Mapping our existing services at Cancer Research UK
We are in the process of mapping Cancer Research UK’s ‘as is’ services — a prospect both exciting and daunting. In this blog post, I want to share how we’ve approached this challenge and pay tribute to all the great service design thinkers-and-doers whose work has inspired and helped shape our approach.
Setting the scene for our first service map
The Technology team at Cancer Research UK is currently leading a large-scale strategic initiative called Technology and Data Future Readiness. Our vision is to deliver stable and adaptable technology and useful data that enables our colleagues to do their jobs effectively and better serve the needs of our users.
The programme aims to replace several core technology applications, which are now considered as heritage. Among them is our Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). Our existing CRM system is used by over 140 teams to record most of the charity’s fundraising operations. Some teams rely on very manual processes to carry out their work as their needs cannot be met by the current system.
So, what does Service Design have to do with this?
One of our main goals as the Technology Directorate is to be led by the needs of internal and external users when making technology choices. Learning the lessons from previous implementations where our technology was based around organisational structure, we want to ensure that any new technology is centred around the key services the charity provides. To quote Ben Holliday, we believe that “aligning how an organisation works to the services it delivers — using this as an organising principle — is the most effective way to keep a clear focus on user needs, goals and delivering better outcomes.”
Being service-led for Cancer Research UK means that replacing our CRM system would be much more than just a technology refresh. Instead, it could provide us with a framework for re-thinking what we offer our users and how we could make it better.
Historically, Cancer Research UK has not seen itself as a service provider and Service Design is a relatively new design capability in the charity. One of the challenges of the Service Design team is to figure out how to create a shared understanding of the services we offer. In the CRM discovery team, we came up with this hypothesis: The CRM system acts as a technology enabler for a large number of the external user facing services the charity offers. Therefore, we could use the insights generated during the discovery phase for our new CRM system to begin mapping our existing services.
But what is a service?
The CRM discovery team needed an agreed definition of what we mean by a ‘service’ before we could start understanding and mapping them. We turned to definitions shared by Kate Tarling and Stephanie Marsh:
A service reflects what an external user (e.g. supporter, visitor, business) needs, or needs to do, where an organisation has a particular outcome to achieve.
Kate Tarling, Changing the Remit
A whole service: this is everything the user needs to do to achieve a goal, including non-transactional things, such as research and choosing how to achieve their goal; a whole service is also everything government needs to do to achieve an outcome, including delivering and supporting the service.
Stephanie Marsh, What do we mean when we talk about services?
Earlier this year, Cancer Research UK completed a piece of work with WeAreSnook, which helped us expand on the definition of a service to reflect more closely what we as a charity do. Traditionally, a service might help our users do something like pledging a gift, organising a fundraising event or applying for a research grant. However, ever more frequently, our services are about providing a platform for co-creating value between Cancer Research UK and the people we interact with, across a collection of services.
We built on the work of Kate Tarling to create a list of terms which can help us communicate what we mean by services across the organisation (and to potential technology partners):
Our V1 and next steps
Our Business Architect had already concluded a big piece of work to identify the business capabilities within the charity which are currently supported by our CRM system. Another internal project had generated a list of audience types Cancer Research UK interacts with.
Rather than starting from scratch, we decided to try and link the business capabilities to the audiences, asking ourselves the questions:
- What do we use this capability to offer this audience?
- Is there a service here?
- If so, what should that service be called?
Over the course of a few weeks, we worked together as a discovery team, tapping into the knowledge of both team members and stakeholders from different teams in the charity. We’ve ended-up with a list of 8 service types (shown below). We have also identified a number of ‘proto’ services and sub-services underneath each type (version 1 of our service map).
Currently hosted in a spreadsheet, our version 1 is far from perfect, but we can begin to understand what services we offer and have further conversations with colleagues delivering these services.
Next, we would like to understand the services in more detail by co-creating service blueprints with colleagues involved in their delivery. We would, of course, need to test and validate our services with the actual external end users, to be sure that they describe what service users want to do, in their own language.
To, again, quote Ben Holliday: “understanding your services is the first step towards improving or transforming them, as well as supporting a service-oriented approach to organisation design.”
We hope that by beginning to understand our services in a top-level way, we can help the organisation make informed technology choices and ensure the right tools and internal capabilities are in place to support the effective delivery of services and achieve better outcomes for our users.
Thank you for reading!
Credit:
Here are some of the people whose work has been hugely helpful:
- Ben Holliday, especially his article on what a service-oriented approach to organisation design looks like.
- Kate Tarling, whose keynote at UX Scotland 2018 (Changing the Remit) and writing on how to create a common language to understand services have been regularly referenced in the discovery team.
- Kate Tarling and Matti Keltanen, who have recently written about using outcomes to focus organisations and defining services.
- The Service Design team at Essex Country Council who have openly shared their work on common service patters.
- Rebekah Barry and the GDS for sharing their knowledge of how to name services.
- Lou Downe and their posts on what makes a good service (‘Good services are verbs, bad services are nouns’)
We’d love to hear from you if you have done or are currently doing similar work and are happy to share the lessons who have learnt. We also welcome tips about how we can make our service map easy to share and collaborative among colleagues across the charity.
