Project/programme description: 

With the approach to life events, the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, together with the government organisations involved, aims to improve government-wide services and chain processes. Within the programme, chain parties work together to improve services for citizens. Concrete initiatives and solutions are being worked on, focusing on people's experiences.

The project leader is responsible for realising coherent, people-oriented and accessible services around the life events ‘I turn 18’ and ‘New arrival in the Netherlands’. The project leader stimulates, facilitates and coordinates government-wide cooperation to achieve redesign of chain processes, based on the life events. In doing so, you work together with the ICTU team, which includes a customer travel expert, service designer, business analyst, lawyer and communication advisor.

Among other things, the Approach to Life Events uses the ‘design thinking method’, in which problems or bottlenecks are always defined from human needs. The focus is on (re)designing service processes so that they better match the perceptions of citizens and entrepreneurs. Some improvements are relatively easy to realise, but other solutions require adjustments throughout the chain. 

The programme team plays a driving role in the cooperation. BZK is the client for the Life Events Approach. ICTU Foundation coordinates the life events in the citizen domain. There is also close cooperation with the Chamber of Commerce where the entrepreneurial domain is concerned. 

What task will the professional perform and what activities are associated with it? 

The activities involved in achieving the mission are: 

• Project management and implementation: defining objectives, scope, schedule and success criteria. Supervising the team responsible for both life events. Prepare project plans, schedules and contribute to progress reporting. Identifying and managing risks. Coordinating meetings with chain consultations and project groups. Ensuring results, required commitment and mandate.
• Stakeholder management: creating support among relevant stakeholders. Maintaining a broad network inside and outside government. Preparing and organising chain meetings in which decision-making takes place.
• Ensure alignment with broader programmes that have a link to Life Events (including. Government-wide counters, Dutch Digitalisation Strategy (NDS), Proactive Services).
• Organise user research, interviews and customer journey analysis for both life events, together with the customer journey expert and/or service designer.

What concrete results should the professional achieve? Results should be concrete and measurable. 

What partial results will the professional need to achieve during the assignment: 

 Tav the life event ‘I turn 18’ the project leader delivers:

• An aligned and agreed plan of action for the transition from youth care to adult care.
• The customer journey is available and concrete research is available to create a service design blueprint for actual process redesign.
• In addition, a customer journey was elaborated around the issue of obtaining a postal address for homeless young people, bottlenecks and improvement proposals were defined, a follow-up approach determined and coordinated with the stakeholders and client.
• Regarding the life event ‘New arrival in the Netherlands’, preliminary research was conducted into the various groups that fall under this, what the characteristics of the groups are, what bottlenecks are experienced and what should be done for each distinguished group to improve services.
• Follow-up research was then conducted among specific target groups, the scope and follow-up approach were determined and agreed with the stakeholders and client. Based on the research, bottlenecks are defined and improvement proposals or redesign of chain processes are worked out.

Desired profile

The project manager is used to operating in an official/administrative environment with many interests. The project leader is environment-sensitive and operates proactively by putting forward ideas and suggestions both solicited and unsolicited. The project manager has experience with people-oriented service design methodologies. Professional is used to looking at government services from a citizen's perspective and, through experience, has good ideas and takes initiative. Professional knows the system world of government and the lack of coherence and coordination between institutions in some forms of service provision, which causes people to get stuck. Professional has an affinity with digitisation, data exchange and inclusive service provision. The project leader knows how to explain which strategy and approach is preferable and includes the team and project groups in this. The project leader has experience with stakeholder management within the government. The project leader is a true networker and knows how to build good working relationships and steer for results while professional cannot be fully decisive. 

Competences

• Customer focus 
• Collaborative, strong in network-oriented work
• Innovative thinking and action 
• Results-oriented 
• Proactive, planned and flexible in an administrative context
• Convince 
• Can switch well between abstract policy and practical implementation