Service Design-in’ at Cancer Research UK
An asynchronous interview with Snezh Halacheva, Lead Service Designer at Cancer Research UK (CRUK).
Q: Ciao Snezh, please introduce yourself.
A: Hi. I’m Snezh Halacheva and I am the Lead Service Designer at Cancer Research UK (CRUK for short). I’m responsible for leading the Service Design capability at the charity. A ‘capability’ is the professional home for our Service Design practitioners, where skills and best-practice are developed and nurtured.
Q: What does CRUK do?
A: CRUK is a charity dedicated to saving lives through research in all aspects of cancer, as well as through influence and information.
We fund around 50% of all publicly-funded cancer research in the UK which makes us the largest independent funder in the world. To put this in perspective, last financial year we committed £443 million to research. We also invested £28 million in public awareness of cancer, its prevention and treatment, and working with the UK government and the National Health Service. We are able to do this because of the support of people who donate, raise money or support us in other ways like volunteering.
Q: How do you define Service Design at CRUK?
A: CRUK has not traditionally seen itself in the context of a ‘service organisation’. When the Service Design capability was officially formed in 2019, one of the first things we felt we had to do was agree on a definition of ‘a service’ and ‘Service Design’ that the whole organisation could get behind. We tend to adapt the definitions we use depending on the audience and the interaction we’re having. Here are some we often rely on:
Nielsen Norman's definition of Service Design:
Service Design improves the experiences of both the user and employee by designing, aligning, and optimising an organization’s operations to better support user journeys.
We like this one because of the focus on both user and employee and on optimising operations — something we often look at.
And this one:
A service:
- Is what a user (supporter/volunteer/researcher) sees, feels and interacts with
- Helps them to do something they need to do — make a donation, become a volunteer, apply for a research grant
- Is made up of the user experience, business processes and tools, which unlock value for the user
At CRUK, Service Designers collaborate with colleagues and our audiences to design new — and improve existing — services in order to better meet the needs of those users and deliver against organisational outcomes.
Q: What’s the current Service Design setup at CRUK? What’s the relationship between Service Design and the other disciplines?
A: There are 7 Service Designers in my team with a range of backgrounds and experience. Service Design is part of the Design function which includes user experience design, taxonomy and digital generalists. Design sits within the Technology department which is part of the Chief Operating Office (COO).
The Technology department sees itself as a partner for all the other parts of the charity, with a heavy focus on ensuring the right information, digital technologies and data are in place to help meet their intended outcomes. The department is organised around stable, multi-disciplinary product portfolios, which tend to align with the key functions of the charity.
As Service Designers we work closely with these product teams but our focus is on services which don’t neatly fit within the existing portfolio structure.
Q: Let’s talk about your Service design work. What are the typical initiatives you work on?
A: There are four different types of Service Design work we do (credit for this way of viewing work goes to Kate Tarling).
Type 1: We aim to steer new or redirect existing projects to orient them around a service; we help multiple teams develop a shared understanding of problems to solve and outcomes to achieve, across various departments and technologies.
Example: CRUK is investing in software which will enable us to improve how we sell high-value donated items on marketplaces such as eBay. Our work as Service Designers includes informing what software we should invest in based on a clear understanding of supporter, staff and organisational needs. In addition to this, we are also aiming to steer the project team to:
- review internal processes for listing items for sale online and the training we provide colleagues who perform this task (how do we reduce colleagues’ anxiety around distinguishing between real and fake items)
- review the wider experience we offer people who donate items to us (how do we achieve the intended volume and value of donated items).
Type 2: We work on projects which are part of a wider service — or programmes of work which impact multiple services.
Example: We are involved with a large-scale programme to replace our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, which is used by over 140 teams to record most of our fundraising operations. This technology change will have a big impact on all of our fundraising, donation, partnership, volunteering, retail and information services.
Type 3: We provide direction on how to approach design to achieve desired outcomes in a measurable way. We also design and test things with colleagues and users.
Example: We were part of the wider team which worked on the ‘Cancer Revolution: Science, innovation and hope’ exhibition at the Science Museum in London. The team was keen to encourage as many visitors as possible to stay in touch with the charity once they left the museum. We helped them think about how to design, prototype and test this ongoing interaction, so we could achieve the desired levels of engagement.
Type 4: Sometimes we get to shape a whole service from scratch.
Example: A team member worked on another large-scale project to replace the system CRUK uses to manage research grants, improve the experience of applicants and grant holders and better leverage research grant data to inform decisions. One strand of the project involved designing an internal service for managing reports and data from the new system, which included designing the relationships between different teams, the flow of information and setting success measures.
The Technology department has always been our home and a lot of our day-to-day involves understanding and working with tech and data. We even think of this as one of our ‘superpowers’.
On the flip side, it can sometimes feel like we have to work harder to get across the message that Service Design is not just about tech and digital.
On reflection, there probably isn’t an ‘ideal’ place for Service Design to sit within large organisations. We will always face silos but what we can do through our work and approach is reduce the hurdles presented by them.
Q: How mature is the Service Design approach at CRUK?
A: Over the last four and a half years, my team has focused on pooling our knowledge and skills, building our toolkit and creating case studies of our work and where we have added value to the charity. Although we tend to follow well-known design frameworks, we have to be flexible in terms of how we apply them and adapt our approach depending on what we’re working on.
Let’s take the double diamond as revamped by Dan Nessler for example.
