For City of Sydney (CoS), local council covering the city centre and surrounding suburbs.
Project team: Kimberley Crofts, Janna Dvyelder (principal designers) and myself.
Project summary
We helped the City of Sydney (The City) to uncover a future way of working for a critical internal service body (Communications) so that they might better inform, engage, and educate the community. The City needed to know how the team could be communicating in more collaborative and impactful ways, and how a review of their ways of working might act as a platform for change. The key was to uncover and unlock the potential value of this critical collective to bring the future of the City’s communications to life.
Embedding ownership of the outcome early on led to the success of this project. Each of the people engaged in the research knew how change could unlock and enable so much more from employees. The collective motivation for change and betterment directly informed a strategy that connected the capability of the employee / teams with the organisational priorities and embed ownership of the outcome early on.
Project approach
We started this project with the recognition that what makes individuals and teams work well is a shared understanding of each other's abilities and a common purpose. The knowledge and capacity for change existed within the people themselves.
Using service design to uncover and define a future way of working was a big risk to The City, having never used this approach for a formal review. Our process allowed those who would be impacted to define how change should proceed. Through desk research and speaking with 133 people via a mix of qualitative interviews, creative workshops we developed a comprehensive understanding of what was inhibiting their potential. This led us to broaden our scope from individual roles to new ways of working as a collective.
Project outcomes
This work was a platform for change. The design process gave individuals and teams the permission to participate, decide, and then enact the change they wanted to see in their organisation. This transformed a culture of siloed teams into a cohesive multifunctional unit of strategic thinkers and creative professionals. This has enabled widespread coordination of key messaging across all channels tasked with reaching and informing the community.
Key outcomes include:
The map depicts the future way of work, it was used as a North Star to guide the transformational change:
Project team: Kimberley Crofts, Janna Dvyelder (principal designers) and myself.
Project summary
We helped the City of Sydney (The City) to uncover a future way of working for a critical internal service body (Communications) so that they might better inform, engage, and educate the community. The City needed to know how the team could be communicating in more collaborative and impactful ways, and how a review of their ways of working might act as a platform for change. The key was to uncover and unlock the potential value of this critical collective to bring the future of the City’s communications to life.
Embedding ownership of the outcome early on led to the success of this project. Each of the people engaged in the research knew how change could unlock and enable so much more from employees. The collective motivation for change and betterment directly informed a strategy that connected the capability of the employee / teams with the organisational priorities and embed ownership of the outcome early on.
Project approach
We started this project with the recognition that what makes individuals and teams work well is a shared understanding of each other's abilities and a common purpose. The knowledge and capacity for change existed within the people themselves.
Using service design to uncover and define a future way of working was a big risk to The City, having never used this approach for a formal review. Our process allowed those who would be impacted to define how change should proceed. Through desk research and speaking with 133 people via a mix of qualitative interviews, creative workshops we developed a comprehensive understanding of what was inhibiting their potential. This led us to broaden our scope from individual roles to new ways of working as a collective.
Project outcomes
This work was a platform for change. The design process gave individuals and teams the permission to participate, decide, and then enact the change they wanted to see in their organisation. This transformed a culture of siloed teams into a cohesive multifunctional unit of strategic thinkers and creative professionals. This has enabled widespread coordination of key messaging across all channels tasked with reaching and informing the community.
Key outcomes include:
- Helping the team develop a reputation as strategic thinkers and creative professionals;
- Dialling up internal communications across the organisation, and improving knowledge of the team’s capabilities;
- Enhancing transparency of strategic communication priorities;
- Developing the ability to right-size the work (and response) based on need, complexity, capability, and priority;
- Reinvigorating the use of audience research;
- Developing the case for the team’s early involvement;
- Redefining team structure to reflect the type of work; and
- Developing a new evaluation method based on predetermined success measures.
The map depicts the future way of work, it was used as a North Star to guide the transformational change: