Fellows are tasked with giving government agencies an opportunity to prototype all the wild ideas they've had, we help ideate, test and build the ideas that show promise and have the ability to help both citizens and government. Along the way we also try and help government develop the skills and form the partnerships they need to ensure they can continue the fantastic work
I decided to apply for the fellowship because I was looking for a change in my career. I wanted an opportunity to bring all the skills and knowledge that I had learned through studying, working at universities, freelancing for small businesses and startups togethor to work on meaningful work that could have an impact on everyday citizens lives, help government deliver solutions for its citizens that meets their needs and reduce the frustration of dealing with government services.
A typical fellowship starts with a period of research within your government department, this gives the fellows an opportunity to understand the context they will be working in, it forces the fellows to dig deep into the department, observe the day to day work staff conduct, asking questions, interviewing internal and external stakeholders and identifying areas where a small bit of technology could be the catalyst for change.
The research forms the basis of the ideation and prototyping stages, where the fellows quickly develop low cost prototypes and start to get them in front of internal and external stakeholders to better understand, develop and re-evaluate the problems they are trying to address. Along the way, ideas that show the most promise and benefit are identified for further development.
During my research period, my time was spent trying to get a better understanding of who the NJC are and what they do. I spent roughly 60 days working at the NJC getting involved in the day to day by:
- Shadowing staff across all different areas of the NJC in their work
- Observing the different types of court cases seen at the NJC
- Attending meetings both on-site and in the community with staff members and sitting in on appointments with clients
- And by asking lots and lots of questions
What I wanted to understand from this was:
- their context - why they exist, what do they do, who do they work with and how do they do this
- their constraints - technical, resourcing and administrative constraints
- their pain points - this included the pain points that I observed, processes I noticed could be improved by some simple teechnology and issues staff were telling me about
- previous solutions and upcoming projects - what were some of the solutions that had been previously tried to alleviate some of the pain points, I didnt want to recreate solutions that had already been tried and tested.
From the research I was able to identify areas that needed more exploration or validation from clients or staff, we could also see some overarching themes between pain points that were identified and so the challenge was to start exploring potential solutions. We wanted to think as widely and wildly as possible about what the ideal solution could be in a certain situation and then scale that back to something that could be prototyped and then tested before investing too much time in chasing the ideal solution.
The aim was to prototype solutions at the lowest level of fidelity we needed to help us:
- test our assumptions and uncover some of the hidden complexity in implementing a solution
- receive feedback from key stakeholders early on so we could either improve the solution or move on
- and ultimately, this allowed us to tweak the solutions that were showing promise along the way without venturing too far down the wrong path.
By prototyping quickly we had the opportunity to:
- Invite feedback early
- Show regular progress to key stakeholders, helping to keep momentum, continue progress and re-evaluate priorities
- Try lots of things without getting fixated on the 'perfect' solution
This allowed us to make evaluations on the different solutions and then identify the projects that were showing the most promise, so we could spend the rest of the fellowship on iterating the ideas that had a clearer focus, showed opportunity for impact and that were achievable.