About Metropolitan Strategies & Solutions

Metropolitan Strategies and Solutions (MSS) is a data analytics and community outreach firm that provides consulting services to federal, state, and local government agencies to make their services more effective and positively impact citizens’ lives. MSS’s innovative design-thinking approach to solve for the user's needs is based on our experience incubating disruptive technology in the private sector.

MSS brings bold ideas, applies rapid learning, and delivers technology that sets leading organizations apart from their competitors. As part of MSS’s ongoing effort to innovate our services, we became an early adopter and certified AskHumans delivery partner. Understanding our clients' needs and challenges is central to our approach, and AskHumans gives us a novel tool to extract valuable insights through scaled and personalized conversational feedback.

Industry

Consulting

Offices

3 in the US

Employees

50+

Use case

Design

The challenges

MSS’s large city client sought to better understand the social and demographic determinants of unemployment insurance (UI) compensation equity and measure program effectiveness to better serve its claimant population. The office recognized several opportunities to leverage data more effectively and build a more robust, more dynamic reporting infrastructure.

To support the city’s goal, MSS designed and developed several key dashboards that allowed agency leadership to become increasingly data-driven when monitoring key unemployment metrics and program performance and making critical decisions.

Using AskHumans for User Feedback

MSS conducted design-thinking sessions with the city using Askhumans before developing the analytics dashboards. This collaborative session sought to develop user profiles and key metrics for each respective analytics product, understand the users’ critical questions and challenges, and guide each product—both in content and design—to be actionable, insightful, and responsive to changing program needs.
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The ability to collect open-ended voice feedback — and have that feedback instantly analyzed to underscore key themes and insights — was instrumental in every step of the design-thinking sessions:
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Before the session, MSS asked users about their greatest challenges, areas they saw for improvement, and what their ideal end state would look like without any resource restrictions. This approach enabled MSS to gather feedback free from groupthink, encouraging participants to express themselves openly in an environment without senior leadership present. MSS then used these results to tailor the design-thinking sessions to the participant’s concerns.
During the session, MSS used AskHumans’ rapid reporting capabilities to display the results of the pre-session survey, establishing a common understanding of the problems and ideal end states across users.
After the session, MSS gathered session feedback and asked participants how their challenges and areas for improvement have changed.
During development, we deployed surveys to gather iterative feedback as we continued to develop analytics tools.

Using AskHumans for User Feedback

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Using AskHumans’ Summary, Insights, and Reporting tools, MSS gleaned valuable insights that helped drive product development. Respondents were empowered to naturally communicate their core product needs, including:
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A consolidated dashboard that summarized the team’s daily productivity metrics
Better team-wide literacy around trust fund solvency and how to leverage data to improve staff optimization
Benchmarks such as historical and future performance, and metrics that address equitable access and potential improvements to UI benefits

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The feedback prompted MSS to design various dashboards, including, but not limited to, a Trust Fund Dashboard, Demographic Dashboard, and a Leadership Dashboard. These tools equipped the city with data-driven insights that have shaped new policies, optimized resource allocation, and improved overall program effectiveness, helping it navigate complex economic challenges and promote greater equity across its programs.

Metropolitan Strategies & Solutions

About Metropolitan Strategies & Solutions

The challenges

Using AskHumans for User Feedback

Using AskHumans for User Feedback

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