Case study
Developing National Communities of Practice in Social Care
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"Seeing our community managers grow in skills and confidence has been a joy. Working together has felt so easy, and we’ve laughed a lot along the way"
Reb Vincent-Newson, Research and Evidence Manager, Social Care Wales
Social Care Wales works with people who use care and support services and organisations to lead improvement in social care in Wales.
One of their core aspirations has been to create the conditions needed to enable innovation and evidence based-practice to spread across Wales.
They believed that convening national communities and bringing together practitioners, researchers and people with lived experience, could be an effective mechanism to realise this aspiration. They also suspected that communities could also become a valuable source of learning, creating a culture of collaboration and knowledge-sharing across Wales.
To help them on their journey Social Care Wales wanted the support of an organisation that could help build their internal capability to establish communities themselves. Knowing there were no ‘here’s one I made earlier’ solutions, they also wanted to use this project as an opportunity to increase their confidence in working in a more agile way. By testing approaches in practice, they believed that over time, they’d learn what people working in the sector really needed and could respond.
We bid for this project because, in all honesty, we thought it was made for us. We’re glad we did. Working together as a blended team of Social Care Wales and Basis people, in five months, we helped establish and grow four new communities.
What do we mean by communities?
In the case of this project, a community is a group of people who share a common interest or profession that come together to learn, share knowledge and experiences, and solve problems. Social Care Wales had decided to establish four communities, each with its own community manager. This included:
We have been establishing and convening communities in a range of sectors since 2017. Grounded in the work of Emily Webber and more recent research carried out by the European Commission, these have ranged from communities of interest in local government to communities of practice in the healthcare sector. Some of Social Care Wales’s communities would be recognised by those with an interest in space as communities of practice. In the case of their community exploring new models of residential children’s care, this would more accurately be described as a community of action.
How we got started
As an organisation, we are interested in making progress on messy problems. These are problems that are not fully understood and that don’t have an obvious answer.
We are passionate about helping people working in social care deliver impactful services. But establishing communities of this kind in the context of social care is a messy problem. From our experience of working in the sector in Wales, we know there are examples of innovation and really effective evidence-based practices in all local authorities. However, there is no obvious answer to the question: “How do you create the conditions needed for innovation and evidence-based practice to spread across an entire country”? Social workers in particular are chronically-time poor and practitioners work with a wide range of service users in very varied settings. In addition to helping Social Care Wales achieve their ambitions, we knew that whatever form the communities ultimately took, they would need to respond to the immediate needs of the sector in a tangible way.
When dealing with messy problems, we use an agile approach. We speak with users to understand their needs, we test solutions and we learn what works by doing. This was exactly the approach we took to this project.
We started the project by training the core team in agile and immediately established a sprint cycle to help us make quick progress.
Every two weeks our Product Owner, Reb, set clear fortnightly sprint goals. We planned our work for the sprint ahead as a team. During the sprint we caught up at regular stand-ups to update each other on what had been done, what was happening next and to identify any barriers that needed to be resolved.
Throughout the project, we worked in the open. We held ‘show and tells’ to demonstrate our progress to key stakeholders to get their feedback. We also shared sprint notes with a wider group of stakeholders to ensure they could see our progress from sprint to sprint.
At the end of each sprint, we held retrospectives without fail which helped us identify what was and wasn’t working about the team’s collaboration. Working in this way allowed us to remove any friction and continuously improve how we collaborated as the project progressed.
Building the team's capacity in community management
Social Care Wales wanted to establish communities in such a way that sustaining them would be possible for the team itself. At the beginning of the project we designed and ran a bespoke training programme for community managers. This included modules on user-journey mapping, online and in-person facilitation, workshop design, content design and an introduction to the European Commission’s Communities of Practice Success Wheel. We also connected the community managers with other people playing this role in the UK and continental Europe to provide them with inspiration from other sectors.
Having delivered the training we worked alongside the community managers to design the operating model for each of the four communities. We conducted user research to help us develop a vision, mission and purpose. We defined governance structures to help us get started and defined what we needed from leaders to help us establish and sustain each community. We articulated what we wanted the user experience to feel like and developed convening plans that set out the ways in which we’d bring community members together to learn and share.
Doing this work with community managers ensured they had tools, processes and rituals in place to establish and sustain their communities themselves. When community managers began convening their communities we coached them in the design of their sessions and facilitated alongside them while their confidence was still building. In hindsight, although I’m sure we might have felt like a helpful safety net, we weren’t really needed. The team is incredibly capable and passionate about ensuring their communities add real value to the sector. Nonetheless, seeing how each community manager became more confident in their role as the project progressed made us feel incredibly proud.
When a Social Care Wales colleague shared that she was going to miss our blended family at our last retrospective, we might have had to hold back a tear or two.
“Right from the start, working with Basis felt like working as one team. Our community managers were new to the organisation and new to the role, so building a creative, fun and safe space to learn and develop was essential, and Basis nailed that.
The team got alongside us (both online and in-person) and role modelled, facilitated, trained and coached us to make sure we got the tools to help build and sustain our communities. Seeing our community managers grow in skills and confidence has been a joy. Working together has felt so easy, and we’ve laughed a lot along the way”
Reb Vincent-Newson, Research and Evidence Manager, Social Care Wales
The impact of the work
Five months into the project, although at different levels of maturity, all four communities are up and running. It’s early days but, already it seems they are having a positive impact on the sector.
"Relationships are primary, everything else is derivative" Rick Torseth
What made it all possible? Starting with user needs and working iteratively definitely helped. But the most important success factor in this project was the relationships we built as a team. Particularly at the beginning of the project, things were messy. It wasn’t always clear what needed to happen next. But the relationships we had meant we could all deal with this ambiguity and make progress despite it.
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