Helping to improve the service through proven research and design methods

Client

Department of Home Affairs

Services

Service Design
User Research

Year

2020

 The Department’s PLN service is a contact point for federal parliamentarians and their electorate staff for case-specific enquiries relating to the Home Affairs portfolio. The team itself had been centralised in recent years and was moved around the Department on numerous occasions. The process undertaken to submit, record, respond and ultimately manage the enquiries was manual and inconsistent. Pragma were engaged to undertake a rapid diagnostic of the PLN service in under a week and provide a findings report. 

Motivated to rapidly improve the PLN service user experience, Pragma sought to engage key stakeholders while simultaneously designing planning documentation. Given the short timeframe we had to undertake the diagnostic, we prioritised internal users to ensure we achieved the maximum value out of the research activities. 

We undertook stakeholder interviews and contextual enquiries with each team member, and in four days, prepared a report for the Department. In this time, we were also able to extract, analyse and showcase data from the team’s SharePoint site (where all data was stored) in a usable format. Prior to this, there had been no relevant or useful reporting on simple metrics such as volume of enquiries broken down by years, state/ territory or Electorate. 

In our work, we uncovered the needs, desires and frustrations of users and produced a detailed set of recommendations. In order to bring the recommendations to life, we also worked with the Department on options to be delivered in the short term, medium term and long term based on complexity and value to the organisation. The final report included a conceptual model, journey maps of the users, key insights based on the findings and recommendations based on these insights. Following delivery of the report, Pragma was engaged by the Department to undertake further user research, service design, and implementation activities. 

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