At Dundee City Council. Stephen Kyle is leading a ground-breaking redesign of the city’s public services.
Service Design can be a tricky concept to explain, but it’s actually really important to everything we do. Service design is just that, how we design the services we use – from schools to housing to your bus timetable. At the council we provide a lot of services – your bin collection, council tax payments, housing or welfare, for example. Service design is about making sure all those things work for the people who need those services from us – we need to make sure they’re designed well, for you.
Essentially my job is to look at things differently.
Years ago I had started a degree in Interactive Media Design so when I moved into my current role, focussing on redesigning services, I knew that we needed to get staff at the council thinking differently, thinking about our customers – what do they want to experience from our services? How can we use service design tools to help make that happen? Why are we designing services, how can we do it better?
To help with changing the way we think about our services, we teamed up a local service design company, Open Change, to deliver a full-day workshop at our bi-annual leadership conference, bringing together around 90 of the council’s senior staff to learn about and practice service design techniques.
One of the key parts of the day was getting all the staff engaged in the process. We wanted to open their eyes to why some of our services may not be working for the customer. We sent all the staff out on a service design safari – they had to go in teams into the centre of Dundee and find people who use council services and ask if them their opinion on them – which parts worked for them and which didn’t. The whole day was really illuminating for everybody involved and we have already begun to apply the techniques with some positive results.
One of those results is a project which looks at the way schools and teachers communicate with parents – each school does it differently, so there’s now a group including parents, teachers, designers and council staff, looking at the best way to bridge the gap between parents and teachers. So fare we have had three half day workshops, with another scheduled next week.
In the first session we sent the team out to speak to parents, admin staff and teachers to interview them and understand their needs from the system. In the second, we pulled out the key information and identify key issues to solve. We wanted to look at the problem in different ways so we can come up with the best solution.
There’s a second project we’re working on at the moment, which is working to increase the number of young people we have working with us in the council. We’ve carried out two full day workshops and for the first we invited young people who are or were modern apprentices working for the council and asked them to explain there experiences of being a modern apprentice.
The second session involved about 75 senior members of staff and those same young people. The focus of this session was to come up with a number of new service proposals or improvements to the way we engage with, employ and get the most benefit of our young workforce.
It’s a new way of working for us, but its hugely important and I really think it will make really positive changes to the way we work in the city.