Building an Early-Career Researchers Committee for the Thomas Young Centre
Diagnosed weak community engagement across a multi-institution research centre and stood up a new ECR governance body — lifting participation by 70% within 7 months.
Techniques & Methodologies
MOST/VMOST
PESTLE
SWOT
Stakeholder Wheel
Power/Interest Grid
RACI
Wireframe
POPIT
Business Case
CATWOE → BAM
Gap
Analysis
Benefits Realisation
Role
Business Analyst / Founder
Context / Client
Thomas Young Centre
Domain
Research Community Governance
Duration
9 Months
Business Problem
01. Elicit
The Thomas Young Centre is a distributed alliance of materials-science groups across several London institutions. Its early-career researchers — PhD students and postdocs — formed the bulk of its membership but were under-represented in events, decisions and the centre's wider community life. Engagement was declining, succession of activity was at risk, and there was no formal channel for ECR voice.
Framed in business terms: a membership organisation with a strategically important but disengaged user segment, no governance mechanism to serve it, and a sponsor (the centre's leadership) seeking a sustainable, low-cost intervention.
Investigating & Framing
02. Investigate the situation
Techniques applied to understand the situation and reconcile the competing views of leadership, ECRs and host institutions.
Strategy analysis — MOST, PESTLE & SWOT
Why · anchor the intervention to the centre's mission, not just a quick fix
Set the committee's purpose against the centre's Mission, Objectives, Strategy and Tactics; scanned the external context (funding climate, REF/impact pressures, post-pandemic engagement norms) and weighed internal strengths and gaps.
Stakeholder analysis — wheel, power/interest, RACI
Why · identify whose buy-in the committee needed and how to manage each group
Mapped every group touching the change, plotted them by power and interest to set an engagement strategy, then assigned RACI roles for the committee's standing activities.
CATWOE → Business Activity Model
Why · turn differing stakeholder worldviews into one agreed activity model
Used CATWOE to surface the transformation and its owners, then built a Business Activity Model of what the committee would actually do — the basis for its terms of reference.
Artefact · Power / Interest grid
Illustrative
Analysing the Gap
03. Analysis
A holistic POPIT view confirmed the change touched more than just "run more events", and a gap analysis defined the target state.
Artefact · POPIT view of the change
Illustrative
PEOPLE
People
ECRs lacked a route to contribute; no named roles.
Organisation
ORG
No ECR body in the centre's governance.
Process
PROCESS
Ad-hoc event planning, no feedback loop.
Information
INFO
Engagement not measured; needs unknown.
Technology
TECH
Comms scattered across channels.
Artefact · Gap analysis (as-is → to-be)
CURRENT STATE
→
TARGET STATE
No ECR voice in governance
Standing committee with terms of reference
Ad-hoc, declining events
→
Planned programme owned by ECRs
Engagement unmeasured
→
Baseline + KPIs tracked each term
One-way communication
→
Feedback loop into leadership
Options & the Business Case
04. Evaluate
Three options were appraised against feasibility, cost and benefit: do nothing, an informal social group, or a constituted committee. The committee won on sustainability and stakeholder legitimacy despite higher set-up effort — captured in a short business case for leadership sign-off.
Options appraisal & business case
Why · justify the recommended change with tangible and intangible benefits
Weighed each option's costs (volunteer time, governance overhead) against benefits (engagement, succession, voice), and recommended the constituted committee.
Benefits & Realisation
ENGAGEMENT
+70%
ECR event participation vs baseline term
ACTIVITIES
6
ECR-led sessions run in year one
05. Realise
Benefits were defined up front with measures, then tracked after launch.
VOICE
4
ECR proposals adopted by leadership
COMMITTEE
+8
Active committee members
REACH
+3
New institutions from committe members
Reflection
What I’d do differently next time
If I ran this again I'd baseline engagement before designing the solution, not alongside it — having a clean "before" figure would have made the benefits case far sharper and the realisation tracking unambiguous. The CATWOE work also paid off more than expected: surfacing the leadership-vs-ECR worldview difference early prevented a committee that looked good on paper but served no one's actual need.