Talk & Discussion: Ensuring Quality Delivery of Services Using Playbooks
The Service Design Network New York Chapter hosted Diane (Dee) Seaver last Tuesday, May 11th for a virtual talk and discussion entitled “Ensuring Quality Delivery of Services Using Playbooks”. Dee is the Senior Service and Experience Leads at Phillips Design and led us not only through her process developing and using service playbooks, but also guided us through her journey through the service design field. You can check out the full recording here on YouTube and if you appreciate SDN New York Chapter recordings, remember to subscribe to their channel!
A Personal Journey to Service Design
Dee has a BFA in Industrial Design and an MFA in Service Design, and likes to say that her journey through the service design field is like following the breadcrumbs. The thing that has enabled her transitions through the field has been her ability to assess:
“where am I in my current space, what is the thing that I want to carry forward, and how do I use that as a springboard to get to the next thing?”
How it started — “I like making things in a contextual environment..”
Dee’s original interests involved how a product sat in a context, and understanding its use case — which led her to taking interior design courses. She began shaping physical experiences and spaces, leading to her work in spatial design. Dee designed trade shows, exhibits, and kiosks, and realized that these elements bring a brand to life.
Then — “I like to help other people creatively problem solve”
Although Dee didn’t originally have the language for her next interest — strategic design — she still acted on her interest and went back to school for a design management program. She began facilitating problem solving in organizations, but still missed the ‘developing experiences’ aspect of design.
Which led to — “I like helping people creatively problem solve multi touchpoint and over-time experiences”
It was here that Dee switched majors to service design, and began looking at experiences in a much bigger context. She was able to combine all of her expertise — in design, design management, and service design, to work on and deliver business innovation concepts at her next two employers — YMCA USA and Phillips. With YMCA USA, Dee emphasized a shift from creating programs to creating an environment that enables employees to create meaningful experiences for customers. And as you will see below, Dee’s work at Phillips Design is centered around facilitating a shift from the product creation model to a service delivery /subscription /pay as you go model.
Something that Dee is very passionate about and that she attributes a lot of her success to is seeing design as something that is to be shared with others. ‘Giving design away’, she says, and collaboration are key to enabling others’ success.
Service Playbooks
Setting The Stage For A Major Organizational Shift
Dee noted that her experience at Phillips Design — where she is working within an internal venture — has been to facilitate change in a complex, regulated, risk adverse industry that sits within a corporation.
For both the industry and customer case, the industry shift is going from a transactional mindset of big budget, capital purchases to a consumption based/managed service model, where the customer pays per service without the burden of ownership.
It was decided that this mindset shift would be launched as a first of kind pilot, instead of launching at scale. The team would build, measure, and learn. Shifting to a pay per service model dramatically changes the ‘what does the over time relationship look like’?. There are net new activities to think about, like — what happens after installation? What happens in the first year of the service, the third year, at renewal? The life of the product is no longer on the burden of the owner, since the customer is now paying for a service rather than for ownership.
This shift in mindset also included a need to get comfortable with “figuring it out as we go”, as the team built, measured and learned throughout this first of kind launch. The shift to pay per use is only successful if the organization is able to scale with repeatability and minimize variability.
Dee and her team also needed to think about: how do we enable teams to self-direct without constant oversight? Especially if as a small venture, the organization doesn’t have capacity to just add people to a process? The answer came to be: service playbooks.
Developing The Playbook
In digging in to documenting processes, it became evident to Dee and the team that documentation existed in people’s inboxes. They realized that if they were going to achieve consistency and scalability, they had to go from ‘it lives on someone’s laptop’ to codifying the organizational knowledge that could be passed from team to team.
Dee and her team knew from experience that they knew they needed to involve the frontline staff in order to have buy-in for the resulting processes. They wanted their process to embody the change management best practice:“do change with me, not to me”.
So Dee needed to develop a process and framework for bringing the experts in as well as creating a space where they could recount their actions, experiences and perspectives.
Dee and her team sat down with the staff from each functional area to understand their roles, responsibilities, tasks, and processes within the larger service delivery process. The whiteboards came out, and Dee asked:
- What are the major topics, within the work that you have done?
Next, Dee allowed the staff to draft the input based on those topic areas, and asked the staff to record on the whiteboard:
- what you did
- how that went
- who did the work
- the materials that you used
- did it work? do we want to do it again?
This new process dissolved concrete titles, and instead focused on the roles and responsibilities that need to be accounted for. This even included the roles and responsibilities of the customer! There were many organizational design conversations, and people were told that they would work with their colleagues in different ways — which ended up being a positive outcome.
The Experience Of The Playbook
The playbook itself is a large, beefy document. The team has made it web-based, to make it a tangible interactive document. Dee works with a visual designer, a copy writer, and a content strategist to make the Playbook consumable content.
And to tie everything together, Dee noted that the team connects the playbook back to the service design blueprints and journey maps. Dee and her team go back to the original teams to ask them: did we do the process as we planned it in the map, and did the playbook guidance that we have, meet our need? The overall assessment of the playbook looks a bit like this:
- we have this thing
- did we do it as planned?
- if not — why not?
- was the playbook enough? do we keep everything? do we remove content?
- do we update the journey map? do we update the playbook?
Dee led the group in an engaging Q&A that revealed even more insights and details about the playbooks and their process. You can listen in via the recording here on YouTube. One final question prompted Dee to agree to this beautifully summative statement that, yes — bringing people along is the true value of the playbook.
Resources From The Conversation
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