Designing a digital platform to streamline and manage the recording, tracking and resolution of contact cases to improve service delivery and compliance with regulations. Making it customer centric, efficient and scalable to all services.
Building a service that exceeded targets for self service by 17%
Local Government 2021 - 2022
Role: Service Design Lead
No of people in co-design: 84
💎 Key Skills:
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Human Centred Design: User research, empathy and accessibility
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Systems Thinking: Process mapping, ecosystem design, and scalability
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Information Architecture: organising case types, and other required data in a clear and logical way
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Prototyping: Advocating for testing of sandbox
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Co-creation and Co-design: stakeholder alignment, providing handovers for developers, facilitation skills
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Change management and advocacy: communication, on-boarding and feedback loops
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Change Readiness: Psychology and Behavioural Science
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Data driven decision making: Supporting analytical understanding. defining metrics and usability testing
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Leadership and mentorship
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Business Case preparation and presentation
⚙️ Service Design Methods Used:
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Discovery and Define Sprints
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Prototyping
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Service Patterns
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Process Mapping
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User Stories
The Brief and Challenge:
"We are co-designing a single simplified system for managing cases that provides the best possible customer experience and supports good customer journeys, with privacy designed in, so that we are successful through evaluation of our outcomes, and that we have identified benefits that can be realised"
This complex service design project has been one of the largest that I have led on the re-design of.
It was one of the main enablers for the future Target Operating Model (TOM) to help the move towards the service patterns of:
Request | Pay | Check | Apply | Register | Tell Us
The main aim was to provide a platform which would support a joined up customer journey and experience. It was also integral to the establishment of the required single customer record with a view to scaling to and onboarding all 150 services that were being provided.
At the time there was also limited experience of design tools and methods, and so the business case was used as a proof of concept in relation to this. It was subsequently adopted.
In scope was:
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Complaints, Compliments and Comments
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Performance
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Enquiries and Service Requests
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Freedom of Information Request
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Subject Access Requests
Process:
I led the team in terms of discovery and define before the technical development was handed over to product and solutions development. This also included the formulation of a Theory of Change (ToC) which included:
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Joining up data
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Standardising and simplifying through making the best use of technology (and reducing technical debt)
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Improving customer experience, and reducing running costs by 20%
This was viewed as a high stakes project due to the need to reduce resources and overall operating costs.
As part of the design 8% (101 people) of the workforce were engaged with in the co-design.
As the design project was of such significant scale a change readiness approach was taken, which I co-led with the change management and development manager. This included facilitated sessions as well as a survey of views and opinions. We were able to use our combined experience in psychology and behavioural science to support this.
All the sprints were transcribed, anonymised and moderated so that there was an audit trail for design decisions to be made.
A continuous improvement teams page was also put in place to ensure a continued on-going dialogue with the workforce.
Results:
The main 'pain points' and current challenges that were identified through the facilitated sessions were as follows:
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Queue management and navigating an unwieldy menu of services and activities
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That we need to take more time to understand reported issues better (and that this should be human driven)
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To provide more transparent responses that managed experience better
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That we needed to provide improved information about roles and responsibilities of a 'one team' approach
Most residents said that improvements needed to be made in listening and responsiveness.
Along with the product manager I evaluated the pilot delivery of the new service against the intended operating model, and the business case (case for change). Together we also ensured that the transcripts were converted to user stories. We also had oversight of their transfer to DevOps.
The delivery of the discovery and define for the service design was delivered to the required timeline, as was the pilot deliveries that needed to take place prior to scaling and further on-boarding. At the 18 month mark 25 services had been successfully onboarded onto the system. I then led on transferring future service designs such as Taxi Licensing, Disabled Facilities Grant and all of Housing onto the same solution.
The service design culminated in the required resource optimisation (benefits realisation), and with the launch of a new Customer Resolution Centre.
In terms of the overall target operating model, 40% of these case types were to be via self service through the customer portal, and this was exceeded by 17.7%