process and Patient Participation Groups, which I previously thought had just been part of a CQC tickbox exercise.
Once our website was approaching completion, we made a plan to seek feedback to help assess its Quality. We sought this from our student stakeholders via use of focus-groups, and also on a more corporate level by presenting the website at the CSP all-staff meeting.
This final evaluation helped me to realise that no project can really be deemed successful, no matter how hard the developers have worked on it, unless its had the approval of its intended audience. This would go for an informatic based project such as our website, or even for developing patient resources and or establishing a new service. Really, it doesn't matter what I think would be useful content to include or helpful means of access, what matters is that the final product is user-focussed and user-friendly.
We hope to follow up our website release with a webinar in a couple of month's time. I'll look forward to reshaping the delivery of this with the next round of stakeholder feedback in mind