British Antarctic Survey
Agile Immersion Day
The British Antarctic Survey’s communications team is a small but mighty gang, delivering award-winning campaigns across science communication, education, public engagement in research and research impact.
This hard-working crew of content creators, designers, media relations specialists, comms strategists and internal communicators was keen to explore how an Agile approach could support them to deliver their workflow more effectively and efficiently.
The challenge
Co-located at the British Antarctic Survey’s base in Cambridge, this multi-disciplinary team experiences challenges that are familiar with many busy communications teams – busy workloads, reactive requests from internal stakeholders, task switching and staying productive within a busy office.
The team operates a hybrid working model, with 3 core days in the office together, home-working on other days during the week.
Based on our pre-session research, some of the obstacles and challenges the team shared include:
- Firefighting and dealing with small, reactive requests
- Struggling to dedicate time to deep-thinking, strategic tasks/projects
- Managing volume of meetings alongside delivering the work
- Email overload! Inbox management
The solution
The Agile Immersion Day:
We brought in the energetic and visionary coach Scott Fulton to join Rachel in delivering an Agile coaching day for the full British Antarctic Survey communications team.
This covered:
- Operating at 80% Awesome – giving yourself permission to regularly communicate your energy levels and potential for productivity.
- Do Less, Deliver More™ – Scott’s signature, eye-opening session about how to be productive and deliver value within a busy comms team
- Differentiating between Workflow activities and Work Execution
- Introduction to Agile working and how it fits within a comms context
- Agile Workflow design: Work prioritisation and bringing tasks out into the open.
The results
PINT – Post-it Note Therapy! We coined this phrase whilst working with the British Antarctic Survey team because the team absolutely loved working with physical Agile tools to share ideas and visualise their thinking.
83% of delegates who underwent the Agile training session said they would work differently as a result of the session.
Some delegate feedback:
“I feel empowered to make the case for limiting task-hopping – both in the way I organise my day, and advocating for focussed task time.”
“This session energised the team. The careful up-front planning ensured that the session really met team needs”
“Understanding that agile is not all about being quicker in a way that causes extra stress, but focuses on efficiency that is good for personal well-being.”
