Four and Twenty Pi: A recipe for adapting service design to a government context
The City of Boroondara is in the middle of an organisation-wide customer experience transformation, the Boroondara Customer First Program. One of the issues identified early on was that the implementation of customer experience improvements could not follow a traditional “waterfall” style project delivery - it needed to be an agile approach. Without ready “on the ground” guidance or frameworks for how to do agile service design in organisations like local government, a new approach had to be developed.
The “20 Day Pi Challenge” was born out of a mixture of process improvement, human-centred design and innovation programs already in existence at Council, with a dash of inspiration from a “Customer Experience For Dummies” book. A 20 day period is set for design teams of four staff to tackle a burning cross-organisational issue that were identified as key topics in transitioning to a customer-centric organisation. Topics tackled so far included undertaking customer journey mapping around planning permit applications, reforming internal payment processes to match customer expectations and developing a cross-organisational process for responding to requests to hold events in the City.
There have been six 20 day sprints to date, with 24 staff trained in human-centred design and service transformation principles. We have integrated various service design principles and tools into the program, such as design thinking, customer journey mapping and service transformation frameworks into developing the program. We have also developed a methodology that promotes rapid-fire team building and self-management by teams which creates an environment that is greater than the sum of its parts. By its nature, each sprint has thrown up different challenges and learnings, which are worth sharing as they cover the gamut of possible issues faced by service designers in organisations like local government.
This presentation will share some of the war stories and learnings from the 20 Day Pi Project Manager (Simon), as well as the insights from a service design practitioner who has been involved in the development of the Program from its early stages (Kate).