Innovation Adoption
Client: A Large Federal Law Enforcement Agency
The Challenge
Change is inevitable. New technology, cultural forces, and government policies are constantly evolving, creating new challenges and opportunities. Organizations need to routinely and systematically audit procedures, policies, and tech stacks. They also need to evaluate whether or not their workforce as the requisite knowledge and skills to succeed. Such a culture is difficult for all organizations, and particular for large federal law enforcement agencies. One such organization was finding it difficult to evolve their approaches due to legacy staff, government mandates, and shrinking budgets. Simply put, the organization was losing the ability to keep up with international criminal organizations who faced no such barriers.
The Solution
I partnered with the Chief Data Officer to deliver a 16-week innovation bootcamp. Together, we recognized that change was needed, but that the workforce did not have the capabilities to deliver meaningful change initiatives. Through a design competition, we identified 4 cutting edge proposals for change and 40 champions of change. These 40 internal employees were enrolled in the bootcamp with the intention of maturing their proposal and ultimately to deliver it to senior leadership.
We built the bootcamp around the principles of Customer Experience, Human-Centered Design, Agile, Lean Startup, Change Management, and effective Storytelling. Each week we explored the key themes of each, and practiced executing critical activities. Teams identified customers, developed personas and journey maps, inteviewed stakeholders, drafted Value Proposition Canvases and Mission Model Canvases, wireframes and prototypes, acquired user feedback, and executed backlogs. Ultimately, the teams applied the knowledge and skills detailed above to design and develop a comprehensive, meaningful solution to problems that had been unable to solve for decades. .
The Results
All 4 solutions were green lit by senior leadership.
4 individuals within the bootcamp received promotions in part due to their bootcamp efforts.
Investigation times were significantly reduced.
The time required to process lab results was significantly reduced.
Tech stack migrations were efficiently and effectively navigated without major disruption.
The bootcamp model was adopted by the agency and is now run yearly in order to evaluate and support the best ideas. A culture of innovation was built within the organization.