Embedding service design in a big organisation

The shift to embedded service design.

In the recent Restarting Britain report that I helped put together, we discussed different ways that organisations could bring service design to bear.

I’ve experience working in or with almost all of the models presented. But for me the embedded one is the most interesting as it’s where I believe most organisations are maturing to. In many cases we’re seeing organisation leave the agency-led era, where external facilitators have proved service design in small to medium-size ways, and commissioners are now seeking to scale its application in larger ways. Achieving this requires an internal design workhorse – a team of people spending dedicated time service designing within the organisation.

But what shape should this embedded team take?

Often it’s the case that many supporting elements exist – research, BI, MI, UX teams etc – but they aren’t bound into a whole. I was speaking to a client just the other day who asked me what an ideal greenfield Voice of the Customer team would look like. I love the intent of this question as it shows that design leaders are being asked about the future (significant), but the form of the question is wrong. For me it’s about binding qual and quant insight into a design led decision making function – which can apply that decision making at short, medium and long term cycles. For instance – tailoring live multichannel contact points, monthly redesigns of top tasks ‘in beta’, and annual innovations of the future operating model. We need to leave old models like VOC behind and wake up (or wake up our clients) to the opportunity of holistic, strategic service design within organisations.

So how do you best bundle them? And what steps should you take to bundling them up?

A case study.

The Government Digital Service is “a new team within Cabinet Office tasked with transforming government digital services.” I’m not that close to what they do, so I’m reading this case study from a distance via conversations, journalism and hearsay. My guess is that GDS was perhaps originally positioned as an agency, with a roving government brief – nothing too threatening, people didn’t have to buy them, and so they avoided ruffling civil service feathers (a standard critical success factor in most public sector projects). So this gave them a chance to wrestle some early projects, build credibility and thus develop a head of steam. But as the business case for design in government became clearer, they changed their footing. I’m not sure when it happened, but they became a mandated ‘fact of life’ for most departments and NDPBs. What’s remarkable is that this has happened to the extent that their design-led philosophy is now embedded in government and is becoming part of the DNA / fabric. I for one very much look forward to seeing what happens as a result. I’ve been taking a number of projects on a similar journey – from early ‘following our nose’ agency-style projects, through to tactical/guerilla change programmes, and on to setting up embedded service design teams. I see other case studies like this all around.

(Interesting aside: why is it not the Government Design Service or the Government Customer Experience Service? Most likely because digital is all about channel shift, which is all about reducing costs, which is all about everything in government right now! But I can see a point in time in the future where Digital will get dropped / replaced. Particularly if the Number 10 / Cabinet Office push on service design grows legs)

So what are the ingredients of an embedded team?

• Dedicated resource – agencies move in and out of the organisation, being drawn on to deliver tactical work. You need a dedicated resource to run embedded work. And I don’t mean two people who basically manage agency work – I mean a team of people who live and breath the strategic challenge of the organisation
• Diplomatic skills – agencies don’t have to be diplomatic – they are commissioned to do the work by someone who has done all the business case smoothign and chaping for them. But the embedded team need to be politically minded to survive the big corporate structures. Many technically adept serviced designers have failed to scale their offer because they overly rely on the “service design flag of intuitive brilliance”. Remember – people don’t care about service design. Work out what they care about and latch service design onto that. 
• Clear methodology – this one is a bit yawn-y but important. Method makes most people’s eyes roll, but what I mean here is that you need a logical spine onto which you can latch your work (see previous point). Otherwise you will be dancing a different dance to every buyer. Some basic principles, a flow of work, that people can ‘buy’ in easy chunks.
• Clear benefits / metrics – service design competes with lean, systems thinking, business process re-engineering etc. You will need a business case that is stronger than theirs. Stronger because people will buy the weaker business case they know, than the stronger business case they don’t know. Get early clarification on what the big measures are – NPS or Customer Effort? And how these trade off against more traditional sacred cow measures such as AHT? You need to fit into what is measured, as that it what is worked on.
• Ways in – you will need to spend time networking. Usually this scares the design ponies as lots of designers do their work ‘in a corner’. But plenty of service designers are all about engaging in co-design and co-creation so this fear is removed. Good – because you need networks, conversation starters, watering holes to communicate the “bloody difficult business proposition that is service design”. This stuff takes time to land and connect into people’s brains.
• Champions / evangelists – probably the biggest one. You need people to make the initial connections happen – people to provide air cover, people to knock heads together occasionally, people who believe in service design. At GDS it has been Martha, Mike and Francis (I don’t know these people, but their first names sound so great in a row like that!). I have had people do it for me. I look forward to doing it for others.
• Story telling – once you get underway you need to be continually story telling – broadcasting the good work and success stories around the business to build that head of steam. The stories are the things that travel and give people reasons to seek you out. If you do your job properly these will just emerge – people will want to talk about it. That’s what service design does when it becomes embedded 

So if that’s the list, then how do you make the move to embedded?

