How to deliver Service Design Thinking and be successful with customer-centric innovation
The innovation model KUER
Service Design Thinking as an approach or set of methods is easy to understand but hard to deliver. By the way, this characteristic applies to all agile and user centered processes. The implementation of great service design concepts is a real challenge, especially working with large and complex companies. Even though the methods and tools are powerful and generate enriching insights, behaviour patterns, useful journeys, storyboards or low to high-fidelity prototypes there is usually no real impact unless you actually implement the concepts.
“We have a real rupture between concept and implementation”
The motivation behind a three-year international study, that I conducted within the framework of a PhD, was to get relevant insights about common barriers and especially success factors for successful service design delivery (“Service Design doing in the real world” by Jakob Schneider et al.).
With the terrific support of around 50 experts from the areas of service design practitioners (Hellon, Livework, Darkhorse, IDEO, etc.), service providers (EON, BMW Group, Océ, etc.) and business and organizational consulting (Capgemini, Etventure, OSB-I, etc.), explorative interviews and workshops were conducted to identify influencing factors, frequent barriers and future potentials. Through a systemic approach (based on Niklas Luhmann, Frederic Vester, Fritz B. Simon etc.), many of the obstacles occurring in service design projects are explainable. Being a service design/innovation consultant myself I found a systemic perspective really helpful. It supports me in understanding my clients way better, the situations they are in and what is (might be) going on in projects.
Results
I’ve distilled some of the most interesting outcomes that could be valuable for your daily project work. The results of the study are the ‘KUER’ implementation model, 24 success factors, a workshop concept and also 12 general lessons which can be used for practical use.
Success, goals and failures
A crucial question is what success can mean in the context of service design delivery. Targets can be purely process or result-oriented or a combination of both. A process-oriented success is when employees learn service design methods, rooms for co-creative work are established within the client company and the organisation prepares for cultural change. In this case, the success would be based on the fact that the client organisation becomes familiar with new methods and prepares itself procedurally and spatially for future projects. On the other hand, a result-oriented success is when the new service design concept is introduced in the company‘s everyday life, presented to the user as a value offer and reconfirmed by measurement that it meets criteria such as efficiency, user satisfaction, or return-on-investment (ROI). It becomes obvious that there are different areas of application and success in service design, which in turn depend on the goals and capabilities of the client as well as external consultants. The reasons found for failure are just as numerous. Obstacles may exist on the client side as well as on the service designers´ side. For example, the lack of experience and implementation maturity of external service designers or consultants, internal resistance or decision dilemmas of top management, lack of user acceptance, or a better offer of competing brands may be the reason.
Result №1: the model ‘KUER’
To date, there is no model in service design research that offers a comprehensive analysis and structure of the influencing factors in the implementation of projects. Based on the empirical results, the KUER model was developed, consisting of four phases and main activities.
KUER stands for ‘Key Prerequisites’, ‘Understand & Discover’, ‘Enable & Define’ and ‘Reinforce & Deliver’. Looking at the ‘KUER’ process model, it becomes apparent that the entire process begins with the clarification in Phase 1 (‘Key Prerequisites’), but that the phases do not have to follow each other linearly because setbacks and feedback must be taken into account. It became apparent that the following six hygiene factors are essential for a successful implementation:
- Implementation maturity
- Compliance/C-level sponsorship
- Implementation management at all phases
- Temporary project organisation
- Interdivisional staff involvement
- Personnel capacity.
In Phase 2 (‘Understand and Discover’) a temporary project organization (‘safe space = physical and mental space for new ideas and thoughts unfamiliar to the organization and co-creative working’) is set up and extensive diagnostics are carried out. Users (User Experience), the client organization itself (Employee experience) and relevant economic parameters must be analysed.
Solutions developed in Phase 3 (‘Enable and Define’) are tested in rapid cycles or agile process with users, employees and relevant stakeholders and evaluated at decision nodes using relevant criteria. A three-dimensional selection mechanism consists of: User benefits, business parameters and targets of the company and the organizational consequences.
As activities to support the user-centered innovation process and its orientation are used iteratively as required, the transition to the integration Phase 4 (‘Reinforce and Deliver’) is seamless.
This is the start of a series of short articles covering the various results of the study (‘KUER’ model, 24 success factors, workshop concept, 12 general lessons). In my next post I will share the first 3 lessons learned.
