Piloting a community-based childcare service

Childcare shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all solution. Every child deserves personalized attention in a nurturing environment that feels like home.

That's the driving force behind my collaboration with the Ministry of Social Affairs to pilot a new childcare service called Sousedské dětské skupiny. By offering care in the welcoming homes of motivated caregivers, we're creating a service that puts children and families first.

How we're doing it?

I'm collaborationg with a department for social innovations at the ministry. The main aim of the project is to identify client needs, evaluate the product-market fit and find ways to simplify the onboarding process for new clients of a service.

Activities

  • Understanding user needs by conducting interviews and ethnographic fieldwork
  • Conducting cross-domain workshops to get insights from childcare professionals
  • Iterative validation and development of onboarding process and support artifacts
  • Piloting a service proposition with a subset of clients in an isolated sandbox simulating real-life conditions
Early
Early process storyboarding allowed the team to align on the service workflow

Learnings

  • There's a high demand for home-based childcare services. Parents with kids with specific needs are especially attracted to this opportunity
  • Data advocacy allows for more user-centered approach during policy design by leveraging insights gathered in user research
  • Consistent and straight-forward communication is an important ingredient to keep public audience engaged
  • Day-to-day life at the ministry is resilient to innovation and opinions are valued more than data
  • Using a sandbox approach when piloting a service is a valuable instrument capable of yielding data for further policy design process
  • Efficient stakeholder engagement is a must when spreading research insights to shape policy design process
Conducting
Conducting a workshop with pilot project participants and childcare specialists

Outcomes

The main aim of the project was to identify if a service meets customer's and system needs before it is officially institutionalized. We managed to come up with several suggestions for further improvement and identified several bottlenecks that need to be mitigated for service to have a higher chance for success.

  • 📈 Gathered data on client needs, problems and opportunities in a childcare sector
  • 🚀 Designed and co-facilitated a 6 month long pilot programme simulating the service before it was officially available
  • 👷🏼 Prototyped solutions and formulated suggestions for important stakeholders, including the deputy minister, to guide further improvements.
  • 🚨 Performed regular risk assessments to evaluate service adoption rates, drawing insights from user research data.
Blueprinting
Blueprinting a pilot project workflow helped the team to align on key milestones of household approval process

Conclusion

Leading innovative efforts in a public sector is a long and complex journey. Having a strong alignment with top management and key stakeholders is an important ingredient in rigid structures that are resistant to change.

We managed to shape the service and its further development to be more user-centered by actively including future users during its development. This allowed us to weed out some edge-cases and potential failures despite several pitfalls in participant involvement.