About us
Dr. Michelle Harrison
michelle.harrison@theiips.com
CEO of TNS-BMRB
Michelle Harrison is the CEO of TNS-BMRB and the founding Chair of the IIPS. She was previously a Director of the Futures Company.
Michelle works with her clients across Whitehall to develop better outcomes for the users of public services. Her work encompasses customer journey research, segmentation, customer satisfaction measurement, public consultation, and policy related social research.
Michelle brings with her many years of consultancy in the private sector, where she worked with leading brands to deliver customer focused strategy and innovation. Michelle is a regular commentator on social trends. In 2007 she was commissioned by the BBC to develop The Blair Decade, a series of programmes on social change in Britain.
Alex Oliver
alex.oliver@theiips.com
Head of Service Transformation
Alex is a Director at the IIPS and joint Head of Public Sector Practice at The Futures Company, where she leads on service transformation and innovation projects. Her work with clients across central and local government is focused on bringing the voice of the customer to the heart of policy and service development and encompasses techniques including customer journey mapping, insight audit, behaviour change and customer-led innovation.
Previously, Alex worked in the Cabinet Office as Assistant Director in Transformational Government. She led the cross-government work on customer insight, embedding the core principles of customer understanding to drive service improvement in the Service Transformation Agreement (STA). She was founding chair of the Customer Insight Forum and managed the production of a range of cross-government guidance on insight tools including satisfaction measurement and customer journey mapping. She has worked closely with Ministers and senior government officials across government to initiate a programme of customer insight projects, with the aim of improving customer experience in a number of cross-cutting areas.
Prior to joining the Cabinet Office, Alex held a number of senior strategy and marketing positions in the private sector, where her international career included 4 years at Egg plc. Fluent in French and Spanish, Alex has an MBA from INSEAD and a first class honours degree from Bristol University.
Katie Buckley
katie.buckley@theiips.com
Senior Fellow
Katie runs the IIPS’s long term research programme and drives its thought leadership work. She develops materials for IIPS events, produces ‘IIPS insights’ and undertakes research on the future of public services.
Prior to joining the IIPS, Katie was based at BMRB Social Research as a senior researcher. Whilst there, Katie worked on a wide variety of quantitative research projects across all modes of data collection. She specialises in understanding how social marketing and communications work, working closely with the COI/DH cessation campaign team, the DfT THINK! road safety campaign team and the COI/DEFRA/DfT ‘Act On CO2’ campaign team among others. Katie has a particular interest in understanding behaviour change and is a member of the research unit heading up BMRB's approach in that field. Katie is also an associate member of the MRS.
Katie has a BA Hons degree in Advertising and Marketing Management from Lancaster University and as part of her learning spent a placement in the planning department of the advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather. Whilst at university, Katie was also employed by her Students Union to conduct research into the delivery of various student services (healthcare, finance, general welfare, housing and sports participation) and also to look at the management of the Union’s businesses – the college bars and shops. Her research amongst the student body fed into the ongoing development and improvement of these services.
Associates
Helen Angle
Director at TNS-BMRB
With over 20 years experience of conducting social research, Helen jointly leads the Communications Research Centre which specialises in conducting research for public sector campaigns. She has a particular interest in behaviour change and campaign evaluation and she has given papers on the subject on numerous occasions, including an IIPS seminar. She has a degree in Psychology and Sociology from the University of Leeds.
Joe Ballantyne
Senior Consultant at
The Futures Company
Joe specialises in Trends and Futures work with the public sector. He has worked for a wide range of Whitehall departments and agencies, and has a particular interest in understanding the impact of social, economic and consumer trends on service delivery. Much of his work involves using trends, scenarios, and other futures tools to spark innovation and inform a more robust and future facing approach to strategy. He is also an experienced and skilled facilitator. He has a BA and MPhil from Selwyn College, Cambridge.
