Using an Organizational Development & Service Design Approach to Improve the Delivery of Government Services.
Project Context
We were originally tasked with developing a digital service for a Ministry branch in the Government of Ontario that grants approvals to citizens and large-scale organizations. Granting these approvals requires specialized knowledge and collaboration between reviewers, knowledge specialists, legal experts, and managers. The branch had shifted from a decentralized service delivery model to a centralized team two years before the project started. While a centralized model would help the team work more cohesively together, the reality painted a different story.
We were commissioned to run a Discovery process that saw us going from user research to tested exploratory prototypes to be validated in an Alpha phase.
Building a Collaborative Foundation
Given the number of stakeholders involved, we worked with our internal client team to design a kick-off that brought everyone together. We presented a preliminary project plan and facilitated a collaborative discussion exploring “what success would look like at the end of this project.” Learnings from these conversations fed into the development of our user research.
User Research
Our research saw us perform over 27 interviews with 31 stakeholders across the department. We transcribed our findings into key themes and insights presented to the broader stakeholder group. These interviews exposed the lack and impact of formalization of business Processes, the high Manual Effort & Duplication, and the inability to effectively transfer knowledge to applicants leading to poor quality applications and additional back and forth on submission. All of this meant increased Response Times & Requests, frustration on the part of external applicants, and an inability to measure impact, as there needed to be clear service standards or ways to aggregate data.
While we were asked to develop a digital tool, our findings showed a need to also invest in standardized business processes and standards to ensure the tool could maximize the current work process. This required us to go “under the surface” and explore approaches to help with this transition.
Drawing on Organizational Development Through Work Sessions
These findings began pointing to a need to incorporate organizational change considerations more explicitly within the project. The service design community often points to change management as a field that can support us in this process. However, as a studio, we have experienced with the more common change management practices (such as Kotter or ADKAR) as they tend to take a top-down approach to change by exerting power-over positional stakeholders, forcing change and often resulting in the sort of gaps that service design is tasked to address. As a studio and within this project, an approach that we drew on to counteract is that of Organization Development (OD), broadly defined as:
the interdisciplinary field of scholars and practitioners who work collaboratively with organizations and communities to develop their system-wide capacity for effectiveness and vitality. It is grounded in the organization and social sciences. Source: University of Nevada
OD builds off the knowledge of organizational sciences by using the capacity to facilitate dialogues and design change processes to surface attitudes, values, and assumptions and give a voice to those most affected by the change to have a voice.
Looking at the two side by side, while service design and organizational development come from two different fields, we share similar values and principles, creating a strong alignment. The figure below highlights these principles based on our experience and understanding of the service design practice.
We had to find new ways to integrate OD principles within a broader project context to work on both the design of a new service and the building of new organizational capabilities for change.
Based on what we designed into our project plan a series of weekly and bi-weekly 2-hour work sessions. The topic of these sessions was not predecided but defined iteratively based on the emerging needs we saw appear in the project, with each of these sessions also building off the last while adapting to the overall project timeline.
We worked with an organization development specialist, Juniper Belshaw, to design collaborative processes and work agendas. Building on her knowledge and experience and our service design approach, these iterative work sessions became a chance not just to design the service but hold critical discussions, a space to voice frustrations and surface mindsets that were holding back the group and the organization.
Out of these work sessions, we uncovered 8 Core Tasks organized into three categories: core work (ie, reviewing and drafting approvals), communication, and management (i.e., tracking, file access, and reporting). These core tasks became the basis for developing a future service. These common tasks act as a framework for our research and support us in organizing the user research insights.
Future State and Prototyping
Together with our client team, we established an overarching vision. More specifically, we defined a Management System that would enable the branch and its partners to effectively and intuitively manage and deliver the approvals process while supporting the development within Ontario.
To do this, we designed a future service journey that would collapse the current fragmented service of various approval permits, forms, and amendments into a single permit path that would provide a consistent experience tailored to the needs of specific applicants.
In an opportunity generation workshop, we developed over 30 opportunities broken down into user stories that we used to base our exploratory prototypes. We developed a prototyping plan centred around four prototypes of user interfaces that represent different information levels of the approvals process:
- The application page
- The search hub for a list view of multiple applications
- Dashboard page for aggregate information.
- A public-facing web form directed at application proponents.
Prototypes consisted of digital interfaces which represented a possible future Management System. The concreteness of prototypes, as opposed to abstract conceptual hypotheses and solutions, allowed users to gain further awareness of future opportunities and allowed us to expand and enrich research findings.
These prototypes were tested with ten internal users with different roles, with learnings from those tests integrated into updated prototypes. During the prototype testing sessions, we asked users to comment on the prototypes and asked them to reflect on specific aspects of the interfaces. We also asked them to navigate and interact with the prototypes themselves.
Preparing For the Next Steps
We developed a governance map to prepare the project for the next steps. We highlighted critical success factors and a future roadmap designed to help our clients transform the insights and preliminary prototypes into a management system.
The project concluded with an end-of-project reflection. Collectively we recognized the benefits of integrating OD practices within a service project to create a more client-led approach that allowed for thoughtful discussion.
“I didn’t expect us to get into depth into the other issues, and we have a better understanding of what needs to happen outside of whatever end product” — Branch Manager.
“This project has helped raise awareness of the importance of discovery and what it can yield” — Lead Project Manager.
