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My colleague Hannah and I recently gave a talk, as part of Digital Leaders Innovation week, about why it’s so beneficial to adopt a design approach for local public services; some of the common issues faced by teams and Leaders in local government trying to make the change, and ideas on how to manage them. It’s something I am really passionate about unlocking. So many good teams spend more time dealing with obstacles than they do making a change. We completely understand that every local authority is different, but we do see patterns in the challenges people face – and we hope this might help a little, even if it it’s just cathartic to hear ‘it’s not just here’.

What do we mean by digital?

Before we start, I am stealing the definition of digital, as a reference point, from Tom Loosemore. It’s a way of tackling challenges, using the methodologies and approaches from the internet age – in particular iterative delivery and user, or human centred design. It’s much more than just about the technology.

Why is Design important?

There are lots of brilliant examples of great leadership teams moving forward with a digital approach. We can no longer afford to have councillors who “don’t do digital”. Hearing from peers, has been a great way of sharing learning; and starting simple – showing leaders that they are already using digital tools – online banking, ordering shopping online, social media. It’s about making it easy for leaders to better understand key concepts, and importantly, making it safe for them to ask questions. We expect leaders to have answers, we need to give them a safe space to ask questions too.

Local Authorities have so many challenges at the moment, not just financial, whilst the needs for local support for residents, businesses and organisations is growing.

The benefits of a human centered design approach

Human centred design is a problem solving approach that puts citizens, staff, businesses, users at the heart of the process to design and deliver a product or service, and can also be applied in an organisation and systems design context. In practice it means:

• Designing services that are fit for purpose, services that are based on user needs and actually work well
• Designing for everyone: ensuring what we design is accessible and inclusive to everyone
• In a government context, where budgets are tight and teams are stretched, human centred design often goes hand in hand with agile delivery.

Making the change

• We know from listening to, and working alongside people in local authorities, there are loads of great people actively working to make a change in how to design and deliver local public services, and they are starting to make this change – but for many – more time is spent manoeuvring and dealing with blockers than is channelled into improving services.
• I think a fundamental reason it can seem so hard is that when first mentioned, it’s treated as just another project delivery model – different documents etc – but nothing else is changed. And that’s the issue.
• To do it successfully, you need to look at all these things. You can’t lift and shift from running technology project to agile design and delivery.
• We‘ve seen a number of common patterns of the challenges, and ideas on how to manage this, to open the door for human centred design.

Leadership

Before you can even start, there needs to be buy-in from the top, that this is the right approach to take. We spoke earlier on why we think a HCD and a digital approach is crucial to local public services, but from experience that isn’t a view widely held, or even understood. I often wonder, if we did a survey of what this concept meant to leaders across Local Government, would there be many different answers? There are obviously 2 large groups of leadership in local authorities, the political and operational.