In this episode, we dive into Richmond’s revamp of their 311 service (RVA311). The episode will be part 2 of a series on Richmond’s re-launch of their citizen request platform (part 1 was episode 20). This episode focuses on the launch, the marketing around the launch and plans for ongoing maintenance and revision of the platform based on feedback.
In a previous episode, the city of Richmond joined us to talk about the revamp of their existing 311 service and their approach to vendor management more generally. The episode was a big hit, which doesn't come as a surprise. Local governments aren't necessarily looking for fancy new products. Sometimes the best solution is something already procured and just needs a product manager like Tina in Richmond to bring it to life.
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Featured government: Richmond, VA
Episode guests: Pete Breil, Director of Citizen Services: Tina Haney, Product Manager
Visit govlaunch.com for more stories and examples of local government innovation.
Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano ,co-founder of Govlaunch and your host. In a previous episode, I met with the city of Richmond to talk about the revamp of their existing 311 service and their approach to vendor management more generally. The episode was a big hit, which doesn't come as a surprise. Local governments aren't necessarily looking for fancy new products. Sometimes the best solution is something already procured and just needs a product manager like Tina in Richmond to bring it to life. This week, we bring back Pete Briel, director of citizen services and product manager, Tina Haney, to talk about the launch of their re-imagined 311 service. So let's see what the team in Richmond is up to today. Pete and Tina, so excited to have you back on the podcast. Thank you both for being here. Can you each quickly re-introduce yourselves and share a bit about your role?
Pete: (01:10)
Sure. I'm Pete Breil, director of citizen service and response for the city of Richmond. And part of that department is the RVA311 access for citizen non-emergency service requests.
Tina: (01:25)
I am Tina Marie Haney. I am also with citizens service and response. I'm the technology manager and the RVA311 product owner. So it's my responsibility to keep the platform up and running in as optimized as we possibly can.
Lindsay: (01:42)
Great. Well, Tina, for those listeners who are new, can we start with a brief recap of the 311 project underway in Richmond? The one we talked about a few months back.
Tina: (01:51)
Uh, sure. We sure can. Well, like we discussed on that first episode, when we joined the city, we'd inherited citizen services, which is a product from Avepoint Inc, uh, that had been gifted to the city in 2018. So we underwent a whole RFP process to pick a new one. And when we last spoke with you, we were in the process of implementing Avepoint citizen services for real this time as a paid subscriber. What we had learned from the first, uh, go after we had started with the city was that the tool had a lot of capabilities, administrative, uh, capabilities that we could delve into. So we'd already begun optimizing. So our project really was just kind of extending on that same note and taking a look at the data, figuring out what needed to be done, basically we did a lot of the driving on what new functionality and features were developed for the next generation of the citizen services product, which we just launched.
Lindsay: (02:50)
One of the concepts tapped into last time was this role of product manager, which isn't very common in local government. Richmond success with this project alone makes a strong case for Tina, your role. Pete would love to have you share your thoughts on this and why you feel so strongly this role of a product manager is needed.
Pete: (03:08)
Yeah, I think the very smooth launch speaks for itself. That's not always so common in government generally. We were very proud of the fact that, uh, our launch went almost flawlessly and the feedback that we received so far has been very positive. And this is really because of the quality of the planning and design that was a direct result of having an internal technology manager who could be the product manager really think through, um, and analyze the needs of our users, both internal and, uh, public. And when you're spending so much on the technology itself investing in the people who are supporting the technology is a no brainer.
Lindsay: (03:50)
Well, again, it's been a few months since we chatted on the podcast. Last we spoke, you were still in the technical phase of sort of building out what you had envisioned for this platform. Can you fill us in on where the project stands today? You all just did your launch, um, but fill in the blanks for us in terms of what has happened between the last time we spoke and now?
Tina: (04:12)
Well, I mean, we're actually very excited because as of March 16th, we successfully launched that next generation citizen portal. We relaunched the two redesigned mobile apps for iOS and Android. Um, during the development cycle, we actually were even able to get some additional enhancements in for our internal portal and administrative capabilities. So we're very excited about that. We're actually moving into marketing and awareness campaigns, which will be ongoing for a while around, uh, the new product and, um, trying to continue driving that adoption up, uh, continuing to figure out what we can learn about the citizens and what their needs are and how we can make the technology continue to support us, the citizens, the internal service teams, our call center, uh, et cetera. So we're in a pretty good place right now, um, and pretty excited about what's next.