• Earn your stripes. Develop some case studies. Make some progress. These are the things you will want to leverage and scale
• Create a shopping list. What do you need to become embedded? See the list above.
• Pitch it. Find a willing buyer / corporate sponsor who will not only willingly listen to your pitch, but has the clout to do something about it

I am very keen to see more GDS stories of embedded service design from around the world, so get in touch if you have any personal experiences to share. Thanks

Task rooms

In the future I’d like to see a situation where, close to every team delivering a service, there’s one or more ‘Task Rooms’. These would normally be meeting rooms where people sit and talk about interminable abstract problems, before breaking up to work solo on their desktop machines. But the Task Room is a bit different:

- the room is dedicated to a key customer task that the organisation is intent on delivering well to its customers
- that task is up on the wall, left to right – warts and all
- each wart is studied and obsessed about – why is it there? How can it be removed? What other warts are the customers seeing that we aren’t?
- one or more big customer personas should be on the facing wall. These are the poor people we are trying to help through all this
- you’d start with the big hairy high volume tasks, and as they got sorted you’d replace them with slightly less hairy but still important ones
- you regularly take people out of delivering the service, to the Task Room to work on the service – to eliminate the warts

That’s it. Not rocket science. Some are already doing something similar. Pixar has storyboard rooms running for 4 or 5 years, so they can continually live within the story and refine it to within an inch of its life.

European House of Design Management

I attended a one day workshop to expplore what a Design Management toolkit might look like and how it might help public sector orgs in Europe. It was organised by the DBA in partnership with Danish Designers, on behalf of the EU. Thought I’d capture my thoughts.

The exercise felt a bit constrained by the way the initiative was procured. The team had obviously had to rapidly find a hypothesis with reference points, which we as a group then rapidly dismantled. The models felt a bit old, dusty and out of step. But that’s by-the-by. It triggered the right level of debate, and the message was given and taken in good grace and I think there’s plans to take a design approach to the next stages.

What was interesting was the intersection of practice in the room. Design was there in many different forms: design managers, design leaders, design academics, service designers, public sector design enthusiasts – all sorts. I was struck by the route Design Management had taken from product, industrual and architecural routes, which made me feel a bit out of place, given I’ve come up through the digital UX route. This was a bit evident in discussions with me banging on a bit about how new methods like Lean Startup and Agile UX were conspicuous in their absence. Also the CX work coming from Bruce Temkin and CXPA. If we want a toolkit in 3 years that feels fresh, then it needs to be taking into account latest practice now!

Having slept on it, I guess my big hopes are:

1. An accredited design toolkit – so clients know what they are buying, get a degree of predictability in method and thus reduces overall risk of the purchase of design. Makes it easier for us to sell it. Something like what architects have evolved.
2. A route map that takes the reader from the steps: “what could we do”, “what should we do”, to “what can we do”, “what will we do”, with a parallel stream of “how should we do it”. Adopting strategic design into an organisation needs to be pitched as a bit of an adventure as it changes the way the organisation works – as evidenced by the Roca case study we were presented with by Raymond Turner, which echoed my own experience with my own clients.
3. A set of tools aimed at leaders (how do I envision and engage), managers (how do I change direction and drive through) and frontline staff (how do I become a designer and keep designing) – to help each group to handle the change on their own terms. Each will face very different challenges through stages of transition
4. A community for leaders (definitely) and managers (maybe at a later stage) to help them build understanding and confidence – hear from others, learn from their mistakes, seek advice from peers.
5. Language, tone of voice, pitch – Confidence is the major stumbling block here. Risk is the watchword in all this – the public sector hates it, but embracing it will help it survive. The relentless pitch to these guys needs to be “innovate to save. execute to survive” – design needs to be positioned as a low cost route to considerable savings, whilst also delivering better outcomes for staff and customers. We need to be clear that this is at the heart of the Design Management offer. We also need to make sure this doesn’t devolve into a dry EU toolkit. It needs to retain all the appealing and human ‘colour’ of design – the creativitiy and inspiration – the focus on storytelling, imaginatoin and drawing that we know often mark the turning points of projects. These things need to be embedded into the output and the way it is distributed.

