Building high-performance teams and optimising service delivery for the public sector

Glen Eira City Council described the challenge well. With so many possible initiatives, knowing where to start and what will add genuine value is hard for any traditional organisation, and harder still in the public sector, which carries constraints the private sector does not.

Public teams answer to residents, elected members, regulators and auditors. Budgets are set in cycles. A failed experiment can become a headline. That does not make innovation impossible. It means the method has to be disciplined about risk, evidence and accountability from the start.

Before Glen Eira invested in training, it asked Collective Campus to assess its resources, processes, values and systems. That meant speaking with employees across vertical and horizontal lines, and reviewing key documentation from across the organisation.

The output was an innovation assessment report with prioritised recommendations, so decision makers could choose where to invest time and money to shift culture. Glen Eira then made investment decisions on culture and capability informed by those results. See the Glen Eira innovation assessment.

Ideas challenges are common in government. The problem is what happens next. City West Water wanted to give the teams that won its internal ideas challenge a pathway forward.

The workshop covered corporate innovation fundamentals, design thinking and lean startup. Teams mapped business models, defined key assumptions and built prototypes to test appetite, showing how quickly a public team can move with the right conditions and framework. Read the City West Water case study.

South West Hospital and Health Service in outback Queensland hand-picked leaders from across the organisation to drive change and innovation. Collective Campus combined an innovation crash course, covering lean startup, agile and the dynamics of innovation inside large organisations, with a design sprint on improving the patient experience.

Participants generated over 200 ideas to improve the patient experience. More importantly, they learned how to prioritise ideas and build low-fidelity prototypes to test the assumptions underneath them, so they would not stall between idea and execution. Read the South West Hospital and Health Service case study.

Singapore Pools, established by the Singapore Government, asked Collective Campus to help its people become more creative and generate better ideas. The tech crash courses covered ideation methods, innovation theory, business model development and emerging technology. Across the cohorts, participants generated over 150 ideas in 30 minutes. Read the Singapore Pools case study.

The City of Whittlesea wanted a more customer-centric approach and better journeys for its residents. Collective Campus analysed existing customer data, including reports and surveys, and developed four customer personas that gave a human face to each key customer type.

Using those personas, Collective Campus ran customer experience workshops for eight business areas: kindergarten enrolment, hard waste, building planning, animal registration, city transport and presentation, venue hire, information management and the contact centre. Each produced a shared understanding of customer types, pain points and opportunities at each touchpoint, and ideas prioritised by cost and impact. Read the City of Whittlesea case study.

Whittlesea later asked to see two everyday services the way residents actually experience them: council rates and the damaged bin process. Both look simple from the inside but stretch across touchpoints, teams and systems.

The session walked each journey stage by stage through the resident's eyes, mapping touchpoints and pinpointing where handoffs quietly break the experience. The council left with a shared, visual picture of both journeys and a prioritised set of friction points to fix. Read the customer journey mapping case study.

Yarra Ranges Council followed its design thinking work with customer experience workshops for its leaders. In the council's own words, leaders had their eyes opened and their thinking challenged, and saw it as an opportunity to be more innovative in how the council responds to and adds value for its customers.

Liverpool City Council in Sydney's south-west wanted to learn how to create great customer experiences through customer-centric design. Its team learned to step into customers' shoes and see the council from their perspective. Read the Liverpool City Council case study.

The City of Marion in Adelaide appointed new CX champions from across the organisation and wanted them ready to lead. The program covered why customer experience matters for councils, case studies of leading CX, how to identify customers, how to build personas and journey maps, and how to champion change inside government.

The champions walked out with the skills to tackle the customer experience challenges ahead in their community. Read the City of Marion case study.

At Whittlesea, customer experience became part of the organisation's vernacular and the foundation of its service design. That is the real goal of CX training in the public sector: not a one-off workshop, but a shared habit of starting from the resident. See the full customer experience workshop.

Water Corporation in Western Australia wanted its product and innovation team able to apply lean startup in a regulated, public body. The workshop covered running lean startup in large, regulated organisations, case studies from the public sector, innovation fundamentals, and how to increase speed.

The team came away motivated to take actionable next steps on existing projects, because it could now see how to apply lean startup despite the usual public body encumbrances. Read the Water Corporation case study.

Deakin University wanted its data and business analysts trained in agile, so they could get from A to B faster and deliver better outcomes. The bootcamp covered the difference between waterfall and agile, and how to run an agile project with backlogs, stories, estimation and agile meetings. The result was a team better able to deliver features rapidly, with a stronger customer focus. Read the Deakin case study.

RMIT engaged Collective Campus to run market validation training for its Activator entrepreneurship program, with students, alumni and teachers taking part. The session covered defining and prioritising key assumptions, prototyping and testing, customer acquisition, and key metrics. Participants arrived with an idea and left with a roadmap to test it quickly and cheaply. Read the RMIT Activator case study.

Better services also depend on how a team works together. Psychological safety builds the candour people need to speak up and learn, without lowering the standard. Critical thinking practises judgment on live work, so people keep ownership of the decision. Productivity helps teams protect time for deep work. Lean startup and agile help them test ideas fast and ship in small steps.

Councils deliver dozens of services to residents, from kindergarten enrolment to hard waste. Council training works best when it starts from one of those services. Our council clients span Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, and most began with design thinking or customer experience.

Agencies and health services carry large, distributed workforces and high-stakes services. South West Hospital and Health Service shows what works: hand-pick leaders from across the organisation, teach the method, and apply it straight away to the patient experience.

Utilities are customer businesses inside a public framework. Melbourne Water, City West Water, Coliban Water and Water Corporation have used design thinking, lean startup and startup partnerships to move faster within it.

Universities run complex operations alongside teaching and research. Deakin used agile to speed up delivery, and RMIT used market validation to help its entrepreneurs test ideas before building them.