Cork County council - Coaching and service design direction and implementation

Building service design capability

Cork County Council wanted to improve outcomes county-wide and set up a centre to showcase service design approaches. They were a council in the process of ‘going digital’ and they wanted to ensure their services were led by user needs. 

Aims

To begin the journey of embedding design inside the council and the start of the innovation centre, we focused on two projects to provide tangible examples of how the approach can work.

The first project focused on a review of the community grant process with the Customer Service Transformation team. It was important for us to find a team who had the capabilities to build the design beyond the initial research and ideation phase.

Embedding design

Working over a period of 8 weeks, we went from initial discovery research into a service that was ready to go Live. Myself and the Snook team ran training sessions with the team on a weekly basis to enable them to learn service design skills affiliated with the stage of the project, focusing first on how to research and discover user needs. We then supported the team to produce prospective blueprints of a multi-channel service that solved key barriers and build prototypes that could be tested with users.

The team and I additionally ran learning lunches with our support across the council, showcasing openly, how the process was working, what they were learning and ultimately gaining buy-in more widely by showing action orientated work. We ran sessions in journey mapping, building user needs, how to prototype and create service blueprints and encouraged staff to apply these to their own service areas.

Re-designing the Community grants service

We chose the Community Grant process initially as the service wasn’t live and seemed at first, easy to improve. The team and I had considered it to be a short and easy process to digitise, but after undertaking discovery research, we uncovered some large potential issues to be solved.

It became clear that the current service was a very manual process within the front stage and backstage of the process with different filing systems across every office. We documented how staff manually categorised bids and filed them so we could learn when digitising the service how it would need to work. Not only was it the filling that was very manual but so was the application, we found that many users are uncomfortable with their handwriting and staff found it difficult to read.

Many groups don’t know the fund exists, which is an issue given there is money to fund local development projects. Users were also confused by the process and often needed further advice due to lack of clarity on what each fund is for and how to apply.

Outcomes and impact

We worked with the team to address the issues that we had uncovered in a service re-design. Here are a few facts and figures showing some of the impact that this project has created:

• The processing of documents by housing policy reduced from 15 minutes to less than 2 minutes per rep. This means roughly a week of time saved per administrative staff member per month.

• We’ve cleared the backlog of work so much so that the staff member we had been working with has been freed up to work on other projects and initiatives two days a week

• We created buy in across the council with the success of this project and the service design team are now thriving. 

Read more about embedding design in this blog post that I wrote whilst at Snook 'You create it. We facilitate it.'