Touchpoint Vol. 10 No. 1 – From Design to Implementation by Service Design Network

vol 10 no 1 | august 2018 | 18 €

From Design to Implementation

34 SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTING SERVICE DESIGN PROJECTS Tina Weisser, Wolfgang Jonas,

Birgit Mager 56 IMPLEMENTATION BY DESIGN Karen Barrett, Ewan Cameron, Sam Hirsch, Martta Oliveira 68 DATA-DRIVEN SERVICE DESIGN Lassi A. Liikkanen

Touchpoint Volume 10 No. 1 August 2018 The Journal of Service Design ISSN 1868-6052

Pictures Unless otherwise stated, the copyrights of all images used for illustration lie with the author(s) of the respective article

Published by Service Design Network

Printing Hundt Druck

Publisher Birgit Mager

Fonts Mercury G2 Apercu

Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes Guest Editors Linnea Vizard Craig LaRosa Lorna Ross Project Management Cristine Lanzoni Art Direction Jeannette Weber Cover Illustration Jeannette Weber

Service Design Network gGmbH MĂźlheimer Freiheit 56 D-51063 KĂśln Germany www.service-design-network.org Contact & Advertising Sales Cristine Lanzoni journal@service-design-network.org For ordering Touchpoint, please visit www.service-design-network.org

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From Design to Implementation

With this issue of Touchpoint, we celebrate a milestone tenth year of publication. And rather than choosing a simple theme, we decided to tackle one of the trickiest problems of service design: How does service design continue delivering value through to implementation? In other words, what happens after that second diamond? If you’re a service designer with either ten years (or even one year) of service design experience, there’s a good chance you recognise a troubling pattern. There are too many examples where service design fails to follow through to implementation: customer journeys gather dust on a wall, or service prototypes that fall by the wayside once the realities of the business become clear during development. If you feel you can’t point to enough real world services you’ve helped design, you’re not alone. But fear not, the community has come together in this issue to hopefully provide some advice and insights. Tackling the challenge from the strategic front, Daniel Gomez Seidel has modified IDEO’s ‘Human-Business-Technology’ model by adding ‘Organisation’. By addressing the internal capacity of an organisation to deliver new products and services, he gives service designers a new way to ensure successful implementation of their work (Page 24). Munich-based Tina Weisser, working with Professors Birgit Mager and Wolfgang Jones, has harnessed the findings from a three-year international study, and proposed a ‘KUER’ implementation model for service design (Page 34). And right down at the operational level, Tim Macarthur shares how inspiration from Lean and Kanban can be applied to get service design delivery right (Page 52). Tim’s efforts for the service design community don’t end with this issue’s article, however. He’s among a dedicated team who are busily preparing to host the SDN’s 11th annual Service Design Global Conference, which will be held in Dublin on 11-12 October (with side events on 10 October). And underlining the importance of the theme of this issue of Touchpoint, SDGC18 itself will be titled ‘Designing to Deliver’. Tickets are already on sale and selling faster than ever before. You’re cordially invited to join the global SDN community in the autumn, to dive further into this fascinating challenge.

Jesse Grimes for the editorial board

Jesse Grimes, Editor-in-Chief for Touchpoint, has nine years experience as a service designer and consultant. He has worked in London, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf and Sydney and is now based in Amsterdam with Dutch agency Informaat. Jesse is also Vice President of the Service Design Network. Linn Vizard is an Independent Service Designer based in Toronto, Canada. She frequently teaches, speaks and writes about design locally and globally. Craig LaRosa is a Principal Director and leads Altitude’s New York studio where he is leading their retail experience practice. Before joining Altitude, Craig was Principal Director in Frog Design’s New York Studio where he led programs for Under Armour, and Total Wine & More. He understands customer and business ecosystems and how service design can bring them together into one holistic, ownable experience that connects organisations products and services with the people who rely on them. Lorna Ross is Group Director at Fjord Dublin. Lorna’s design career has been an remarkable journey spanning more than 25 years, with stops in the world of fashion, wearable technology and, most recently, health care. She is a futurist at heart, recognised for her ability to anticipate shifts in the social, cultural and economic context for design. Birgit Mager, publisher of Touchpoint, is professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD) in Cologne, Germany. She is founder and director of sedes research at KISD and is co-founder and President of the Service Design Network.

