Work Package 4 aims to identify the change management and innovation process issues, arising from novel or new digital tools and services in different farm advisory contexts through up to 30 User Cases, identified from partners, third parties and external entities.
In a User Case, a sectoral group of advisors, within an organisation, or a group of independent advisors within a region or a country, describe a challenge they face while delivering better support to farmers to get onto or progress along the digital age. Challenge is solved adopting and adapting one or more Digital Advisory Tools or Services (DATS), available or added to the FAIRshare inventory. Pilots, i.e., observations of DATS adoption, will be set up within these User Cases to develop a clear understanding of the issues affecting adoption in different User Case context, giving rise to valuable learnings on challenges to embedding DATS in different advisory and farming contexts.
These 30 User Cases will be a combination of those chosen in advance through project partners and third parties (20 assigned ones), and those chosen at a later date via subcontracting.
In D4.2 the assigned User Cases have been described by the relevant project partners and third parties, who will then decide and choose from or add to the inventory, the DATS they find most useful in supporting their farmer clients. The next 10 User Cases, will be selected through a public procurement competition with the criteria for the selection of these external ones presented in the Annex of the D 4.2.
Major outcomes
- Collaboration between WP4, WP5 and WP6: A successful process
To support the 20 partners in this process, WP4 in collaboration with WP5 and WP6, developed a template for the description of the User Cases, in an attempt to help the Organisations to make a comprehensive description of the work they will do, to tackle the challenge they face for the benefit of the advisory and farming community.
One-to-one meetings (virtual), regular calls with the partners and communication via emails to answer any questions raised on the template sections, have been engaged by the relevant WPs’ Leads and Task Leads, to further facilitate the process.
An initial review of the draft templates and feedback have been provided over a discussion with all the partners at the general annual meeting which took place on 17th – 19th of November 2020.
What is more, to provide additional support and clarify any open issue, WP4 together with WP6 organized an extra Q&A session (online), on 28th of January 2021, asking partners to submit their questions well in advance.
- In FAIRshare project the advisors choose a new approach
In the pilots, the advisors choose a new approach. They all face challenges in different topics. In the project they identify a challenge they meet and they describe it in a User Case. Once they have defined what they want to achieve, they choose or add existing DATS in the FAIRshare inventory in that context and use them as a key factor in their User Case to improve, change or renew their advisory service.
Development will be planned in a Business Case, detailed in an action plan and broadened in a road map and then the implementation will be monitored.
Support and training are organised in parallel.
- Knowledge Transfer between Advisors and Farmers: The most popular need identified
The challenges identified in the User Cases address a wide range of issues as shown in Figure below, though there are some common themes. The most popular is the need for knowledge transfer between advisors and farmers, each User Case following a different approach. Another frequent theme has to do with improving the handling of data. The topics of remote consulting, record keeping and technology use were also present.
- Farming Sectors Identified in the 20 User Cases: a multi sector need is the most prominent
Many of the organizations whose User Case addresses their own advisors’ needs, work across multiple sectors as their advisors do. As the pie chart in Figure below shows, a multi sector need was the most common amongst the 20 User Cases. Where the User Case addresses a need in one sector, the chosen sector is varied: dairy, poultry, citrus, with the most popular being dairy.
Read the full deliverable here.