Spreading the word on service design and digital!

Written by Alex Mihai and Dave Morton

Here’s a question for you! How do you spread the idea of agile and service design within local government? Alpha? Beta? Iterate? What’s that all about? Most importantly, what does it all mean for the organisation?

Ok, maybe that’s more than 1 question, but nonetheless, these are the questions our fellow colleagues may have asked themselves when they were hearing the buzzwords like ‘service design, prototype, show and tell, hypothesis’, especially after we moved away from the word digital and adopted service design. Sounds a bit confusing, I know, but bear with.

So what did we do about all this? What we’ve been working as a multi-disciplinary team for over a year on various project of various sizes. What all these projects had in common is putting the customer at the heart of our work, getting a deeper understanding of their needs and being able to adapt to the fast pace of the 4 step approach.

On this journey we’ve made loads of friends within our services and they liked working in this way. Ok, let’s rephrase that a bit. Our friendly services actually adopted the 4 stage approach in their own services. That means we rubbed off on some great people!

You might’ve thought we stopped there, but here’s where you are wrong! We had even bigger dreams of how this might look across our organisation.

With this in mind, we wanted to share everything we’ve learnt about service design, agile and digital and give our organisation a snapshot into all the work we have been doing alongside our services. In order to do this, we put on an event where the whole organisation and partners were invited to come along and see what this strange world of service design really is about.

In order to show the bigger picture, we took everyone who attended, on a project journey. What this means is that we started by first explaining what service design is and how we work, then we showcased various projects at different stages in the 4 step approach by our delivery leads. The journey was completed by the data and intelligence team, web team, learning and development and a quick showcase of what agile comms looks like. We also had some of our new friends from the services we work alongside to share their stories and experience.

So here’s what happened: We had roughly around 60 people coming along on the day (yay) our first one being the Chief Exec. This meant that there was enough time for quality conversation to take place (on an average 45 minutes was spent talking; that’s quite a bit) so that our attendees got a better feel of what we actually do. And to make sure that we sure we measured everyone’s understanding of service design and agile, we asked them to rate this at the beginning and end. Well the results speak for themselves.

Just to prove that we love recycling, all the material we used was authentic material we had from Show and Tells, Stand-Ups, etc. all dotted around the room, so that people could actually ‘see’ the work we have done, because that’s how we roll!

On top of all this stuff we are doing, we are working with our learning solutions team to embed skills within our organisation so that we can grow our own agile roles like user researchers, designers, user testers, etc. In order to do this efficiently, everyone that attended was asked how they like to learn, and this feedback will be used in order to shape a programme of learning.

Since the event we had positive feedback from various folk, so high fives all way round!