Reimagining a $1.1B Public Service From the Inside Out
Client: Government of Alberta
Program: Persons with Developmental Disabilities (PDD)
Role: Service Designer
Timeline: June 2023 – November 2024
Program Scale: $1.1B annual funding | ~13,000 Albertans
Caseworkers meeting clients at coffee shops and public spaces, pen and paper in hand — no way to share a form on a screen, no branching logic, the same information collected over and over because the system wasn’t built to remember.
THE PROBLEM
The Question Nobody Could Agree On
That was the reality behind Alberta’s $1.1B PDD program, a service supporting roughly 13,000 people. It wasn’t broken in any dramatic sense — it was doing its job, at real cost to the people running it and the people who needed it most. Early on, a policy question stopped the room cold: should every applicant get the full Assessment of Needs, or should the process screen people out earlier to protect stretched caseworker capacity? Leadership was genuinely split — not posturing, a real disagreement about what the program owed people. It wasn’t a UX debate. It was a values question with real operational consequences, and no wireframe was going to resolve it.
THE APPROACH
Building the Mirror
Service design, done right, doesn’t stop at the end user — it looks at the whole ecosystem, including the people delivering the service. So instead of jumping to a fix, I built a service blueprint mapping the program end-to-end: every touchpoint, every handoff, every place a policy created a downstream problem. It wasn’t a pretty document. It was a mirror — and what it reflected back to leadership was often uncomfortable: processes nobody had questioned, gaps everyone had quietly normalized. That blueprint became the foundation for every conversation after it. When we got to redesigning the Assessment of Needs form itself, we didn’t validate a prototype with caseworkers — we went to them first, to co-create the logic and flow before a form even existed. They carried the edge cases and exceptions no policy document captured. Because they helped build it, they were invested in it — and that matters more than most teams realize.
THE TURNING POINT
Five Days, One Real Question
The clearest turning point was a five-day MVP planning workshop, run across three phases — discovery with caseworkers, planning with the delivery team, alignment with leadership. We came in with a question, not an answer: what problem were we actually solving, and for whom? What came out the other side was alignment — a shared, committed scope, with clear lines around what was in, what was out, and why.
THE OUTCOME
What Changed
The MVP launched within eighteen months. Two foundational tools — a digital, branching Assessment of Needs, and CIMS, a case management system built around how caseworkers actually work — replaced two fragmented legacy systems. The roadmap stopped being a wish list and became a plan.
WHAT I’D DO AGAIN
Clarity, Not Speed
What I’d do differently: co-create earlier, and hold the line on discovery even harder. The builder is rarely the user — skip that step, and you don’t just build the wrong thing, you build it with confidence. Transformation isn’t a technology problem. It’s a clarity problem. That’s exactly what service design, done well, is built to create.
Facilitated 12+ workshops | Engaged 15+ frontline caseworkers | MVP delivered within 18 months