Spinning Plates
Written by Dave Ferguson
A term all too often heard in the public sector, resources reducing, doing more with less. But how do we do it?
Take for example, trying to transform a car, bus, train or plane while it’s being used. Sounds difficult, but that is what we are doing day in day out across the whole public sector and our organisation.
I work in a service design team here at North East Lincolnshire Council and faced with a mass of opportunities for change. It all starts with deciding the most important things to change. In order to do so, one must answer a set of questions:
· Does it meet users needs and solve a real problem?
· Does it align to the organisation’s priorities?
· Does it deliver real savings and efficiencies?
· Is the timing right and the service empowered?
· Is a good news story and does it match the political ambition?
Not an exclusive list, but this certainly focuses on what we should be spending our resources on to make the changes that have the greatest impact.
Our approach is all about making the right decisions based on evidence so the starting point for these pieces of work or projects is to agree the scope, talk about the hopes and fears in relation to the work, who needs to be involved and deciding the outline scope.
Before committing to any delivery, it is key to understand and define the problem we are looking to solve. We do this by conducting deep ethnographic user research, living the lives of users, gathering their experiences and understanding to what degree and how well did we meet their needs and are there any unmet needs.
A clear definition and understanding of what the research is telling us enables us to ask some questions of how might we….so that….? All starting points to test some hypotheses and prototypes engaging with and working with those that deliver the service and those who receive it. WeTest, test, test and gather feedback to continuously improve. And we spread the word by having regular show and tells.
The key to delivery is doing with, not to or for and developing the best possible relationships with everyone involved, aware of their pressures and strains.
‘Doing with’ means that we empower the service to learn about how they can design and iterate, take forward transformation at scale by transferring skills and changing the way that we work across our organisation.
So what about the ‘Spinning Plates’? — make a plan, set criteria and as you would eat an elephant, keep calm and do it in bite size chunks.
Follow our progress and read our other blog posts.
