We designed and launched a repeatable Digital Product solution to allow a number of departments within the UK Civil Service to upgrade their intrapreneurship skills at scale by applying Lean Entrepreneurship principles to real challenges.
Background
Her Majesty’s Home Civil Service, also known as Her Majesty’s Civil Service or the Home Civil Service, is the permanent bureaucracy or secretariat of Crown employees that supports Her Majesty’s Government in the UK.
As at the end of March 2018 there were 430,075 civil servants in the Home Civil Service.
Tackling the UK’s high-priority issues within today’s digital age requires creative ideation and agile decision-making.
The UK Civil Service recognises the power of intrapreneurship as a force to activate change and innovation, and have therefore set an example for Governments worldwide by professionalising entrepreneurship within its workforce.
To this end, they devised an Intrapreneurship Qualification to provide their talent with the skillset, toolset and mindset to be entrepreneurial in every part of their professional life.
Brief
The UK Civil Service has asked us to provide small number of their departments with a digital product to upskill Civil Servants by guiding them through a series of exercises where they would apply the key Principles of Lean Entrepreneurship to a challenge related to their day-to-day operations.
The main requirement was to allow the programme to be administered independently and remotely at scale, without any active intervention from us apart from designing, producing and setting it up.
Approach
We designed a 5-day autonomously facilitated Sprint to guide Civil Servants on how to use their entrepreneurial skills to tackle a series of challenges within key departments of the UK Civil Service.
We used our experience in embedding intrapreneurship in large organisations to provide the client with a package containing the tools and resources needed to confidently organise and run a series of remote Sprints, autonomously.
This consisted of a series of deliverables.
Facilitator Handbook
We boiled down our experience in designing and running large-scale innovation programmes to craft a step-by-step guide for the UK Civil Service to organise their own Sprints and Bootcamps.
Participant Handbook
We provided each participant with a day by day handbook to guide them along the entrepreneurial journey. The handbook included tips on the theory and mindset needed in any given exercise and provided instructions on executing each exercise of the sprint to accomplish the final goal.
Bespoke Video Content
We filmed a series of daily videos where our expert innovation strategists and intrapreneurs guided participants through their tasks, using examples and visual cues to help illustrate key concepts.
Bespoke Exercise Canvases
We designed custom templates for entrepreneurial ideation and decision making, to help Civil Servants collaborate in a structured, timed way.
Outcomes
Using our bespoke journey, teams managed to interview stakeholders, isolate early adopters, build and iterate MVPs and pitch to a panel of judges to secure a commitment from senior leadership to take their projects further as part of their departments’ direct priorities.
Most importantly, the UK Civil Service is now equipped to scalably run the virtual sprints across the organisation to embed intrapreneurship in every department and role.