14. Agile Research Delivery Teams

The Agile Research Delivery Teams Function provides strategic and operational oversight of flexible and responsive research delivery capability and support across England, through the regionally-based Agile Research Delivery Teams. It leads the development and delivery of the associated service, ensuring transparent, consistent and equitable access to research support across settings, specialties, and communities, including for studies of national importance. To enable this, it will design and develop innovative models, processes, measures and tools to facilitate rapid deployment of the Agile workforce, greater visibility of the ways the teams are supporting the portfolio, and aid their valuable impacts on research delivery to be showcased.

All Regional Research Delivery Networks (RRDNs) are expected to review and adopt the “Principles for Support and Ways of Working with the Agile Team” document (1). 

The document outlines the principles under which the NIHR RRDN Agile Research Delivery Teams (ARDTs) will be deployed and operate to ensure alignment with national priorities and the NIHR RDN Strategic Plan.  The principles help to ensure that the services of the team are strategically and consistently deployed in a fair, equitable and transparent way.  This will ensure that health and care settings and services are appropriately supported to undertake safe research within their capability and capacity, which is set up and conducted in compliance with the UK government requirements. 

It also sets out how study teams and Delivery Organisations can request support from the ARDT, and how these requests can be processed, approved and managed to achieve consistency, efficiency and impact. 

The principles in this document will provide a framework that all RRDN regions can follow to ensure that the ARDT service is provided as consistently as possible across the RDN. It is acknowledged that there will need to be some flexibility within regions due to the variation in how health and care systems are structured and operated.  Additionally, the RDN is a learning organisation that fosters continuous learning, knowledge sharing, and adaptation, allowing it to evolve, innovate, and thrive in changing environments, and these principles will adapt in line with this approach. As such this is a working document and will iterate over time. 

All RRDNs are expected to review and adopt the “Principles for the Adjustment of Adaptive Roles” (2) for managing adjustments to the Additional Adaptive Roles (AAR) within ARDT structures. 

The AAR were established to ensure a flexible approach to meeting research delivery demands in evolving health and care settings and systems, thereby optimising the delivery of the regional portfolio across all Health and Care settings.

These principles will be enacted to ensure:

• Newly identified roles are proposed and agreed upon based on demonstrated need.

• Existing roles are regularly reviewed, revalidated, and standardised across all RRDN ARDT structures where appropriate.

Principles for the Adjustment of Adaptive Roles within Agile Research Delivery Teams

Principles for deployment and ways of working with the Agile Research Delivery Team