The team at ENZ working through how we might best build a robust discussion guide and 'tools for talking' for our stakeholder interviews.
To make sure we truly understood ENZ's customers' unmet needs, we developed a carefully sequenced, multi-stage interview process, with a variety of exercises to help participants think through the issues under consideration, and give us–as interviewers–a clear platform from which to ask probing questions.
Is our focus right? And is our structure best suited to what industry requires us to deliver? Big questions...
This was a large, design-led project initially aimed at helping Education New Zealand (the government agency that looks after international education in New Zealand) strategically review & improve its service suite: the products and services it supplies to secondary and tertiary education providers around the country to help them with providing international education.
What the project unearthed, however, was a need for much more fundamental conversations around ENZ's purpose, structure and role - as well as the products, services and experiences it offers. These ongoing strategic conversations are currently informing a customer-centered re-design of the ENZ value proposition.
To get to this point, we:
- Undertook in-depth interviews with more than 40 key stakeholders across the country in universities, polytechnics, ITPs and schools to understand their unmet needs;
- Conducted a rigorous thematic analysis of the interview outputs (and supplementary data) to develop clear insights and;
- Developed series of initial recommendations around the products, services and experiences that ENZ might best develop to meet those needs - as well as some of the policy shifts and changes that might be required to support the delivery of those products and services.
This work is ongoing. Please contact Sam Mackay at ENZ.