Pete: (05:07)
Yeah, I would just add something that's near and dear to my heart as we built out a complete reporting suite,which is pretty unusual for many, many tools in government. If you look at the generic reporting suites that come with a lot of products, they are exactly that they're generic. Uh, we really utilized our reporting that we've been doing manually over the last two years to design a lot of very impactful reporting for our internal service owners to manage their queues more efficiently and understand the demand more completely. But we also are now providing reporting, uh, that's better than anything I was able to produce in the past that is self-service and available to our council members and to the general public. So we're very excited about the transparency that we're creating there.
Lindsay: (05:56)
That's fantastic. And tapping into that a little bit more. Are you building this, it reporting has been built in house or using a vendor for this?
Pete: (06:04)
We used our vendor. It's built into the product using power BI. We did a lot of the design work and tried to create some things that would be universally applicable even to other customers in the future, although, um, in our particular case, just because some of our data needs, we, we tailored it, but, um, try to still keep it universal in its approach.
Lindsay: (06:29)
And then Tina, did you all opt for more of a soft launch or, um, you mentioned the communications campaigns that are underway now. Did you do any of that before the launch leading up to this big March 16th date or was it more of a soft launch? Make sure everything works. And then now you're really hitting the communication hard.
Tina: (06:49)
I would say it was probably a hybrid of those two things. We did a ton of advanced planning, uh, leveraging all of the experts that we could get our hands on and who were willing to help us. We'd also built in some marketing related assistance into our RFP. So the vendor was, uh, building out some professional artifacts for us, but it was a soft launch in this, uh, in the sense that, um, anytime you're doing something like this, that's that major, you kind of do want to be sure that it's super stable before you start really trying to drive people to utilize it. But because it was so distinctively different from what anyone had experienced, we didn't feel like we could pull a surprise and not do anything. So we did some preliminary, very short-term just a few days before we were launching it, uh, maybe a week in advance preparation, leverage some of the ambassadors that had been identified, some of our civic partners, bloggers and that sort of thing. And some folks in the internal office of the press secretary assisted us in building out some collateral that we could share with them, uh, trying to get some press. So we did a combination of both things I would say to answer your question, because it was, um, was kind of a massive undertaking. And we did end up having a couple of things that we needed to fix post-launch right. Now we'll continue with the marketing now that we sort of see that it stabilized and we'll really dig in a little bit harder in that in probably the coming 30 to 45 days getting bus wraps on and you know, stuff like that.
Pete: (08:19)
Yeah. Where we really focused our time, was I think preparing people for the change. So it was less about showing off everything, but just building, not for the sake of suspense, but preparing people because the visual differences were dramatic. And so we spent a lot of time with internal audiences, especially to, uh, prepare them, uh, and we did a lot of internal training and then we had training prepared on a website that we could direct people to so that when we launched citizens had access to training immediately if they felt the need. While at the same time, several weeks before the launch, um, spending a lot of time with the staff of our city council members, um, who are kind of the direct constituent services people of each district to make sure they were aware and that they would be also engaged in the marketing that we were doing.
Pete: (09:15)
And then the other thing we really made sure to do was all of our marketing materials were bilingual and we really engaged our office of multicultural affairs to help us get the word out as well.
Lindsay: (09:26)
We talked a lot about the functionality of the platform last episode, but for those of our listeners that missed that episode can you give some of the highlights? What was the objective obviously to give a, a totally re-imagined 311 experience, but what are some of the highlights or things that really make what you've built unique, do you think?
Tina: (09:43)
In the new experience, what we wanted to do was kind of bring it into 2021. And, uh, we wanted to leverage the geolocation services that are available now. We wanted that to be seamless. We wanted the process of submitting a request, uh, to be, um, kind of a flow based approach where we give people the opportunity to do, uh, instead of one long form that they feel like they might be filling out forever. Um, we're able to sort of chunk that down into the who, what, when, where, why type of questions to where they answer those in specificity. We also enhanced in some ways for ourselves to allow people to, um, submit anonymously if they want to, uh, building in configuration capabilities that allow us to disable that in the instance of types of requests, um, that we couldn't service them if we didn't know who they were. And we also wanted a clean mobile experience, which we had struggled with, uh, previously. So we wanted that mobile app to feel current and fresh.
