Transforming Public Services by Design

Re-Orienting Policies, Organizations and Services around People

Sabine Junginger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409436256
• eBook ISBN: 9781317007869
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

For policy makers and policy implementers, design challenges abound. Every design challenge presents an opportunity for change and transformation. To get from policy intent to policy outcome, however, is not a straightforward journey. It involves people and services as much as it involves policies and organizations. Of all organizations, perhaps government agencies are perceived to be the least likely to change. They are embedded in enormous bureaucratic structures that have grown over decades, if not centuries. In effect, many people have given up hope that such an institution can ever change its ways of doing business. And yet, from a human-centered design perspective, they present a fabulous challenge. Designed by people for people, they have a mandate to be citizen-centered, but they often fall short of this goal. If human-centered design can make a difference in this organizational context, it is likely to have an equal or greater impact on an organization that shows more flexibility; for example, one that is smaller in size and less entangled in legal or political frameworks.

Transforming Public Services by Design offers a human-centered design perspective on policies, organizations and services. Three design projects by large-scale government agencies illustrate the implications for organizations and the people involved in designing public services: the Tax Forms Simplification Project by the Internal Revenue Service (1978-1983), the Domestic Mail Manual Transformation Project by the United States Postal Service (2001-2005) and the Integrated Tax Design Project by the Australian Tax Office. These case studies offer a unique demonstration of the role of human-centered design in policy context.

This book aims to support designers and managers of all backgrounds who want to know more about reorienting policies, organizations and services around people.

Section II
Three examples of transforming public services to re-orient government around people

6
The USPS domestic mail manual transformation project¹

The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.²

This first case study looks at the Domestic Mail Manual (DMM) Transformation Project by the United States Postal Service. This project demonstrates how the design of a product affects all elements of the organizational system described in chapter 2: people, structure, resources and vision and how this allows for transformation by design. For this project, the organization explicitly recruited external designers willing and capable to work together with the organization on a difficult organizational problem.³ Design methods and design thinking were brought into the organization to redesign – that is to change – one of its core products. But this was not possible without considering the organizational system at large.

In 2001, then Postmaster General John E. Potter described the United States Postal Service as ‘a massive organization’. He underlined this with numbers:⁴ ‘In roughly one week the Postal Service matches the annual volumes of United Parcel Service™ and in two days, it delivers what FedEx™ delivers in a year’. Translated into numbers, the Postal Service delivered more than 680 million pieces of mail to more than 135 million addresses in the United States that year. To do so, the organization maintained 458 mail processing facilities, 38,000 post offices (including stations and branches) and operated the largest fleet in the nation with 205,000 vehicles, ranging from trucks to carrier vehicles. All in all, the organization employed nearly 900,000 people to ensure it could fulfill its constitutional mandate, to provide universal service to all Americans: ‘Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day.’⁵

Even today, the USPS maintains boats, planes, trucks, and horses to get a letter or parcel to its intended recipient. From Benjamin Franklin to Jack Potter, the Postal Service has had a crucial role in weaving the American fabric in social, commercial and economic terms as well as in terms of personal freedom and liberty – the right to live anywhere without losing access to society. In many rural communities, the local Postal Office is a treasured institution, and it is difficult to imagine US streets without mail vehicles or letter carriers. The Service in this sense has always provided a certain kind of comfort to people that they are connected with other people. But this relationship is not without woes. Electronic mail and private competition have cut into its operations. The circumstances under which the Postal Service operates are unique among government agencies. It is not funded by taxpayer money but relies on self-generated revenues.⁶ At the same time its status as a member of government prevents it from accumulating operational profits. In other words, the Postal Service needs to make money to operate but cannot make more money than is needed for its operation.⁷ Despite this challenging business model, the United States Postal Service, with a history of more than 200 years, has outlived many traditional businesses. But this struggle for survival is getting increasingly more difficult.

As in private organizations, procedures, rules and regulations exist to govern the use of the Postal Service. These rules and standards are contained in the Domestic Mail Manual, also referred to as ‘the DMM’. For both mailers and employees, the DMM holds the ultimate truth to any mailing question. Indeed, staff throughout the USPS refers to the book as ‘our bible.’⁸

The DMM is the bible of the postal service… it impacts many departments and most of the employees in the organization at one time or another have looked at this book.⁹

A book that holds such weight within the organization can be expected to be substantial, and the DMM does not disappoint: more than once had the heavy six-inch binder been successfully used as a doorstopper or bookend. These non-intended secondary uses had become symptomatic of a bigger problem that plagued the organization. Because people were not paying attention to the standards and rules of mailing, they were also not preparing their mail appropriately. This led to more and more interruptions on the processing level. Every single interruption was costly.

People quit looking at the standards: they just go by, went by, what they remember, what another customer did. And so over the years, we have just been going way, way, way, way down a slippery slope in terms of verse versus standards and when I hear people talk that there are issues with this, I am thinking everybody has gotten away from the standards. They are making this up in their head. This is not logical and I think the reason this is not is because they quit looking [at the rules and standards in the DMM]¹⁰

In early 2001, the head of the division had enough and decided ‘We need to fix that book.’¹¹

A brief introduction to ‘the book’, the Domestic Mail manual

The DMM is a legal document that is citable in court and changes often. Ignoring the DMM is not an option: ‘Everything that happens in the United States Postal Service depends on the DMM’.¹² The DMM is the axis around which all continental USPS mailing operations turn. For anyone in the mailing industry, from the small print house that bundles customer mail for better rates to the technician who develops new mail processing equipment and on to the software developer who works on a computer program for small business mailers, the DMM is just as relevant as for those people who actually do the mailing: Parents sending care packages to their college students; small business owners promoting a sale; medium businesses strategically targeting select customers and markets and large mailing companies that build much of their enterprise around their ability to get things in the mail, quickly and reliably. For USPS employees, the DMM represents the law on which they rely when they make decisions about customer services and complaints.

