How Service Design is changing Cancer Research UK
Written by Emily Sears and Snezh Halacheva (Cancer Research UK Service Design team)
The need for service design
“Things get designed, whether you design them or not.”
Mike Laurie, Using Systems Thinking to Design Better Services
Like many other large organisations, over time things at Cancer Research UK (CRUK) have evolved with bits bolted on here and there. So CRUK has invested in service design to take a more holistic view of what we offer as an organisation and bring end-to-end thinking to how all the different parts fit together to deliver services for our audiences.
We have a lot of very dedicated, capable people who deliver these services. But often, they don’t have time, space or resources to radically rethink and improve things. In addition, our services are complex and expansive, and cut across multiple teams and products, departmental agendas and technology systems.
One of the best parts of our job is working with and learning from colleagues across the organisation. They act as the subject matter experts and we guide the work using our tools and techniques to get the best out of their knowledge and expertise.
Our vision for service design
Over the last year we have been mapping the charity’s existing services and identifying where there are clashes, gaps or opportunities for improvement. Through this work, we’ve helped CRUK to see the top-level services it provides from an outside, user perspective for the first time.
The Technology directorate is using this work to help us make key technology decisions in upcoming months (e.g. our future Customer Relationship Management system). In the process, we’ll inform how the organisation is set up to support and deliver better end-to-end services.
As a by-product of our mapping work, we have created tools which other teams are using to build shared understanding and improve parts of their service.
All of this work is bringing us closer to our vision of enabling CRUK to design and operate good services.
Our biggest challenges
CRUK is a long-standing organisation, and as a result we’ve built up layer upon layer of organisational structure. So, when a new capability, approach, technology or skillset is needed, instead of redesigning what is there, we often design a brand-new version and let the redundant layer fizzle or freeze.
This results in waste and inconsistency, and the emergence of silos where audience journeys are broken up and passed along between teams at different stages, without anyone owning the end to end experience.
Because of this, teams don’t have the opportunity to truly own their products. So, decisions are often made for pieces of a journey, according to the KPIs and targets that individual teams are held to in isolation. Everyone wants to work in a more collaborative way, but there just aren’t the structures in place to make it happen.
This type of top down decision-making and hierarchy holds people captive to these siloed structures and restricts their freedom to make decisions about work that they know better than anyone else. As Service Designers, our job is to bring these issues to light and help empower teams to move towards a better decision-making process.
Because of our size and complexity, it can sometimes be hard to gauge if all the work different teams are doing is making things better for our audiences in a measurable way. We’re still in the early stages of thinking about what we do as end-to-end services, so measuring how our services are performing is challenging. But it’s something we know we need to tackle to show how we have helped improve things for our audiences and for CRUK, so we can further demonstrate the value of a service design approach.
The impact of service design on Cancer Research UK
We have 8 principles to communicate the value of service design at CRUK:
1. Show the organisation how it is perceived from the outside
2. User centred decisions both internal and external
3. Systems thinking to understand root problems in context
4. Revealing duplication and synergy opportunities
5. Breaking down silos through improved communication channels
6. Understanding how all the pieces fit together to improve the bigger picture
7. Understanding the value of a piece of work and whether it’s worth pursuing
8. Finding balance between organisational needs and user needs
Seeing our top-level services from an outside perspective for the first time
Successful organisations around the world have one thing in common — they have a close relationship with the users of their services. They listen to them and seek their feedback when making decisions. What’s more, that feedback is equally balanced, if not more heavily weighted for importance than the organisation’s business requirements.
To help do this at CRUK, the Service Design team has mapped out the key services that CRUK offers, which are extensive. We have 9 different ‘Service Groups’ that show the breadth of our capability:
- Information
- Support
- Retail
- Recognition
- Giving Money
- Raising Money
- Volunteering
- Commercial
- Research
At the moment, we offer around 35 services and within those, many more sub services. As a team we’re working towards creating a clear and holistic view of the organisation through the lens of the people who interact with us, as well as those who deliver the services.
Changing approach: using services to show connections
Service design is all about perspective. Rather than reacting to individual pieces of work and taking them at face value, we ask questions and draw connections between those pieces of work and others that they link to.
This means that we’re able to tackle problems holistically, rather than piece by piece. Our team helps get a bird’s eye view by using systems thinking to get to the bottom of what a problem really is and where it has come from, then finding other areas that are affected by that same problem. For example, connecting three separate pieces of work related to how (and why) people get in touch with CRUK.
We’d love to help to fix all of the challenges that our organisation faces, but we’re just 6 people in a 2,000-person organisation. So, we need to be disciplined about the problems that we choose to fix and recognise when the work can be done by others. It’s equally important to know when to step away from a piece of work when we’ve delivered the most value. It’d be easy to ‘hang around’ on projects to either help with odd jobs or because we feel attached, but we recognise that’s often not right.
We upskill teams to continue to think about the core of the problems they are trying to solve and the perspective of their audience. Once we’ve done that it’s important we walk away, because the best way to learn is by doing. And people won’t get the chance to do it if we hang around.
Measuring the value of service design
We have talked about difficulties in attributing exact cost savings or income to the value of our work due to its complexity and interdependencies but these are some more indirect methods that we use to measure our present value, both tangible and intangible. We track both outputs and outcomes, as well as the behaviours of people who interact with our work. It‘s not just about each time one of our outputs such as blueprints are used to inform a decision, or each time a service design perspective is called upon. It’s also important that we record more indirect evidence of value. Like a colleague in another team repeating something that we have mentioned or asking a question that we encourage others to ask.
Seeing others thinking in our way and using our techniques is a success in itself. It means that we are making a change and creating a more user centric and end-to-end organisation. So when others who have heard us repeatedly emphasise the same key considerations, beat us to raising it, we celebrate and record that.
We record feedback, we create case studies, we track every time that a problem has to be redefined. We log how often we are called in by others for our expertise and the resulting outcomes of that inclusion. We can show you where we have identified duplication or synergy, where we have simplified end to end experiences, and where we have surfaced silos and informed strategy.
We are outcome focused, because it doesn’t matter if you create 100 maps or diagrams if they never get used. Sometimes even the half-finished outputs are enough to steer a direction.
Delivering value, and moving forwards
Service design seeks to find balance between the organisational needs and the needs of those we deliver services for. This drives decision making that focuses on people, whether they are internal or external to the organisation. Some of these decisions remove duplication and silos while others capitalise on synergy opportunities.
Service design brings systems thinking to the forefront, helping teams to continue to question their problems — is it a problem, or is it a symptom of another, deeper problem? This allows them to focus on the root cause rather than just pruning the branches of a bigger problem.
In such a large and complex organisation that has both split and tangled with age, we’re now able to break down all the pieces to understand how they fit together. And we’re excited to have helped the organisation understand how these pieces could better fit together in the future.
Please get in touch if you’d like to swap experiences or learn more about our work.