Tina: (10:51)
We also wanted better capabilities to communicate with our constituents out there in the field, right. To sort of say, Hey, this program is about to launch and you need to look into it, or this deadline is approaching quickly, and you should get your materials turned in if you're planning to take advantage of it. So the new tool gives us, um, an alerts and announcements and important notices panel that we can, you know, publicize information that we need to, to get word out. We just wanted it to be a little more integrated of an experience for the user to capitalize on some of the features that we had, but we didn't have a really good way to, um, communicate them to folks.
Pete: (11:33)
Yeah. And I would just add that Tina was very humble in her comments about geolocation. Uh, we've got a very visual interface now that, you know, let's say you're standing on a corner and see a sign has been damaged and you want to report the need for a repair when you select that request type. And then go to the next step. The first thing that's going to show you is anything related to that request type within a 10th of a mile, so you can immediately see, has somebody else already submitted this? If so, can I upload it rather than submit a duplicate? If I'm really interested in that, can I follow it, so that I can see it in my list of requests and see what the outcome was. So really cool things that we can do, um, with that geolocation capability combined with the dataset of existing requests.
Tina: (12:24)
Yeah. That's a good point. And that also really helps our internal teams as well, because that ability to sort of cut down on those duplicate submissions helps our service teams internally not have to chase down things that somebody's already chased. So, yeah, it's a good point, Pete.
Lindsay: (12:39)
Last time we talked about some of the local government nuances and the terminology that you all use and how as an end user resident, I have no idea what a, I can't remember what we all talked about. The trash bins were called something strange, super cans, the super cans. Yes. Have you gotten any feedback initially on that, uh, less, fewer questions, requests going to the crack department now? Any feedback you have so far, is it a little too soon to tell?
Tina: (13:10)
I think it might be too soon to tell for that one. Mostly because some of that optimization on renaming of requests, we'd sort of done preliminary, you know, even before this new launch, we had taken on a lot of that, uh, when we first came to the city in 2019, because that was a real struggle. What we are seeing though, is an uptick in the number of requests and we are seeing an uptick in the number of self-serve submissions. Um, so we're sort of taking that as a positive, right? So, um, people utilizing it and getting those requests in now, some of them are getting in so many, we're not really, so we're not sure what to do with them all, because they're just walking around using our super fun app to tell us how many street lights are out. And I'm like, okay. So, um, that's been sort of fun to figure out what we're going to do with that one. We also do have a feedback utility in the new tool where people can actually just click on it and tell us what they think. And we really have received for the most part, um, predominantly positive feedback from their, uh, when they could submit their surveys, their short little surveys. So that's been a good sign for us as well.
Pete: (14:21)
Yeah. And I would just add, there's really three things that we're measuring as part of this rollout. The increase in self-service, the reduction in duplicate requests and, the accuracy of request submission, making sure it's going to the right place the first time. And that is partly the system and partly, um, the incredible value of having an internal product manager who is focused on creating the descriptions and designs to, to guide people to the right outcome. Because you know, we've got a public that thinks about storm drains and internal employees who think about drop inlets and connecting those two that this thing that's clogged up, uh, on my street, that's flooding my street as a storm drain and translating that to the drop inlet that our public utilities guys are looking for. Um, and not confusing that with something else is something that it takes that depth of knowledge of both sides of the world to be the product manager who can be a universal translator.
Lindsay: (15:26)
Right. Exactly. You touched on this a little bit, Tina, but what would you say are some of the main things you tried to focus on when gearing up for this launch that you really feel helped with this with its success?
Tina: (15:40)
Well, from my perspective, um, I think the UAT was the biggest, that was the biggest contribution. I mean, we spent a lot of time in UAT cycles and repeated UAT cycles, trying to be certain that we went out to market with the best product that we possibly could. I think we touched on this briefly in the last podcast, but we already had like a reputational thing that we were trying to overcome in the sense that the prior systems had not necessarily, um, been well loved by the citizenry. So we were wanting to be certain that what we introduced was for sure an improvement on what they had already. So we focused very hard on that.
