Cork is a large county, in fact it’s the biggest in Ireland. As a local authority, Cork County Council (CCC) has a challenge administrating that size of area. From requesting housing, to reporting a pothole – delivering services that address public needs can become hard to manage when you have a large region to cover.

Service design has not traditionally been an improvement methodology that the public sector has particularly engaged with, however a greater focus on building in-house design capabilities and applying design to services is gradually evolving. CCC recognised the potential of design in supporting the digital transformation they were seeking, and they invited Snook on board to help with their journey.

Learning by doing

Working as one team, we undertook live projects to enable ‘learning by doing’ as part of our design in practice programme. This helped build in-house capabilities while driving digital transformation. In particular, we undertook a redesign of the council’s housing representation service, from discovery to beta. Housing representation is a service where any elected member can make a recommendation on behalf of a citizen to the council, whether that be low-income families trying to apply for a grant, or a person with complex needs seeking accommodation.

We discovered that the service was using a system that was ten years old, and the offices themselves were buried under heaps of paperwork, all of which was time consuming. However, we didn’t just want to shift all of this online, we wanted to transform the whole service.

From user research we discovered that legacy systems, siloed working, and a complex application process, were causing a lot of invalid applications – and an unnecessary amount of paper. There was a lack of clarity around what information was needed in the application: bank statements, pictures of families and everything in between was being sent to the department, causing unnecessary admin.