the project (27 months) and also took on the role of project manager. This had not been the original proposal -- we envisaged a separate project manager role -- but feedback from the funders had encouraged us to reduce our costs by combining these two roles in a single post. As such, the structure of the overall team reflected Platt's \[[@CR21]\] observations on funded academic research in which the (three focused ethnographic) study researchers were employed on fixed term contracts to fully focus on the project and the (six) co-investigators were involved in several other studies, had other responsibilities, and more secure positions. We will elaborate later in the paper on the consequences of the team composition on the delivery of the study.Table 1Background and team member roles indata and the volume can feel overwhelming.Wider team (chief investigator and three co-investigators) • Feel a lack of control in project, less 'hands on' than in previous work • Involvement of other projects

Ethnographic teams differ in their structures and divisions of labour \[[@CR22]\]. In our case the five-persons focused ethnographic team led the focused ethnographic work with the three focused ethnographers being at the heart of the data collection process as they were the only ones present in each general practice. The focused ethnographers also identified from their interview transcripts, practice summaries and field notes the sections in the data that were relevant to each of the analytical categories from the coding framework that had been agreed within the focused ethnographic team. The focused ethnographers sent the coded data to