Hi Clara, thanks for taking the time to comment on the post.

Working with organisations that employ analysts but not designers is a typical scenario we face working on FutureGov projects for local government in the UK. A lot of our work is focussed on introducing new ways of working and user centred design. We approach everything as skillsets and collaborative working over individual roles.

It’s often the analysts that start to develop new skills or who are able to apply existing skills sets in new ways in these situations, sometimes very effectively. But, importantly, I believe it’s about changing mindsets and shaping the delivery culture of the organisation to be user centred. Anything that starts with ‘business’ is always going to make it difficult to maintain this focus. If analysts can do user research and contribute to a design process I think that’s great, the challenge is changing perceptions and how we face the problems we’re trying to solve as an organisation.

One of the ways I’ve used the material shared in the blog post is to help people think about which set of skills or the mindset they need to employ when faced with different situations in a project. I think you need to be deliberate when faced with thinking about something from the organisations (business) perspective versus from a users perspective.