Challenge

The LicenceNSW program was created to consolidate and uplift the fractured and decades old licencing system in NSW. This included the design and build of a new whole-of-government platform and the migration of over 80 licences from 9 government agencies.

There were 2 key objectives for the project.

1. Improve the customer experience for citizens, making it easier to apply, renew, and use their licence in NSW
2. Streamline and improve efficiency for regulators who administer and manage licences

Some of the key challenges;

• Each licence has its own unique legislative requirements that couldn’t be avoided
• Funding challenges and a department restructure
• Mid-project roll out of SAFE Agile disrupted team velocity
• Stakeholder resistance (they had spent 20 years building their current system to their individual needs)
• No single view of customer – an individual licence holder could exist in multiple systems with different data (e.g. Address, contact info) made data migration and customer matching difficult
•  Early project strategy centred around individual regulator engagements and reusing code – leading to a massive blowout in estimated effort to completion
• Complex stakeholder landscape - 9 regulatory agencies involved each with different licencing and enforcement teams.
• Legislation changing during delivery including new reforms and ministerial priorities

My Role

I was brought onto the project as a member of the project’s leadership team. My key responsibilities included.

• Defining the design strategy for the platform and overseeing its implementation
• Co-ordinate the efforts of the design team dispersed across the product teams (2 Service Designers, 1 content designer and 8+ Product Designers)
• Responsible for the adherence and governance of our Design System and guiding principles
• Helping the leadership team, prioritise and define the roadmap
• Hands on design work (Journey mapping, workshop facilitation, stakeholder management)

Glossary

Government loves an acronyms and legislation. Let me translate some of the terminology used in this case study.

• Regulator – A government agency responsible for regulating/managing a licencing scheme. (e.g. Fair Trading, SafeWork)
• Citizen – Our end user, in this project may be an applicant, licensee or consumer
• Licencing Scheme – Licences are often grouped into schemes. As an example, all pyrotechnic, explosives and firework related licences sit under the Explosives Licencing Scheme.
• Licence – An authorisation/licence/registration which allows the holder to do something. E.g. Paintball Licence
• Transaction – Transactions make up the lifecycle of a licence mainly initiated by a customer e.g. New Application. Although some maybe regulator-initiated e.g. Suspend a Licence.
• Sector – In this case study the term Sector refers to the collective Regulators as a body

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Discover

The size and complexity of the previous licencing ecosystem was daunting, 9 regulators were administering and managing 86 licences for over a million citizens in siloed and bespoke third party and custom-built platforms.

I led the design team efforts to help the project achieve its outcomes and pivot into a new way of approaching the discovery and design. Co-ordinating the team’s efforts as well as getting hands on when needed.

I set up a discovery team to work ahead of the project, their goal was to take a broader “whole of sector” view to the research and avoid getting stuck in the deeper regulator specific engagements.

I developed several methodologies and tools to help us rapidly engage with our regulatory users and identify their pain-points, behaviours and potential business requirements. The output of these sessions was combined with quantitative transactional data (e.g. satisfaction scores, drop off rates, application volume etc.) and compared with qualitative data from our licensee customer interviews.

We also identified that most of the opportunities to improve our (citizen) customers experience lay in streamlining the regulators manual processes and improving data quality provided in applications. Many of their pain-points came from long processing times, request for more information and duplication of effort.

Define

The research was synthesised into two key outputs – The regulator profiles and customer journey maps. These artefacts captured an end-to-end life cycle of a Licence in NSW.

Each regulator profile and journey were overlayed to help identify all the possible permutations of a customer’s journey and identify “hotspots”, areas of opportunity where they converged.

The findings debunked the strongly held belief that “each licence was truly unique”. Many commonalities existed across the sector, in terms of legislative requirements, capabilities, integrations and workflows.

Focusing on the areas of commonality, I developed a concept of a “standard product offering”. These are generic transactions vital to a licence’s lifecycle. (e.g. New Application, Renew, Replace, Cancel). This involved creating a transaction with paths for the most common configurations which could be adopted or ignored by the regulator based on their needs.

Deliver

Working with the architects, SMEs, and the design team we were able to design a catalogue of “agnostic” capabilities for the platform that would serve most of the the sector’s needs.

This approach had several key outcomes.

Configuration over Reuse – instead of duplicating code and reusing it, creating a new instance to be maintained, we designed each feature to be a configurable building block that could be built once then implemented by each regulator. This meant that enhancements and maintenance only needed to occur on the root instance.

 Industry Standardisation – Many of our regulators where resistant to altering their policy or workflows. I was able to help sell the advantage of aligning to a restricted list of configurations that met their legislative requirements and offered them the ability to reduce training costs and create a mobile workforce.

Design Governance - To address the more unique business needs I set up a Design Governance Forum. Their role was to identify and justify the ROI of a business requirement and determine its priority and funding. (funded by program or by regulator). This group had representation from all the key disciplines.

Prioritise – With a much more detailed view on the sector needs it was easier to prioritise how we would both build the features we needed and migrate the licences schemes onto the platform. I facilitate workshops with the Associate Director and Delivery Manager to assign a comparative complexity score for each licencing scheme. We were then able to cluster the similar schemes into Horizons for delivery and identify clearly exactly which features then needed.

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