Youth Offending Team - Newcastle

Introduction

Youth offending teams ("YOT") work with young people that get into trouble with the law. Their main focus in on preventing existing criminals from re-offending and to prevent those at risk of committing a crime in future. The project involved conducting a series of workshops to understand the current process within the organisation and identify opportunity for improvement.  The YOT project focused on how to reengineer the operation workflow so as to provide high quality services with a lower budget.

The Project:

The MDI team tackled the challenge of how to assist YOT in maintaining a service level with less financial resources. One of the main challenges was to deepen the understanding of how the organisation operates, effective communication amongst the team and how to best utilize resources. It was important to consider different stakeholders involved and their interests in suggestions and alterations posed by MDI.

The Process:

The group conducted a series of workshops designed to facilitate a better understanding of YOT’s organisational structure and relationship with external parties. The MDI team made use of different design inquiry techniques to create an interactive and creative ambition fostering exchange of ideas between the MDI team and the employees. The MDI team also made an audit of relevant documents that circulated through the organisation pertaining to service performance and conducted a thorough analysis.

The Result:

The students identified four themes to increase the operational efficiency; change in environment, clearer accountability among members, closer relationship with volunteers and better collaboration with various partners. A series of infographics were used to present statistics of the current situation.From this project, the group gained skills across areas of stakeholder analysis, conducting workshops, creative activities and management of internal processes.