Building a programme for the engagement is good practice, but often missed when viewing the project as overly simplistic. Common practice is to simply organise weekly or bimonthly workshops with a vague purpose.

We worked back from any key milestones outlined by the commissioning body or school during the Scoping exercise. In small scale pilots, this was often the optimum date for implementation (construction works), which is generally a holiday period, and usually the summer holiday since it is the longest, and the school will not struggle with losing access to a space during this period.

In some of our pilots, it was more complex, with a series of milestones around key holidays for phases or work, such as the decant of a Home Economics room in St Marys, Blackpool, over one holiday so that construction works could take place in a subsequent holiday. The next key issue was determining the scale of intervention whether this was a large, medium or small scale project and then selecting which sessions were going to be run. The Project Manager needed to liase with the school to understand what commitment they could generally give, and planned each phase.

Our general principle was that the Review stage could be programmed intensively, sometimes over two days or a couple of days over several weeks, since it required little reflection time and engaged with a wide variety of stakeholders.

From the Concept Brief onwards, where a Champion Group was needed, school resource became a key constraint. Many of our schools struggled with the degree of time we originally asked for them to commit (particularly large scale pilots), and we worked as best we could to minimise engagement whilst still ensuring we got quality output. This often meant we had to run a session every one or two weeks, usually after school, unless the session required a different set of stakeholders (such as learners), in which case we could combine engagement on the same days as the Champion Group. In some cases we were able to hijack INSET days.

This spread of sessions was useful for the school, giving reflection time, and for us, giving us time to write up output between sessions, which was often required for subsequent sessions. Where time was tight or where journey time to the school for the Project Team was more than four times longer than the session itself would be, however, even the Concept Brief could be run intensively.

The Concept Design phase requires longer gaps between sessions, since a higher degree of backstage work would be required before each session, with our designers working to draw up concepts to test with each session iteration.

We built detailed Gantt charts for each pilot projects at this early stage, which were continually updated and evolved during the project to ensure we hit the milestones as best as we could, particularly when resourcing needs at the school end would be determined a phase at a time.