Wilderness Society / Head of Digital
Candidate: Simon Murray
Question 1: Explain a situation when you used your ability to analyse an organisations strategy and data, which you have used to create an effective digital strategy and plan? What was the outcome for the business / organisation.
In 2016 I was appointed by Y&R ANZ to lead the Public Transport Victoria (PTV) / Digital Communications Roadmap 2020. This project was in its initial stage, a stakeholder engagement piece for submission by PTV to State Government and Department of Treasury and Finance. The goal being to be granted funding to renovate the entire PTV online picture.
We had access to extensive user data, conducted all the usual user research and structured personas around the ‘need themes’ that emerged from both. An important part of creating these kinds of roadmaps is to also research user aptitude, and emerging tech. Creating a meaningful utility, a web application in this case, that will take all the behavioural nuance of any given user and wash it PTV’s available realtime data to advise a user from location to destination in real time was the mission. It is true that Google already does this with a reasonable degree of efficacy. And this is where the project had to articulate two standout organisational tech / user advantages.
Only PTV has realtime data on delays, projected interruptions and the users ‘ins and outs’ through Myki (automated ticketing service) analytics ( data around how crowded any given service might be). Meanwhile Google only has access to static ‘timetable’ API’s and as a result can only provide a static, as opposed to realtime, picture of the user and the relation to the network. PTV had access to owned resources that would make the organisation the ‘trusted’ advisor, Public Transport, which they rightfully should own.
PTV we urged would, through building on trust, born of a more reliable service (compared to google) create bespoke communications specifically designed to ease the day to day anxieties that plague public transport users. Forewarning and providing realistic expectations and alternatives around delays and changes to services, delivered to relevant users who have opted-in with a function termed ‘Favourite Trips’ was one expression of this. Cognitively, the positive association of ‘knowing in advance’ via bespoke notification provides a far better user experience for customers. With PTV Managing a million expectations via bespoke communications. So we tested the user aptitude towards creating a profile in exchange of these benefits and the results are more positive (regarding access to geo-location and other personal data) for PTV than they are for Google.
This was some heavy lifting digital strategy, prototyping, user experience refinement and interface design which I led from inception to completion. The real challenge that lay behind the rigour was to distill the communication into ‘end user’ experience that the key stakeholders could not just comprehend, but actually champion as a cause. Remembering that the first desk it would hit was government, not the public.
Admittedly this was exhausting work, it encompassed every bit of strategic and design thinking from future proofing to managing very old and ‘ropey’ legacy dev work. A strategic communication challenge of funnelling a raft of information as broad as the hundreds of thousands of daily users into nerdy agile ‘need states’ and functionality that could be expressed to people with only very rudimentary understandings of the technology and what was being proposed.
The good news is that the project succeeded in garnering the budget support in required and is now backed by a small army working within PTV chipping away at sprints, of which the first iteration is now live. You can see it, and use it now: https://beta.ptv.vic.gov.au/
Personally this was, as a project, completely devoid of overtly creative outcomes… pretty dry technical stuff yet it’s a good representation of the skill sets the question is probing for I hope?
Question 2: What is your favourite technology and / or digital tool and why? How has it supported your goals as a manager?
Can I answer with ‘the internet’? After doing this gig for over 20 years, I’m hard pressed to land on one tool as I’ve seen many come, and go. Understanding why some things work well for particular instances and not for others is driven out of behavioural insights which are themselves informed for me by aptitude, the nature of the communication and / or desired outcomes. ‘Goals as a manager?’ I like Trello because I’m a list type person, it’s simple enough and has the basics whilst being platform (not browser) agnostic? I don’t dig Slack, as the name suggests, it’s just like ‘project twitter’ for sharing often inane rubbish in the workplace? That’s my experience anyway. Most of the conferencing stuff is getting much better, but the importance of ‘face to face’ is something I still regard highly, where possible. I’ve enjoyed hacking squarespace to provide ‘hotted up’ presentations. I’ve used instagram as a project management tool for various client interactions. I’ve created web apps for casting talent, scraped re-tweets for petition entries to lobby presidents and created creepy handles to shock people like ‘Melanoma Like Me’ … in short, thers lot’s of good tools, choosing the right one for the job is the tricky bit.
Question 3: Provide an example of when you lead a team or individual to achieve strategic outcomes. How did you effectively motivate, develop and direct them.
This is great question. The most successful projects I’ve led have been ones that have had the audience needs at the core of the communication and strategic thinking. I guess I’ve become a fan of ‘Failing Forward’. It’s counterintuitive to concede failure as a positive, but alternatively if don’t make mistakes you don’t learn. The instances that jump to mind of things that have really ‘kicked off’ have had the right mix of experience in the team to challenge assumptions, balance convictions, test, learn and let the audience grow around them organically. Standard ‘Campaign’ style thinking doesn’t traditionally align with ‘agile’ approaches because media has been booked and deadlines needed to be met. It’s the difference between building a platform and supporting a movement.
A loose example?
Back in 2011 I headed up the team to build the launch site for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse. The task was to firstly communicate the undertaking of the commission. And then, where possible provide agency to victims to step forward. Be that through a phone call, or a written submission. At the start there was very little engagement.
We had one hunch. The team recognised that the anonymity of the internet was a positive element to engaging with an understandably reticent core audience.
One of the developers put forward a solution, which having jumped through a few technical hoops, provided an entirely anonymous format to ‘reach out’. It involved ‘cursor’writing on a browser window, much like a PDF signature as we know it nowadays. We added a page to house it and started recording the submissions. Through this, an insight grew which was a shared belief amongst the victims that, as had happened before, their stories would not be believed. That they would face yet more humiliation. This informed the central tenet of most of the communication moving forward and with a bit of tweaking the commission enjoyed a leap forward in willing participants.
Building on this the commission then urged victims who’d shared their experiences to contribute to the page, in the knowledge that they would be published anonymously, for other victims and the public to see. This has become ‘My message to Australia’ which you can see here: https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/message-australia
In this instance we had no idea what the lived experience of these victims was like, nor what would come out, or how to communicate to help them step up, or even wether the tech would work at the start. If it wasn’t for the innovation and tenacity of the team hunch to push the ‘anonymity is good’ strategy through, that core audience insight would have been missed. Recognising that a blank slate, both technically and metaphorically, was needed was a collaborative conclusion, for which I simply provided the levity to ‘fail forward’ and learn through.