MOE Service Design
Empowering collaborative learning
and staff micro-innovation.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
COLLABORATOR
Ministry of Education (MOE)
Partnering Primary School
FOCUS
Deliver Service Excellence
DELIVERABLES
Service Tools, Artifacts, Activities
CHALLENGE PREAMBLE
With Singapore growing its focus on service as one of its strategic development areas, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has identified an opportunity to improve its service delivery so as to deal with the changing operating environments, higher expectations from citizens, increasing complexity in public’s queries and feedback, and manpower and fiscal constraints.
One area that has been identified for design intervention is the building up of service capacities of frontliners in primary and secondary schools.
RESEARCH PROCESS
As a start, our team employed various ethnographic methods to grasp the service space, understand its stakeholders and define its ecosystem.
Focused Group: Frontliner
Kicking off with a focused group was a great opportunity for a quick, deep dive into the service space. It opened up a series of exchanges that gave us a big picture snapshot of the environment and its people.
Journey Mapping
We had the staff assist us in mapping out 'A day in the life of a frontliner'. This helped us identify immediate pain points, bottlenecks and opportunities for design intervention.
In-Depth Interviews
By singling out certain key stakeholders such as the administrative heads and interviewing them, we gained the management's perspective of the frontliner staff and the challenges they faced.
Shadowing
Our team visited the partnering school on multiple days and at different timings in order to capture and understanding in-situ the frontliners' motivations and challenges on the ground.
Focused Group: Parents' Support Group
We took an opportunity granted by the partnering school to conduct a focused group with volunteer parents from the Parents' Support Group to better understand the perceived quality of the school's service delivery.
ANALYSIS AND INSIGHTS
By mapping the gathered data, we were able to uncover the unique ‘middlemen’ nature of frontliners’ relationships between parents, students, managers, and MOE. During our analysis, our team was drawn to two insights in particular:
1
Communicating Service Principles
The current means of communicating service principles (by MOE to the ground staff) struggles in speaking to the the flexible nature of frontliners' responsibilities
2
Micro-Innovation
As an administrative team, the frontline staff were more than capable of resolving minor issues independently and in demonstrably creative manners.
DESIGN OPPORTUNITY
How might we allow staff to define for themselves what makes for
service excellence and enable them to put it to practice?
SERVICE FRAMEWORK
Our stakeholder map led us to center our efforts on raising the frontliners' skill ceiling for service excellence through the approach of Generative Learning: our design tools or activities were now scoped to empower frontline staff in constructing their understanding of service excellence, encouraging peer-to-peer learning and enabling team-based micro-innovation.
CARE-LENDER
DELIVERABLE CONCEPT I
The CARE-lender is a personal, bite-sized guide that utilizes generative questions to prompt frontline staff in discovery-based learning and self-reflection. To suit the hectic, fast-paced nature of frontliner work, the CARE-lender leverages on visual cues and bite-sized information to help frontliners better process the prompts.
Self-Defined Service Excellence
Rather than rigidly set the words that service staff should parrot, the CARE-lender empowers staff to define their own brand of service excellence through the use of open, generative questions.
In-Situ Quick Help
The CARE-lender distills service protocols down to the most essential elements with a single key question, along with a recommendation - when the staff is in a pinch and needs quick help.
Fits Environment
The team felt that by taking the form of a calendar, the Care-lender would blend naturally into the desk environment while still remaining visible (compared to notices stuck onto walls where it may be out of sight and forgotten).
Low-Fidelity Mockup: Keychain
In an earlier prototype, we contemplated the possibility of framing the content in the form of a compact keychain. However, this was too small for comfortable engagement and would be likely shelved away and forgotten.
EUREKA! BOARD
DELIVERABLE CONCEPT II
The Eureka! Board is a communication tool used in frontline staff meetings to streamline discussions on various problems faced by the administration, consolidate the team's thinking and present viable solutions visually.
The Eureka! Board encourages the team to consider multiple causes of their perceived issue and also to approach these causes from multiple angles. The sheer volume of ideas generated by the team even sublimes into a shortlisted optimal solution - a Eureka! moment.
Structured Discussions
We noted the administrative team's proficiency in kickstarting meeting discussions only to get sidetracked midway and miss out on consolidating their solutions. The Eureka! Board introduces a structure of facilitation and shared ownership over team issues to address this.
Valuing Team Responses
Each member's response in the discussion is valued through their participation: by providing their own input and perspective on the raised issue and how they might approach it. The team benefits from the multiple perspectives and uncovers new information collectively.
Low-Fidelity Mockup: Plain Board
The earliest draft of the Eureka! Board was a plain board with a variety of post-it shapes: an open-ended tool to elicit natural needs for such a tool.
This test uncovered a need for a linear flow: i.e. from problem, to causes, to ideas. It also pointed to the need for clarity on what exactly users ought to write on the post-it notes during the respective discussion stages.
Usability Test: Eureka! Board
The highlight of this test was observing how keyed in and engaged the whole administrative team was when trying to address a simple issue. We noted that the team's enthusiasm came from being aligned on the issue, along with a wealth of ideas being generated from the various perspectives of different appointment holders.
PRESENTATION VIDEO
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PROJECT BACKGROUND
ABSTRACT
This project is the outcome of a service design studio in collaboration with the Ministry of Education (MOE). The studio aims to design artifacts, tools, activities, to improve the service quality of the schools in Singapore.
PROJECT DETAILS
Type of Exercise | Team of 3
Supervisor | Dr. JungJoo Lee
Partners | Denise Yeo, Valerie Tan
Duration | 12 weeks
Collaborators | Ministry of Education (2018)
Runner-up award for Internal Competition within the Design Studio.