The 2point0 Principles: Designing a Simpler Bromford

Today I’ve been working on joining up the service design across our organisation — so I thought I’d post this. It was written for an internal audience — but attempts to sum up our approach..

2point0 is all about simplicity — delivering our strategy through streamlined services for customers.

We recognise that one of the biggest challenges to simplicity is our sometimes siloed culture- we all try to do the right thing but that’s often done in isolation from other teams.

To help combat that we’ve come up with a set of nine principles that will guide the way we work in the future.

Having a clearly articulated and understood set of principles should help us do the following:

• Get us all on the same page
• Avoid future silos — as everyone is working to the same principles.
• Help us evaluate proposed work — if things don’t fit the principles we may need to challenge why we are doing it

The posters you’ll be seeing outline each principle but I thought it would be useful to explain why we think they are important.

Challenge assumptions

Grace Murray Hopper was a computer scientist who coined a great phrase “The most dangerous phrase in the language is, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ That’s exactly what’s 2.0 is about — challenging the way we have learned to do things and thinking differently.

Abandon activities that don’t add value

The more balls we have in the air does not present more chance of success. The best companies focus on doing only what they do best for customers. Accordingly we’ll be saying no to new activities occasionally and concentrating only on what delivers impact.

Automate bravely

Automating business processes saves time, money and a dependency on spreadsheets. Our principles mean we’ll be designing out repetitive and labour intensive processes. We want colleagues reserved for the things that really matter — building relationships with customers and each other.

Simplification at the heart
Complexity makes life difficult for customers, it heightens stress and it increases the cost of doing business. We’ll be making sure our ways of working are easy. That means removing complication, double handling and lots of escalation.

Build for needs not wants
One of the main reasons new products fail is because of building things people say they want , but don’t actually need. Think of all the apps on your phone. You probably wanted all of them but in practice you only actually need a few. Building for needs not wants means the risk of solving a problem no one has is significantly reduced.

Design for everyone

Accessible and usable design is good design. So we’ll design services that everyone can use without trouble. You shouldn’t need to be an expert or fantastic with technology — everything should be as complete, legible and readable as possible.

Meet standards

Currently we have a lot of systems and processes that don’t connect with each other. Colleagues have to spend lots of time transferring data from one system to the next. Our principle promotes open data and open systems, all built and run in accordance with best practice.

Joined up Bromford

We want to create a motivating environment in which colleagues work, communicate and do business with each other openly. That means connecting services up and recognising that what one team does invariably affects another. Our principles promote cooperation and collaboration.

Build trust

Arguably our most important principle. Great relationships are at the heart of Bromford. If we don’t have a trusting relationship with our customers or colleagues we can never hope to help people be the best they can be.

We hope by working with our new principles we’ll design an organisation that’s even more customer focused and great to work for than it is today.