Project updates
- Hackney works
- Community resilience partnership
- Cross-check a Prospect to Proposal
Hackney Works
Background:
The overall aim of this work is to improve visibility of employment & skills related activities in the different parts of the borough — in order to increase take up of activities that bring resident’s closer to the labour market and elevate their chances of starting or maintaining work.
There is a sense (from stakeholders) that the team needs a calendar in order to better advertise activities and improve attendance. — As a result, there has been an expectation of us to deliver a thing.
What we did
We started this piece of work with some data analysis and light guerilla research in the skills and employment hub and quickly created a prototype of a calendar in order to get user feedback.
The response was that the new calendar was generally clearer and visually pleasing, but we weren’t convinced that improving the calendar would solve the problems.
We could have just delivered the new calendar very quickly, which would probably please the stakeholders. However, the team is invested in making a real difference for residents/staff and as a result, we knew that we needed to address the real problems.
This led to a lot of difficult conversations about quickly delivering something to avoid conflict or doing a piece of work that might have a meaningful impact.
These issues are yet to be resolved, but I’m excited that I’ve been able to convince the team to at least have a go at understanding user needs. — They’ve now completed another round of user research in order to understand the real problems.
What have we learned?
From the first round of guerrilla research, we learned that users had some preferences for how they wanted the calendar to be re-designed.
However, by conducted the second round of research, we learned that:
- User are not aware of the new website
- User are not aware that the skills and employment team promote activities
- They are not motivated to attend activities
- They are only interested in attending activities that are relevant to them
- There are not enough activities being promoted
- That finding where activities is located on the home-page and navigation is not very clear
- Finally, (as previous found) the way activities are advertised is actually user-friendly, but there is space to redesign it to make it clearer. I.e adding photos and filtering by months.
Overall, it may have taken slightly longer to complete this work, but there is an agreement that conducting the research properly was necessary.
Also, that buying or building a calendar would not solve the problems for users — and the team can now see the value in making things right the first time.
Next steps
So far we have collected some really insightful and actionable feedback. I’ll be away on A/L for a couple of weeks, but I’ve set out a clear plan that will help the team come up with some clear recommendations by our next show and tell.
We have also welcomed Thea and Liam (digital apprentices) on the project, who will have the responsibilities of leading this project while I’m away.
Other thoughts…
It’s always more challenging to step back and get everyone to question the real problems, especially when stakeholders have already written a business case.
- On one of my other projects, I’m thinking about how we can work towards helping colleagues think about creating a strategy rather than putting out flames
Colleagues from other services are usually busy with business as usual and this way of working can be an add on to their role.
For this project, we’ve been experimenting with:
- The location we are working from
- Having a couple of dedicated days that’s committed to working together
- Finding new ways of updating stakeholders and managing their expectation around what can be realistically achieved in each sprint — due to limited resources
Community resilience partnership
Background:
Community Resilience Partnership (CRP) aims to tackle the root causes of violent crime in the borough. The project we are working on stems from a key priority of the CRP work plan — Developing a wider community resilience network and addressing community reassurance.
Similarly to Hackney Works, there is an assumptions that a digital communications platform will solve the problem. However, the team is keen to understand the real problem and user needs before delivering a thing.
What we did
The team is really interested in taking a user-centred design approach and just before Christine went on A/L she wrote this project update.
Meanwhile…
- I’ve put together an information sheet about our work in order to inform participants about our work
- I’ve created a discussion guide for the research
- Also, despite not knowing what the problems are, I’ve been doing some research around existing work around community networks, solutions and tools — in order to get things quickly moving when we are both back from A/L
Next steps
We are looking to kick-start the research mid-November and we are planning to have regular show and tells to get stakeholders more involved in the work.
Other thoughts…
Again, similarly to some other projects I’ve been working on. I’m working with colleagues who may not be exposed to this way of working.
- It’s very rewarding to bring them along this journey, seeing how they evolve and understand the importance of putting users first. However, I’m also very aware that it can slow down the process and I need to think of ways we can deliver faster whilst sharing our skills
Cross Check a Prospect to Proposal
Background
This project is a bit of a passion and side project.
For a little while now, I’ve been thinking of ways we can set a team up for success when starting a project. Particularly looking at the moment someone has an idea or a problem to when a piece of work starts. — What I call the “pre-project phase”.
Teams in ICT have now delivered a few in-house projects and I wanted to take the opportunity to understand our processes and tools, looking at what works/doesn’t and how we can share best practice.
Additionally, the Service Design team has been thinking of ways we can work closer with the Relationship Manager during this phase.
What we did
Working alongside Andy (Relationship Manager) who has now left, we looked into the following to understand the problem:
- Reviewed the current process, from consultation with services to when discovery starts
- Spoke to colleagues from ICT and agencies to understand their needs and experiences during this phase
- Gathered and reviewed existing feedback from service assessments
What we learned
Generally, colleagues expressed that the “pre-project” phase was not very clear and/or not formalised. And the activities that happen during this phase leads to projects starting with:
- Vague information or assumption based briefs
- A lack of discussion on how to approach the work, who is available and to what capacity
- Broad scope and not a clear focus for discovery
- That work may start with ideas or projects rather than a problem
As a result of this, work and teams are not always set up robust enough to effectively start a piece of work.
This can lead to:
- People spending a lot of time re-defining the scope/brief, re-working mistakes
- Project stalling due to the lack of skills required or teams members capacity
- Conflicting expectations — and attempts to reassure stakeholders that we know what the problems are and we know how to solve them
Our recommendations
Although we identified several problems within the “pre-project” phase, we piloted a “pre-project” process that takes an idea/problem from the point of asking the right questions (cross-check a prospect) to this is how and team might approach this work (proposal).
We tested this out with two projects where we learned that:
- We can narrow down the scope of work by conducting a half a day service mapping workshop, which can lead to a discovery being much more focused and ultimately taking a lot less time
- Teams had better conversations about what was in/out of scope, they started thinking more about what needed to happen to deliver the piece of work and were able to manage the stakeholders expectations
Next steps
I have been meeting with various teams to share the learning from this piece of work and to get their feedback on what works, what’s missing and what could be done differently.
The overall response to the recommendations has fantastic. I’d like to continue collaborating with people across the whole team — especially with Cate McLaurin and Relationship Managers to try out the recommendations and iterate as we learn new information.
I’m also looking to write a seperate blog about what I’ve learned from the service assessment — and at some point introduce this piece of work more widely to people from other organisations/agencies — as many of you have helped me shape this work. — Thank you!
