Starting local

Service transformation in Hackney Council

Over the last 20 years, Hackney Council has gone from under-performing across many of its services to being awarded as the ‘Council of the Last 20 Years’. Simultaneously, the council has recognised the potential for it and digital to help drive further improvements.

Our residents expect that we deliver better services. This includes services such as social care, waste collection and online ways to pay rent for about 300,000 residents. Transforming the way these services are delivered is a challenging journey, but one that Hackney Council ICT is determined to play a role in.

Director of Information and Communications Technology at Hackney Council, Rob Miller, puts it this way: “We are here for our residents, it’s our citizens that matter.” This means putting users first and working alongside colleagues in the frontline to deliver better services.

Consequently, Hackney ICT is moving away from a standalone ‘digital strategy’ and is focusing on shifting the perception of it as a service provider within the organisation to one that is a part of ‘core business’.

It is not an easy job, but Hackney is building the right foundations. To start this journey, Hackney has invested in skill sets such as service design and user research. Moreover, we are changing the way we work with the help of our HackIT manifesto and Hackney Agile Lifecycle (HAL). Adopting the principles in the HackIT manifesto and working in a user-centric and agile way enables us to improve things for people, learn faster and deliver results more quickly.

Creating holistic services for our users
We are putting people at the heart of the services we deliver so that they can help us create services that they actually want to use. From a user’s point of view, this sometimes means engaging with the Council to satisfy a need that may stretch across multiple channels and touchpoints, that can happen over a period of time.

As a service designer in Hackney, this might involve creating holistic services by joining up the touchpoints that may be owned by different parts of the council. These are complex problems that require us to bring together people with different expertise in a room. The multiple perspectives allow us to create better outcomes.

We are very lucky to have the support and the space where we can actually make this work happen. Having said that, working in this way is easier said than done. The first step in this journey, and probably the most challenging part is giving people reasons to be in the room and embedding this way of working.

Going back to basics
When I first started at Hackney Council, my first instinct was to spread awareness of user-centred design and service design.

Coming from organisations where this way of working was the norm, it is easy to forget that these concepts are often new to people in local government. For many, service design is fuzzy, it has many different definitions and people find it hard to differentiate it from traditional approaches to design.

Working in this environment means that apart from delivering projects, a lot of the groundwork is demystifying service design, user-centred design and agile approaches. In addition to this, we help people understand what we do, how they can work with us and convince them of why they should. This often involves not hiding behind ambiguity. Service design as a practice is relatively young and emerging, we may not have settled on a single definition, process or best practices, but resolving some of these is paramount to helping people better understand our work.

When it comes to changing the culture and the way people work in Hackney, it hasn’t been enough to just tell people about service design in the hope that they will understand it. Therefore, it is important to allow them to see and experience what service design can look like. When working on a project, I approach service design as a shared activity. I take on the role as an educator and create opportunities for people to fully participate in the experience.

It is imperative that my work can be clearly understood and transparent, which can often mean that I need to show the steps that I have taken, rather than talk about the outcomes. Recently, I utilised a self-guided exhibition style show and tell to do this. I put up my work on the wall, which included my design process, design decisions and artifacts to show people a step-by-step journey. I found that it is the combination of transparency, stories and numbers that is successful in winning hearts and minds.

Putting in the hard work to make things easy
As one of the first in-house service designers in Hackney, a lot of this is still very new to me and I am discovering and learning along the way. It has been much easier to do this with the help of the wider community, both from central to local government who are open to sharing their practices and lessons.

This journey can sometimes be tough, but I am very optimistic about what we are achieving in Hackney and how much more we can do. Most importantly, I am really fortunate to be able to help transform the way services are designed for our residents.

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Rahma Mohamed is a service designer for Hackney Council. Previously, she worked at a social enterprise and luxury fashion e-commerce company Ujng.