Week 5: Understanding End Users
Written by: Katie Englander, Senior Data & Evaluation Associate at the Department of Human Services
Why don’t City government employees innovate? What’s wrong with them?
Hmmm… Let’s try that again without biasing the respondent and priming her/him to think of all the negative stereotypes and poor interactions s/he has had with City employees. Instead, perhaps, we could ask respondents to describe instances in which they’ve had opportunities to innovate and what the process was like, including challenges and barriers to implementing new ideas and initiatives.
This week, our cohort grappled with the challenge of writing strong survey questions and sought to identify and avoid some of the pitfalls inherent in the questions that I asked at the beginning of this blog post. Specifically, we practiced developing questions that would help us better understand the needs and perspectives of different stakeholder groups. Question formats included open-ended (e.g., Describe a time when…), closed (e.g., Yes/No or multiple choice), and scaled (e.g., On a scale of 1-5, how often do you…).
Drafting survey questions and considering other types of data collection, including interviews and focus groups, can help researchers glean insights from different populations, which may in turn shape how a new initiative is developed and implemented. The focus on thoughtful data collection and analysis also nicely complemented some of the activities we practiced in previous weeks. For example, during Week 2 and Week 3, we tried completing “Empathy Maps,” which document what a stakeholder might see, hear, feel, etc about a given situation or interaction. Rather than assuming we know what this person perceives, survey data can help us fill in the gaps and possibly identify unconscious biases in our own work.
As we move into the final two weeks of the Academy, it has become clear that there is nothing “wrong” with City employees, and there are, in fact, a lot of innovative practices occurring within City agencies and departments. Our cohort regularly shares ideas and resources that cross disciplines and areas of interest, and we are increasingly dedicated to helping one another come up with new ways to address long-standing problems. So, while a survey question listing possible challenges associated with innovation might require a “Select all that apply” format with the somewhat ubiquitous open-ended “Other” option, on a scale of 1-5, I would certainly rate us as “5- Very Likely” to use these tools for generating new and ideas and problem-solving.
What is the Academy for Municipal Innovation?
AMI is a seven-week program that introduces participants to the principles and practice of innovation. Participants will learn to integrate tools and techniques of innovation drawn from design thinking, system thinking, business analytics, and ethnographic research to discover innovative solutions to complex real-world problems. The program will be delivered in a studio setting, anchored in Jefferson University’s (formerly Philadelphia University) signature nexus learning pedagogy of active, collaborative, and real-world learning. Each session will introduce practical techniques & tools that can be immediately applied at work to inspire innovation through collaboration.
Throughout the program, the City (Innovation Management) will offer opportunities to further develop the skills and tools that participants are learning in the classroom. Brown bag lunches, innovation consulting sessions, and workshops will take place throughout the fall to encourage students to engage with the material in the context of their everyday portfolios, and to provide them with a space to meet past graduates and learn about how they’ve integrated innovative thinking into their roles.