Strategic design
Strategy is easy to write and hard to live with. Portable's strategic design practice closes that gap, aligning your people, process, and technology so a strategy holds up once it meets daily operations.
What we do
- Service design and service blueprinting
- Systems mapping and analysis
- Customer and service experience strategy
- Journey mapping and stakeholder mapping
- Concept development, prototyping and testing
- Roadmapping and business case development
- Policy and strategy translation
Seeing a system clearly enough to redesign it.
Portable makes visible how a service actually operates, which dependencies matter, where the constraints are real, and where they're just habits. And then to co-imagine what it could be instead. The Centre for Relational Care wanted to shift child protection towards child connection, which challenges a core premise the system runs on (rather than any part of its delivery.) There are 46,000 children in out-of-home care in Australia and many never get a lasting relationship. We ran design dialogues with sector stakeholders to turn that conviction into a stated vision, grounded models of how relational care would work day to day, and a case for change credible enough to take to funders.
Seeing a system clearly enough to redesign it.
So Portable designs with both. For Power and Water, the Northern Territory's only utility, that meant 332 hours of dialogue: riding with the frontline crews who maintain the network, surveying 159 employees, and working with customers across Darwin and Alice Springs, property developers, and representatives of the 72 remote Indigenous communities served through Indigenous Essential Services. The interesting design problems sat where those realities pulled against each other. Ambulance Victoria presented a similar idea in miniature, a guide to patient-centred care built to be used by paramedics rather than filed away.
Seeing a system clearly enough to redesign it.
What we hand over is shaped by twenty years of experience seeing how real change actually happens in services and systems that shape our society. Roadmaps sequenced against what an organisation can actually fund and staff, business cases, and the training to build capability where hiring isn't an option. Power and Water's customer experience strategy runs to 2030, and the roadmap has been translated into business cases with dedicated teams leading initiatives. Wellbeing in Victoria, the state's first strategy for promoting good mental health, went from a community-led first draft to policy launched at Parliament House in 2025. Portable also builds and operates the system.
