Profession Lead User Research

**Details**: **Reference number**: - 245524**Salary**: - £48,981 - £65,600- National - £48,981 - £58,000 / London - £52,964 - £65,600**Job grade**: - Grade 7**Contract type**: - Permanent**Business area**: - DIT - COO: DDaT**Type of role**: - Information Technology - Operational Research**Working pattern**: - Flexible working, Full-time, Job share, Part-time, Compressed Hours**Number of jobs available**: - 2Contents Location About the job **Benefits**: Things you need to know Location - Cardiff, Darlington, LondonAbout the job **Job summary**: - Join a team at the heart of the global economy_ We create digital services, data tools and technology for businesses to prosper around the world. Have a look at our **video** Our Digital, Data and Technology team develops and operates tools, services, and platforms such as great**.gov.uk** that enable the UK government to provide world leading support to businesses in the UK and overseas. You’ll get to constantly push boundaries in an environment free of heavy legacy, driven by curiosity, social purpose, diversity of thought, entrepreneurship, and the aspiration to offer an incredible experience to all our users. **Find out more on our blog, Digital Trade.** **Job description**: User researchers are key figures in our digital teams. They help our teams develop a deep understanding of the people - citizens, businesses, or government - who use our services. Their findings enable our teams to design and deliver better services quickly, with less risk, and at lower cost. We are currently looking to reinvigorate our user research function, as part of our broader User Centred Design mission to champion the needs of our users. We’re looking to increase our influence and impact. This means developing agile, pragmatic ways of working that help teams meet the CDDO service standards while reflecting the delivery pace of the department. We’re looking at how we set and assure research standards, how we innovate our approaches, and how we support teams to understand and respond to user needs. Our latest User Research blog tells you more. The newly formed Profession Lead Roles are central to making this happen. - Working with the Head of UR to set standards of "what good looks like", and with our UR teams to ensure consistent delivery - Developing pragmatic, innovative ways of working so we meet service standards while responsive to the delivery needs of the department - Leading on a Professional Development Area - either establishing career paths for DIT user researchers, or building our user centred evaluation capability - Leading on more strategic pieces of user research - Developing specialist knowledge of one of DIT’s key user groups (investors or DIT staff) and their end-to-end experience of DIT You will be line managed by the Head of User Research. You will task manage the Portfolio Lead User Researchers, providing support, coaching and guidance to ensure the user research in their portfolios is aligned to our standards and ways of working. **You will be responsible for**: - ** Research Management and Leadership** - helping establish our practice standards, diversifying our practice, and assuring delivery from the team - ** Leading on a Professional Development Area** - building the team’s professional capability, through establishing a career development strategy, or developing our ability to conduct user-centred evaluation of our products - ** Promoting agile, user-focused practice with stakeholders** - engaging stakeholders in the value of our work and understanding the business needs - ** Conducting strategic user research and developing expertise on a key user group** - to become an internal expert and advisor on one of our user groups - ** Staff recruitment** - managing recruitment campaigns and working with the Head of UR to develop an attractive employee value proposition **Person specification**: - Planning, designing, and delivering user research projects and programmes in complex, ambiguous contexts (eg multiple stakeholders, unclear or changing research needs, novel environments where the users and needs are not well understood) - Being an effective advocate for the user and for what good user research looks like, able to build stakeholder buy in to the value of user centred practice - Engaging with stakeholders to understand business needs and ensuring we design and deliver research that is responsive to those business needs - Improving a team’s professional capability, by establishing good practice standards and by bringing a critical eye to identifying how we can improve and extend our user research offer - Leading through influence and engagement (rather than just line management control) to build team buy in and support for the professional standards and ways of working we are seeking to establish - Being responsive to the delivery pressures of an agile environment, bringing the pragmatism, professional judgement