One pretty cool thing about this project is being able to hear from different people about how they develop and deliver policy advice. Your experiences help us identify how we might go about making the process a little easier (hello the Delivering Great Policy Starter Kit – email us at DeliveringGreatPolicy@pmc.gov.au to get your hands on a snazzy hard copy version of our kit!).
One thing we have consistently heard from you when we chat great policy advice relates to time. As one person put it in our workshop last week, our days are often taken up with the “busyness of being busy”, which can make it hard to carve out time to do long-term policy thinking.
We want to work with you to develop a new tool, or maybe even tools, to help when you are developing great policy advice, no matter how much time you have.
Last week we kicked off another co-design process and spoke to 43 of you about ‘Delivering great policy advice in 24 hours’. People were so keen to share their thoughts we have booked another workshop in for this Monday (who would have thought, a waitlist to talk policy!?).
We had so much fun at the first two workshops and heard some really interesting things. Our key insights were:
- when developing policy advice in a short timeframe, the focus becomes on what will have the least risk and the greatest impact
- short timeframes are way more manageable if you have already done some prep work, particularly in terms of investing in relationships
- people feel equipped to engage with citizens and bake in evaluation when they have lots of time to develop policy, but need more support to do this when timeframes get shorter
- people told us they want checklists and templates because when they’re in a rush it’s easy to miss or forget critical steps
- people also want real world case studies – it helps to know who’s done what and how it worked out for them.
This week we are busy analysing and synthesising (in other words, making sense of many, many post-its). Our plan is to run more workshops in the next couple of weeks to test some prototypes – please let us know if you want to get involved (our email is above), we would love to have you.