Finally a note of concern about the 3 year timescale. Please please please can we not wait until then to deliver a perfectly form but hopelessly out of date toolkit? Can we instead borrow from the latest in design (Lean Startup and Agile) to reach a Minimum Viable Product in the next few months. Get that basic toolkit out there in the public domain, being used by a beta group and – crucially – failing to work, so we can quickly improve it again and again. The energy in the room yesterday will lend itself well to that way of working. 

Signal-to-noise – Service vs Customer Service

In Accenture’s 2011 Global Consumer Research Study they state that “consumers around the world are giving off mixed signals at a time when keeping consumer relationships strong is more critical than ever to providers. On the one hand, consumers claim they are more satisfied with the companies they do business w2ith. Yet on the other, they feel less loyal to companies, increasingly switch providers and shop for better deals as their expectations rise.”

I’ve been thinking about that phrase “mixed signals”. Generally consumers are pretty straightforward and its us organisations that are failing to discern signal-to-noise. I think consumers are signalling something pretty clearly. ‘Customer service is important to me, but it doesn’t drive my loyalty. How you help to meet my need drives my loyalty.’ I find this distinction is regularly confused in the service industry – between ‘customer service’ (what you do for customers who need help) and ‘service’ (how you meet their need). Let’s be clear – business effectiveness comes from the latter and not from the former. If all your customer experience work is focused on providing great customer service, you’ll have an efficient service but it’ll never be effective at achieving truly great loyalty.

The overlapping but distinct fields of Service and Customer Service

In many ways we already know this. Evidence indicates that customers don’t reward good customer service (which they consider hygiene), but they are certainly willing to punish bad service. This does not sound like the basis of a loyal relationship. HBR’s work reinforces that customer service in and of itself is not so important. (I know some surveys indicate that what people value from a service is friendly and informed staff, short queues etc – but they wouldn’t even be in the store without a great service proposition. Mostly I think this is the result of ill thought through survey structures.)

I’m witnessing this challenge at the moment. A Customer Service team that just doesn’t understand the purpose of the Service Design team. They have traditionally done continuous improvement against their own KPIs – though I feel have failed to realise that those KPIs are for a Customer Service team who’s modus operandi is increasingly to deal with failure demand. The Service Design team is there to focus primarily on the service proposition – what is the purpose of the organisation in the customer’s eye? – not whether they had a nice call experience. I don’t want to diminish the latter, as it is important, but the former is critical to long-term success and profitability.

Gov.uk went live the other day. It was a big day. Another chapter of user-led government opened. A new phase that brings us bang up to date as a country. And I’m not just talking about a nice new clean interface. This is not a cosmetic shift. The behind the scenes work involved here will have been considerable.

Government tends to the complex, like my kids tend to the nutella. To get one page of simple plain English content published will have taken multiple drafts, professional reviews, discussions to calm those reviewers, and redraftings. I know cos I’ve been there. I once argued with the owner of the Cider and Perry regulation over the phone for an hour. My suggestion that her 80-page regulation could be reduced to 1 side of A4 was literally heretical. That it was ‘impossible’ was one thing, but she also insisted that it was nigh on illegal. Her view was that government was obliged to lay down every fact, and it was the responsibility of the reader to learn, discern and take action. There was no sense that 80 pages of lawyer-level language was a barrier to some chap wanting to make and sell a bit of cider. That it was holding back UK PLC. That – far from being a civil ‘servant’ – she was actually hindering opportunity. (I never said that by the way. That wouldn’t have gone down well). Eventually I got her agreement on the basis that I wasn’t replacing her 80 pages, just preceding it. And she finally conceded that getting someone to understand the key points in 2 minutes meant they were more likely to read her lovely words in full – or something like that. Either way it was a small victory, and those days of early ‘transformation’ were built on small skirmish victories like this.

