Putting People at the heart of Innovation: Transforming critical public services across Europe

Working with 21 cities across Europe to improve public services for their residents

FutureGov for Bloomber Philantropies

While at FutureGov I led part of a European Digital Innovation Initiative to improve public services for residents in 21 European Countries. Supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and Harvard, the initiative accelerates digital innovation to improve critical services, delivering better results for residents. The programme brought together municipalities in Ireland, Slovenia, Iceland, Finland and many more countries to deliver high-impact services and share lessons learned with cities across the world.

Project Overview

For the duration of the two year program, participating cities received coaching, capability building and technical support to transform one resident facing public service to deliver better outcomes. Participating cities focused on a range of key public service areas including healthcare, transport, waste collection, housing and education.

Public Innovation Case Study: Improving housing support services to deliver better support for residents.

As part of the initiative I worked with a local authority to improve their housing support and repair services for tenants. Our focus included redesigning their service model and streamlining various internal processes, all aimed at facilitating their service model transformation and ultimately providing improved housing support to residents in government-assisted housing.With a diverse team of designers, researchers and civil servants, we set out to understand what the critical failing points are in the service model and how resident satisfaction could be improved.

Researching the current service landscape

We began by conducting research exploring the experiences of staff and residents to map the existing service landscape, user journeys and articulate key pain points and service improvements. We Interviewed 25 staff members across 5 different departments to understand their current experiences and where things could be improved. Working during coronavirus changed the approach to our research, conducting the project remotely we were able to virtually shadow staff online to learn about current tools and processes. We also held a series of service mapping workshops with the internal project team to co-create models of the current service experience and map our research and insights.

Issues for residents

Insufficient onboarding for new residents
During our research many residents indicated uncertainty around their responsibilities relating to the maintenance of their homes leading to a lack of clarity on responsibilities between the council and residents. This often led to residents not understanding when to contact the authority and the authority disagreeing on what was the residents responsibility in contrast to what the authority is responsible for servicing.

Poor Communication between the housing authority and residents
When residents register the need for a housing repair there was often poor communication between the authority and the resident leading to confusion and frustration for residents when they are not clear when their issue will be repaired. From the supply side this also results in extra business expenditure and lost hours for repair staff when they visit homes and the homeowner is not present to give them access to service the repair.

Unclarity on policy for vulnerable groups
An absence of comprehensive understandings of vulnerable groups meant that priority residents were often not recognised as priority users within the service, resulting in poor service standards for those often most in need.

Identified process issues

Inadequate information on issue diagnostics
During discussions with frontline service staff, a central issue that stood out was the frequent lack of adequate data or information regarding the specifics of housing repair jobs. Due to a lack of a protocol for diagnostics, incomplete information was being delivered to the trade team. This led to a lack of clarity on the skills and resources needed to complete the job, misdiagnosed cases and loss of repair time.

Outdated systems for managing repairs
Using a mixture of paper based processes and distributed digital systems meant that it was very difficult to manage workload efficiently and monitor the performance of repair jobs. This led to a lack of data on the completion rate of repair jobs and difficulty assessing the performance of the service over time.

Redesigning the Service

We set out to redesign the service focusing on solving the issues identified for both residents and frontline staff and streamlining processes for improved satisfaction and efficiency.

Improving clarity for new residents on responsibilities and when to contact the authority
Working in collaboration with the service team at the local authority we redesigned the guidance and support that residents received when moving into a property to better convey their responsibilities and understand when and how to ask the authority for support.

Redesigning the diagnostics process and data captured on housing repair issues
As one of the critical issues preventing a more efficient housing repairs service was lack of sufficient information on issues experienced by residents, we worked to redesign a comprehensive diagnostics tool to capture more accurate information and leave frontline staff confident they have the necessary context to successfully complete the repair. This involved creating a diagnostics workflow for call handlers and reporting multimedia support so that residents could add photos describing the issue.

Better communication and status updates during a repair
To improve communication between residents and frontline staff servicing repairs we tested and deployed a notification service based on Gov Notify which gives residents timely updates on the status of their repair request. This enabled residents to be more informed on when visits were scheduled and reduced the risk of tradespeople arriving to the property while residents were out.

Improving support and self sufficiency for residents
In order to empower residents to take action when possible, upskill residents on practical skills and reduce the burden of simple jobs on frontline staff, we created a resource that supports residents to solve common household issues. We conducted research with frontline staff to understand what the most common repairs that were self serviceable (such as sink blockages) and created a guideline to test with residents.

Future Service Blueprint, designed in collaboration with the project team at TPX Impact

Working towards continuous improvement

In conjunction with process based service improvements we also designed a range of monitoring and evaluation behaviors for continuous monitoring, evaluation and improvement.

M&E Behaviour #1: Frequently evaluating how new placements can be supported
When tenants are placed in housing the authority checks how orientation and onboarding to housing maintenance services can be improved, identifying any gaps in the onboarding process.

M&E Behaviour #2: Engage directly with tenants to understand emergent support needs
To effectively address the evolving needs of residents, the authority should periodically review its support with both current and new tenants. This engagement should focus on addressing unmet support challenges and finding ways to adapt the service to meet emerging resident guidance needs.

M&E Behaviour #3: Assessment of the Quality of Data Capture and Diagnosis
With the implementation of a new evaluation + assessment of repair diagnostics framework, the authority should run interviews or other qualitative measures with frontline staff to evaluate the quality of job information received. Subsequently redesigning and improving internal protocols and practices based on research and evaluation.

M&E Behaviour #4: Regular evaluation of job completion time and resident satisfaction
To ensure that the service is meeting targets on repair rate and resident satisfaction the authority should regularly monitor and evaluate satisfaction rates with users of the service along with repair performance over time.

Results:

During Beta testing we ran an evaluation of the improved service model. The results were promising with service loss reduced from 13% to an estimated 2% and recorded an increased resident satisfaction through qualitative assessments with residents.