Redefining processes through Service Design

June is the month in which Service Design Day is celebrated and you will surely find on your LinkedIn or design blogs posts and articles related to the discipline more than usual. Almost always my participation is in forums, workshops, or activities organized by groups such as SDN Chapter Monterrey, but this time my way of celebrating the date is by sharing how my Service Designer mindset helped me identify opportunities in a project that is not necessarily within the discipline.

From a few years, we have been able to hear a bit more about Service Design and there are several definitions of the discipline hanging around, however, when people think about Service Design, optimizing processes is not the first thing that comes to mind.

Service Design is more often associated with innovation and creating new opportunities, but making existing services more user-oriented to prevent failure, is also a powerful application of Service Design. Some challenges can’t be solved with a management mindset and require a different approach to do things better.

For about a year now, I have been part of a UX team in a digital transformation project that represents a big challenge for most of the team every day. As consultants, we often face some incompatibility in the work culture that exists between a client and the company, as you can imagine, this was not the exception. We found communication problems, siloed information management between teams that limited our visibility in internal projects, outdated technologies that we had to relearn to fit into the client’s work process, among other things that made it complicated to perform and deliver the way we are used to.

These micro signs have ranged from not having an up-to-date design repository to have version control of the files, to the lack of constant communication and feedback between the client and the team. This evidenced that there were opportunity areas within the client’s design process that had to be addressed to improve the performance and the team’s comfort within the project.

The information to uncover opportunity areas for improvement was there, in the experience of my colleagues who had been assigned to the project for many more months than I had. We just had to find the correct way to collect, analyze, and hierarchize it to create an action plan that would generate the change we needed, considering the client and the team needs.

As a Service Designer, I am constantly trying to understand processes and their impact on both users and business to suggest improvements. For me, it was easy to see the big picture from the outside (macro vision) and understand that you had to break it into parts to start small and gradually scale it. If as a team we understood that with small adjustments in our process, we could positively impact the rest of the teams and be able to break silos and decentralize information.

Bringing the information together

We organized some co-creative sessions within the UX Team where we used a tool based on AJ & Smart’s Lightning Decision Jam. Although we were not focused on a particular user, we as “service providers” were also operating within it, so the solutions that resulted from this exercise would impact our work to have better delivery.

The exercise we did looked like this:

1. We divided the design process into stages and added some other important topics such as “project onboarding”, “file search and versioning” among others and in each of them we defined what was moving us towards good performance? and what was holding us back / slowing us down from achieving good performance?. We ended up working with 8 topics.
2. Then, we looked for patterns and grouped the information that we gathered. We decided to focus on the things that were holding us back/slowing us.

3. From here, we began to identify how each group of information impacted the team’s performance, how we could tackle it, and which stakeholders were key to be able to solve the problem.

Along the way we realized that we had not identified all the stakeholders, so it was the right time to take a few steps back and map all the stakeholders that were important for this exercise.

Voilá! We had more than 20 groups of information with solutions that could be tested or implemented to help change happen. But what were we going to tackle first? We had to evaluate the solutions within two axes:

• Control. Which solution was in our control, I mean, what we could start working inside the UX Team without involving the client vs
• Time. The time that the implementation of each solution would require.

But how would we be able to evaluate the changes? If any solution was implemented, how would we be accountable that the solutions had been successful? We needed to define some concepts that would allow us have a baseline to measure success tied to numbers that were important for the leadership team and the client as well. So, the evaluation in axes evolved into a matrix in which we added: the complexity of the implementation and the time savings each solution would bring into the design process. (Which would later become money savings)

CONTROL: How much control we have on the implementation of this solution. TIME: How quick we could implement the solution. COMPLEXITY: How easy it would be to implement the solution. SAVINGS: How much savings this solution will bring.

We used this matrix to evaluate and hierarchize all the solutions. The value numbers (x4, x3, x1, x2) were defined with the leadership team. For the points awarded to each category we used just 3 scores: 1(less), 3 (mid) and 5 (more). Example for Complexity: 1 not very easily, 3 somewhat easily and 5 very easily. Finally the process (maths) naturally gave us the top 5 solutions to start working on. 🎉

Outcomes and Takeaways

This work has taken us a couple of months and we are currently in the process of implementing some of the solutions and at the same time, we are negotiating internally to implement some others. Although the process continues, I would like to tell you some initial outcomes:

• Have key information that can help support change and that is helping turn things around that seemed impossible to change at first. For the leadership team, this exercise was a very valuable tool that allowed them to deeply understand the state of the team and the needs we had.
• Identify and fix the lack of structure. We were able to understand our processes, actors, roles, responsibilities, and areas of improvement.
• Identify opportunity areas in other teams. We could replicate the exercise within other teams inside the project to identify opportunity areas in their processes and break silos.
• The opportunity to increase the efficiency of the design team and improve the quality of the deliverables. Within the UX team, we were able to identify gaps that could become another great project. Such as DesignOps implementation for the orchestration and optimization of people and processes to amplify design’s value and impact at scale.

I’m aware it was not a complete double diamond process, but this exercise was an opportunity to confirm that there are always better ways to make our work better and more efficient. For me, this exercise brought some takeaways:

• The importance that as designers, is crucial to understand client’s language. In this case the stakeholders and leaders are people outside the design environment, so it was pointless to talk about technical stuff that maybe wasn’t that relevant for them. Instead, I tied the solutions to the impact this will bring based on the metrics that are considered important for the account leaders and the client. Always keep in mind the importance of knowing what does success mean for your client as well as knowing the metrics that will define this. (Operational KPI’s, operational goals, business KPI’s, etc.) Understanding this and speaking this language will help you have allies and sponsors to promote your solutions.
• Things work better when you share and co-create. This exercise and its outcomes would not have been possible without the collaboration of my team and my leaders.

All this work of months has been a great win for me and my team. Now, besides continue working on the implementation of the solutions, my commitment is to continue being an advocate of the discipline within Accenture. Showing what Service Design does instead of what Service Design is. Making the intangible tangible, turning it into something people can see, touch, and quantify. Make it actionable, practical, tactical. Service Design is much more than digital touchpoints, Service Design is not tied to screens. Service Design is a strategic way to uncover opportunities that can turn into new business opportunities.

Thanks for reading until the end of this post. I would love to have your feedback or opinion.

D.✨

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The co-creative sessions were held virtually using Mural.