ICT benefits realisation consultancy

Work shadows

“…an over the shoulder view of work practices”

What work shadows can offer you

Work shadowing provides an objective view of the exact behaviour people engage in during their daily work.  It provides a breakdown of the time spent conducting specific activities, equipment and support used and the communication mediums used by the individuals.

The data can help to consolidate your thinking and decision making about future system developments, and illustrate the degree to which your project has been successful. For example, the process can comparatively quantify the benefits of staff using handheld rather than desktop computers.

What we do

We have developed and refined a robust method for collecting and presenting individual work shadow data. Typically we will work shadow staff over a number of comparable work shifts, focusing on specific times of day/week, locations and job activities. Key to the process is building rapport with the people we work shadow, so that we have minimal impact on their behaviour (we are experienced at working discreetly and harmoniously alongside staff in a variety of challenging work settings).

Some of the work shadowing we’ve done

British Transport Police PDA Project – comparison of pre and post PDA implementation. This illustrated that officers working on revenue operations can increase the time they spend out of station by ~50 minutes per shift.

Derbyshire Police – as part of a wider requirement definition exercise we work shadowed officers from neighbourhood, response, roads policing and scene of crime roles in rural and urban environments.

Bedfordshire Police BlackBerry Project – involved work shadowing over 30 officers with different job roles, ranks and locations as part of requirements definition, evaluation and benchmarking services.