Pathways Pipeline 6: Field Log
By: Nyc Opportunity
Tags: Prototyping, Social Services, New York City, Child Welfare, Service Design

After almost two months of co-designing and testing with parents and staff, our two month testing sprint has come to a close! The team is now working on a plan to put these prototypes into the hands of CPS workers, Prevention case planners, and Parent Advocates to try out in their day-to-day work. Each of these staff have a unique role in effectively introducing and matching families to prevention services and may use our materials in a slightly different context. Before ACS fully rolls out these new materials, it’s important that our team sets up a field test period to understand how these new supports and communications work outside of a prototyping context.

Working with leadership across the Department of Prevention, the Division of Child Protection, the Department of Advocacy, and a few prevention service providers, we will be helping our partners at ACS organize a small field testing pilot. The goal is to gather 2 service delivery staff from each of these units, introduce them to the materials we have been prototyping over the course of this project, and then send them out for 1–2 weeks to try out each and report back on what works and what is still falling short.

While small in scale, this real-time pilot will help ACS really see the new tools we created together in action. By co-designing success metrics with the front-line staff conducting the test, we can help ACS build a plan for continuing this iteration even as the project closes.

Integration Testing

Service Design Studio designer Tim Reitzes testing prototypes with ACS Child Protective Specialists

Over the last few weeks our team has also been able to meet with Division of Child Protection staff from Borough Offices in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island. We’ve now met with six out of the eight ACS Borough Offices across NYC, and have scheduled sessions with the final two offices. Staff at these Borough Offices are responsible for responding to child safety allegations across the city.

Coordinating these sessions has offered great insight into the unpredictable and urgent nature of the work of a Child Protection Specialist (CPS worker), for example, one of our sessions had to be canceled at the last minute because two of the participating CPS workers were called away on emergency cases!

We’ve transitioned some of our materials from paper prototypes to digital over the course of our testing period.

Lesson of the Week

Tim Reitzes, a designer at the Service Design Studio, has been co-leading the integration workstream. After attending almost every integration session a key learning for him from this week: Institutional knowledge is only as good as our ability to access it.

Tim Reitzes

“There is a lot of institutional knowledge across the agency and its partners about Prevention services and providers that is not readily available to all ACS staff or the families that might need those supports. We’re working to externalize that knowledge and to create experiences that make it accessible, understandable, and easily digestible for everyone involved.”