City Service Management

Context

First, it is necessary to give the context where this project is inserted. In Brazil, 5,570 cities receive financial resources from the federal government to city ​​maintenance services such as garbage collection, street maintenance, tree pruning, etc. Private companies are hired through a highly bureaucratic process to do this kind of service.

For companies to receive the money for the service provided, it is necessary to prove what has been done. 

This verification is done in a highly analogical way. A supervisor with a clipboard goes to the place and looks at the service and how much was done. This process is called mediation. This process takes a lot of work for companies to receive and enables corruption. The money can be misappropriated in the process of checking service has been performed where a person can place overvalued values of service.

Pavi called us with the following briefing: Can we use technology to solve this?

My role

In this project, I ended up getting involved in everything in the design process. I traveled to cities to interview politicians, service providers, residents, and public agencies. I set up a strategy for approaching the problem by showing the ecosystem of service provision by mapping where each user interacted with the service and showed where corruption would occur in this bureaucratic chain.

At first, the goal was to see if there was a possibility to do something using technology to help with the service management process. 

After researching that it was possible, I did all part of information architecture and interaction design. I led the UI and front-end team to create a shielded tool against processes that could generate money deviations.

Approach

I started by understanding the context of a company's contracting for a public agency. During the process, I ended up traveling to some cities to understand if there was a pattern. I interviewed politicians, companies, employees, and residents, making the mapping of the entire chain of service execution for a city. Services vary by city, but in general, it is garbage collection and maintenance of street cleaning.

I discovered where the problems existed in the field, such as having an agent with a clipboard seeing if something was done or not and putting the amount executed using only his experience and eyes.

It was at that moment that I discovered where could be the diversion of money occurs. Companies receive by quantity executed, and who determines what was done and how much is an agent. If the agent has bad intentions, he can change the amount of service provided and make money illegally.

It was at that moment that I realized that we could use technology to solve the problem. We created a digital service where the service provider receives his demand and starts the service. From that moment, we can track what is being done in real-time by cell phone and GPS sensors put in workers' equipment.

We measure where the service was performed and the quantity performed. The figure of the inspecting agent no longer exists in the cities where this system has been implemented. The entire service execution process was digitized in an ecosystem, which involves city halls, companies, and residents.

This understanding of the product could be only possible with in-depth research where we aligned the user, business, and technology.

Today, this system that we defined was presented to the Brazilian account regulator is being voted on at the congress to be mandatory in all cities in Brazil.