Blog

How we work with our clients

6 April 2023

How does Opencast work collaboratively with its clients? In a new video, five of our specialist practitioners explain our approach to collaboration to ensure that our clients get the most out of the support we offer.

Listening, engaging, perspective and consensus. All are vital ingredients in the Opencast approach to collaboration with our clients in helping them address their challenges.

A new video series from Opencast explains the ways that our specialist consultants work with clients to help them deliver success. Each features the voices of our people in explaining their work to support our clients. The first of these looks at how we collaborate.

Illustration of person balancing on green plank
We work to balance both clients and users

Understanding user needs

“We always sit down and understand what it is that our clients are trying to achieve, and then we also talk to their users,” explains senior content designer Milly Shaw. “We need to understand the users of this particular area that we’re working in, it could be a website, it could be an app, it could be something else.

“We really need to understand what the users need from it and what the business needs from it, and then we will work together to come up with a solution that satisfies everybody.”

“We involve stakeholders on a little and often basis when we’re doing things like service mapping, blueprinting and journey mapping,” explains senior consultant Anth Elstob. “It’s important that we bring them  on that journey to teach them our ways of working.”

User research practice lead Marianne O’Loughlin adds: “How we implement user research for our clients very much depends on the client. There is a standard approach, but no one-size-fits-all.”

Agile perspective

From an agile delivery perspective, delivery manager Mark Hall says: “When we first go in to our clients, we look at a holistic place like where it is now. We have a conversation with the people we work with, with their clients and ask them questions like how have things been done before.

“Through this we start to gather an idea of where we are at now, and is there anything in place to talk about where we’re going? If there’s not we’ll start to work with our stakeholders to understand the real problems which exist and one by one in a priority order we’ll go through, with our stakeholders, their problems and try to make it a better place.”

“Building some rapport within the team, helping people understand motives, desires, dreams, who you are as a person is really important to build a really good team” says Andy McMurray, “Then we structure it around the product and ensure that everybody has that same common objective.”

Watch the video: working collaboratively with our clients
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