Parents looking to enrol their child in preschool no longer have to search through long lists of centres to see which ones are nearby and most suitable.

Today, they just need to get on their smartphones and launch the Moments of Life (Families) app, which is loaded with a comprehensive list of preschools that can be searched by location. The one-stop app also shows the vacancies and enrolment fees, and allows parents to indicate their interest in sending their child to a centre.

This service from Early Childhood and Development Agency (ECDA) is available on the Moments of Life (Families) app, which was released in June 2018.

The app is the first product from the Moments of Life initiative, a government-wide effort to streamline government services across different agencies to provide relevant services and information at key moments of citizens’ lives. The initiative is one of six strategic Smart Nation projects.

Making life easier for parents

With the first Moments of Life (Families) app, parents can register the birth of a child, apply for Baby Bonus benefits, view their child’s immunisation records and look for childcare centres, all via a single platform.

“Having to navigate a complex web of government services and information can add to the stress of sleep-deprived new parents,” said Ms Lee May Gee, Director of the Moments of Life (Families) Programme Office.

In a bid to make life easier for citizens, public officers thought: Why not enable citizens to do all this in one place?

Ms Lee added: “It is important to have a healthy degree of discontentment with the status quo. We were not satisfied with making citizens fill up the same information multiple times on manual forms and having to queue physically at a counter.”

The initial phase for Moments of Life focused on parents of young children. Since April 2017, the integration exercise, co-led by the Moment of Life (Families) Programme Office and the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF), has involved over 200 representatives from 15 agencies, including the CPF Board, ECDA, Health Promotion Board, and education and health ministries.

For the broader Moments of Life project, “the intent is to provide services and information from the citizens’ point of view, to make it easier and more convenient for them to interact with the government without having to navigate different agencies at the same time,” said Ms Lee.

All in one

But as the team behind Moments of Life (Families) found, bringing all the agencies together wasn’t easy. Every agency already had its own way of doing things and different plans. For instance, for parents to register their child’s birth and apply for the Baby Bonus on one platform, the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) had to speed up its plans for online birth registrations to meet the project’s deadlines.

The ICA and the MSF also had to work closely to match their work processes, data requirements and system enhancements.

For Ms Zaleha Ali, Head (Births & Deaths) at the ICA, the biggest challenge was translating “an analogue system, which relied on personal interactions, into the ‘faceless’ digital realm”.

But the team worked very well together, said her colleague from the MSF, Ms Cynthia Chan, Director of Family eServices and Digital Solutions Division. “The ICA team was open-minded and cooperative from the get-go. There were several rounds of discussions, work, and re-work, but the team remained cool and facilitative.”

What helped, said Ms Zaleha, was that the main coordinator, Moments of Life (Families) Programme Office, would step in as a mediator whenever there were hurdles. The Government Technology Agency team also deployed all its expertise on the back-end to develop the app (read more in "The Tech Behind The Moments Of Life (Families) App").

Understanding what users want

The team had set a tight timeline of delivering within a year, and there were budget constraints too.

Two things worked in their favour, said Ms Lee. First, everyone was committed and determined to see the project through. Taking the lead was the Moments of Life (Families) Operations Committee that met monthly to set directions and quickly work through any kinks.

The agencies also spent time understanding what the people want. Using design-thinking principles, with guidance from Innovation Lab, they interviewed and engaged with people who would use Moments of Life (Families) to learn about their service experiences and pain points. Each agency then painstakingly made sure the changes responded to what people wanted.

“It helped the agencies see beyond their domains, and work towards a common goal of improving the experience for both the citizens and their agencies,” said Ms Lee. Taking the time to question the “whys” behind every process or policy was also useful in understanding different agencies’ considerations and concerns.

On how Moments of Life (Families) has transformed citizens’ lives so far, Ms Pauline Mo, Director of Partnerships and Programmes at ECDA, said: “Through the app, parents can now search and indicate interest for their preferred preschools, any time anywhere. They also like how the information is presented visually… showing both geospatial and detailed information of the preschools in the search results.”

For ECDA and preschools, it also means spending less time on parents’ queries since key information is made available via the app.

New features and enhancements, based on user feedback, will be added over the coming months. Ms Lee said: “The Moments of Life project is not about building an app. The goal is to transform citizen experience, as well as the way we are organised within the government to deliver services and information.”

Related Stories:

• Mapping The Way To A Digital Government
• The Tech Behind The Moments Of Life (Families) App
• Integrating Public Consultation Into Public Policy