Situation

A government department’s ambition was to transform its marine licensing service. The complexity of the process, ministerial oversight, and several failed attempts in previous years made this a challenging environment that required careful stakeholder management and ambiguity around recruitment.

Task

The team was tasked with conducting a standard Discovery to understand the current process, and identify opportunities, pain points, and behaviours. A report of our recommendations and early concepts was to be presented to the government ministers who would issue budget for the next phase of work.

Actions

As a small and agile research team we worked closely with Product, Design, and Delivery, to plan and execute the research in record time.

To make sense of the departmental context I conducted several in-depth research kick-off workshops that challenges the client to think about their assumptions. These assumptions were then turned into testable hypotheses and success measures.

We used generative AI to quickly conduct desk research and review 50+ sources for key themes and existing insight.

We then conducted interviews with a complex network of service users and stakeholders, mapping the process as we went. We produced lean personas, process maps, and ‘as-is’ service blueprints.

Recruitment included:

• Stakeholders (e.g., port authorities, scientific organisations, and other government departments) that were recruited using snowball recruitment through word of mouth and existing relationships.
• Service users (e.g., engineers and building company leaders applying for a licenses) that were recruited using a third party recruiter.

Result

We spoke to 10+ service users and 5 stakeholders. The final report, which included 30+ insights and recommendations, along with a “to-be” service blueprint and several concepts and hypotheses for future testing, was presented to the small project team and a clean version was produced for ministerial scrutiny.

The department was successful at securing the funding and proceeding to a longer Alpha phase.