City of Boston: Permitting Service Blueprint
The City of Boston’s Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) is working on developing service design expertise and sharing user-centered methods with offices across the city. In a partnership between DoIT and the Inspectional Services Department (which handles building and construction permits), I led a team of fellows in creating the city’s first service blueprint. In a cross-functional team within only three weeks, we mapped out an applicant’s experience of applying for and receiving a building permit so that specific touchpoints can be redesigned in context in the future.
City of Boston
as part of the Coding It Forward 2023 Fellowship
Summer 2023
The final process book of the blueprinting project was published through the Coding it Forward GitHub. We created the process book as an artifact for the City of Boston team so they could replicate the project or reference lessons learned in future blueprinting work:
Methods included:
project planning and scoping
facilitating collaborative sessions and online workspaces
service blueprinting
team retrospective
Note: This project only involved one user interview, which was a known flaw with the approach due to the very short project timeline. We recognized this flaw from the beginning and suggested future user research work in our final deliverables.
Delivered at end of project:
service blueprint
service blueprint template aligned with brand
suggestions for next steps
final presentation
process book
reflections and lessons learned
Piecing together the complete permitting service from the employee perspective, across several collaborative sessions.
After finalizing the stages and steps of the blueprint, copying into the final template.
The service blueprint template we created to match the City of Boston’s brand guidelines, and included explainers on how to use in the future.
Final Service Blueprint
Close up of one phase of the blueprint, showing how we displayed online and in-person service experiences alongside each other.
