Intermunicipal cooperation in Hessian authorities with Stackfield

About the city of Giessen

Giessen is the seventh-biggest town of the German state of Hesse with roughly forty percent of its inhabitants being university students. Together with five other Hessian municipalities and in the context of the intermunicipal cooperation Digitale Kommune@Hessen (German for Digital Municipality@Hesse), Giessen is actively pushing digital transformation forward.

Along for the ride is Hendrik Schaus, who is passionate about innovative ways of thinking, agile methods and an intensive intermunicipal exchange. For six years he has been managing the staff unit Organizational Development & Digital Strategy in the town authority of Giessen and has been engaging in numerous future projects and smart city topics.

The town administration of Giessen has been using Stackfield within the authority as well as in intermunicipal cooperation for four years. 120 individuals work together digitally in Stackfield, making their working environment more efficient.

The initial situation

Collaboration, communication and project organization before Stackfield followed conventional patterns. The large number of projects demanded a great deal of communication within and across teams which primarily relied on emails and Word documents. Although progress was made, it was difficult to maintain an overview of the project's status and the current work distribution.

Even more pressing was the need for a solution for intermunicipal collaboration. Joint work on various state funding projects was difficult without a central point of collaboration, as those involved were spread across different locations and could hardly coordinate in person.

Why Stackfield?

Three overarching requirements emerged for Hendrik Schaus and his colleagues. The tool should...

1. be simple to use and as easy to introduce as possible,
2. combine a comprehensive range of functions from different areas, and
3. meet the strict data protection and data security regulations to which the administration is subjected.

Stackfield is pretty self-explanatory, says Schaus, and offers the necessary all-in-one feel that they were looking for. Communication and collaboration, including the management of tasks, files, documents and events, can take place in one tool and remain bundled and transparent for all parties involved. In the end, however, the main argument in favor of Stackfield was the security aspect. Stackfield impressed as a German, GDPR-compliant and ISO-certified tool with the highest requirements in the field of data protection, which is becoming increasingly relevant.

Introducing Stackfield in the authority

After the decision was made in favor of Stackfield, Stackfield was initially only introduced in the staff unit under Hendrik Schaus. We tested everything and then gradually brought in more people. It was all very laid-back, says Schaus. Today, when new people join, a central administration team is available to answer questions. In addition, Schaus shares a webinar video provided by Stackfield with the new users. Everything works pretty smoothly, he praises.

Intermunicipal cooperation: Funding project Totally Digital

The introduction of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to reduce the workload of administrative staff, a Digital Transfer Forum to impart knowledge and other sub-projects, events and methods with the aim of end-to-end digitalization: The project Total Digital (German for Totally Digital) of the intermunicipal cooperation Digitale Kommune@Hessen ran for two years and was funded with 2.18 million euros by the Hessian Ministery for Digitalization and Innovation. Stackfield played a central role in successful intermunicipal collaboration and communication.

Totally digital: Collaboration

The funding project Totally digital of the intermunicipal cooperation was driven by the agile OKR method (Objectives and Key Results). A separate room was set up in Stackfield for each three-week OKR sprint. Mid-term goals, objectives (long-term goals) and later key results of the sprint were then documented and bundled in the room's task module and assigned to the team members in the form of task cards for direct processing. The associated Kanban board could be flexibly adapted to individual requirements. For example, in other projects like Open Smart City (Shaping the smart city of tomorrow with open government, open data and open source) the columns of the board were renamed and tasks and milestones were also visualized in a Gantt chart. The combination of user-defined task board and Gantt chart provided an overview of the current progress of the project and any bottlenecks at all times.

In addition, the other modules and element types of the Stackfield room are used intensively as part of the funding projects. All relevant appointments such as jour fixes, consultation hours and absences of participants from the various municipalities are documented in the calendar. Meeting minutes are recorded as pages (text documents within Stackfield) and provided with checklists so that open points are directly visible in follow-up meetings. The room's polls are also used to coordinate appointments and other decision-making processes. Stackfield optimizes the shared working environment tremendously and saves us a lot of searching, praises Hendrik Schaus.

Integrating externals into projects

External parties are regularly involved in the funding projects. For this, Stackfield offers flexible options depending on requirements and project duration. The local authorities have thus decided individually to what extent project data should be accessed:

• Long-term contributors are given full access rights and are added as full members to relevant rooms.
• Short-term supporters are added as guests with limited rights and are only granted access to selected content and functions.
• Participants who are only required for individual meetings are not included in the Stackfield organization, but are only invited to the respective meetings via email.

Totally digital: Communication

Communication between municipalities can be seamlessly mapped in Stackfield. Private and group chats can be created at will and information can be exchanged on specific topics. The chats are really helpful because you can always read along and catch up. That's not possible in plain email correspondence. In Stackfield, communication remains bundled – that's a genuine benefit, says Hendrik Schaus.

The individual rooms offer additional communication options: Each element, such as a task, has its own comment section and all activities in the room are automatically documented in the communication stream where messages can be sent directly on a room-specific basis. Whether direct message or room comment – every message can be commented, questions answered and reminders stored. In addition, users can be tagged easily. Perfect for daily work, says Schaus.

Communication with the steering committee

For higher-level decisions and funding management, the steering committee of the funding projects is also involved in the relevant rooms. This allows them to see the current status and both sides can ask questions. Everything that would otherwise be done by email simply happens in Stackfield, says Hendrik Schaus. There is an extra room for topics that specifically concern the steering committee. This allows the project managers to assign tasks to the steering committee and the steering committee can handle its own topics, such as monthly meetings, financial controlling and retrospectives.

Collaboration tools: Making the right choice

For anyone interested, Hendrik Schaus recommends a structured approach when introducing a tool like Stackfield. The first step is to make a conscious decision. You should explicitly ask yourself why you want to introduce a tool like this and what it should support in concrete terms, says Schaus. Only those who define the motivation, purpose and expected benefits can exploit the full potential.

Clear rules are just as important right from the start. Binding conditions are needed to ensure that the tool is actually used on a day-to-day basis. For Schaus and his team, this means that all project-related communication takes place via the relevant Stackfield rooms.

Finally, it's time to select the tool. For Schaus, the decision was clear: Stackfield. Stackfield is very easy to use and has very good support. Questions are answered incredibly quickly, emphasizes Schaus. The tool is also a leader in the area of data protection and security and bundles all the features that are crucial in (intermunicipal) collaboration. Schaus sums up: It's an entirely different way of collaborating, also across municipalities.