Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) leveraged an immersive design-thinking process to create and implement a Service Transformation Strategy that would respond to Canadians’ service expectations and a government-wide policy direction. This process allows ESDC to gather innovative ideas from employees, clients, and partners, and translate those ideas into client-centred service solutions using an agile and repeatable design methodology. Convinced by the approach and motived by our dedication to continuously improve the client service experience, ESDC created a physical space to support the new methodology. The Acceleration Hub enables in-person and virtual collaboration and ideation of service improvement solutions, concepts and ideas.
ESDC provides $117.1 billion in benefits to Canadians and delivers services across many channels. Workload is divided among specialized teams, an efficient structure, but one that is not conducive to a department-wide, collaborative, and creative approach to innovation. Previously, service improvements were made on an ad-hoc basis, usually without input from clients or service partners.
The agile design methodology places clients at the centre of service improvement to implement our ambitious, multi-year service transformation agenda.