Improving justice experiences and outcomes for Koori people

Project background and context

One of the key goals of Burra Lotjpa Dunguludja (the Victorian Aboriginal Justice Agreement, Phase 4) is greater accountability of justice outcomes.

Court Services Victoria (CSV) and, specifically, the Dhumba Murmuk Djerring Unit (DMDU) have a key role to play in delivering upon this goal as the central orchestrators of the Victorian courts system. However, the ability of DMDU to monitor, evaluate, and continuously improve justice outcomes for Koori individuals and communities was impeded by the lack of access to high quality data about Koori people using or employed by the Victorian courts system.

To support DMDU in tackling this complex challenge, Beaker & Flint was engaged in April 22 to design and develop of a holistic strategy and implementation plan to uplift the capture and use of Koori data across the Victorian courts system.

This strategy needed to build upon work done to date and align with broader organisation and state-wide strategies for advancing self-determination for Koori court users and staff.

My role

Working alongside the Service Design Lead at Beaker & Flint, I drove the successful delivery of the project, from kick-off to close-out.

Along the journey, I had the opportunity to play a number of roles:

Human-centred designer: Drawing upon service and systems design toolkits, I led the end-to-end, surface-to-core, and human-centred process of discovery, synthesis, co-design and ideation, and roadmapping.

Design researcher: I designed and facilitated qualitative and quantitative research throughout the project, and led the development of all supporting materials (including Miro boards and written communications).

Storyteller: I communicated and socialised the findings and recommendations of our work, presenting at multiple governance forums attended by CSV executives and ERPs. Communicate case for change to garner buy-in, endorsement, financial support and resourcing

Relationship builder: I drove the ongoing collaboration with DMDU throughout the project journey, working closely with the team to co-design, validate, and iterate at every step of the project journey.

The design challenge, reframed

How might we improve the capture and use of Koori data to enable the monitoring, evaluation, and continuous improvement of justice experiences and outcomes for the Koori community?

Exploring the problem and opportunity space

Our research and discovery spanned more than two months, and involved group consultations and surveys across 30+ stakeholders in CSV and the jurisdictions, as well as the review of key internal and external documents.

As a framework to guide discussion in the group consultations, I drafted a ‘Koori data journey’ that distilled the complex end-to-end process of Koori data capture into a simple journey map that visualised the key steps, from data capture to use.

We developed a core approach for the consultations, supported by a facilitation guide and Miro board, and tailored this approach to each consultation depending on who was in the room, existing insights from DMDU or the survey on their Koori data maturity, capability, and awareness, as well as the nature of their existing relationship with DMDU.

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Learning: The beginning of a period of divergent research naturally lends itself to discomfort. When the unknowns outweigh the knowns, the volume and disparity of insights can be overwhelming, particularly for a problem space as complex as this. It’s important to lean into this discomfort, complexity, and ambiguity, because the turning point at which things start to converge and the holistic picture becomes clear always comes.

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Learning: It is well worth the effort to spend a little extra time at the outset of a project to automate or simplify low value tasks (i.e. replacing back-and-forth emails with the client to book stakeholder consultations with an automated booking page via Calendly, or setting up a shared Airtable base for synchronous collaboration). It enables your team and your client to focus their time and brainpower on high value tasks and deep work that prioritise critical thinking and problem-solving.

Making sense of the research

As the consultations progressed, the Koori data journey was continuously validated and iterated, resulting in two distinct journey maps that portrayed the end-to-end data journey of Koori users and Koori staff.

Each step was further unpacked through the underlying actions, stakeholders, and technologies, enabling a surface-to-core view. Key gaps and challenges were overlaid onto the actions to highlight priority areas for uplift.

The Koori user data journey highlighted the critical need for uplift at the local jurisdiction level, given the significant downstream impacts of their low Koori data maturity and capability.

On the other hand, the Koori staff data journey highlighted opportunities to increase the visibility of Koori staff data requirements through mandatory Koori status identification at the onboarding stage and uplift of existing HR data reporting.

Throughout the journey of synthesising consultation and survey insights into the key current state challenges and opportunities, it became more and more evident that what had originally been described as a technology problem by stakeholders ran a lot deeper. We likened this to the well-known ‘tip of the iceberg model’ analogy, which prompted us to identify a framework that defined four levers for systemic change. This would go on to become a persistent visual and storytelling mechanism that framed the findings and recommendations in our final report.

The strategic framework enabled us to communicate to stakeholders that systemic change could only truly occur through targeted uplift across multiple levers of change. [Extract from final report]

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Learning: Technology transformation is often seen as the ‘silver bullet’ that will solve all the problems, but more often than not, solving for technical problems doesn’t address the root of the problem. Technology is used by people, and human behaviour is influenced by a vast range of intangible and tangible factors. This means that true systemic change requires uplift across the tangible (tools, processes, and policies) and the intangible (behavioural norms and culture).

Guided by this framework, we synthesised our research findings into eight key current state challenges, diving deeper into each by presenting our observations, considering the implications and consequences, and identifying opportunities for uplift in the future state.

Eight current state challenges were defined across the four levers of change. [Extract from final report]

Co-designing the future state and bridging the gap

Drawing inspiration from the broader strategic context around uplift of Koori justice experiences and outcomes (including CSV and DMDU’s holistic strategic vision and priorities, the goals of Burra Lotjpa Dunguludja (the Victorian Aboriginal Justice Agreement, Phase 4), and the targeted outcomes of the ongoing Yoorrook Justice Commission), we co-designed a vision statement and set of design principles that brought the future state aspirations of DMDU to life.

The final piece of the puzzle was to define the priority areas for uplift across Court Services Victoria and the jurisdictions that would enable the gap between the current and future state to be bridged.

16 priority areas were defined, and broken into immediate (1-6 months), medium term (6-12 months), and long term actions (12+ months), with quantitative and qualitative indicators of success defined for evaluation of tangible implementation outcomes and impact.

In developing the action plan, our key priority was for it to be as practical and actionable as possible. We worked closely with the Koori Data and Implementation Lead of DMDU to validate the ideal level of detail, and ensured that what we eventually handed over was something that could be immediately picked up and put into action.

16 priority areas for action were identified and broken down into key actions across three horizons. [Extract from final report]

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Learning: A strategy is nothing without the support of a robust and actionable implementation plan, no matter how compelling and inspiring its vision of the future is.

Communicating and securing endorsement of the case for change

The strategy and action plan needed to be socialised with key executive and senior stakeholders to secure buy-in, endorsement, and financial support. As a result, we were invited to present our research findings and strategic recommendations to executive leaders across CSV and the jurisdictions, as well as Traditional Owners, at a variety of virtual and face-to-face forums.

We ensured that each presentation was tailored to the audience and what DMDU’s desired outcome was - this meant that, for the governance forum of jurisdiction leaders, the focus was on the practical detail of the action plan, while a room of executives with only a high-level understanding of the project needed to hear the compelling case for change and vision for the future.

The outcomes that we achieved

We developed the first consolidated, holistic view of the key challenges in the Koori data space in the Victorian courts system.

We defined an action plan that clearly presented the key steps to be taken to realise the future state Koori data vision over the next 12+ months, with an emphasis on systemic change across tangible and intangible dimensions to address the problem at its root.

Through widespread, ongoing engagement, we were able to significantly improve the awareness and understanding of DMDU’s role and the importance of Koori data capture and use across the jurisdictions and other areas of CSV, and positioned DMDU team members as Koori data SMEs that should be engaged as part of any data-related initiative

Our open, authentic, and respectful approach to engagement garnered overwhelmingly positive feedback from the DMDU team members, and resulted in strong, trusting relationships.