MY ROLE: Experience Design Practice Lead, Symplicit

Responsibilities

Designing and developing the program and supporting materials, managing the design coaching and prototyping team, project management, facilitation of the program, coaching for a team each round and shaping delivery of outputs.

Objective

Build Design Thinking and HCD capability for staff across the TfNSW cluster, drive a culture shift from product-centric to human-centric problem solving, break down silos and improve cross-functional, cross-agency collaboration, prove the value of HCD by delivering innovative customer-centric solutions to identified problems.

Approach

• Understand the business needs, design the program and determine the best, most relevant tools to use to achieve the desired outcomes;
• Design and deliver a scalable, repeatable HCD problem solving incubator program that could be applied to a range of ideas and customer-facing or internal (EX) problems, and enable people to apply HCD in practice for relevant TfNSW issues

How the incubator program worked

Each round of the program ran for 3 weeks and followed the double-diamond
methodology. For each round, cross-functional teams of 3 people from across the TfNSW cluster were created, and each was assigned a design coach.

• Week 1 consisted of 4 full day workshops for participants, looking to understand the problem, talk to real-world customers, identify the right problem to solve and define who they needed to design for
• Week 2 consisted of 3 full day workshops for participants and 2 prototyping days, moving through ideation, concept development, storyboarding, prototyping and concept testing with customers to determine effectiveness and DVF of proposed solutions
• Week 3 consisted of 1 full day workshop for participants to develop the CVP and showcase pitch, 3 showcase prep days and a showcase day for Transport executives.

Achievements

• Delivered 10 rounds of the incubator program over a 12 month period
• Over 120 Transport staff participated in the program
• 36 ideas / problems were explored and solved through the incubator;
  100% of the solution concepts that were pitched to executives were
  funded for development
• Delivered supporting HCD playbooks, toolkits and resources for staff
  to use throughout the program and to enable people to take their
  learnings, share with their teams and embed HCD in practice afterwards

Key metrics

• Number of people participating in the incubator
• Feedback from participants – value, relevance, quality
• Number of ideas put through the incubator and funded as a result
• Understanding of HCD and value as a problem solving tool
• Development of champions and advocates across the business