This post is great, begining with a concrete example of a broken customer experience and showing the depth needed to not just fix the visible problem but the real root cause - how the team worked.
Reading the first quote from the article below I’m sure we can all think of at least one thing everyone at our company knows is broken and is being avoided.
Back to that letter – there’s a photo of it at the top of this post. No-one thinks it’s a good thing. No-one at the CA office. No-one who writes policy. No-one working at GDS or in any government department. But it still goes out, day after day.
Why? Because it’s hard-wired into the system – an old fashioned, inflexible system, built up over decades.
To change this our job is to dig deeply into why and leave our company issued roles at the door. One way I like to do this is through the “Five Whys”, try it, it’s amazing where you’ll end up by that fifth Why?.
This type of work requires an evolved view of transformation, beyond pixels and code to something much more real.
So when we talk about “transformation“, we don’t just mean messing about with the hardware and software that makes things happen. We mean thinking about the whole service, getting a multidisciplinary team together, and transforming the experience for users, for the people who are seeking help when they put in a claim. We mean delivering a better experience for them, doing something that makes a genuine difference to their lives.
Resulting in an evolved approach.
They’re making decisions with data. They’re keen to build up a portfolio of user research and user statistics. The more data they have, the better they get at making decisions.
They now release code on a two-week cycle, rapidly iterating on what came before. Many changes, little and often.
The team is now making use of cloud-based infrastructure and services. That’s not unusual, not in the commercial world anyway, but in government it’s considered innovative, even radical. via gov.uk What we mean when we say service transformation
Hat tip to @clayparkerjones for sharing this post and helping it find me.