Does your city or municipality want to go digital? But you still lack a "proper" digitalisation strategy? A look at other "digital municipalities" can be helpful. We therefore present a best practice that shows you how: Digitalisation projects can be easily implemented with the right tools and methods!
What does digitalisation in the municipality actually mean?
The development towards a "digital municipality" affects very different areas: Perhaps your municipality is initially focussing on the introduction of a digital administration, or perhaps improving online access for citizens is at the top of the list. Digitalisation in the municipality can also include digital offerings for the local economy or affect the health, culture and leisure sectors. A commitment to "digital schools" is also becoming increasingly common.
Why drive digitalisation in your municipality?
Both the E-Government Act and the Online Access Act of the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Home Affairs (BMI) have actually been obliging local authorities to offer their administrative services online since the end of 2022.
Apart from these legal requirements, your local authority will probably want to give its citizens the opportunity to deal with their administrative matters online anyway. The simple processing of applications or other matters can increase the satisfaction of citizens and companies with the respective authority and positive feedback can increase motivation in your team. What's more, less paperwork makes everyday life easier for employees.
The introduction of agile administration will also make work simpler and clearer for the employees of authorities and offices in your municipality. Many processes can be automated and tedious duplication of work can be eliminated. Digital collaboration also creates more flexible working time models: as productive collaboration within the team is possible regardless of time and location, employees can also work (temporarily) from home. This makes the working conditions more attractive and valuable specialists have fewer motives to change jobs.
Successful practical example: How digitalisation works in Nuremberg with Stackfield
In 2020, the city of Nuremberg was suddenly faced with the challenge of creating opportunities for digital collaboration: Many employees were working from home due to the coronavirus. When looking for a collaboration tool, Stackfield was quickly chosen. The simple user interface and wide range of functions were not the only decisive factors. The Office for Digitalisation and Process Organisation (DiP) was particularly impressed by the tool's especially high data protection requirements.
The municipality's digitalisation concept can now celebrate tangible successes: the city has implemented the Online Access Act as well as the further development of its digital citizen service "My Nuremberg".
What digitalisation strategy did the municipality decide on?
Oliver Krämer, project management specialist at DiP, summarises his "strategy" quite simply as learning-by-doing. He and a small team of "test users" simply tried out the collaboration tool after a short briefing. Initially with their own to-dos, so that even less tech-savvy employees were able to find their way around the digital platform at their own pace.
Oliver Krämer - Office for Digitalization and Process Organization of the City of Nuremberg
Gradually, projects were then created on Stackfield, all employees involved were added as users in the respective project room - and the project work became more and more familiar. For Oliver Krämer, the Kanban Board played a key role in the introduction: It enables particularly simple and clear task management. Employees can easily find out about the status of individual tasks at any time. This means they always have an overview of all their own tasks and those of their colleagues, which makes collaboration more transparent and effective. Progress on the project is discussed in weekly meetings. Everyone involved is in constant contact via chats or audio and video calls.
Without having to explicitly use the term, "agile project management" had been successfully introduced at DiP. It is just as easy to bring external people into certain project rooms as "guests" and cross-departmental collaboration was also established thanks to Stackfield, without employees having any major concerns about its feasibility.
Digitalisation in municipalities: a sustainable step into the future
If you promote digitalisation in your municipality, administration, citizens and companies will be in closer contact and innovative ideas and more complex projects will be easier to implement thanks to digitally networked solutions. Digital administration also simplifies the day-to-day work of your employees. For example, it relieves them of the tedious search for paper documents and makes work processes clearer and more effective.
As the example of the city of Nuremberg shows, you can use collaboration tools such as Stackfield to get started with the digitalisation of your municipality almost immediately: Thanks to intuitive use, project management is so easy that your team can get started at any time, even without prior knowledge.
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