Bosnian Government - Digital Transformation

Situation
I was approached by a member of the Bosnian Government and asked to facilitate them in understanding why applying design thinking and problem framing / solving would be beneficial to their teams.

Task
I ran a design sprint, coaching them on how to use these sprints in their day to day work, so that they can quickly identify problems, frame problems correctly, develop solutions to test, test solutions quickly and begin the roll out of new products, services and initiatives for their country.

Action
I ran through the five stages of the sprint process, initially we worked on the problems they face as a government and collectively decided on which one to take through a sprint.

'People are not using our new online services, how do we market to these people and increase uptake?'

We worked through the research, define, ideate and prototype part of the sprint, mainly due to time constraints, so that they had multiple ideas to take away and work on testing and development.

Result
It became very clear that the problems that they thought they had were not framed correctly and that a lack of people taking up their services was due to a lack of access to the internet due to networks not being installed, digital poverty and destruction to networks caused by conflict.

This changed the mindsets of many of the government officials and led them to rethink their strategies and focus of marketing and digital teams so that the real problems around infrastructure were solved before looking at how best to market to their citizens.