Transforming hearts and minds

Reflections on building Australia’s co-Labs

It would be naive to think that successful digital transformation simply comes down to processes, tools and methodologies.

The Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) exists to make it easy for people to deal with government, by helping government transform services to be simple, clear and fast. co-Lab is the DTA’s dedicated design innovation service where government teams come together to work on ideas, learn about how to apply the Digital Service Standard (the Standard) and Service Design and Delivery Process to accelerate innovation and change. The service is made up of engagements: in-house residencies and outreach programs, and Communities of Practice where practitioners come together to learn from co-Lab’s digital specialists through training and workshops.

Government leaders tell us they want their people to develop new digital skills and take faster steps towards delivering transformational outcomes. So, over the past 9 months, my team and I have been concurrently flying a plane — delivering a service — and building a plane — designing the service — to achieve this goal. What took us by surprise was the cultural shift we saw in delivery teams.

Identifying past successes and failures
The DTA had run residencies — called exemplars, where service teams across government co-located at the DTA to work on rapid transformation; but the view of these was mixed. We knew we needed to better understand what worked and what didn’t so we wouldn’t repeat the problem (only new mistakes!).

Through research, we learned very quickly that the exemplars helped change mindsets and enabled cultural shift. They offered a high period of learning and growth that steered many people’s careers and influenced how they work today.

“Every single day I was learning from people who were experienced and we were all learning off each other. Everyone got better from working in that space” — recounted a resident on their instantaneous growth during several weeks over their 16-year career in the public service.

The main problem we identified was around executive buy-in and as we mapped the co-Lab service, we saw that we needed to focus more strongly on the onboarding experience. This included early and ongoing support from senior executives, which is critical for successful service transformation. Before considering an engagement, we decided it was compulsory for the agency to gain buy-in from their executive and agree to a scoping workshop.

During our scoping workshops, we form a shared understanding of the problem and collectively agree the desired outcome for the engagement. Led by one of our experienced facilitators, we work together to define what good looks like, agree success measures, map stakeholders and unpack what we know about the end-users. We found these workshops to be incredibly valuable, as they lay the foundations of a good ongoing relationship.

Once on board, a welcome pack is provided, which includes useful artefacts to help get teams started. Our digital specialists provide training on the Standard, and contemporary ways of working, such as agile, service design and user research. Throughout the engagement, we work in pairs to provide the agency team with the support they need. We track their journey through regular check-ins and retrospectives, right up until we off-board the team and help them integrate their learnings and outcomes delivered back to their home agency.

Honing the service
As we became more popular, we created a prioritisation model to help us pursue engagements that were viable and feasible, as well as aligned to DTA’s strategy.

Since launching in August 2018, we designed two collaborative spaces in Sydney and Canberra. We’ve worked with over 20 government agencies, including, Australian Bureau of Statistics on the Census, Department of Jobs and Small Business on the Future Employment Services, Department of Finance on Future of Records Management and Department of Human Services. The team have run and hosted over 50 training workshops and meet-ups with over 2,000 attendees across the Australian Public Service.

Where to from here
As we mature as a service, we recognise that there are two types of digital specialists we need in our service team for better sustainability. The first are those that want to fly the plane, to help government teams transform their service and drive capability uplift; and the others that want to build the plane, specialists that can focus on improving the service through research and iterative design.

Over the coming months, we will be iterating the service so that we can scale and create more champions of change across the Australian Government.

It’s all about mindset
In the words of a recent resident who was initially skeptical about the relevance of human centered design in her work: “We got under the skin of what the problem is. I wasn’t a convert, but I am now.”
Doing this requires leaving behind obvious solutions and pre-fixed ideas. It involves embracing the messiness of realising that there is no straight path through the problem (especially in a government context).
Through co-Lab we’ve learned that people can be nudged forward with every interaction and that successful digital transformation will happen when there is transformation of hearts and minds as well.

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Meera Pankhania product manages co-Lab and leads the service design practice at the DTA where she is responsible for providing
strategic and technical guidance.