What are Service Design Blueprints?
At IBM, I’ve worked in a variety of roles including: an automation developer, cognitive automation architect, intelligent workflow engineer, service designer and now, a business transformation consultant for IBM Client Engineering. The role that stood out the most was working as a service designer as it has changed the way I approach each project and the skills I that I have learnt has been transferrable to all my future roles. As such, I thought I would share my experience in terms of what service design is and how it could be applicable to your career.
What Is Service Design?
Service design is focused on navigating complexity whilst coming up with a solution for physical and/or digital products and services. I like to think of service design as a capability that has many frameworks which any team can adopt to solve a problem. The most successful service designers have the ability to deal with ambiguity and continuously being curious to understand the root cause problem.
You can also think about service design as a combination of management consulting skills mixed with a human-centred design framework to achieve an outcome, often advising on cost out, big digital strategies, and platform ecosystems.
What I learnt from IBM was that you can think of service design as the intersection between people, processes and technologies. When you design a future-facing customer journey, you need to be able to implement that experience. When you create an app, the system behind it needs to be smooth to make it happen. Service design is about thinking and identifying how we handle the information that needs to be shared and leveraged to optimise the customer journey.
Since service design utilises a human-centred design framework when solving complex problems, it is important to consider the user’s experience across all of the different touch points in physical and digital environments. The interactions between the people, processes and technologies can be quite complex when we are focused on our individual siloed tasks. So, to help service designers visualize the journey on a holistic view, we create an asset called a Service Blueprint.
What is a service blueprint?
Service blueprints visualize organizational processes in order to optimize how a business delivers a user experience. It is a diagram that helps you visualize the interactions between people, processes and technologies within a customer journey. Service blueprint templates are quite fluid and can vary depending on the specific customer journey, the designer and the audience.
The difference between a generic service blueprint and the one we create at IBM is that the service designers at IBM have a stronger technical understanding of edge technologies like automation, AI and IoT. The major advantage of having a more technical service designer is easier collaboration with architects and developers when building the solution. As a former developer, I definitely have an appreciation for service designers with a technical background as they would create user stories that could easily be translated into development features. For those who haven’t seen a service blueprint before, the below image illustrates ONE of many examples of what a service blueprint can look like:
My first experience in creating a service blueprint helped me to understand and visualise a holistic view of my client’s processes, the technologies currently being used, and the activities their employees perform. When developing the service blueprint, I uncovered repetitive activities, automation opportunities and demonstrated value to the risk-based maintenance tool my team was developing.
The other benefits from creating a service blueprint were:
- Identifying opportunities to optimize the journey — By obtaining a more holistic view, we were able to identify if there were redundancies, repeated actions and inefficient steps taken to achieve an outcome.
- Identifying weaknesses and wasteful effort within a process — By mapping out the processes and interactions between people and the technologies, we were able to get a clearer view of how many times the system is being used and repeated.
- Understand the interactions between different parts of the business through the interchange of data, communications and touch points — Here we were able to determine if the system was even relevant to the required task and whether multiple legacy systems which could be replaced through a single platform.
To put it into perspective, I thought I’d share a case study from when I created a service blueprint and how it has helped me to provide value to my client.
Case Study: Service Blueprinting
Working in the IBM Garage delivery team for an Oil and Gas company, we had to understand their current operations and their customer journey. To do this, we reviewed their documentation, interviewed multiple stakeholders and traveled to their site (which really put things into perspective) so that we could develop a service blueprint and map their risk management strategies.
Our goal was to reduce the client’s operational costs by 30%. Our initial assessment identified that their maintenance costs were quite high due to it not being set at an optimal timeframe. We examined all types of use cases, like equipment being replaced, repaired and simple routine checkups.
As we were undertaking our discovery workshops and defining our personas, we noticed a common concern and mindset. The engineers had an extremely risk-averse mindset due to the nature of the work and restricted their innovative thinking. We were able to break through this risk-averse mindset by introducing the IBM Garage method and Enterprise Design Thinking framework. We were able to create a safe environment for creative thinking, where we collaborated and came up with a solution which everyone was pleased with. The solution was a new tool which could calculate the optimal time to maintain a piece of equipment and reduce the costs of labour and resources, all while maintaining the level of safety on site.
Although this was co-created with the SMEs, it was difficult to bring the rest of the company along with us on the journey. This was where the service design blueprint became extremely useful. The service blueprint showed a comparative view of the interactions between the people, technologies and processes before and after the solution. It was a simple visual which could be used to explain the solution to anyone regardless if they had a business or technical background.
Not only did the service blueprint aid with the adoption of our tool, but it also helped in identifying critical bottlenecks in their current processes, additional value opportunities along the journey and numerous user pain points which could be alleviated. You can learn more about the full case study here.
When to use a service blueprint?
A service blueprint is an excellent asset to use when your team is trying to showcase a customer journey and their interactions with technology, people and processes to an audience who require a more holistic view of their business. The service blueprint is adaptable and can be tweaked to demonstrate different levels of stakeholders (business, technical and executive). Each service blueprint is unique to each project.
We now live in a society where people, processes and technologies are so intertwined that it is critical to understand the interactions between them all. Understanding the flow of data between people, processes, and technologies is how companies will solve their users’ problems, today and tomorrow.
I now create a service blueprint in all my projects and I hope that I’ve been able to show the value that it can bring for you. There are so many opportunities which could be identified from having a more holistic view of it all and then diving deep into the process.
If you’re curious to hear more about service design, UX/UI design or any other roles in product and services development, you should check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viLkanGjq-M&ab_channel=BTV. The purpose of my channel is to create a transparent future and provide insights into what adult life is all about. I’ll be trying to discover all the different job roles that are out there, talk about finance/investing and tips on self-development.
