The Journey to Digital Transformation
On Thursday the 30th of April I had the pleasure to give a virtual talk for the Leeds Digital Festival titled “The Journey to digital transformation: how to move past challenges with a Service Design mindset”. Video available here.
Having so many people joining in from all over the word was an incredible experience and I was truly humbled by the level of interest and engagement during and after my talk.
In this post I will share the key insights I have discussed during the talk and provide some answers to the questions I received during the Q&A section at the end of my talk.
Please reach out to me or comment on the post if your question wasn’t included in my answers here, or you wish to discuss any of the following further.
SHORT SUMMARY & KEY INSIGHTS
During my talk I discussed the importance of moving away from the expectation of digital transformation projects as easy and straightforward.
It is more effective to start to understand digital transformation as a journey and embrace the challenges that come along the way.
Adopting a Service Design mindset throughout this journey can be very helpful with:
Broadening and deepening the understanding of people
- Considering all the actors important in your journey (e.g. Ecosystem map, Personas, etc.)
- Engaging with them to understand their perspectives, collecting valuable experiences and learnings.
Breaking into existing ways of working
- Making digital transformation an inclusive process (Empathy & Collaboration)
- Providing everyone with methods & tools to visualise the processes and contribute with new ideas
Thus, my recommendations for those who are about to start a digital transformation process are to:
- Embrace digital transformation as a journey: Accept challenges, avoid template and define yours, spend some times defining the direction of travel
- Understand people: conduct User Research and map your ecosystem
- Pay attention to ways of working: Care about the way you deliver work and pay attention to the needs of your internal teams.
- Invest in Design: empower design teams and embed design as a key strategical element for the success of your business.
Finally, if you are a Service Designer reading this Trust your tools to help the teams outside your brief.
QUESTIONS, THEME 1: METHODOLOGY
Do you have any go-to methods for visualising a brief?
Visualising the brief and re-writing is one of the key moments in every service design project I take on and getting this phase right is crucial for the final success of my work.
The way I understand this task is to move away from a brief that doesn’t talk to me clearly, to a brief that is more approachable as a service design practitioner.
The first step I normally take is to look for those elements in the brief that are useful for me to start planning my service design work, such as:
- Problem statement (or research questions)
- Supporting research or assumptions
- Goal(s)
- Success criteria(s)
- Starting point (e.g. existing product & services)
- People: Users & Stakeholders
- Risks
- Milestones & Deadlines
I prefer to start doing this first in an unstructured way, reading the brief a couple of times and capturing all the interesting information I find either on my notepad or a whiteboard/wall when available (nowadays I use Miro boards). Working “freely” from a specific structure at this stage helps me to avoid the feeling of being constrained by a specific form to fill and instead to choose the best method to visualise the information in the brief only after I have a clearer idea of what has been shared with me.
Normally, I would say that most of the content included in the briefs I end up visualising in:
- An initial roadmap with goals, milestones, and deadlines.
- An initial user journeys/service blueprint to start breaking down the part of the service/product in scope and the associated pain points.
- An actor/ecosystem map to highlight the people and system involved in the project.
- A question log to capture all the gaps, information missing and subjects to explore further.
All of these artefacts act as my initial understanding of the challenge that I can validate with the rest of the team and stakeholders to plan my next set of actions.
To summarise, I believe that when possible you should always choose the methods to visualise the information in the brief depending on the content that has been shared with you. Over time you will start noticing the methods you feel more comfortable with, creating your go-to methods, however I urge you to never stop exploring and experimenting with new ones. It is much more effective (and fun!) to be able to use more than one method for whatever task you need to complete.
If you want to explore more method choices, I would recommend you to check out the Service Design Doing book, which has some great resources or look into some online resources such as:
How one can make sure that multiple mental models of end users will be satisfied with one Service Design Standard ?
As this question correctly points out the end-users of your product and services can be very different from each other.
So, the first step to carry on your work as a Service Designer effectively is to work closely with User Researchers in your organisation, if you have any. Their findings and insights will be incredibly helpful for you to get a better on how your users think, feel, and do. If there are no User Researcher on your team, try to conduct some User Research yourself.
Second, make sure to test your design with more than one “type” of user. Always validate your assumptions, journeys and prototypes against different type of user needs and scenarios, capturing what goes wrong and iterating based on the feedback. If you don’t have the chance to do this work with real users, try to create some personas from your research findings and ask yourself: How would they approach the different steps of the journey? Would they struggle at any point? How could I address those pain points? Am I missing out on any opportunities?