Hopefully this gives you a sense of how tough it was. And this was around 2002. There was little-to-no sense of ‘the user’, or their ‘user experience’ in government. We at businesslink.gov.uk had to run these arguments on a daily basis. We scraped through. We couldn’t point her to many universally recognised examples of user-led brilliance like Amazon. She probably hadn’t bought much online. There was no Apple back then. ‘Platform’ wasn’t even a word. We were still guerillas in the mountains of Whitehall. (he he – honest, it did feel a bit like that).

So Gov.uk’s launch has had a long trajectory. Thousands of sites, down to three sites (labelled – I always felt quite ridiculously – as ‘supersites’), and now down to one. This is an important history and one that many other countries are watching with interest. But I have to admit to some reservations, initially triggered by some of the language being used. Reading some of the coverage, you’d be forgiven for thinking nothing had come before gov.uk. References to the supersites always had the whiff of the “carriage clock gift” after 20 years of service. ‘They’re valuable websites. But they’re of their time. And times change.’ I paraphrase. I can’t deny any of those points, but emotionally I feel like Schmidt. In contrast, the language used to describe the gov.uk initiative has on occasion had the sort of breathless air of that which surrounds Silicon Roundabout. So I guess this post is part feedback, part air brake on things.

The overall look and feel is fantastic. It’s how government should be. Simple clean and with all unnecessary obstacles removed. It’s a site that gets out of the way. I had no problems at all using what was there. Getting the next bank holiday slap bang in the middle of the page is great. When it comes to interface – this is a great step forward.

My problems popped up with the content. I picked the ‘do I need to pay VAT?’ question as it was always a highly ranked search at businesslink.gov.uk. I browsed first, got to the Business Tax page and couldn’t find a reference to VAT. This was weird. So I searched ‘do I need to pay VAT?’ – again, no joy. I got ‘Pay your VAT bill’ on the standard search and ‘Amusement Machine Licence Duty’ on the detailed guidance.

This was even more odd, because the VAT decision marks a pretty major life stage for a business, so to leave it unsupported like this was strange. Also, businesslink.gov.uk had a pretty good interactive tool that helped you answer this question in a couple of minutes.

More worrying was where you go from there. The VAT helpline was listed a couple of page scrolls down the search results. But that kind of undermines the intent of digital by default (a call costs ££s, a web visit pennies). With a bit more creative searching I eventually found a “When to register for VAT” page, but the content on it was so light it didn’t really answer the question. The 2002 civil servant responsible for VAT would be turning in their grave! So… what do you do at this point? Well… you type ‘do I need to register for VAT?’ into google and then… well, god help you, it takes you here…

I haven’t had much time to dig further, but this example reinforces sone discussions i’ve had with folk in this area – that there’s still a challenge that gov.uk still needs to address. One which is an inevitable challenge given the Digital by Default pledge. And it’s this – the long tail.

Government can only be simplified so far. You can take the top tasks and clean them like a whistle, so that 80% of users skim through happy as a lamb. But government is complex – starting a business is complex – VAT is complex. If you run race horses in the UK, you will pay different VAT to a baker from Cornwall. You can’t fix this with a better interface. In one way the Cider and Perry lady was right – somewhere, somehow government needs to publish all the facts. This is a big hairy content problem.

In a digital by default world all of this content needs to live somewhere. And I want it all to live on gov.uk – it has the right philosophy, the right team, the right interface, the right mandate. But I don’t see it there. The current site feels a little too neat. A little too tight in scope. I know Direct.gov shouldn’t have had content on bee keeping. That’s proper ‘deep in the long tail’ stuff, so i wouldn’t expect to see it here. But not being able to answer my VAT question is more troubling, as that is arguably a ‘long neck’ business task.

Digital by default is about user experience, but really it’s about saving government pots of cash. Gov.uk is way cheaper than any of the supersites it has replaced. But we need to be careful that it’s not a false economy. The reason those big old expensive sites cost so much was (partly) because they required an army of people to work the content, and keep that content in-step with regulatory change – which was costly to track. (Government doesn’t have a team tracking changes. I had to commission a legal team in the private sector to track changes and notify me so I could keep my content up to date. To the point where – ironically – I often knew about a change in regulation before the originating department official did).

