Service Design-in’ at Barnardo’s
An asynchronous interview with Amy Ricketts, an Experienced Service Designer at Barnardo’s
Q: Ciao Amy, please introduce yourself.
A: My name is Amy Ricketts, I’m an Experienced Service Designer at Barnardo’s; a children’s health and social care charity.
Q: What does Barnardo’s do?
A: Barnardo’s is the UK’s biggest children’s charity. It provides services to children, young people and families across the UK, supporting people with their mental health, connecting children with adoptive and foster parents, supporting young carers, providing short breaks for children and young people with disabilities and much more.
This makes up the vast majority of income for the organisation however we also raise money through fundraising and work on campaigns and advocacy for those we support.
Q: How do you define Service Design?
A: I believe service design is the process of designing a service; making decisions about things like how the service should be experienced by the end user, how it should work behind the scenes, what kinds of skills staff need to have to deliver it, how many staff, what it might cost to deliver it and how it might generate income and finally the tools, systems and technical infrastructure needed. Service designers are unlikely to be the people to have all of this information, but they are good at facilitating the right kinds of conversations between people who do. They are often well placed to represent the views and experiences of end users and will work to ‘protect’ this perspective in relation to all of the other, sometimes competing factors that inform how a service comes together.
Q: What’s the current Service Design setup at your organisation?
A: Service designers work alongside researchers, visual design, developers, delivery management and product leadership as part of a multidisciplinary team called the Innovation Lab. We started out working as part of a large digital team with the responsibility of bringing about organisational change and transformation; making our services more user centred, more fit for the 21st century.
In March 2020 (by coincidence at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic) our team was re-positioned to work much more closely with our frontline services. Instead of being part of corporate services, our work would now fall within a Design and Innovation directorate, much closer to children’s services.
Service design is currently applied to new areas of business and growth, in particular high revenue, high profile projects such as strategic partnerships with local authorities and emerging markets such as health. We currently do not yet have a working model for engaging with our existing services, this happens on an ad hoc basis where they need extra design support, for example with a new process, tool or with gathering insight.
Our service design capacity comprises 3 experienced and 1 midweight service designer who have worked across the public, third and private sector. We are motivated by both improving outcomes for families and young people as well as seeking to move beyond services as a mechanism for change and apply broader systems design thinking to the problems we are seeing children and families face.
In this respect, it would be fair to say that we’re applying design thinking methodologies rather than specific service design practice. For example, embedding user centred principles, ensuring we’re using an evidence base to make decisions and encouraging a test and learn mindset. This is as opposed to following a strict design process or producing service blueprints and/or operating models. This is because a service may not always be the most appropriate output for our work; we may be designing a new process, tool, strategy, or way of working.
Q: What’s the relationship between Service Design and the other disciplines at Barnardo’s?
A: Within our own team, service designers will work alongside researchers, developers and a visual designer on a project by project basis. We are beginning to collaborate in a more structured way with teams outside of our own, such as those responsible for bringing the voices of children, young people and family into the organisation to shape the decisions we make. We are also beginning to work with our data and insights team responsible for developing good data standards across the organisation so we can better learn from what we do.
Q: Let’s talk about your Service design work. What are the typical initiatives you work on?
A: Personally I have spent most of my time at Barnardo’s working on a large programme called Care Journeys. This was created as a 10 year piece of work, funded by Barnardo’s to work with a small number of local authorities to radically improve outcomes for young people leaving care. I joined the programme at a relative stage of infancy, where the team was beginning to plan our strands of work. I was responsible for establishing our design approach for the programme and delivering a number of in-depth research studies to define which areas of the system we were looking to improve. This involved spending a lot of time speaking with care experienced young people about their transition out of care. We also spent time with staff, both shadowing and interviewing them to understand how they support young people as well as where they saw the gaps and challenges.
After a period of maternity leave, I returned and have since worked on developing a set of high-level offers for our integrated child and family health services, a new area of work for Barnardo’s. For example, when considering what support might be beneficial to new mothers, we began to develop a service proposition looking to support mothers with their mental health. This both drew on our expertise in providing mental health support but also would allow us to offer something new alongside our existing children’s centres and baby groups.
I have also begun working on a project looking to identify common service components across our services; essentially what do our range of services have in common and how might we design standard tools, processes and experiences for our services to use?
Q: How do you prove the impact of Service Design?
A: We are in the process of finalising an evaluation framework for the team. Our lead researcher has developed this recently as we were struggling to quantify our impact and link our work back to some of the wider ambitions of Barnardo’s.
Firstly we define what we’ve delivered across our different levels of activity; product, practice, service, process and system. Then we look to capture what impact this is having in the immediate term, medium and long term. An example of an immediate or short term area of impact may be an increase in the time staff are spending providing support and a reduction in time spent carrying out administration tasks. A longer-term example may be more care experienced young people in employment, education or training.
Q: How do you educate your organisation on the Service Design approach?
A: We work to educate our organisation and advocate for service design at a number of different levels. Our Head of Innovation Lab and Head of Service Design both engage with our senior leadership teams, whilst our design team work closely with Heads of Service and Direct Workers to help demonstrate the value of service design through projects.
It would be fair to describe the overall level of understanding of service design at Barnardo’s as ‘developing’. We do have a number of advocates at a senior level however their view of service design is not shared amongst all colleagues. It is certainly not yet valued by staff providing direct support through our services who are both very time poor and geographically dispersed. We do work directly with teams however this is happening in small pockets of activity, time-bound to projects so the knowledge and experiences gained from working in new ways are not spread more widely.
Our team is under a lot of pressure to deliver across a range of projects, however we are not yet setting the direction ourselves for where our energy is best used. It feels as though we are at a critical point now of both working to prove ourselves whilst beginning to lead more strongly the direction of the team.
Q: What’s the future for Service Design in your organisation?
A: This is something the team are continually reflecting on and now emerging from a period of massive change during the pandemic, we are taking the opportunity to refresh our direction of travel. In the short term, the team is growing to accommodate more work as the demand for our team remains high.
Q: A service you wish you had designed
A: The Maggie’s centres for those receiving cancer treatment are a wonderful example of the coming together of clinical and pastoral care, with thoughtful architecture and interior design. “Maggie’s Centres are the legacy of Margaret Keswick Jencks, a terminally ill woman who had the notion that cancer treatment environments and their results could be drastically improved through good design.”
Q: How can people follow you?
A: @a_ricketts
Service Design-in’ is a collection of thoughts and interviews with Service Designers working within organisations. If you want to share your views, please reach out.