So, my advice is to know your users, always test your product & services with them, learn and iterate.
How do you decide which tools to use when your team has different skill levels & knowledge or which tools are most versatile and can be used for multiple purposes?
One of the values I believe to be more important in my practice as a Service Designer is the one of collaboration. In my experience, the greater the collaboration in your project, the higher the chance of achieving successful outcomes. So to answer your question, my personal choice always goes to choosing tools that allow the highest number of people to contribute in the design process.
This is as important when considering tools in terms of software (e.g Sketch, Miro etc.) as it is when choosing the methodology to use inside the projects. In my experience, it is better to use methods that team feel comfortable contributing to and build from them, rather than forcing them to use yours. In this sense it helps that many methods are thought to be built incrementally: it is easier to create a good service blueprint starting from a user journey or to build a business model canvas when you have already a value proposition canvas.
I would also go as far as saying that you should also try to minimise “design jargon” where possible, if you wish to encourage more design “outsiders” to contribute to your work. For example I found it surprisingly beneficial to start conversations over user journeys, tech touchpoints etc. when I expressed them as “series of steps”, “process”, “resources” to design outsiders.
QUESTIONS, THEME 2: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Should we still be calling it ‘digital’ transformation? Isn’t it just transformation to cater for current and future needs better?
Working as a Service Designer for a tech consultancy I tend to use quite often the term “digital transformation”, as most of my projects involve ways in which digital technologies and digital ways of working can contribute to delivering value to the users and organisations.
However, it is fair to say that the subject of transformation (or change / innovation) can be discussed without specifically touching on the the impact of digital technologies in this space. In fact, there are many books and studies dealing with the subject in which technological consideration are not central in the dicourse (e.g. social innovation, cultural change inside organisation, etc.).
I believe that an interesting reflection to have in attempting to answer this question is what is the importance we should give to the problem space (e.g. need to change or transform) and the one of solutions (e.g. digital technology).
Normally as designers we work to serve the user needs regardless of the specific solutions we implement (digital or not), hence we prioritise looking first on how to address the problems over the solutions. However more and more often we rely on digital technology to implement solutions for our users.
So, I believe that the value in keeping the term digital transformation is to allows professionals in debate specifically on the many tech solutions we create: exploring trends, debating over ethical considerations, and learning from each other. Nonetheless we should never assume that the only solutions available come from digital technologies and that “off-line” or “low-tech” solutions are still very relevant to explore. A good example, in this case, is the need of granting the access to basic services (e.g. government & banking) to those with low digital literacy, so imagining services that can be consumed through multiple channels.
How do you embed a culture of continuous improvement and transformation rather than it becoming a one-off /time limited thing?
To be honest, I still feel I have lots to learn on this specific subject, so take my attempt to offer you some suggestions to this question with a light heart.
Personally, the technique I found most effective so far to establish a culture of continuous improvement and transformation inside organisation is the one of finding sponsors or evangelists for your message across the team and especially among your most important stakeholders. These people shall be your allies when spreading your message of transformation and you can regularly catch up with them to discuss best strategy and tactics.
Another important point for me it is to always try to not loose momentum after big transformation projects. Keep your transformation team engaged for example by re-purposing your routines and by trying to continue delivering bite-sized innovation projects while you wait for your next big one. A couple of suggestions could, could be to use your stand-ups as modd check-in with your team; re-purpose your show & tells for people to share interesting trends and innovations; and use retros to discuss your achievements as an organisation and how to improve your internal ways of working.
I hope this can be a good start for you, as I continue to prepare for a better answer :)
QUESTIONS, THEME 3: USER RESEARCH
According to this situation, how can we get real user experience during running research? And is some user research/testing always better than nothing? Even if it’s just testing a prototype with family members/your household?
If you are struggling in recruiting participants in this period, remember that some user research is always better than no user research! Be aware of the assumptions in your design and try to test with end-users as soon as you have access to them.
Despite all the current limitations, we at Sparck & BJSS are continuing to work during lockdown to deliver user-centered products and services, so I would encourage everyone to still keep investing and accounting for user research in their projects. There are now a number of tools and guides available on how to recruit and conduct effective research remotely. My colleagues Natalie Pearce and Alicia Grimes have provided some great insights on the topic here (See Theme 2).
