Public Sector Service Design

Public Sector Service Design

  Chu Wei Ming was shocked and surprised of not entirely satisfied of management by present their final project plans. He went into confusion on incomprehensible queries from management. Because the project team and vendors had made every effort to improve upon existing systems and center designs by trimming away outdated features and streamlining the processes with an improved model and reduced waiting and processing time, he could not understand why the management was still not entirely satisfied.

   The goal was to operate effectively, workflow and keep waiting and transaction time short based on the existing old design at the WPSC. It was not unusual for project team to take some technological and creative innovation to making improvements to meet these targets.

   Lean thinking improved efficiency, however, in this case, efficiency was not the main goal. Trimming the waiting and processing time was expectable outcome. What’s the consumers feeling and how about their consuming experience would be the main task to face. Like the question mentioned in the case, why do visitors have to wait at all? Will there any solutions to figure out this problem? For example, could the applicants apply online? Would the online system provided?

   Design thinking is often taking in five steps: empathy, define, ideate, phototype and test. In this case, on the step one, we need to build an empathy with the applicants. If we were applicants, how would we feel about the applying progress? Is this progress succinct and convenient enough? How the conversation with staff? Such bunch of questions from customers’ view under taking the human-centered service design. Not following the previous workflow: Formulate policies, create processes, and then think about how to design customer experiences. Facing the questions from management, by experiencing as consumers, figure out the problems firstly and then engaging the staff together to brainstorm. One possible solution could be to improve the online applying system in order to not everyone need to wait.

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