Christchurch City Council – Information Management and Communication Technology group (IM&CT)

responsible for the development and implementation of information and technology services to all departments within and external to the christchurch city council

Challenge: The IM&CT team designs and builds tools to facilitate and support Christchurch City Councils (CCC) internal and external communications. As is common, the technology developers have a limited understanding of the organisations extensive stakeholder needs; in addition the wide variety of technical ability and response to change.

The system currently services both personal and arms-length interfaces with customers incorporating, but not limited to collecting, storing and accessing information as well as processing payments and delivering advice. It is the Councils expectation that they will move towards self-managed online services over time, ultimately replacing the entire system.

Approach: The challenge for the CCC is to institute a dynamic design process that delivers to existing needs and evaluates future directions. The goal is to create the greatest value for the most users and to be prepared for future needs. To do this requires the establishment of key user groups and the development of a clear understanding of their largely unarticulated needs.

The programme was delivered in three stages.

Stage 1: Two hour seminar to introduce and explain the program to team leaders and carefully select participants for the program.

Stage 2: Participants, drawn from a variety of disciplines and areas of responsibility, spent several hours becoming familiar with a generic form of the persona development tool before moving on to the process of building personas to represent key users and their expectations.

Stage 3: After a three-week period drafts of the Personas, developed by the IM&CT staff, were presented back to the designindustry team for evaluation. As with most groups this review stimulated much discussion and debate. The more vigour applied to this stage the richer the information and the resulting services.

Result:

• Staff have begun to display a more collective focus on critical end user groups rather than trying to incorporate design features for ‘marginal’ users
• Focus has shifted from producing the best outcome for systems designers to a achieving a clarity of design purpose for all stakeholders
• Resulting process was able to be handed over to a ‘design champion’ who will integrate and uphold the new design standard.