As a design leader, Meera is all about working on complex, purpose-driven challenges. She helps organisations take a human-centric approach to service transformation and helps deliver impactful, pragmatic outcomes while building capability and leading teams through growth and change.
Meera co-founded Propel Design, a strategic research, design and delivery consultancy in late 2020. She has 15 years of experience in service design, inclusive design, and product management across the private, non-for-profit, and public sectors in both the UK and Australia.
Meera is particularly interested in policy and social design. After a stint in the Australian Public Service, Meera was appointed as a senior policy adviser to the NSW Minister for Customer Service, Hon. Victor Dominello MP. In this role, she played a part in NSW’s response to the COVID pandemic, flexing her design leadership skills in a new, challenging, and important context.
It’s a chicken and egg situation when it comes to securing funding for a large transformation program in government. On one hand you need to submit a business case and as part of that, you need to make early decisions about how you might approach and deliver the program of work. On the other hand you need to know enough about the problem you are going to solve to ensure you have sufficient funding to understand the problem better, hire the right people, design the right service, and build it the right way. Now imagine securing hundreds of millions of dollars to design and build a service, but not feeling confident about what the user needs are. What if you had the opportunity to change this common predicament and influence your leadership team to carry out alignment activities, all while successfully delivering within the committed time frames?In this talk Meera will share a case study on how to approach service traceability and alignment, and some of the challenges faced to deliver the following: - Alignment between different layers of government, such as the minister’s office and departmental teams,- trace decisions to a hierarchy of artefacts commonly produced, such as a blueprint, business case, and products and features delivery roadmap,- produce a delivery readiness framework to determine if further research and design is needed before products and features go into build,- establish research and design operations practice to provide a strategic and holistic approach to the service design and delivery process.Attendees will gain an understanding of how to use service traceability techniques in their work and apply them to any environment to ensure they design and build the best service possible, no matter the funding model they have been required to work within.
