Porto “Switzerland” Room, a neutral physical space to jointly analyse challenges at work and figure out solutions

Porto Pilot Solution meets this goal: it is implemented to build up solutions to tackle tangible problems faced by several Municipal Services.

The MVP process creation started with 2 workshops between July and September 2019. It involved 19 MPV participants from 2 Municipal Departments and 6 beta testers from other 6 Municipal Departments.

The first workshop, called “Exploration”, covers the first part of a double diamond model taken from the Design Thinking approach (Discover and Define). The aim of this phase was to explore and identify problems and opportunities and gather relevant information.

In the second workshop, called “Co-creation”, corresponding to the other 2 parts in which the second diamond is split (Develop and Deliver), participants had to generate ideas and strategies to create prototypes. 

People were engaged through an interactive session to produce MVP, by using different methodologies such as boarding games (bingo, brainstorming cards and so on) designed by Porto Digital Association (the closest ULG Member): the idea is to make each participant feel like a co-designer to enhance his/her engagement. 

The winning solution of the creation process launched with the workshop was a non-digital one. The selection was based on impact on the user’s experience and on the effort to be held by the organisation to implement it.

The following phase consisted of developing the pilot solution, which can be called “Switzerland” Room. It is a neutral physical space, strategically located in HR Municipality Headquarters, where municipal colleagues can meet and discuss.

The aim is to create face-to-face interactions, a space where to jointly analyse real ongoing challenges at work, while figuring out, all together, possible and feasible solutions. This process has another result on municipal employees: it can strengthen internal dialogue, communication, teamwork, engagement and motivation.

The “Switzerland” Room was officially shown to ULG members, MVP participants and beta testers who felt the event like an important mark on their personal and team contribution to the whole work done so far.

As Alexandra Santos, ULG coordinator City of Porto, put it: “MVP is a result of a close and collaborative team work among HR Municipal Director, ULG and Project Coordinators (both belonging to HR Municipal Department), Porto Digital Association (our closest ULG Member) and all other Municipal Colleagues and ULG Members involved so far. The feedback of everyone else that has actively been working with the Core Team was extremely positive and encouraging”.

The high level of satisfaction is confirmed by a survey submitted to the participants to workshops and competition to understand their satisfaction regarding the activities and the overall process (here are detailed results of the survey).

Now it’s time for a very demanding but crucial phase of the project: using, testing and iterating the Pilot Solution.

Players involved in the project will have to get things done into practice, which means beginning to use the 'Switzerland' room and coming with doable and useful solutions, to see results starting to come up.