Capability Curator — First steps
I’ve been working at Cancer Research UK for nearly 5 years now as a User Experience (UX) designer and researcher. For nearly 3 years I have been UX lead and have been heavily involved in our journey towards digital mastery. You can read more about our journey in our Strategy manager and Change lead, Anne Bienia’s post on the Technology Team Blog.
I’ve just landed an additional role as an Operational lead in the Design, Delivery and Change team (DD&C) under the Directorship of Catherine Howe, if you are interested in the type of thing she is thinking about check out her blog. For the next year at least (unless I mess up badly) I’m going to be the Capability Curator for 20% of my working week. The remaining 80% will be spent fulfilling my existing role.
What is a capability?
This is the definition I’m starting with (it’ll probably change):
A capability is the combination of processes, tools, skills and behaviors, and organization that delivers a specified outcome.
There are currently seven capabilities in the Design, Delivery and Change team:
- User Experience
- Agile Delivery Management
- Content & Search
- Service Design
- Solution Architecture
- Business Analysis
- Project Management
What is a Capability curator?
Well I’m going to work that out and share my thoughts here. This is the definition for the role I applied for:
Works with the capability leads to build a capability model template that other teams can use. Works with HR to make sure that this fits with our Personal Development Review (PDR) and other systems. Takes the model to other teams in Cancer Research UK to encourage take up and supporting our strategy.
and this how I have interpreted that (this will probably also change)
Define
Shareable plain English description of each capability.
What they do, where they add value and how.
Career progression
Where do you start and what do you need to do to develop?
Open source
Provide guidance and toolkit for any area of
expertise to become or improve as a capability
What am I going to be doing?
In month one I plan to talk to lots of people both inside and outside of the organisation. Listen a lot, read and share some thoughts. I have some experience of building a capability as UX lead. I’ll take what I have learnt and see what can be used to help develop other capabilities. My experience in developing the UX capability has informed what I’m calling the Capability Cookie Cutter (too much alliteration?). This is a set of questions. I hope that the answers will help people to describe their capability and begin to explore what is needed to develop it.
Capability Cookie Cutter - 0.1
- Describe your capability in a single paragraph. (elevator pitch)
- What are the key skills and tools you use? Which are core? (most important)
- What value do you add?
- What can be done as a beginner, intermediate and advanced? What areas need a subject matter expert.
- How do you get started? Where are the opportunities for people to gain experience? How do people progress?
- What is your biggest challenge? (Achilles heel)
- Is there a community outside of your Capability hub that is doing related work? How do you support it?
- What should the community be reading? (Theory)
- How do you maintain quality? What does good look like?
- How do you measure success?
By the end of the first month I’d like to have a rough description of each capability in my Directorate. Whilst doing this I aim to improve the questions in the Capability cutter.
I am going to try to understand what ‘good’ looks like in each capability,
what career development looks like and the communities of interest that the capabilities support.
I will also be trying to understand how each of the capabilities apply our design principles and if the principles are helping them to achieve better outcomes. I expect and hope to change my view of what a capability is and what it can be. I look forward to the challenge.
I’ll be documenting what I’m doing here on this blog and would love to hear what people think.
