Digital Transformation

Service Design and Process Improvement

Process Mapping

Some engagements with Digital will involve process mapping. Process mapping is a great collaborative tool to build your team’s understanding about how a process works, and to use when your team wants to redesign a service or internal process. If you recognize that things could be better, problems or mistakes regularly arise, or there is a feeling of wastes of time and resources, process mapping is your baseline to get started on improving the process.. Process mapping involves working with stakeholders and documenting the steps that are taken by everyone involved in the process. We will work with your team to walk you through the exercise of mapping out your process, find the steps that do and do not provide value to the process, and areas where improvements can be made. Process mapping can include the “as-is” process as well as an ideal future state. Creating a future state map is particularly useful when there is no clear current state process, or the current process is not standardized. Your future state map will eliminate the obstacles experienced in the current state and serve as a visual representation of how the process should go.

We give you the tools to help redesign the process and outline recommended next steps for prototyping, testing, change management, and scaling your innovation.

Solution Ideation

We will work with your team to identify challenges, measure those challenges by importance, brainstorm solutions to address challenges, brainstorm solution to make improvements, identify dependencies that need to be in place to reach our goals. Identifying the challenges, particularly their root causes, is important for a team to move beyond assumptions about why a problem is occurring. We will help your team get to a level of understanding about why a problem is happening and to shift from blaming people to blaming the process.

Design Session – The goal of this session is to prioritize the challenges and begin developing actions that can mitigate challenges and/or improve processes.

• Workshop Root Causes of Problems
• Problem Impact/Importance Matrix
• Brainstorm Pain-relievers
• Brainstorm Gain-creators
• Define dependencies (Digital)

Prioritization

We can’t do everything at once so we need to prioritize where we start. That involves reviewing the actions we can take that have the greatest impact with the right level of effort based on available resources and the scope of our work with you. We will prioritize the actions Digital can take, help you prioritize what your team implement, and focus on delivering that work product to you and your team.

Design Session – The goal of this session is to take learnings and outcomes of session 1, evaluate risk and effort, and then prioritize projects to build a roadmap.

• Impact/Effort
• Roadmap

Prototyping

Designing and prototyping solutions is a great way to try new things, fail, and learn from your mistakes. Once we have prioritized the specific scope of a solution that we have co-developed, our team will work with you to design and prototype solutions or process improvement. This phase can vary depending on the design in question. We will design, pilot, and test our solutions with your team and other stakeholders as needed. Sometimes a prototype can lead to a final product and sometimes a prototype serves as a temporary placeholder until a long-term solution can be procured or developed.

Testing

Testing is an important part of process improvement and prototype design. Before determining if a solution can be scaled to the public or Citywide, we will put it through a testing process. Testing involves working with stakeholders, and/or members of the public to assess the viability of the prototype. Testing allows us to identify issues that need to be resolved before scaling a solution or launching to the public. One form of testing, usability testing, we have specific tools and processes for that are detailed below.

Change Management

Changes to processes or the implementation of new software and services can be disruptive if consideration is not made for how it will impact users. Change management is an area of study that helps develop a plan for communication and scaffolding to support change both within the organization and for the public. More difficult or bigger changes require more thought and planning, so it is important to plan for how the change will be communicated to all stakeholders throughout a process and what training different stakeholders may need. We will work with your team to consider how change management should be considered in communicating to stakeholders and implementing your new process or product.

Scaling Innovation

Once your idea has been tested and we have a plan for launch we will work with you to define a launch plan to scale it to a wider audience. Considering how you scale your innovation is important to help support a successful launch and make sure everyone is aware of the changes you plan to implement.

Sample Workshop Session Agenda

• Session 1 - Current State + Problem Identification (60 to 90 minutes)
• Session 2 – Future State + Solution Ideation (60 to 90 minutes)
• Session 3 –Solution Prioritization + Action Plan (60 minutes)
• Session 4 – Post Implementation Follow-Up (30 to 60 minutes)