Streamlining Parking Services: The Modernization Journey of Cambridge

Continuing with our digital transformation series, we turn to look at Perry Group’s work with the City of Cambridge. Perry Group has been working with the City as a consultant and strategic advisor since 2014.

Increasingly, following the show don’t tell approach, we are working with municipalities to actively help them re-think and re-design services to be more customer-centered, modern and more efficient to operate - to help them understand what is possible through a digital approach. We think the Cambridge work is a good illustration of this approach.

Like many forward-thinking municipalities, Cambridge has long been in the process of transforming their digital capabilities to better align with their City’s evolving priorities. 

As one of its key customer facing services - a service that can often be a point of friction with citizens - one of the most recent initiatives that we have been involved in has been the modernization of parking services. This initiative was aimed at markedly improving the customer experience, while boosting efficiency of parking operations. 

When Perry Group began working with Cambridge, we focused first on delivering an education program for parking leaders, managers and staff that focused around societal digital impacts, harnessing digital transformation, process discovery and service design techniques, and considering the art of the possible. As part of this early learning, we challenged Cambridge parking leaders to find ‘where can you park’ on a number of peer municipal websites. We used this as a way of getting parking leaders to put themselves in the customers’ shoes, illustrating the challenges that customers faced.  

Then we worked with the team to put the education into practice, focusing on using Good Service Assessments, Customer Journey Mapping, and Process Optimization methods to fully understand the current situation. 

It became abundantly clear through this discovery work that managing Parking services across multiple departments was leading to fragmented service delivery. The enforcement department handled ticketing, while parking facilities and permits were managed separately,  with little integration or communication between departments. This approach, designed more around how City departments operate rather than focused on the customer needs,  resulted in a fragmented system that frustrated customers, depended on manual workarounds, was riddled with inefficiencies, and resulted in disjointed parking enforcement. 

Recognizing the challenges, and armed with the knowledge from customers about what “better” could look like, the Cambridge team worked with the Perry Group team to re-think and re-design services for customers, while considering what people, process and technology changes would be needed to deliver the improved services. 

Where possible, Perry Group advocates for reusing existing tools and technologies. All too often we find that municipalities have the solutions but aren’t using them to their full potential for various legacy reasons.

So, in Cambridge’s case, the end solution was a system the City was already using - gtechna - a product designed and built to optimize parking enforcement and administration while significantly improving communication and coordination across municipal departments.

By leveraging their existing system, the City’s parking and technology teams quickly worked together to launch a new feature enabling residents to conveniently apply for overnight parking exemptions. This quick win resulted in significant benefits for both enforcement officers and residents, as exemption information automatically synced with handheld units, ensuring accurate enforcement and minimizing the risk of erroneous tickets. It also built momentum for the team by showing the type of improvements that could be implemented quickly .

In parallel with this quick win, the team built a multi-year work plan that defined a set of work packages that the City’s parking and technology teams will tackle over the next few years.

The City next plans to leverage gtechna’s permits module to begin issuing permits digitally, that will eliminate the need for manual processes and paperwork. The City also plans to enable online payments for monthly permits, enhancing the user experience and reducing administrative burdens associated with manual transactions. 

The introduction of license plate recognition technology is also planned, which will allow for efficient identification of permitted vehicles and prompting alerts for vehicles parked without valid permits.

We work on the principle that if you look after the customer, everything else will take care of itself. In this case, by equipping leaders with the knowledge of what’s possible in the digital age, and by giving them the tools to look at their processes and to hear from customers about their experiences, doing the right thing becomes easy.

By looking closely at services through the lens of the customer, organizations can break down silos. And by fully leveraging existing technology as part of the re-design, the City is well-positioned to transform parking services into a modern service that is efficient, effective and meets customer expectations.

Perry Group, with expertise in all aspects of municipal service modernization, was proud to guide Cambridge through this transformative process. With a seasoned team featuring former municipal officials, process and service design experts, technology and digital specialists, Perry Group has successfully helped numerous municipalities in modernizing services. 

For more information about how we help municipalities position themselves for a successful digital future, feel free to get in touch with us here.