Lindsay: (16:24)
Those of you, for those of you who are less familiar with product owner, product manager, that's user acceptance testing, correct. Making sure the users and what you're doing.
Tina: (16:32)
Yeah. Sorry about that. I'm all again, I'm always against jargon and I, and there I did it, but, um, but yeah, so the user acceptance testing was, um, rigorous and, and repeat cycles. Other than that, I think we definitely spent a good amount of time trying to focus on making certain we had good marketing materials and partnered up with folks to, um, to have a story that we could tell about this new product. So we actually engaged with the marketing team, with the vendor to come up with a campaign that highlighted why the tool is a good tool for citizens to be able to use. And we came up with a super citizen campaign, right? This sort of says, you know, you, by using our tool can help make your community stronger and better and safer. Um, which I felt was a very big win for us because it's kind of challenging to do that type of thing for such a transactional type of tool.
Tina: (17:24)
We also focused on being certain that we communicated very effectively, as much as we possibly could, both internally letting people know that the change was coming and leveraging what channels we had access to, to, and, incorporate that internally. We got the mayor to do an introduction to the video that we made. We leveraged the vendor to make us a couple of very professional video collateral pieces. And then we leveraged the tool itself, right? So as soon as the tool, like in preparation for launch, we crafted a message to use the alerts panel for, to direct people over to where we had stored off some training materials that they could access and some videos that they could watch. So when they first hit our homepage, the first time or on the mobile, the first time they launched, they would say, here's where you can learn about why this looks so different to you today. Welcome to the brand new world that you're going to live in for the next foreseeable future.
Lindsay: (18:19)
This project has been underway for over two years now, and a lot of hard work culminated to this launch. Can you discuss how citizen feedback and use of the system fits into the product life cycle now that the product is launched and how your role as a product manager has transitioned to incorporate these recommendations?
Tina: (18:37)
We actually have a couple more phases going out. That's a really good question. Um, we don't want to do another set it and forget it, right. We inherited the poor results of that approach. So, uh, I think we'll probably focus a lot on doing the same things that we Pete and I both focused on when we first came to the city, which is keeping our eyes and ears open, um, continuing to solicit feedback, both from the citizens as much as possible, also from our internal stakeholders. Um, and as we go into phase two and phase three of development, which we are continuing with this vendor to do, uh, we'll take that feedback and see how it folds into the designs, use that to sort of make certain that we're focused on the right priorities and being flexible and as agile as you can be in a big government setting, um, being willing to sort of tweak those priorities and sort of go, Oh gosh, we're actually seeing the data is telling us a lot about this. We need to shift our focus and we need to look at that and see how we can improve that for folks. And I think as the pandemic situation, uh, lifts as well, we'll get back out into the field and probably try to do some additional attendance at district meetings and solicit some direct feedback from our citizens and let them tell us what they like. And don't like, and try to remind them that we just make the tool. We don't fill the pothole.
Pete: (19:57)
I'm sure like many of your listeners, uh, we have very vocal populants. Um, so they're not shy at all and telling us what they'd like to see. And we capture that on a regular basis for future enhancements. And as Tina already mentioned, we've got a full roadmap of continued enhancements. Um, so we're, we're excited about the future.
Lindsay: (20:20)
It's been interesting because a lot of the communication around this project and engagement with the community for user acceptance testing that stage of the project has been during COVID, I'm just curious, Tina, how you all went about that in engaging the community, um, digitally, what tools did you use to gather some feedback?
Tina: (20:41)
Well, um, Microsoft teams was, you know, critical for us. We basically utilize teams meetings to do the, uh, original engagement sessions with our citizens to sort of gather the feedback and, um, allow them to sort of take the first test drive of the citizen. Um, the tools basically when they were still just in a design oriented, um, static form and give us their feedback on what they were looking for. So we leveraged that for sure. And that has been critical also to our internal teams meeting and stakeholder meetings that we've been able to, to have. We also used, um, some new tools internally because you couldn't really schedule and plan to do any kind of public sessions to do any trainings or dog and pony shows or demos or whatnot. So we did the training videos and we, um, use Snagit, which was a small tool that we had purchased to sort of create some video artifacts that we could use and have in a little library to share about how new things worked.
