Dr Joy Van Helvert
Joy is a sociologist and change management specialist. She has over 25 years experience of working in local government, higher education, and business. During her 14 years as an academic, she researched users’ experience (UX) of new and emerging technologies, and human responses to cultural and organisational change, including the processes of adjustment and adaptation. She uses this knowledge to design and implement strengths based change management strategies for Local Government and other areas of business. Her recent Local Government work includes:
- Design and implementation of an Appreciative Inquiry based ‘whole business’ engagement and co-creation programme to identify ‘hot-spots’ for change and prepare Children’s and Adult Social Services for the roll out of a modern case management system – Suffolk County Council.
- Process designs for Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub and Transitions (to Adult services) utilising new system functionalities and ensuring the flow of information across system boundaries – Suffolk County Council
- Design and implementation of strengths based BME community engagement programme – Waveney District Council.
Joy has led social evaluation and implementation activities on behalf of University of Essex on EU funded collaborative projects, ATRACO and Metalogue, with teams distributed across Europe, and worked on e-learning innovation collaborations with universities in China. She is published in the field of user experience (UX) and methods for collaborative working, and has a special interest in inter-cultural communication. She is an experienced conference speaker and lectures on qualitative research methods to Computer Science students at University of Essex where she is a Visiting Fellow.
Her earlier experience includes on-line learning research and product/service ideation and design as a Principle Research Consultant for BT and 6 years as a Senior Business Analyst for Cambridgeshire County Council.