What we offer
Consulting.
For us, agile consulting doesn’t mean having all the answers. We don’t spend vast amounts of time analysing data, writing long plans and crafting beautiful PowerPoint presentations. Instead, we bring together teams of people involved in the delivery of a service to understand the challenge they are facing. We help them break down their challenge and together we design and test new solutions with service users.
This is the agile approach in practice. It’s an approach we pioneered as a means of tackling messy problems in the public sector.
Interested in working with us?
What we work on
All our work is aimed at making services better for citizens, faster to operate and cheaper to run.
Our approach is most effective when working on messy problems; problems where the challenge is not fully understood and there is no off-the-shelf solution. In these circumstances it’s necessary to test solutions on a small scale to learn what works in practice.
While our methods are applicable to messy problems across the public sector, we are particularly drawn to the following:
For all these challenges, we’re not interested in writing theory or doing endless analysis -
we’re interested in implementing change.
How we work
We believe you never really understand a system until you try to change it. Making changes on a small scale and learning from them is an essential part of our agile consulting process. Regardless of whether we’re trying to improve outcomes, release savings or both, taking this approach helps us to understand what changes will work in practice, and not just in theory.
Because we start our projects by experimenting and trying out new approaches quickly, many of our clients tell us they accomplish more in a week with our support than they would have in six months without it.
We use a wide range of tools to understand the challenges we work on and to design solutions to solve them.
Our practice draws on learning from the fields of: agile, Lean, Design Thinking and Adaptive Leadership. But we’re not dogmatic or evangelists for one school of thought over another. We’ve worked on a wide range of challenging projects and have accumulated an even wider range of tools in the process. We tailor our approach to each project, using the right tools for the job at hand.
Building your capacity
What’s different about the way we work is that we don’t just pay lip service to the idea of building your internal capacity. As part of our projects, we create the opportunity for your teams to try out new approaches to designing and implementing change. Through experience, they develop the confidence to use these approaches in their own work after we’re gone.
Although we love our work, we want you to develop new skills and capabilities within your teams to ensure that at some point, we’ll no longer be needed.
Want to chat to us to find out more?
Our approach to designing solutions to complex problems in the public sector is heavily influenced by relational practice. We started noticing in our projects that the Agile principles of “individuals and interactions OVER processes and tools” were applicable not just to the methods we were using - but also to the design of the services themselves.
To help embed this way of working, on our projects we aim to test solutions that:
Want to build your capability in relational practice?
Try out our Relational Conversations and Make Every Contact Count training
Send us a message
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Basis helped us to build out and accelerate work on two areas which are vitally important for The Trust: mapping out and prioritising key areas of improvements within our volunteer journey, and developing and prioritising the most impactful and viable ‘iconic ideas’ for how volunteers can enable The Trust to support more young people.
Their assistance was invaluable. They were able to provide a range of interactive activities to break down masses of ideas, challenges and opportunities into manageable chunks. They were always ready to challenge pre-conceptions, and ensure that outputs from sessions weren’t just ideas, but time-bound actions.
Joe Martin, National Head of Volunteer Development, The Princes Trust
The impact of the work speaks for itself, but what really amazed and inspired me about the process was the enthusiasm and commitment shown by the team to come together to solve complex problems and improve services quickly. These team members have since been able to apply these skills in practice and have progressed to new and challenging roles within the Council.
Simone Melia, Head of Homelessness Prevention, Hammersmith and Fulham Council