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Clarification

PHASE 1

KEY PREREQUISITES

Interventions

PHASE 2

UNDERSTAND & DISCOVER

Support

PHASE 3

ENABLE & DEFINE

Alignment

PHASE 4

REINFORCE & DELIVER

30 40 22 FEATURE: 2 IMPRINT 3

FROM THE EDITORS

6 NEWS 8

KERRY’S TAKE

Journey Managers by the Numbers Kerry Bodine

12 CROSS-DISCIPLINE 12 How to Stay Relevant

Daniel Ewerman, Sabina Persson 16 Innovation Labs to Scale Up

Service Design Gustavo Correia

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SERVICE DESIGN AT SCALE

24 Organisational Capability

and the HBTO Model Daniel Gomez Seidel

26 Building Bridges

Andrej Balaz 30 Thinking of Organisations as

‘Conversations’ Lotte Raun

34 Successfully Implementing

Service Design Projects Tina Weisser, Wolfgang Jonas, Birgit Mager

40 A Story of Failure (Almost)

Dorota Wecławska, Marta Malesinska

44 Political Principles Applied

to Service Design Ricardo Martins

49 Service Design Pattern

Language Luka Baranovic, Branimir Spajic, Natasa Dereta, Mladen Tica, Viktor Hlaca

52 Approaches to Service

Design and Delivery Using Lean and Kanban Tim Macarthur

56 Implementation by Design

Karen Barrett, Ewan Cameron, Sam Hirsch, Martta Oliviera

c ontents

Alternative expertise

V4 ............

ten

............

tim

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ver Ne

Innovation leadership

............

S4 ............

Rewards and Incentives

S5 ............

Building capability

Innovation work

............

Customer centric

............

Testing new ideas

............ ............

D3 D4

A2 A1

CT IV

Left Side

IC S

Co-creating with customers

Right Side

N DY

............

Resources for innovation

Desired Culture

Lived Culture

re Ra

S T RU C T U R E S

R A S T RU C T U R E

............

Flexible work space

IN F

............

ays Alw

Innovation strategy

............

Collaboration

V1 V2

Trust to take risks

Embracing change

Short learning cycles

Element

Scale

I AV

62 90 77 90 PROFILES 90 Robbie Bates

60 TOOLS AND METHODS 62 The Moment Culture Scan

Erika Bailey 66 The Service Teardown:

Follow the Money to Better Decisions Richard Ekelman

68 Data-Driven Service Design

Lassi A. Liikkanen 72 Taming Organisational

Challenges in Service Design Gassia Salibian, Alexandra Pratt

77 The Service Designerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

Time Machine Mike Laurie

80 Introducing the Service

Design Scorecard Simon Mhanna

84 Evaporating Empathy

Karin Lycke, David GriffithJones 86 Implementing Services Using

the Transaction Pattern Graham Wilson

93 INSIDE SDN 93 Thank You for a Great

Service Design Day!

94 Celebrating Touchpoint

Vol 10

96 Volunteers Help Deliver

a Successful SDN Finland National Conference

98 Making Meaningful

Connections: The SDN Midwest Conference

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DESIGNING TO DELIVER: SDGC2018

For 11th edition of the Service Design Global Conference, we are going to Dublin! Many great minds have said that ideas are easy — it’s implementation that’s the real challenge. For service design, it is no different. Journeys, visions and blueprints help us understand the end-to-end customer experience, identify opportunities and guide teams and organisations. But how do we ensure the design of the service is what gets delivered and goes on to make real impact in the world? We will be exploring this very topic in this year’s conference, with the theme of ‘Designing to Deliver’. Speaking of delivering, who’s going to convey their expertise on this subject this you? In addition to more than 200 submissions in response to our ‘call for speakers’, we’ve invited a top-notch line-up of renowned experts from the world of service design. Here’s a quick peek at two of our keynote speakers at SDGC18. Join us on the journey towards designing to deliver at the Dublin Convention Centre on 11th-12th October 2018. More information can

be found at www.service-designnetwork.org/sdgc/2018 and by following SDN social media and the Insider email newsletter. Lorna Ross, Fjord

