Weeknotes 25-29 May
We’re starting a new experiment in the Citizens Advice Lab to help advisers find answers more quickly.
We’re starting a new experiment in the Citizens Advice Lab with our Expert Advice team, looking at how our advisers find answers when they’re delivering advice on phone and online channels while our offices are closed for face to face appointments. We’re collaborating with 4 Citizens Advice offices in Sheffield, Bournemouth and Poole, Manchester and South Somerset.
The Lab has been running for about a year now, you can read more about it in this blog post by Kate Simmons, the head of our Lab team:
As we’re moving into a different way of working, we want to share what we do in the open. We’re starting small by documenting in some week notes but will be exploring some different ways to how we can open source our work.
What problem are we trying to solve?
Advisers have moved to a new, more remote model of delivering advice. These changes open opportunities for working in different ways, including how we answer adviser questions.
By answering adviser questions more quickly, we think it could help us meet more demand by reducing how long it takes to provide clients with the support they need. It could also improve the experience of receiving remote advice by reducing the time it takes for a client to get their problem solved.
We’re partnering with our Expert Advice team who are already exploring this. There is already a lot of great work happening here, so we are working together to look at what opportunities could use a lean, user-centred experimental approach.
At our kickoff workshop last week, we picked our focus for this work: ‘making it less likely that advisers need to ask supervisors for help.’ We agreed on this because we felt it would help us address the cause rather than the symptoms. If advisers can find information which they trust quickly
As we use a lean, user-centred approach we break off a small part of a problem to explore through running an experiment with an early prototype.
Before the workshop, our user researcher Jamie led interviews with people working in Local Citizens Advice to understand how working from home is changing how advisers are getting support they need to answer client queries. UX designer Rhona and fellow service designer Magda reviewed our existing research, including discovery research from the Adviser product team. This gave us 10 opportunities to choose from, which we discussed in smaller groups in the kick-off meeting. Having separate google meet links ready with people pre-assigned into groups made this pretty seamless.
We’ve been running remote workshops for a while, but like everyone else who has moved to a full time distributed team, it has been a new steep learning curve with new challenges. I found this blog post from designers in government about how they are running remote design workshops really useful. They also shared a handy list of digital ice breakers. We used the time machine one, which was a fun way to get everyone speaking.
We used Mural for the workshop. Overall it works well, once you have set up the board anyone can join without creating an account which removes some of the friction. However we did have some issues as it works differently on different machines and not everything worked for everyone.
Our next steps are to map the scenarios when advisers need to speak to a supervisor and understand the experience for advisers, supervisors and clients. This will help us see where we might experiment. Rhona is also leading on the landscape analysis.
Building a self-sustaining network for innovation
This experiment has two goals. The first is solving the problem of finding answers quickly for advisers working remotely. The second is to co-design what a self-sustaining network for innovation could look like.
The Lab has already started crowd-sourcing problems to explore and have adapted our governance model. We are now moving into the phase of collaborating and problem solving on our first experiment together.
We’re exploring how we operate as a distributed group, ensuring everyone’s voice is heard. How do we make distributed decision-making work? How do we prototype new interventions that can work for different areas with different local needs and contexts. How do we share what we learn so others can use and adapt to them, both within the Citizens Advice network and other charities and the social sector? Most importantly, how do we create an environment of trust so we can make all of this happen?
Working as a distributed team
As we are a distributed team across multiple locations we want to make it as easy as possible for people to participate. Most of the group felt regular, shorter sessions would work best, so we are adapting our usual workshops into shorter activities that could be run individually or as a group. This will help us minimise long video calls which can be draining and less easy for everyone to participate. This is a great read by way on why video calls can be so taxing on the brain.
We’ve also looked at how different groups can stay involved and contribute to the work. We took inspiration from Emily Webber’s agile onion. The core team is made up of the lab and the incubator network. The second layer is for our collaborators who we’ll involve to get their feedback and expertise. The outer layer is for people we want to keep informed. We also want to ensure we’re working in the open so that anyone can benefit and contribute if they find things of use.
As we’re experimenting with a new model for working, we don’t expect to get everything right. We want to create an environment for everyone to give feedback on what does and doesn’t work. We’ll know if we have created it if people feel comfortable to say what we can change and improve. This may take some time. It reminds me of a quote I heard from Lauren Currie, ‘relationships move at the speed of trust, change moves at the speed of relationships.’
