Image Credit : Tigerspike
Project Overview
The IVY DTL (Digital Tenancy Lease) is the first and only digital leasing process for community housing tenants.
Through a user-centered process, Tigerspike, together with DCJ and Telstra have redefined the steps that enable Australia’s most vulnerable people to find a home.
Project Commissioner
Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ)
Project Creator
Team
The project brought together DCJ , Telstra and its preferred digital services delivery partner Tigerspike. This included meaningful contributions from Northgate Public Services, and DocuSign contributing the skills and expertise of their respective disciplines.
Project Brief
Tigerspike, together with DCJ and Telstra have re-designed the way that community housing tenants engage with DCJ, Australia's largest social housing landlord.
Digital Tenancy Lease (DTL) transformed a process that was admin-heavy and completely paper based, and re-engineered it to be seamless, contextual, user-friendly, and client/tenant friendly. Through a user-centered process, Tigerspike, together with DCJ and Telstra have ensured that housing officers have the tools and information required to complete their jobs, and that community housing tenants have the information they need to be set up for success in their new homes.
DTL mobilises tenancy management staff with the right information when and where they need it, reducing the need to search multiple areas of their backend system to find a tenant. DTL empowers housing officers to complete the leasing process from anywhere. Freeing-up essential office space and enabling housing officers to meet clients that are unable to visit offices: the elderley, those in hospital or care and future tenants currently serving prison sentences. This ensures that no matter the tenants current position, they can go through the process and be confident they have a home to go to in the future.
Project Innovation/Need
DTL expands on the resounding success of two already revolutionary products - IVY (I Visit You), a built-for-purpose, tenancy management application designed for housing officers, and MyHousing, a bespoke mobile application created for community housing tenants to manage their tenancies, properties and personal information.
The DTL Service Design project simplified and digitised the administrative work housing officers need to do before meeting with a future tenant. Through a service design lens the team were able to assess the existing business processes, simplify and streamline them to fit into IVY - an app that has already changed the way housing officers engage with existing tenants. DTL closes the loop for housing officers in regards to tenant setup and management, ensuring that they only need one tool, which now includes selecting the right tenant for the right home, confirming eligibility, contract signing, and lease commencement.
DTL reduces the time that remote housing staff need to travel. During the research for DTL it was found that regional housing officers and future tenants can make a 3 hour round trip just to view a property, they have to make the trip again to sign lease papers and confirm their eligibility. With DTL this can be done in one go, giving the housing officer time to complete more sign-ups and reducing the time that community housing properties remain empty between tenancies.
Design Challenge
DTL is a part of Tigerspike’s continued work with DCJ to ensure that housing staff spend less time completing administrative tasks and data entry - and more time engaging with the members of our society who need it most.
DTL is a user-centered process that focuses on providing the right information and capabilities at the time that users require it. Prior to DTL information was distributed across different areas of their backend system and had to be searched and filtered before duplicating it onto a paper form, only to be signed and stored in another system.
Now, information is displayed contextually, collated into relevant digital forms that can be sighted, swiftly updated and confirmed.
DTL, along with IVY and MyHousing have all been crafted from a user-centered process. End-users not only provided input to the ideas and designs that shaped these processes - they acted as gatekeepers. This process has ensured quality, and enabled 100% uptake of new processes and tools, future-proofed the department's working processes and increased operational efficiency by over 50%. Saving over 70,000 hours of administration per year; time that staff have spent meeting the needs of community housing tenants: low income earners, those living with disabilities and the elderly.
Future Impact
With an applicant list of over 46,000, multiple technology vendors, and a long list of existing tenants that were at risk of going unchecked, understanding the disparate needs of staff was not often the biggest focus - nor was it simple.
One big challenge was scope - users of DTL are diverse, dispersed and all do their jobs differently. The difference in both process and priority was observed not just in region or suburb, but sometimes per office.
What was different about DCJ’s first engagement with Tigerspike was the process. With a discovery team that combined UX designers with visual design, business analysis, change management and software development, we were able to understand the problem, and the users from all angles, and come to a shared understanding of how to tackle the problems.
Throughout the process of designing, developing and implementing IVY, MyHousing and more recently DTL, Tigerspike have spent hundreds of hours with end users, tenants and subject matter experts. Starting in 2017 with contextual inquiries, we spent time with housing officers (end users of IVY), learning what it was like to do their job, seeing first hand how they engage with community housing tenants across NSW, and what information they need (and when). We met with tenants and applicants from a range of backgrounds - from single working parents, the homeless - from Surry Hills to Orange. We took their needs, views and stories and translated them first into a process, and then a product.
Service - Government
This award celebrates creative and innovative solution design for the successful delivery and provision of services. Consideration given to system integration, user experience, product design
More Details