Lorna recently returned to Ireland from the USA to take up the position of Group Design Director at Fjord in Dublin. Because the Fjord studio in Dublin sits within The Dock, Accenture’s multi-disciplinary research and incubation hub, Lorna has the unique role of placing design at the heart of the multi-disciplinary teams working on R&D projects which aim to address some of the biggest challenges facing society today. Patrick Quattlebaum, Harmonic Design

Patrick Quattlebaum is the co-founder and CEO at Harmonic Design, a consulting firm based in Atlanta, Georgia. Previously, he was principal designer at studioPQ, Managing Director at Adaptive Path and Head of Service Design at Capital One. An expert in design strategy and service design, Patrick works to make design practice more value-centred, collaborative and iterative.

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR PASSIONATE AND ENTHUSIASTIC CHAPTERS: SDN MEXICO, SDN POLAND AND SDN UKRAINE!

This summer, the SDN has been enriched by even more new international Chapters! During their building phases they shared their enthusiasm and connected the service design communities in their respective areas. SDN Mexico successfully held their first event, in which they discussed the future of the AI and how service design can transform it. In addition, they joined in the celebration of Service Design Day, with an event that brought the directors of large financial groups to discuss the role of service design in their organisations: Bancomer, CitiBanamex, Actinver, GBM and Scotiabank. SDN Poland has gathered the Polish community of service designers across the country’s sectors and regions, and held its inauguration event. And last but not least, SDN Ukraine held a meet-up and had an wonderful time with a range of service design practitioners from both digital and non-digital businesses being represented. They discussed what is service and what is service design, and how design thinking differs from business thinking. We can’t wait to see how these ambitious Chapters move forward! Check out upcoming events and activities being held by your local Chapter: www.service-designnetwork.org/chapters

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ne ws

SDN A SIGNATORY OF THE MONTREAL DESIGN DECLARATION

In late 2017, alongside 21 other international design organisations, the Service Design Network became a signatory to the Montreal Design Declaration. SDN Vice President Jesse Grimes, alongside Torontobased Chris Ferguson (Bridgeable), who also represented the SDN, were

PARTNERING WITH CUMULUS AND THE IXDA

Following contact and fruitful discussions in the months before and after the signing of the Montreal Design Declaration, the SDN is proud to announce it is developing working partnerships with both Cumulus and the IxDA. Cumulus is a global association supporting art and design education and research, and will be using the expertise of the SDN as input to help design model curricula for design schools, with respect to service design education. Cumulus counts 257 members from 54 countries. More information about

present in Montreal for the preceding two-day Summit and the signing ceremony. The document, which traces its roots to discussions started amongst a handful of organisations in 2016, “proclaims the potential of design to achieve global economic, social, environmental and cultural objectives and includes a dramatic call to action to professionals, educators and governments as well

the organisation can be found at www.cumulusassociation.org. Given the shared interests and overlaps between the disciplines of interaction design and service design, it is also positive to announce that the SDN and IxDA (Interaction Design Association) are working towards closer collaboration, which will shortly be defined by a Memorandum of Understanding between the two organisations. The IxDA was created in 2003, and counts more than 100,000 members in its ranks, and has more than 200 local groups. More information about IxDA can be found at www.ixda.org.

as a list of proposed projects.” It cites over 700 national entities from 89 countries associated with the signers, representing more than a million designers. To continue the momentum generated by the Summit where it was signed, a smaller group of organisation is seeing the project forward, and working to initiate several projects that aim to demonstrate the value of design – and better utilise the potential of design – in a global context. As a service designer, you are encouraged to review the Declaration, which can be found at www.montrealdesigndeclaration. org. Alongside the founding design organisations, the SDN will be present in April 2019 in Saint-Étienne (France), to continue the work discussed in Montreal, alongside the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne. Further news can be found at www.facebook.com/ montrealdesigndeclaration.

The growing partnerships with both organisations will become evident in late October 2018, when SDN President Prof. Birgit Mager will give a keynote presentation at Cumulus’ annual conference, in Wuxi, China. She will also join IxDA President Alok Nandi in giving a workshop at the conference. Information about the conference can be found at cumuluswuxi2018. org.

