Executing Strategy and Change in Local Government

Context

To ensure every child can attend school, the council provides families with transport assistance. However, the service’s operating costs had increased significantly in the past few years, consistently going overbudget and dipping into other council service’s funds. This project’s aim was to implement a new policy that would offer a new form of travel assistance which was expected to help recover some costs.

This particular project faced a lot of pushback from both senior leadership and service manager levels and a troubled relationship between service managers and the service providers.

I came in as a Service Designer to look at how to implement this new policy offer. As I tried to understand how the service operated, I knew it was also important to navigate stakeholder relationships carefully and “zoom out” to contextualise what I was learning to the bigger objectives of providing a good service to families and reducing operating costs, even if this wasn’t part of the original “project ask”.

What we achieved and how

On top of executing a new policy offer, I found additional opportunities to improve operational efficiency, service quality, and update our policy to address inconsistencies in what was being communicated to families and staff, our legal duties, and the service that was actually being provided. This doubled our savings and led to significant improvements to the current process and resident experience and a roadmap of future work.

I did this through:

1. Using the assigned project scope to simultaneously uncover other ways to deliver value.

   While delivering on the project ask, I looked for ways our team could repurpose the information we were collecting to improve the service. For example, our intial scope was to execute a new policy. While visualising how we would operationalise the new policy offer through discussions and workshops with staff, I was also creating service maps to understand pain points and opportunities of current service. Then, when we presented thoughts on how to implement the new policy to service owners, we were also able to suggest some ways to improve the staff experience and efficiency of the service. After facilitating discussions to prioritise and rank opportunities, we presented these to senior leadership.

2. Showing value early first and being okay with addressing more down the line.

   I knew that we were going to have to build trust and show value early before we could bring up the ‘meatier’ and more controversial improvement opportunities, like addressing inconsistencies in the service policy and the actual service offered. Therefore I focused on showing how our team could help the service gradually instead of trying to do everything at once, starting on more ‘neutral’ ground. We started with areas of the service with highest staff pain points that were also linked to the resident experience.

3. Providing clarity and leading the team.

   Because we were quite a large project team with differing levels of time committed to the project and skillsets, I knew it was really important to make sure we had a shared understanding of the roadmap and expectations. I created a team workflow to set priorities as a team, manage our backlog, review the many assets we were creating and set a cadence to communicate findings and progress with stakeholders, knowing that we would continue to build on and iterate it. This also involved connecting with other teams to understand dependencies and reduce duplication, providing coaching and guidance to junior team members, planning for and bringing in the right skills to the project as well as reallocating work when needed. I also learned through this project that teams work so much more effectively with trust, guidance and autonomy. Especially on a project involving so many simultaneous strategic and operational pillars, knowing how to mentor and guide a team was critical to success. This included providing frameworks and recommended activities, reviewing and helping craft their presentations, and providing guidance on next steps.

4. Establishing rapport with skeptical stakeholders.

   This particular project faced a lot of pushback from both senior leadership and service manager levels and a troubled relationship between service managers and the service providers. I encouraged our team to consider which stakeholders we needed to keep informed and engaged versus consult, to understand their fears and incentives and to keep experimenting. This included tweaking narratives depending on our audience and knowing what type of information they trust and trying a variety of formats ranging from formal to informal (presentations, facilitated discussion, sticky note workshops, conversations) to hit the right balance between ensuring staff felt comfortable and outcomes were positive. We also tried different methods to deescalate the tension between the service manager and service provider, like creating space through video calls, alternating physical meeting locations, and meeting separately. We didn’t get it right all of the time but this test and learn approach helped us to stay nimble, adapt to changing needs and ultimately establish effective working relationships to execute on the new policy and make additional process, data management, and policy improvements.

5. Wearing multiple “hats” and working at both strategic and operational levels.

   To execute change successfully, I had to wear many hats, and know how to have both strategic and technical conversations. My “hat” within the project shifted depending on our priorities, where we were in our roadmap and what the team needed support on. I played the roles of strategic lead, delivery manager, mediator, storyteller, user researcher, content designer, service designer — moving from meta to matter and back to meta again — from looking at the end-to-end service to designing assets like call sheets, website content, to zooming out again to design the policy and rethink the whole service, prompting the team to consider what it should do instead of what it does do.