Service Blueprinting with the ACS for the Child Care Voucher Program
Project Background
The Administration for Children Services (ACS) childcare voucher program supports more than 25,000 families across New York City and is used at hundreds of home-based and center-based providers. Eligible families in NYC are provided vouchers to cover childcare costs.
In February 2022, leadership from the Division of Child and Family Wellbeing attended an office hour session with the Service Design Team to discuss strategies the agency could take to better understand and document the current childcare voucher application process from the staff perspective. The deliverables for this project include a service blueprint of the staff’s current voucher review process and a separate insights report that includes more nuanced qualitative insights developed with staff through interviews and collaborative sessions.
Team Members
Administration for Children Services
- Throughout this process, we’ve had continuous support from ACS leadership including Chief Operating Officer Elizabeth Gillroy, Assistant Commissioner for Child Care Support Services Curtis Walton, and Assistant Commissioner for Eligibility and Referral Services Robert Finch. Elizabeth, Robert, and Curtis helped to build staff buy-in, coordinate interviews and sessions, and find overlapping priorities between staff and agency leadership.
- ACS staff and their insights were the foundational knowledge shapers of this project. We had representation from four key units: Call Center (CC), Resource Area (RA), Voucher Enrollment Unit (VEU), and the Provider Inquiry Unity (PIU). Staff from these units participated in semi-structured interviews, validation workshops, and a survey to inform the service blueprint, generate process improvement recommendations, and determine priorities for moving forward.
Service Design Studio
- The Service Design Team (SDS) included Design Leads Abigail Fisher and Tez Cortez, Deputy Design Director Lyndsey Richardson, and Design Fellow Bridget Qian. This team served as the project coordinators, design researchers, and staff champions.
Process
Through initial conversations with the ACS leadership team we learned that due to the increased resources for childcare from the federal, state, and municipal perspectives, many teams throughout NYC were looking at the voucher enrollment process. We had great conversations with the Office of Technology and Innovation and the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity’s behavioral design team, ideas42, about how they were tackling technology and external communication planning respectively. That division of labor allowed us to focus our work on the staff experience. Many hands make light work!
We defined our design challenge and scope as the following:
- Design Challenge: How might we understand the current childcare voucher experience for ACS staff so that we may strategically plan for a future that eases the administrative burden on staff and families?
- Scope Statement: This engagement will help ACS plan strategic initiatives that are informed and transformed by the experience of ACS staff delivering the voucher service.
After aligning on an area of focus, we decided that appropriate outputs for this project would be a staff service blueprint and a recommendations report; ultimately leading to action plans to implement priority items.
Learn more about what a service blueprint is here.
Before engaging staff, we needed to get an understanding of the process and roles making up the childcare enrollment ecosystem. We had two collaborative sessions with ACS leadership to begin to map the process. This level setting helped us to craft visuals and interview guides for staff that went beyond basic fact-finding, getting to more nuanced feedback and thoughts more quickly.
Next, we conducted 17 staff interviews across the four voucher processing units. We used basic visuals of the process to prompt discussion, as well as questions tailored to the interviewee’s specific role. Take a look at a template of those discussion guides below. As a gesture towards establishing trust, we made it clear that these interviews would be anonymous and unattributed in communications back to leadership to avoid hesitancy in speaking frankly.
Next we synthesized those interviews within the Service Design Studio Team. If we were to do this project again, we have discussed more participatory ways to synthesize findings with the staff that participated in interviews vs. doing that work solely internally. This is another way to deepen our co-design (“with not for”) process.
The end result of that synthesis were early drafts of the service blueprint and recommendations report. We took those drafts back to ACS leadership and staff in a collaborative validation session. Another learning we had was considering whether management and staff should have participated in a combined session, or if having staff work individually would allow for more open conversation. We acknowledge that an important part of co-design is bringing groups with varied roles together to have hard conversations, but also think it’s important to recognize power dynamics by creating space for people to have frank discussions with their immediate peers.
Finally, we refined the service blueprint and recommendations based on the validation session feedback and routed a survey to get a sense of staff priorities of the recommendations. This vote will directly impact which action plans we put together for implementation.
Prior to sending the survey we did validate feasibility with Deputy Commissioner Elizabeth Wolkomir to ensure that any recommendation we put forward could be executed within resource, timing, and leadership priority parameters. Only a few recommendations were taken off the table due to this review, and if a recommendation was removed we provided context and reasoning for staff to ensure that they felt 1) they were heard and 2) we take this collaborative process seriously.
Key Recommendations
So what challenges and opportunities emerged? Take a look at the five key categories for recommendations:
- Training — Staff desire deeper support on how to excel in their roles as well as how to work more efficiently with other teams.
- Internal Communication — Additional processes could be put in place to ensure every unit has the same understanding of policy/protocol updates and who to go to for frequently occurring questions.
- Staff Wellbeing — At times, these roles can be emotionally stressful and draining. Staff would benefit from additional support for their holistic wellbeing.
- External Communication — There are many tweaks that could be made to external communications pieces that could better educate the public and ease the amount of back and forth staff engage in.
- Technology — Upgrades to hardware and some strategic connections between database systems could facilitate a more efficient process.
What was interesting about these findings was that ACS leadership had originally thought there would be major team/role shifts or deep technology inefficiencies compromising the process. In general we found many more low-lift/low-effort ways to create a big impact in how staff communicate with one another and with clients.
Learnings
An important part of any project is the debrief process. The Service Design Studio team met to discuss what we learned and what we might do differently next time. Here are some process improvements we are considering integrating for future service design projects:
- Hold a pre-interview session to provide context and allow participants to have a say in the project plans scope, process and focus.
- Send interview questions in advance.
- Send interview highlights back to the interviewee to both validate and give additional opportunity to reflect on their thoughts and offer additional input.
- Build in more time for group synthesis with those we interview.
- Consider how we can formalize skill building moments into the project scope as a form of reciprocity with participants.
- Begin sessions with defining and practicing key mindsets like creativity and iteration outside of the context of the project to build staff confidence.
- Consider holding separate collaborative discussion time with staff and management.
- Craft a transparency agreement to solidify decision making structures throughout the process. Externalize that agreement to participants.
Next Steps
ACS leadership has already begun to use recommendations generated in this project within key reports and requests.
There are big changes happening within the childcare enrollment process due to increased federal funding and policy changes, so further action planning on recommendations is on hold until staff becomes familiar with these changes. We see this as a positive as it will give everyone a chance to sit with these outputs and reflect on additional thoughts and learnings along the way.
