Research and Development Services
Synthesis Training can offer a range of research and development services to help you consolidate and improve on performance.
We can deliver all of the research and development work directly, or train and facilitate other people to do it for you, such as staff, volunteers or service users.
Research Services
We can design pieces of research that use interviews, focus group sessions, surveys, research events and workshops. We will make sure that you have an impressive report and executive summary to show when the research is completed and help you to prepare and make presentations that do it justice.
We can help you to investigate
- Community and service user needs
- Practice, policies and procedure
- Progress and achievement
- Organisational and staff development needs
- Appropriate changes and ways to introduce them
- Key underlying issues or problems and ways of tackling them
- Resources that will assist development
- Sources of support
Participatory Action Research
This is one of our specialisms and we recommend it to anyone who is looking for the most authentic and reliable information on which to build developments.
For an explanation of Participatory Action Research, please click this link:
Development Services
Planning, coordinating and monitoring
Synthesis can help you to plan pieces of work then, organise, support and track them on your behalf, such as:
• New programmes or projects
• Practice development initiatives
• Organisational development
• Staff development
Designing and producing
Synthesis can develop resources to help you to manage and deliver services or staff, raise the profile of your organisation and generate income.
For example:
• Guidelines, handbooks and resource packs
• New or improved operational systems and processes
• Promotional events and materials
• Training and work programmes
Stakeholder Collaboration
When organisations ask us to help them develop pieces of research, projects or services, we prefer to do that by working with everyone who has a stake in what we are doing. Using the Stakeholder Collaboration model, we work with clients to find appropriate ways of involving staff and volunteers, the people and communities they serve and the organisations whose interest and support they need.
If everyone who has a stake in the work helps to decide how it is done, how it progresses, contributes and promotes its success, then the results are more sustainable.
Clients have found that forming a Steering Group to support, track and promote the piece of work and holding a Stakeholder Event to conclude it, are really effective strategies. The Steering Group provides a mechanism for engaging Stakeholders and ensuring that relevant policy-makers and service providers recognise, value and respond to the work and its outcomes. The Stakeholder Event is an ideal way to present and discuss the work and gain agreement on how to build on it.
Properly facilitated Stakeholder Collaboration affirms common ground and addresses any differences that may arise between parties with an interest in the work and what it leads to. It helps people to reach realistic agreements on ideas and builds the foundation for multi agency contributions and partnerships that help to achieve action. It also ensures that our clients and their staff, service users and volunteers who have worked on the piece of research and development with us, get full credit for their work.
