Congratulations to Heather Barrett who completes her PhD

Heather Barrett has been Head of Strategy, Partnerships and Operations for CPRL and the Department for Policing Organisation and Practice for nearly four years, having joined CPRL in 2015 as Centre Manager. It is with great delight that Heather has recently passed her PhD (subject to final corrections). 

Heather’s research interest is in systems thinking and practice.  Her work suggests there is often a focus on large-scale technology adoption projects that are known to fail, sometimes at significant cost and the implementation of smaller innovations are often overlooked. 

Heather’s thesis examines practice of collaborative innovation in the context of multi-agency working in policing. Specifically, she researched a multi-agency situation in the night-time economy. She proposes a systems-based framework for collaborative adoption and diffusion analysis. Having achieved the PhD, and also teaching on the OU’s systems thinking programme, she has now decided to pursue new opportunities.  We thank Heather for her contribution to the Centre over the years and wish her all the very best as she moves on to pastures new.