Tina: (21:48)
It's definitely been a strange alternative experience for us. And then I would say, we had a lot of challenges with the user acceptance testing cycles because of the pandemic as well, because the development team who would probably normally have sent someone here on site to could not do that. Right. So the other tool that I used a lot was my car because I took the mobile apps that I went driving around. And so I was like, uh, I became the QA team myself to sort of go, is this geolocation stuff, functioning and working as we would expect. And then I, uh, used, uh, teams again with my own internal team to sort of say, Hey, can you guys go drive around and test it also, please?
Lindsay: (22:34)
Hey, whatever it takes to get it into the end zone.
Tina: (22:37)
That's exactly right.
Lindsay: (22:40)
So this question is for both of you, what are some things you've learned throughout this entire process that you'd like another local government to know specifically about your work on the 311 system, or even more generally product management?
Pete: (22:51)
So first I'm going to encourage people to take a look at what we created at RVA311.com. And the videos that we referenced are at RVAstrong.org/rva311 to give you a feel for the things that we've been talking about throughout this podcast. But my lessons learned are, um, you can never make another first impression, so make sure your product is great before you launch. We ended up building an additional UAT time in part, because of, uh, the pandemic we just had to do UAT differently, which took longer. But we, uh, gave long and hard thought about whether to extend the time and we felt we had no choice, but to, uh, extend the time to allow for the robust UAT to make sure that the launch went smoothly and it did. So I think it was worth every moment of that. Engage internal and public users to understand their needs.
Pete: (23:51)
As we've talked about a lot, use whatever data you have to access, uh, to assess the demand from your internal users and the public. So you, you know, what to expect and can tailor your experience to that. Um, as we talked about with the product, makes sure that you've got somebody internal who's accountable for continuous improvement. I think people vastly underestimate how dynamic governments and the public are and their needs are going to evolve. And if you spend a fortune on technology and don't make a similar investment in people, you're really gonna lose a lot of the benefit of that technology investment.
Tina: (24:35)
Yeah. Those are all terrific points. I would just add one quick note about the multifaceted nature of an engagement like this, right? Which involved not only the product management side of things and the discovery side of things, to be certain that development was going in a direction that was going to work out, but there was also the vendor management piece of things, um, that is sometimes under estimated, right? You can, in fact, we did at the city, we built a lot of the needs that we knew. I knew when we were going into this, we would need some assistance with change management and process, and we would need some assistance developing marketing materials, and we would need some assistance developing some training materials. So that was all built into the RFP, but without some clear oversight and vendor management, I don't think our stuff would have gone as smoothly because you still have to be accountable for making certain that that vendor delivers all the things that you had bargained for.
Tina: (25:40)
And then project management also plays into it because making certain that they're going to be able to deliver those things to you at the times in the cycle and on a cadence, that's going to get them to you by the time that you need them is not necessarily always your vendors focus. It's not where their attention is. So you have to have that internal person who understands your own organization. When you're going to need things, how much advanced lead time you're going to have to have them buy, et cetera. And you've got to keep the eye on the ball there because it would be easy to have that stuff sneak up on you and can end up just derailed.
Lindsay: (26:17)
Well, those are great pieces of advice from each of you. Thank you, Tina and Pete, for coming back onto the Govlaunch podcast on behalf of your team in Richmond. We're super excited to continue to follow your progress as we enter the production feedback stage. Pete, we'll be sure to include some of these resources you mentioned in our Govlaunch story so listeners can have easy access and congratulations again on the launch. And thank you again for being here.
Pete: (26:42)
Thanks Lindsay.
Tina: (26:43)
Thanks Lindsay.
Lindsay: (26:50)
Pete and Tina remind us today of the importance of ongoing and dedicated oversight with large scale projects such as this. Now it may not be reasonable to assign a staff member to each vendor. Your local government has a relationship with, but for these larger vendors providing technology that impacts operations across the organization, as well as your citizen services, it's a no brainer. Allowing yourself time for comprehensive user testing and a coordinated campaign across stakeholder groups is also going to meet necessary to ensure the success of any project launch. To learn more about Richmond's work or to find other projects like this come to Govlaunch. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki at govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.