Situation
Our Client, a Swiss cantonal government, has developed a transactional platform to provide e-government services to their citizens so that they can complete their administrative procedures online, e.g. do their tax returns or claim child benefit. This signifies a true paradigm shift in service provision, moving citizens from physical counters to a fast and secure web channel, aiming at reducing waiting queues, but also improving service quality. Their platform encompasses a number of functionalities, including web forms, an online payment system and a management system handling processes in the back office. These elements were all technologically operational, however, their infrastructure had not been optimized to perform real-time service delivery.
Approach
At project start-up, we found a technically segmented environment where teams would operate in a vertical hierarchy, i.e. don't communicate with each other. Despite these rather difficult conditions, we were able to successfully deliver a six weeks implementation project for the homeland security office, helping them optimize their e-government services offering. In order to achieve the above goals and to overcome the stumbling blocks previously identified, we opted for a unique approach setting up a special project environment where teams could efficiently collaborate and work towards a shared goal. Following this approach we were able to achieve the following results:
- Accelerate the overall delivery time from hardware setup, over service development and integration, through to rollout and operations support
- Provide leadership for a cross-functional, multi stakeholder team, using a combination of waterfall and agile project management methodologies. Waterfall was used for setting expectations, documenting business cases, creating visual assets, determining privacy policy and implementing quality management. On the other hand, agile was the preferred method to validate and optimize product features, which were iteratively assessed through demos and in workshops
- Accelerate procurement lead time for service activation, streamlining and optimizing workflows and processes between various internal and 3rd party providers
Upon project completion we could not only demonstrate a significant reduction of service delivery lead time but were also able to present our client with an in-depth situation analysis, clearly stating other areas of improvement, e.g. the total cost of service delivery. These findings are now being assessed and will be subject of our next project with them, for which we are a currently awaiting approval.
