KPMG puts people with lived experience at the centre of co-design

Putting the customer at the centre of planning in a co-design is key in moving from a participation to a partnership model, said Sharon Cody, director customer advisory at KPMG.

Cody spoke at Forrester’s recent CX APAC event about the co-design that KPMG and Aboriginal Housing Victoria undertook to create the Victorian Aboriginal Housing and Homelessness Framework to deliver a system-wide transformation to housing for the Victorian Aboriginal community.

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According to the Cody, a key element of the project was the inclusion of “critical friends”, or partnerships with individuals that act as lived experience facilitators.

“What I really wanted to do and had the opportunity to do a couple of times on some work is actually bring people with a lived experience in, sitting at the table with us, planning with us, co-designing if you like, the actual approach,” said Cody.

KPMG formed a partnership with Mental Health Victoria in order to gain access to a network of lived experience facilitators as well as to provide mental health support to the facilitators throughout the five month project.

Cody said the critical friends were brought in at the early stages of planning, as well as participating in the findings, in the final report, and in the implementation.

“[A critical friend] is someone to hold the mirror up to you and your team, throughout the whole engagement,” said Cody.

“Their role is to challenge us, keep us on track, keep us true to the essence of what we're hearing and the essence of those stories that we're hearing from people, making sure that we're staying true to the intent of the design as we move through the various different phases.”

Cody said there were times when the critical friends were able to point out both individual and organisational bias, and hold the team to account during the project.

According to KPMG and Aboriginal Housing Victoria’s critical friend Gareth, when organisations usually draw on customer experiences, it is superficial at best.

“We start by planning, and there's this conversation about involving the customer at some point, and preferably, somebody else will sort that out. At proposal stage, people like me are often approached and asked to be named, and then if we can rubber stamp the pitch. When it comes to the project, we're often invited to single workshops, where we get to answer a huge barrage of complex questions,” said Gareth.

“And then in reporting we're told this is what we said or what people heard. And then we're given a weekend to read it and rubber stamp it.

“And lo and behold, when we get to evaluation often we find it didn’t go so well and we collectively think perhaps we should have had the customer involved a bit more in the planning.”

According to Gareth, the experience with KPMG was not just to be named, but to be included as a member of a diverse team of customer representatives, where the customer was at the centre of the planning.

“In the project, there was multiple and agile ways that we were involved. And the team worked hard to seek this constant guidance on making sense of the information,” he said.