Making waves for wastewater reduction: our partnership with Hunter Water
At a glance
It’s only through collaboration and partnership that we’re able to build the kind of future we imagine for the next generation. We joined forces with services provider Hunter Water to help minimise the effects of wastewater overflow on the community. Learn about our design-thinking approach with lasting impact.
The challenge
The Hunter Valley, Australia is recognised as a major wine producer and home to more than 600,000 people. Its rich biodiversity and sustainable communities ensure the region can continue to thrive.
Local utility, Hunter Water, is now under pressure to provide a more dynamic offering for the people it serves. Like most water services it suffers wastewater overflow problems – including ageing infrastructure with corresponding failure risks- that directly impact its customers.
Hunter Water is also serving a separate ambition – to move from a traditional asset-centric focus to one that’s more customer-based. Hunter Valley provided a key opportunity to change the status quo, a change that can bring lasting community benefit.
And so, it posed the overarching question, ‘Are we delivering the level of service a customer expects of a modern utility?’
They wanted to look at the challenge of wastewater overflow through the technical and human lens. One that responds to real needs among the customer and utility network. Technical best practice alone cannot provide an empathetic, customer-centric solution.
Complexities can also stem from multiple stakeholders and other factors interacting in a way that is often changing and unclear. Teams may be unable to identify a firm basis for defining the problem or even judging when it has been solved.
Hunter Water made it a strategic priority to create solutions to the complex problem, solutions that put the customer experience at the centre.
Our response
GHD partnered with Hunter Water to lead a design thinking approach that maximised engagement and provided diverse opinions while avoiding traditional problem definition and solution thinking.
They collaborated on a series of interviews to gain a deeper and more empathetic understanding of their customers’ problems and needs. These insights were defined as statements for exploration, prototyping and potential implementation.
Outputs of our response:
- +80 people involved
- 17 interviews with customers and stakeholders
- 900 lines of insights
- +75 ideas generated
- 9 key themes identified
- 5 priorities solutions
The impact
We took the five priority solutions established from the workshop and developed them further through exploration and testing.
Ultimately the collaboration has created heightened organisational understanding of Hunter Water’s systems and customers generally. Design thinking tools have nurtured an innovation-led culture, one that can help them improve a dynamic public service for the future of the Hunter Valley community.
The process has further equipped Hunter Water staff with new problem-solving skills to meet the ever-increasing expectations of their customers, now and in the future.
The process enabled us to work differently together with GHD and discover new solutions to a persistent problem.”