Scaling the design of good services
You’re the CEO of a large organisation. You want the products and services you offer to be the best. The most used, the most loved, the most efficient to run or the most effective at doing the thing they’re meant to achieve.
Everyone is full of advice. Have you structured your organisation for the digital age? What’s your target operating model? Have you mapped your organisation’s capabilities? Do you have a blueprint for your organisation? What does customer insight say? What about business design? Don’t you have a blueprint for your it? A target architecture? And now there’s someone recommending you hire service designers. You wonder how is that going to be any different to whatever it is the transformation team are doing, the strategy team, the business change team, the new innovation lab, the business architecture team and all the agile delivery teams. And if so, how does it all fit together? It’s noisy. It’s exhausting for anyone trying to understand what to do and how to do it. And it’s fragile.
In large organisations, the internal departments, teams and disciplines grow organically over time and boundaries form. Organisations like these aren’t structured to deliver joined up, cohesive services and products. The result is portfolios of hundreds of projects all building and changing things without the clarity on whether these are the right things and whether it’s all cohesively making products and services better.
Across an organisation, people hold different beliefs about how good design and delivery happens. Some believe you need to know exactly what you’re doing before you start, to avoid duplication, to standardise on technology or to reach a designated ‘future state’. This view works pretty well for infrastructure and hardware, for example. Others will state that you can’t know everything up front and so to avoid building something expensive that doesn’t work or isn’t fit for purpose any more, you need to start small, and learn and adapt as you go. More true of software and web-based applications or services.
For a service designer entering a large organisation like this, you face three challenges. You’ll be working with some people that don’t agree with you how to do design, in an organisation that isn’t structured to work on services and often with the ask that you are the one that explains how this all fits together.
The most harmful thing would be to position Service Design™ as The New Thing, with a competing set of artefacts and processes to counter all the other artefacts. You could be repeating the same behaviour that led to some of the underlying problems in the first place and it’s not likely to land well.
If the goal is to design good, joined up services, we already know this takes the work of many different people — frontline staff, behind the scenes decision makers, analysts, data scientists, technical architects, user researchers, infrastructure specialists. At scale, no one single person can design the service, there can be 50–100 different delivery teams working on different parts of the same thing.
To make this collective work ‘good’ and therefore design better products and services, we need ways to align work and provide direction while leaving room for autonomy and learning. When we ask ourselves what makes services ‘good’, we open up a way for everyone to contribute:
• If this service worked really effectively and efficiently, what would be the end result? What would we see happen?
• If the best service is one where no one has to do anything, how could we design this service to be the best?
One way to align people’s different beliefs about how good work happens is to collectively articulate really clear desired outcomes for a service, or a stage within a service — the ‘what we’d see’ if this worked really well. Whether for policy intent, operational efficiency or because we’d fully met user needs.
A team at the Home Office is identifying indicators or measures of how well end to end services achieve these desired outcomes. They’re exploring how useful this is as the basis to frame new work or re-shape current work. It could be used by an end to end service owner to make new investment decisions. It could help align the work and focus of multiple different teams all delivering parts of a large, complex service.
All the work happening in agile delivery teams, in business change units, in strategy teams and boardrooms and in new policy making, should ladder up to have clear relationships to desired outcomes (e.g. that an organization gets the data it needs to make a robust decision) and performance indicators (e.g. number of human hours spent processing). The work that is needed most is to effectively guide and facilitate the work of others to achieve this. And this is a great remit for a new CEO, who needs a diverse and open-minded team to achieve it.
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Kate Tarling provides digital and design leadership, training and coaching. She previously worked with the Home Office, Government Digital Service, financial services and social enterprises.