We could be spending a lot of time in the very first stage, trying to influence the brief and ensure there is scope to take more of an end-to-end approach rather than focusing on just one element. Because of the nature of large organisations with traditional operating models, a lot of work is planned a long time in advance. If we don’t get a chance to influence how much time and budget is set aside for activities such as research with users, prototyping and testing we can find ourselves having to ‘fight’ for these activities to take place later on.
Sometimes we rely more on secondary research, as there is a lot of insight and data which already exists across the organisation and it’s our job to find it, make sense of it and determine if we are comfortable making decisions on the back of it. On occasion, we have to be explicit about the risks we take if we don’t allow time and space for primary research with users.
Another consideration is that because of how work is approved and prioritised, we may experience long pauses between the define and deliver stages, waiting to get business cases and people’s time approved.
In terms of the maturity of Service Design outside of the Design team, this really varies from area to area. There are teams and functions we have worked with who have a good understanding of Service Design principles and can see the value in applying them to their work. There are pockets of CRUK we haven’t been able to properly engage with yet. In an organisation of our size, which is often undergoing some form of reorganisation, we have to invest a lot of time and energy in building relationships and networks and ensuring we’re visible across different departments.
We often talk internally about Service Design in terms of having a Service mindset rather than following strict frameworks and processes. For us, this involves:
- Working in a co-creative, interdisciplinary way by bringing the relevant teams and departments together so that we can reduce the hurdles presented by existing silos.
- Looking at the end-to-end experience we offer our audiences, cutting across multiple products, teams and departments,
- Approaching a problem or opportunity from the perspective of the people we’re designing for,
- Bringing this outside-in perspective to our internal processes rather than reflecting our existing organisational structures back to our service users,
- Leveraging design thinking, lean and agile tools and methods to carry out work and helping colleagues adopt and adapt these to suit their needs,
- Encouraging and embedding ownership of services with the relevant teams; encouraging continuous review and improvement of services.
Q: Your Service Design work at CRUK. What are the most unsexy bits you ever worked on? What are the bits you are most proud of?
A: The nature of the work we do is varied. One of the things the team is currently working on is an app for patients aimed at improving their experience of taking part in clinical trials. Another is focused on improving colleagues’ experience of key internal HR and IT systems. We are also in the process of designing a better fundraising experience in the streaming space to capture new audiences and provide supporters with what they need.
The most ‘unsexy’ bits are also the bits I am most proud of. Over the last four years, we have been evolving our understanding of the services the charity offers and how well we are set up to deliver them. I wrote about this and why we were doing it back in 2019 when we were in the process of creating our first ‘CRUK service map’. Since then, we have gone through a few iterations and are currently on version 5:
We have added different layers such as which business capabilities and tech products underpin each service, as well as created detailed service blueprints of a number of the services. All of this work has been hugely helpful in a number of ways:
- It has made ‘services’ more understandable for colleagues.
- It has helped them see their role in the context of the services we offer; it has given us a shared language to talk about what we all do and how it fits together.
- It has informed key technology decisions such as what Customer Relationship Management system to invest in.
- It has allowed us to form close relationships with a number of teams and departments which are key for advocating for a service design mindset more broadly.
- It has allowed us to identify pain points and opportunities across a number of services, which have been fed into different initiatives, product backlogs and wider conversations about transforming supporter and staff experience.
Q: How do you prove the impact of Service Design at CRUK?
A: Measuring and proving the impact of service design is something we spend a lot of time thinking about. We wrote about this back in 2020 when we reflected on the challenges we face as service designers when it comes to using indicators such as cost savings and income generated to prove value.
We look for indicators such as:
- our expertise being requested on a piece of work
- colleagues referring to work they have done with us and using tools like service blueprints to tackle problems and make decisions
- redefining problems to be more centred around what users' and colleagues’ needs
- bringing teams together to work on a shared challenge.
We record success in this way alongside instances where we have improved outcomes for users and staff, made things more efficient or led to an increase in engagement and funds raised.
Compelling storytelling around value and impact feels crucial in a traditionally-minded organisation where it can sometimes feel like different disciplines and approaches are competing for senior leadership attention and buy-in.
Q: How do you educate CRUK on Service Design?
A: We try to be visible at as many different fora as possible across directorates, often by sharing our work and the impact we’ve had. We also rely on informal networks of colleagues who we have collaborated with to advocate on our behalf. This helps us with our bottom-up influencing and educating. We often seek out opportunities to get in front of senior leadership so we can showcase the work of the team and ‘lobby’ to get involved with initiatives where we think we can make an impact.
Sometimes it can help to shine an external spotlight on the work we do in order to draw more attention internally. So we encourage each other to share our work by blogging and taking part in service design events.
We have created materials we use internally such as blog posts, case studies and visuals. We also invite new colleagues to drop-in to one of our team meetings where we can give them an overview of what we do and how we can support them.
Q: What’s the plan for Service Design at CRUK?
A: Back in 2020, we shared our vision for service design at CRUK (as inspired by Kate Tarling’s work).
This vision still holds true and in the last couple of years, we have made good progress in helping the charity know whether its services are any good, doing work to improve them and creating tools that help everyone to make our services better.
However, our ambition is to move beyond modernising one service at a time and towards changing the conditions inside CRUK to enable us to put a service-focused lens on everything we do and design and deliver better services by default. I’m really looking forward to reading Kate Tarling’s new book ‘The Service Organisation’ for practical advice on how to do this.
Q: How can people follow you?
A: On Linkedin!
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.