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Journey Managers by the Numbers At the end of July 2018, a LinkedIn search revealed 1,248 people with “Journey Manager” in their current or previous titles. Not all of these people are managing the types of journeys that you’re probably thinking of. Some of these managers, primarily based in the Middle East and Africa, are charged with securing oil and other valuable commodities as they make their way from point A to point B. But many are, in fact, managing the experiential journeys of customers who are doing business with their employers.

1,248 may seem like a large number, but it’s dwarfed by the number of results returned by a search for “Product Manager”: a whopping 1.4 million. Product managers have become a staple at Google, Facebook, Uber, and the rest of the tech industry. They gather customer insights, assess the competitive field, craft a vision, and shepherd their products through to production. And while they provide a mission critical service to their organisations, there’s one key problem with this role: silos. Product managers focus on, well, a product. They’re not tasked with helping customers find the product, learn about and evaluate it, buy it, install it, maintain or upgrade it, or cancel their subscription. That’s where journey managers come in. 8

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Journey managers have the potential to reinvent their organisations, bringing together colleagues from across departments and those unavoidable silos to ensure that customers have a smooth experience, no matter what part of the end-to-end journey they’re currently in. As our first foray into this research area, we wanted to understand the backgrounds of journey managers and the types of companies that are employing them. So in March 2018, Kerry Bodine & Co. embarked on the task of scouring 408 LinkedIn profiles of people who currently hold that position. Here’s what we found. Demographics We started by looking at geographical distribution. Accounting for 39 percent

of the LinkedIn members in our study, England is the clear leader in early execution of the journey manager role (see Figure 1). Scotland takes a distant second place with seven percent. Add in a few journey managers form each of Northern Ireland and Wales, and nearly half of those in our study (48 percent) hail from the United Kingdom. Next on the list are Belgium and the United States, a country with a population nearly 29 times of that of Belgium, which both account for six percent of our journey managers. Not surprisingly given the UK data, Europe employs the vast majority (77 percent) of the journey managers in our study. However, we did find at least a handful of journey managers on each of six continents. (No journey managers in Antarctica … yet!) Over the past decade, we’ve watched the discipline of service design flourish in Europe, then travel to North America — and the discipline of customer experience expand in the exact opposite direction. The high concentration of journey managers across the UK and mainland Europe, coupled with the dearth of those in North America, suggests that these positions are primarily rooted in the methodologies of mindsets of service design. We also looked at the industry category listed for each journey manager’s current company on LinkedIn. Banking and other

k e rr y ’ s ta k e

financial services firms account for over a third of those in our study (see Figure 2). Not surprisingly, the majority of the companies we examined are service-based. However, we did find journey managers in product-focused industries, including apparel and fashion, building materials, chemicals, cosmetics, food and beverages, luxury goods and jewelry, and packaging and containers.

Figure 1: Journey Managers by Country England Scotland Belgium United States Netherlands Australia France Germany Italy New Zealand

Education Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of the LinkedIn members we looked at hold a bachelor’s degree.2 Their most common areas of study were business, marketing, communications and media, and economics. Sixtyfive other journey managers listed further-flung disciplines, including fashion, geography, leisure management, law, and a variety of foreign language studies. Just over a quarter (26 percent) hold a master’s degree. Similar to what we found for bachelor’s degrees, the most common focus areas were business, marketing, and communications. Other top businessrelated fields included international studies, economics, and management. We also found lone journey managers with master’s degrees in chemical engineering, playwriting, pastoral studies, and sports management. Six members in our study, barely one percent, hold PhDs, with concentrations ranging from marketing and consumer behaviour modeling to biochemistry and environmental science.

