H4MoD Problem Sponsor Interview: Wing Commander Mike Burt

Editor’s note: Hacking for MoD (H4MoD) is a postgraduate programme in which teams of four to five students learn and apply lean start-up methodology to understand and solve national security and defence problems in 10 weeks. Each team is given a different problem, each with its own government Problem Sponsor. The Sponsor is someone who understands and has experience of the problem.

We caught up with Wing Commander Mike Burt to talk through his experience of being a Problem Sponsor on H4MoD.  He recently sponsored a problem at the War Studies Department, King’s College London, looking at the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) recruitment process.  His team’s solution will provide the RAF with a tangible way to measure the effect of the £15 million per year they spend on marketing, outreach and engagement activities to attract new recruits.

 Could you talk us through the problem that you submitted to H4MoD?

The RAF, in partnership with the Royal Navy, is currently reviewing our recruitment process and building a new Recruiting IT System (RITS) to support it. Working with a contractor, Pegasystems, we have the opportunity to take our entire recruitment process online and this was the backdrop to the problem that I submitted to H4MoD. I wanted scrutiny of this proposed move online to find out what, if anything, would be missed by removing face-to-face activities from the recruitment process.

The students quickly got to work on the problem. As a result of their discovery, which highlighted that Pegasystems was already looking at this issue, they amended the problem area away from the post-application and ‘interview’ process space to the pre-application and so-called ‘attract’ space. The RAF spends around £15 million per year on marketing, outreach and engagement, which includes activities such as careers fairs, sporting events, air shows and school visits. The way we determine the relative value and success of these activities is confined to measuring footfall at events, because we have never been able to explicitly link ‘Candidate A’ applying today to their attendance at a specific event last week, last month or even last year. The solution that the team came to will allow us to do this.

So the student team came up with a solution that will allow the RAF to explicitly measure the value of these events in attracting new recruits - which account for a significant share of the £15 million spent every year on recruitment? 

Exactly.

That is impressive. Could you talk through the team’s solution?

Their idea was to assign a unique QR code to each event that would enable us to track anyone who had attended an event through to their application. The team didn’t have the technical know-how to convert this idea into a solution, but through connections they’d made in their discovery, they approached the contractor working on our recruitment system - Pegasystems. In collaboration with them, the team developed their original idea and they found a way to assign every event a unique QR code.  

What do you anticipate being the impact of implementing the student solution?

It will provide us with a way to measure the effect of specific outreach events and types of events, which will help us to decide as to how we should best apportion our budget. For example, we may find that a significant proportion of our recruits attended air shows where recruiters are present, whilst a very small percentage come from the sporting events that we support. When implemented, this solution will allow us to be more intelligent and targeted in which events we deploy recruiters to and how we apportion our marketing and outreach spend.

Have you implemented the team’s solution?

Not yet, but we intend to. The project is moving at pace and with only 40 weeks to create an end-to-end recruiting IT system we are currently very focussed on delivering the capabilities stated in our original statement of requirement. Using the Agile methodology, we intend to go live with an initial operating capability at the end of September to start processing new applicants, and then add additional capabilities incrementally to achieve our full operating capability in December. Part of the Pegasystems’ delivery methodology is to teach us to maintain and develop the IT system ourselves, so we are looking to implement the team’s solution in early 2022.

Could you talk us through some of the key highlights of the H4MoD course?

Supporting the course exceeded my expectations. Alejandra Camjalli, Robert Ward, Giorgia Tomasello, Loreto Anguita Alonso, Daniel Ben-Shaul formed a team of five very bright, very articulate, and very motivated young people who clearly wanted to solve a problem for me. That was very powerful because it brought intellectual horsepower and capacity to look at a problem that I knew existed but did not have the time to look at myself. It also brought the benefit of people who were not constrained by military experience and thinking, so they looked at things with totally fresh eyes, pursued ideas that I wouldn’t have thought about and asked some very challenging questions. An extra benefit for me was that they were also drawn from the age group that forms the main target audience for military recruiting, so their insights were particularly valuable. 

I was also genuinely amazed at how far their web started to reach. I had given them a list of 10 relevant people to talk to at the start of the project and off they went. Within weeks I was getting phone calls and emails from individuals and organisations with no obvious connection to RAF Recruitment and Selection, asking about the team and the work they were doing. Overall, through interviews and surveys, my team ended up collecting a quantity and quality of data that is exceptional and has proven to be very powerful in informing various decisions, from whether we pursue an exclusively online recruitment process through to the language that we use in our recruitment publications.

Are there any key lessons you would impart to future Problem Sponsors?

First, be aware that your problem may change as a result of your team’s discovery. This will be governed by the data they are gathering from interviews and their own ideas as to the direction they want to go in. My advice is to take a step back, give them time to experiment, and see where they take your problem. These students probably don’t think like you do and you should embrace that.

Second, like most things in life, what you get out of this is directly proportional to what you put into it, so give your team the support that they need and deserve. I met with my team for an hour every Monday evening to discuss progress, answer questions and see how I could provide specific support to help them maintain momentum, and I attended their weekly class presentations, which enabled me to track their progress. I also ensured timely responses to emails throughout the week. Ultimately, the team was working on my problem, so making this relatively small investment of my time every week ensured that we all benefited.

Third, in future, I would also like to listen in to more of the other teams’ class presentations. It so happened that I caught one presentation looking at ‘Skill Fade’ in the Royal Marines. As I listened, I thought ‘this sounds familiar’ and I was able to connect the Problem Sponsor and team to individuals in the RAF Regiment’s Training Wing who are experiencing and working on the same problem. These sorts of connections can be priceless.

If you would like to become a H4MoD Problem Sponsor, you can submit your problem here.