Background
Brackenridge supports over 200 people living with intellectual disabilities and autism throughout the Canterbury region of New Zealand.
The Youth Service provides residential support to intellectually disabled young people who cannot live with their families.
The sector is currently facing massive disruption. Families and young people will be able to make more decisions on the services that they engage with. Individual funding will replace ‘collective pools’, and the young person’s voice is to be front and centre for decision-making.
And organically developed processes need to be reshaped with a focus on customer experience to position Brackenridge as a preferred provider in the sector.
The Solution
The solution incorporated design thinking and service design components across three phases: research and understanding, ideation, prototyping and testing.
Research and Understanding Phase:
We completed several activities to explore and understand the problem space, including:
- Semi-structured interviews. Interviews with stakeholders, including young people, family, social workers, service managers and support workers. The TEDW model was central to the type of questions asked.
- Observations of critical activities and experiencing the entire process.
- Creating a current state ecosystem map to understand the players and interplays between domains.
- Creating a current state service blueprint including customer journey, emotional arch
- Developing a current state value stream map to quantify time and information metrics, pains and costs.
Ideation Phase:
- Two co-creation workshops with Service Managers and Team Leaders
- Developing a service delivery ecosystem map to capture needs, pain points and interactions. Then, ideating solutions.
- We used dot voting throughout to make collective decisions.
- Developing personas.
- Using How Might We statements to reframe and prompt when brainstorming and brainwriting.
- Clustering and deriving the main point of view and sentiments.
- Creating a future state service blueprint.
- Creating a future state service ecosystem map.
Prototyping and Testing Phase:
- We developed a future state Business Model Canvas.
- Several assets were prototyped, tested and iterated.
Output
There were several assets that we created during the five-week project:
- Developing a future state Business Model Canvas.
- A Discovery Document to use throughout the process to capture and assess data.
- Step descriptions are to be used as a training tool and to articulate each step’s why, what and how.
- A Case Consultation as a collaborative stakeholders meeting.
- A young person’s voice meeting.
- A support team voice meeting.
- A risk mitigation matrix.
- A metrics calculator to gather data for driving future process change decisions.
- A visual that can be used as a training and communication tool, whether front-facing or with staff.
- Pre-service checklists.
- Transition plans and roadmap.
Impact
The youth service now has a more repeatable and scalable process for assessing referrals and transitioning youths into service. The impact is:
- A more comfortable and anxiety-reducing transition into service.
- Increased collaboration amongst the various professionals.
- Allowed the voices of young people, family members and staff to be front and centre.
- A more robust process that provides more certainty on the support needs, risks and all-around ‘fit’.
- Increased customer confidence in the service.
- Identification of potential financial losses.
LET’S WORK TOGETHER
