Bringing it to life — lessons learned from creating the service design playbook
Following on from my last post ‘Come play with us — the Tesco service design playbook’, I want to share how we got there, starting with user needs and following the service design approach.
Start with user needs
The team observed there was a strong interest from other Tesco teams to get an understanding of how to manage their own design-led process. After supporting four teams with similar needs for a clear process and simple-to-use tools, the decision was made to create the playbook.
We used service design to approach this issue and started working on a basic structure as a team.
Do the hard work to make it simple
Making something look simple is easy. Making something easy to use is much harder — the trick is to start small and iterate widely on all the tools with the mind set of enabling others to use them easily, so there was no need to have specific software knowledge. This means keeping things plain and simple, but effective.
All of the templates are paper-based (A4 or A3) and based around a Post-it note grid (if applicable).
Soft launch before you go live
The best way to build good product/service is to iterate, iterate, iterate. This means releasing a minimum viable product early on to open it up for feedback, adding features or making refinements.
Release plan
Lesson learned that it is important to have a release plan and content strategy, and someone responsible for them. This helps to know when what has to be delivered how and who does it.
Product owner or manager
It’s important to have a product owner or manager to keep up the momentum of product development. He or she is the go-to point if there are any questions.
This is for everyone
The playbook and its play are accessible. If you have to sacrifice elegance, so be it. Built and keep building the tool for the needs of your users and for the business: easy to access, easy to read, easy to use as a product (user side: our colleagues) and as a tool that can be used to train and up-skill teams (business side).
Be consistent, not uniform
The service design playbook complies with the newly developed and released digital design language. No need to reinvent the wheel by creating tools which are already available and simply putting another label on it. The playbook is complementary to what’s already available and credits people who supported the process.
Opening up
Sharing is caring: with colleagues, with users, with the world. I believe that the playbook will help people getting unstuck in their process. It’s a conversation piece: to educate our community and get the work outside the four walls of Tesco.
Benefits of the playbook
With the playbook, I am trying to use design methods to create a design guideline toolkit or a method bank if you will. This will help other teams streamline their service. It’s a great resource for training others.
It helps to show what best practice is (“what good looks like”) and over time there will be an educated community in Tesco using it.
This will reduce costs
because
- all the tools are based on what we have in the office
- getting to a more streamlined way of working
- focusing more on work in-house, reducing the reliance on external agencies.
A different way for how Tesco will own data and insights
This means sharing insights in the right way because the right structure to capture and share them was established. This ensures that the outputs of the projects are usable for the business because teams will become consistent in how they structure and share their results.
The #changechronicles, a growing collection of written work from Roman Schoeneboom, covers but is not limited to #projectwork, #storiesofimpact, #sessioninsights, #training-by-doing, #opinionpiece, #teamsupport, and #changemanagement.