Darren Bhattachary
Executive Director at TNS-BMRB
Darren heads up TNS-BMRBs qualitative and international work. He has a wealth of experience in the use of deliberative research and has also led a number of major behaviour change initiatives. Working at a senior level across Whitehall, he has helped to embed citizen insight into decision making for clients such as Cabinet Office, MoJ, COI, Home Office, DfT, DoH, CLG, DCSF and BIS. He holds a PhD in deliberative research for policy making from UCL. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Douglas Dalziel
Director at TNS-BMRB
Douglas has experience of leading both quantitative and qualitative research for a wide variety of clients - mostly from central government and government-funded agencies. Many of the projects Douglas has led have examined end-users perceptions of the service they receive for a variety of government agencies and services in the areas of Health, Education, and Community.
He holds degrees in psychology and a doctorate in organisational change.
Siân Llewellyn-Thomas
Senior Associate Director
at TNS-BMRB
Siân specialises in public sector research primarily in local government. She manages a program of annual customer satisfaction surveys for London Councils and the London Boroughs measuring residents’ satisfaction with their council including perceptions of service delivery. Siân also has considerable experience of stakeholder research in local government through studies for public sector bodies including the Local Government Association, IdEA and other associated organisations.
Siân has a BSc in Social Research and is a member of the Market Research Society, Social Research Association and the Association for Qualitative Research.
Sally Malam
Director at TNS-BMRB
Sally specialises in Customer Insight and Communications projects, ranging from traditional customer satisfaction work, through to evaluation of large scale government campaigns. She works closely with The Futures Company to manage a project for the Cabinet Office to produce best practice guidance for customer satisfaction work. Sally has built up considerable expertise in research design in her time at BMRB, with a focus on developing challenging surveys. She also has a strong reputation for managing large scale and complex surveys. Sally holds a first class degree in French and Mathematics and an MA and PhD in linguistics.
Rebecca Nash
Senior Consultant at
The Futures Company
Rebecca chairs the public sector team and manages many complex service transformation projects. She works across both Trends and Futures and Insight and Innovation teams, and spearheads much of the joint working between TNS-BMRB and The Futures Company. In 2009 Rebecca completed her tenure as Senior Fellow of the IIPS, where she authored a number of IIPS insights and undertook research on the future of service delivery and social research. She is also an experienced ethnographer and holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Virginia.
Susannah Quick
Managing Director at TNS-BMRB
During most of her career Susannah has specialised in research for the public sector, covering a very wide range of subject areas and techniques, both quantitative and qualitative. Much of her early work concerned service transformation in the health sector, and she has spoken at various industry events on improving service delivery to patients. More recently the main theme of her work has been education, and how both experiences and outcomes can be improved. Susannah holds an honours degree in languages from Nottingham University.
Joel Williams
Director at TNS-BMRB
Joel leads an in-house team of statisticians as well as having responsibility for drawing on the specialist global expertise found within the group. Joel focuses on complex survey design issues, bringing a mixture of pragmatism and statistical awareness to the projects he works on. He has particular responsibility for sample design but holds a broader brief, covering mixed-mode survey issues, special problems associated with longitudinal studies, sourcing new evidence on questionnaire design plus new methods of countering non-response and non-coverage bias. Joel is also a Fellow of the RSS.
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The Futures CompanyThe Futures Company (formerly Henley Centre HeadlightVision) is a strategic futures consultancy known for its ability to understand consumer choice and social change, and for applying this knowledge to help clients’ strategic planning, with a particular focus on public service transformation. We have a dedicated public sector practice and an experienced team of consultants and researchers who work with our clients across Whitehall, government agencies and local authorities. Core service transformation offersCustomer journey research |
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TNS-BMRBTNS-BMRB are a specialist provider of public policy research and insight to government and not-for-profit clients. We are trusted to undertake some of the UK’s most high profile research assignments and our work influences decision-making across the policy spectrum. We pride ourselves on producing work that is of real value to policy makers by bringing to our projects a combination of subject expertise, technical excellence, creative thinking and insightful interpretation. Research specialismsSocial surveys |