For anyone mailing anything, for people in the mailing industry and for employees of the United States Postal Service, the DMM holds all the answers to their mailing questions. Want to know the maximum size of a postcard? Or how many mail classes there are? Want to find out what you cannot mail with the United States Postal Service? Or what your rights are as a mail recipient? Want to know how to write software for mail applications? Or are you more concerned about how to pallet your periodicals correctly? In any event, the source to turn to for an answer is the DMM.

By the time the DMM Transformation Project started, the DMM had already undergone two major makeovers. First there was the ‘Green Book’. Named after the forest green color of its plastic covers, the Green Book organized the USPS rules and standards first by mail class (for example, First Class or Priority Mail), then by topic (for example, addressing or eligibility), and finally by shape (for example, letter, flat or parcel). It may well have been the most densely printed rulebook the USPS ever published. To keep the printing cost manageable and to keep the weight of the book feasible (both for reasons of distribution and handling), the pages of the Green Book were very thin and the print size chosen was very small.

Many postal employees romanticized the Green Book. Though it was very difficult to read because of poor layout and visual design, it offered employees a familiar pathway into the information organized around classes of mail: First Class, Express Mail, Standard Mail, etc. These were concepts most employees were familiar with. However, when the Green Book finally became unmanageable, two staff members involved in issuing, maintaining and enforcing standards and rules were asked to simplify this booklet. They were explicitly instructed to cut down the number of pages of the document. In only six months, they did as told and carefully weeded through the document to remove any redundant information. Sentences and paragraphs were taken out and the document was reorganized around relevant mailing topics. In the minds of the Postal Service, Eligibility was a topic as was Addressing. Each topic contained information sorted by mailing class and mail shape. Just reading through this paragraph offers a glimpse into the language and concepts at work. We get a sense for the difficulties people had trying to relate to these.

Nonetheless, that team presented a new version of the DMM with fewer pages and more ‘white space’, that is bigger margins around the text. The new DMM showed typographic improvements and a clear visual layout to make the document more appealing to the eye and more legible. In many ways, this first attempt at simplification of the DMM is comparable with the IRS Tax Forms Simplification Project described in chapter 10.

Over the design of the ‘thing’, the actual document and its pages, the organization, however, had lost sight of the needs of those people relying on the DMM who were not experts. The rigorous elimination of pages had inadvertently created a disconnected system of twelve arbitrary sections. Confused customers and employees now had to piece together information about a mailing topic by themselves in a detective-like mode. Among DMM users the ‘five-finger-search method’ became popular: researching the answer to a mailing question, they would find one part of the answer on page five, but this page referred them to a rule on another page, that rule again referred to another section and another section in the document, and so on and so on. The reader ended up ‘bookmarking’ every page with another finger as they needed to flip back and forth to reassemble all elements to their mailing question.

Since every rule and standard was stated only once within the document, the responsibility to piece together relevant information to a particular question fell to the person searching for an answer in the DMM. In their hunt for a complete answer, people often forgot their original question by the time they had pursued three or more of these references. Reading through difficult legal language added to their frustration and fatigue. The unintended result of eliminating redundancy in words was a dramatic increase of redundancy in work. Customers and employees alike continued to complain about the book, and, instead of using it to guide them in their mail preparation, they simply avoided the rules altogether.

Recognizing this problem, the Postal Service initially developed a series of ‘children documents’, add-ons to the DMM that sought to offer compact information on at least some questions. These ‘Quick Service Guides’ were often printed in color and included illustrations. However, they, too, were written from a postal perspective and organized around mail topics that required and assumed previous knowledge of the rules and standards. Knowledge few mailers had.

Even those mailing experts who over the years had come to be quite familiar with the DMM and who actually set out to find the answer to a mailing question themselves often reached for the phone to confirm their own interpretation with someone at the post office. They soon found out that the answer changed from one post office to another. The postal clerk, say in California interpreted the same rule differently than his counterpart in the state of Maine or in Louisiana.

Organizational project background

Since the creation of the modern U.S. Postal Service in 1971, the organization operated under a business model built around the assumption ‘that continuing growth in mail volume and revenue would support continued infrastructure growth’.¹³ But changes in technology and general business climate proved this business model to be outdated at the end of the second millennium. U.S. congress had followed the developments at the Postal Service and continuously voiced concern over its viability (as it does today).

In early 2001, the Comptroller General of the United States, David M. Walker, effectively added the Postal Services ‘transformational efforts and long-term outlook’ to the High-Risk List maintained by the General Accounting Office. He justified this measure ‘so that we and others can focus on its financial, operational and human capital challenges before the situation escalates into a crisis where the options for actions may be more limited’.¹⁴ While the report commended the Postal Se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• SECTION I Re-orienting policies, organizations and public services around people
• SECTION II Three examples of transforming public services to re-orient government around people
• Bibliography
• Index