I don’t see any radical new way of handling that. I’m sure there’s a MUCH better CMS in there somewhere, with a MUCH better cross-departmental review process. But people still need to do the words. Agile UX will not help resolve that. Someone needs to argue with the 2012 equivalent of my Cider and Perry lady. If they don’t, then the service never gets beyond the cosmetic – it helps you get to and through the basics quicker, but it can’t help with the detail and the complex. So you end up back at the big old flabby departmental website, suffering through a tricky UI. And so we’re back with lipstick on a pig. A more glamorous, 2012 brand of high-sheen, uber-gloss lipstick – but still lipstick.

Since leaving businesslink.gov.uk I’ve graduated from guerrilla tactics, though only a bit. I still feel most of my work happens in the trenches. Multichannel service design in the public / private hinterlands is a tough gig. It’s upstream from the interface. It’s trying to get user-centred practice injected directly into the DNA of the organisation. Nirvana for me is changing the pig. This will not happen over night.

I feel a strong kinship with gov.uk. We’re fighting on the same front. We carry much the same kit. But I worry that thus far – after quite a long prototype cycle – they haven’t tackled the big hairy content issues, of which my admittedly singular VAT example appears illustrative. (Incidentally – I am probably a bloody awful reviewer of gov.uk. Having spent a chunk of my career running businesslink.gov.uk, I am always going to be a bit defensive of it, and perhaps sharply critical of any replacement – but equally, I hope that experience can provide a useful vantage point).

But it’s early days. And there’s plenty to indicate a possible win in the long-term pig-changing battle. Major air cover from Maude. An inspiring and talented front lady in the form of Martha Lane Fox. An experienced and energetic team who’ve now cut their teeth. Every win they have on this front will help all of us involved in building better services. Getting gov.uk to this point has been a considerable achievement. I don’t want to take from that. I just hope that there’s a programme manager in there somewhere, already limbering up for phase 2 / eternal beta, supported by a crack troop of ninja-like content editors, ready to do Cider and Perry battle, and laser focused on answering my VAT question in under 2 minutes.

Mobile tariffs

I just experienced some silly mobile tariff nonsense from otherwise pretty reliable O2. I regularly eat through my 500MB of data, so I got on web chat and asked if they could do better. No was the answer – not without me paying an extra £10 a month. I dug my heels in and said a) I wasn’t prepared to pay that and would just ration myself and b) I would find a new more flexible provider come October. Immediate capitulation from them and now I’m paying £1 LESS a month for double data allowance – because I’m a ‘valued customer’. Valued customers shouldn’t have to threaten to leave to get some flex.

The biggest irony though is that I was willing to pay a bit extra for a bit extra data, and instead I’m now paying less for twice as much data. Add that to the cost of serving me, and the damage done to their brand by driving up my customer effort and O2 come out at a clear loss. 

Corn

I’m reading The Omniovore’s Dilemna at the moment. I just read that it now takes 2 energy calories to produce 1 food calorie. Basically modern US farming has avoided the need for sun by securing its nitrogen from fossil fuels. That and a tangle of farming subsidies has led to industrial food production, where the majority of farmers grow too much corn (which is used in everything) and soya (which feeds livestock / meat protein), which they then can’t sell at a profit – so the US government spends $13b a year to subsidise it – which is all just plain crazy.

It had me reflecting on the day that DEFRA, or whatever it was once called, announced that it was abandoning any pledge for the UK to have self-sustaining food production. Can’t remember when it was but   I do remember thinking ‘this is odd and somehow not quite right.’ Surely where your food comes from is pretty important, but I’m guessing the economists had done some clever sums and the costs worked out better, whatever abstract instinct I might have had. Though it turns out that this sort of loaded, economics driven farming is actually very risky for all of us. 

Today I read that the recent freak weather in the US has left 74% of last month’s US corn as ‘substandard’. And given the insanely complex world of US agriculture I get the odd sensation that no-one knows what the implications will be – other than confusion – which = low confidence – which means market turbulence, which we really don’t need now. 

Who ever thought that relying on large, undiversified, single cash crops, across diverse international markets would be sensible? I guess the cynic in me would say Cargill and their ilk – who clearly, as the largest privately owned company in the world, have some clout on this stuff. Either way I have learnt 2 things – we are in for more turbulent times (who after all really thinks that our weather is going to calm down?) and I should probably start growing some vegetables.