IS AGILE FIT FOR PURPOSE FOR SERVICE DESIGN PROJECTS?
The dictionary meaning of Agile is to move quickly and easily. Agile in the world of project management translates this definition into the ability to deliver efficiently, by improving interactions and maximising efficiency of resources and time.
Over the last 5 years there has been a growing interest in organisations to ‘go Agile’, that is find efficient methods to iterate and deliver services and products quickly and efficiently. With growing competition and technology enabling organisations of all sizes to get to market quickly, being Agile has become key to surviving and gaining that crucial competitive advantage.
In 2001, Agile emerged from a desire to improve the way software was developed, tested and delivered. By stripping the process of anything that seemed unnecessary, be it the deliverables or roles, this process was made lean and hence could move faster.
The desire to move swiftly and efficiently is not specific to the area of software development and hence naturally, Agile has found its way to other areas like design and marketing where there is a need to address aggressive deadlines and complex delivery.
While using Agile has become the industry baseline for running digital projects, is it fit for purpose for running service design projects?
THE DIFFERENCE BE METHOD AND PROCESS
In order to run Service Design projects in an ‘Agile’ manner it is important to objectively look at both Service Design and Agile as individual entities.
What does Service Design do? It helps us define at a holistic level the service experience across channels.
What does Agile do? It helps deliver the solutions/recommendations/outcomes of this problem with maximum ease and efficiency.
The fundamental difference lies in the fact that Agile does not help you define solution areas that are aligned to the design thinking process. It is however a way of managing and delivering a project with ease and efficiency, once you have defined your recommendations/solutions, or what your product is, you can choose agile as a way of delivering and taking it to market.
One might argue that the Agile framework can be used to shape the proposition based on the principle of reviewing and assessing or ‘test and learn’, but the difference lies in the fact that Service Design encompasses a wider spectrum of considerations including financial and business models that need not necessarily fit into the Scrum framework or fixed delivery sprints.
Hence one can assume that Service Design sits at the start of a project, it defines the problem, investigates and builds what should be the ideal service experience based on the insights and the problem premise.
While its recommendations might include both products based or operational, Service Design can help shape this product proposition and only once that is created can the Agile processes help deliver it.
UNDERSTANDING SERVICE DESIGN LED PROJECTS
All design is not the same. Service Designers deliver different outcomes from visual designers, industrial designer or interaction designers.
Organisations like Google have championed the success of Agile by demonstrating how one can design quickly and efficiently. Using the sprint methodology, teams can use design to uncover valuable insights and deliver tangible outcomes at the end of every week.
While this methodology can be successfully applied to UX and interaction design led projects with a clear outcome of a prototype, Service Design sits more within the realm of design research and business thinking and is often utilised to develop a holistic vision of a service, to understand and improve existing propositions or to develop new ones.
Because Service Design focusses on creating a complete view of a service, the outcomes are not necessarily digital, but omni-channel. Recommendations could range from a digital product, an improved training programme for staff or even a new retail outlet.
Recommendations that sit in channels outside of digital adhere to a pilot way of testing and learning and not necessarily an Agile way of test and learn sprint cycles primarily because in most cases, it isn’t possible to rapidly iterate or get findings as quickly as one can in a software development process.
While digital outcomes can, all the outcomes of a service led process need not necessarily fit within the outlines provided by the Agile way of working.
RECOGNISING HOW SERVICE RECOMMENDATIONS CAN BE IMPLEMENTED/DEFINNG ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
As mentioned above, Service Design recommendations are omni-channel in nature, what this means is that they are relevant to physical and digital channels. This also means that digital recommendations influence retail channels and call centre recommendations could influence the digital products.
While implementing Service Design recommendations, it is important to create an omni-channel delivery team.
Does this mean that Service Design recommendations can’t be delivered in an Agile fashion and are hard to implement?
Perhaps only as hard as it is to embed Agile across an entire organisation that is built around a waterfall way of working and siloed team structures.
The other aspect to consider is roles within agile and how that translates onto implementing service design recommendations.
Consider a financial provider that is fairly traditional in the way it is structured. It has a digital team that owns the digital channel, a business and operations team that looks after retail and a customer experience team that is the custodian of the call centres.
This provider has a traditional business model, not best placed to truly benefit from Agile delivery, but has recognised the need for change and wants to create hybrid teams that can help accelerate their delivery.
If Service Design recommendations are best implemented by omni-channel teams then who is best placed to be the product owner?
And if it is the Service Design who is responsible for defining the proposition and the vision for that service experience, then is there a need for a product owner and a Service Designer?
In order to deliver Service Design recommendations, it is essential to primarily scrutinise the business model and its capability to create teams that can deliver across all channels consistently. Traditional organisations like Tele-communications, banks and government services who are the biggest pioneers Service Design thinking are also those who have a business model that isn’t set for Agile delivery at this point and are only able to improve delivery processes in smaller pockets and teams.
CAN SERVICE DESIGN GO AGILE?
The short answer is, yes. Like any template, if key aspects of Agile method are used to implement the way Service Design projects are managed then we can ensure certain level of efficiency in what we deliver. Four take always that Service Design can do in order to me more agile:
1. Re-think your deliverables and be more lean: What are the most important deliverables that a service design led project should deliver in order to enable the business or the delivery teams action the recommendations; what deliverables are relevant as background knowledge and what deliverables will be actionable. Stripping deliverables down to only those that can be built upon will allow for projects to move faster.
2. Evolve the design thinking process to be less waterfall: Design process often follows a liner way of thinking. Observe, investigate, Ideate, design etc. Once the ‘thinking’ is complete, then we start building our ideas. Agile makes a valuable point where thinking and making naturally co-exist. This is akin to how our minds also tend to naturally work. You might get an idea while conducting interviews with users. Why wait till the 3rd step in the process to ‘Ideate’, why not make it and test it with the same group of users you were interviewing with?
3. Create a working group of makers: While Service Design brings in the business and technology teams to collaborate and co-create what the service experience should look like, it should bring in teams of makers who can bring that blueprint to life during the service design process. This team of makers could include developers, call centre staff, retail manager or a business manager who can directly take the ideas out of the blueprint and implement it into their day-to-day as a quick ‘test and iterate process’. Moving Service Design approach from ‘making recommendations’ to ‘creating recommendations’ would also enable a more efficient way of validating the proposed service experience.
4. Integrate the role of the product owners and service designers: A product owner is responsible for defining and sharing the vision of what he/she wants to build and communicate that to their scrum teams. A Service Designer is also responsible for defining and shaping the vision. With both the product owner and service designer producing different deliverables, in the spirit of Agile- create a universal product/service owner role who can use service design thinking to create deliverables that can be actioned by the relevant delivery teams.
To conclude, re-defining the design process to become less linear and creating a hybrid role of a service designer-product owner could help deliver a greater level of efficiency in the way projects are managed. It could also enable service design consultancies or in-house teams to integrate better with the product teams. Being critical of Service Design deliverables and aligning it with the agile philosophy of producing only that is necessary and that can be actioned upon could further enable service design to move beyond the concept and ideation phase into the actionable delivery domain.
