“It can’t be that hard”
Better Public Services – Part 2: The Smart Start Programme
I expect we all know a good “customer-experience rant” - one where it seems like a simple service or product ends up being way more difficult to use then it should be. You might be digging through a website looking for the phone contacts (that have been deliberately hidden), be hangry-ly waiting for your food in a seemingly not so busy restaurant, or find yourself explaining a simple issue to the 5th customer support agent you’ve been transferred to. Then you might find ourselves exclaiming: “it can't be that hard!”
The people who know me are well aware of my infamous customer-experience rants, it's like a professional curse that comes with working in the field. All along, I know first-hand that the line: “it can't be that hard” may be a genuine and fair expression of how I'm feeling as a frustrated customer - but almost without fail, the technically correct response is:
“yes it shouldn’t be, but it is… you have no idea”.
There are a few professional fields where we collectively assume to be difficult, like rocket science. But particularly with public services, we don't seem to have that kind of awe or empathy, we don’t seem to assume we’re dealing with complexity. Unless you have worked in public service or in other large and complex organisations,
it's quite hard to imagine how a seemingly simple act can be so difficult, expensive, or take such a long time.
And we even when you have worked in this space like that - it can still leave you aghast.
Better Public Services it's truly one of those examples. After Part 1, in which I recounted how a lack of leverage in the programme lead to most efforts crumbling (in my estimation), today I want to talk about the one that got away: the one initiative of “Result 10” that saw the light of day – it became known as “Smart Start”.
It was launched in December 2016 and simply means that when a baby is born in New Zealand, there is now only one form that parents need to fill in to register the birth of that child. Pretty basic, right?
Previously, parents had to fill in one separate form each for the DIA (Births, Deaths and Marriages), the IRD (kid’s gonna pay tax one day), the MOH (for health services), and MSD (for social services).
Ok, that sounds frustrating.
In my time at Better Public Services, I helped out the “action” that later became “Smart Start” with some customers research. I interviewed new parents at Pluncket groups around the country, and it was stunning to hear how the endless forms that they had to fill in felt like the straw to break the camels back. There you are, recovering from the birth and adjusting to life with your new bundle of joy (which is far from easy for many), sleep-deprived and endlessly rotating – and you’re expected to fill in the same information over and over again for some dumb government stuff that seems far, far away. They were some of the most impressive interviews of my career, very emotional.
This may seem like mall and insignificant from the outside, but for those going through it, it WAS an issue.
And it's a perfect example for the value of good design. We often spoke about this in our team meetings, that good design becomes invisible. That many of the actions in Better Public Services were the kind of things that, once achieved, people could only ask: why was that ever different?
It’s a bit like the line we learned during the pandemic: there’s no glory in prevention. Once the job is done, the idea that it ever worked differently becomes absurd.
Why did you have to fill in four different forms when you had a child? Because each ministry and department has their own digital systems that don't touch each other. You may be identifiable with your full name and date of birth, but to the DIA, IRD, MOH and MSD’s systems – you might as well be 4 different people.
And this is where we go: it can't be that hard. Just link them up, run some cables between some servers, fiddle with a few knobs, and there you go- problem solved! Right?!
Now remember: Better Public Services was launched in 2012. It took a good four years to make these connections happen in “Smart Start” - and mind you, this was the ONLY “action” of Result 10 that saw the light of day.
This may well seem crazy to you, seriously: it can’t be that hard… But it is.
In part for good reasons: the systems of different public institutions are separate and the people responsible for them guard any links to the outside world very carefully, because that provides multiple levels of security to us citizens.
The NZ government does not have some kind of all-seeing-eye view of its people, where all your information about what tax you pay, what health conditions you have, what speeding tickets you got, and who you're divorced from, is in one place .
[smash-cut to some conspircy theorist]
I read that as a good thing! And cyber-security wise, the benefit of having only utterley necessary links between systems that hold such sensitive information might be self-explanatory. But not your first thought when you hear you have to figure out fill in four different forms, is it?
I was not involved in the latter parts of the programme that became “Smart Start”, so I can't say what exactly happened that it took four years before this singular, and important connection was made. But based on my other work between agencies, I can say that coordinating any initiative – no matter how much it gives the appearance of a low-hanging fruit – across multiple government agencies is the worst kind of “herding cats” I can fathom. Everyone has their own policies, their own strategies, different governance cycles and routines by which they make decisions, the level of expertise and available staff can be vastly different, leading to distrust, crossed wires, and circular discussions. And then everyone is being restructured every few months, so you get delays and a churn of people…
With everything I know, four years is it pretty fast clip. And most of all – it ACTUALLY HAPPENED. It was launched. It works. It did not fail multiple times and had to be resuscitated.
That in itself is amazing – which is why you’ll find writeups like this one by Pia Andrews on it.
So why is it so hard? I find people often refer to something they did in their own life as an example of “common sense" the public service should use, and then suddenly all would be easier and faster.
To me the answer lies in scaling.
Have you ever coordinated a weekend away for 20 people? People of all ages, coming from different locations, with food allergies, pet peeves, and different levels of enthusiasm. Think how different it would be to organise a daily activity, food and evening entertainment for this group than it is to do the same for a couple of people who know each other and their preferences very well. Going out to eat is a simple idea in principle, but think of how complicated and frustrating it can get to coordinate a large group of people, find the right restaurant that will take your booking, and have everyone split the bill in the end.
The level of complexity and the potential for misunderstandings and frustrations grows exponentially with the number of people involved, and the variety of needs and preferences they have.
That's the simplest way I can explain why it gets so difficult, and sometimes my impossible, to organise things for “the” public and the people that attempt to serve them.
That doesn't stop me from sometimes exclaiming: come on, it can’t be that hard! But after I vented, I typically calm down in the knowledge that: well, it probably is.