Austria Israel Switzerland Other 0%

10%

30%

40%

Base: 408 Journey Managers on LinkedIn

Figure 2: Journey Managers by Industry Banking Financial Services Telecommunications Computer Software Utilities Insurance Airlines / Aviation Marketing & Advertising Nonprofit Retail Information Technology Other

15%

23%

30%

Base: 408 Journey Managers on LinkedIn

The LinkedIn members we looked at skewed 57% female and 43% male.1

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With only a couple of exceptions, we found that those LinkedIn members with master’s degrees and PhDs in specialised fields — such as engineering, sports management, or playwriting — do not work for companies directly related to their fields of study. Work Experience Just two percent of the LinkedIn members we reviewed have less than two years of overall work

experience (see Figure 3). The lion’s share of our journey managers (68 percent) have between five and 15 years of professional experience under their belts. Fifty-seven percent of the journey managers we looked at held previous roles in their current companies before taking on the journey manager role, while 43 percent were new hires. Honestly, this finding surprised us — we expected to see more in-house hires who could leverage existing

Figure 3: Journey Managers’ Total Professional Experience <2 years 2 to <5 years 5 to <10 years 10 to <15 years 15 to <20 years 20 to <25 years 25 or more years 0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

Base: 408 Journey Managers on LinkedIn

Figure 4: Journey Managers’ Previous Experience in Their Current Organisation <2 years 2 to <5 years 5 to <10 years 10 to <15 years 15 to <20 years 20 or more years 0%

15%

23%

Base: 233 Journey Managers on LinkedIn

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30%

relationships with people across multiple parts of the organisation. Of those that had previous roles in their companies, almost a quarter had been with their employees for less than two years, and just over a quarter had been with their companies ten years or longer (see Figure 4). The Journey Manager Role Sixty-nine percent of our journey managers have been in their current positions less than two years, reinforcing our hypothesis that this is still a nascent role industrywide (see Figure 5). But this position isn’t completely new. Seven of the LinkedIn members we looked at reported being in this role for over ten years — with three reportedly racking up 13, 16, and 23 years of journey manager experience! Regardless of whether they had been recruited from within or outside the company, only 18 percent of those in our study reported having previous journey manager positions. Of those who weren’t new to the role, just 39 percent had three or more years of journey manager experience before taking on their current position. Nearly two-thirds (73 percent) of the journey managers in our study hold this position as a full-time job. We’re concerned for the other 27 percent. We found part-time journey managers who were also tasked with jobs like inside sales, marketing, software development, and quality assurance — just to name a few. With multiple responsibilities, journey

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Figure 5: Time in Current Journey Manager Role <6 months 6 months to <1 year 1 to <2 years 2 to <3 years 3 to <4 years 4 to <5 years 5 to <10 years 10 or more years 0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

Base: 408 Journey Managers on LinkedIn

management is sure to take a back seat, just as customer experience did until organisations started dedicating full-time resources to this discipline. Sixteen percent of the journey managers we looked at had the word “Digital” in their title — occasionally with some indication of the specific digital journey they’re responsible for, such as claims, personal investing, or training. With people’s behaviour increasingly shifting towards digital, we acknowledge the need to focus on and improve digital interactions. However, we feel that focusing solely on digital channels runs counter to a customercentric view of journeys. With some exceptions, of course, many (most?) organisations still interact with their customers through physical channels: a paper statement, a visit to a retail branch, or a (dreaded) phone call. If journey managers overlook these interactions, they risk having a huge blind spot on key parts of the customer experience.

Kerry’s Take This first phase of our research has revealed several key takeaways for those looking to implement the journey manager role within their organisations: 1. Don’t waste time looking for someone with past journey manager experience — especially if you’re not located in Europe. Instead, recruit candidates who have shown the ability to articulate a future vision, are detailed planners, and possess the people skills required to herd stakeholders from across the organisation. In fact, it might be wise to hire someone with past product management experience. 2. Similarly, don’t hold out for someone with an advanced degree. A bachelor’s degree plus five to 15 years of professional experience should be more than an adequate background for someone taking on a journey manager role.

3. If cross-department poaching won’t cause a political uproar, consider hiring someone from within your organisation who has already developed good working relationships across the silos that are related to the journey(s) you’re initially focusing on. 4. Give your new journey manager the opportunity to focus on this role full time. In any mid-tolarge sized organisation, there’s certainly more than enough journey management work to fill a 40-hour week. Plus, a dedicated position will give your new hire the breathing room to work out the kinks of their role and ensure that future journey managers are successful.

1 Base: 395 2 Base: 405

Kerry Bodine is a customer experience expert and the co-author of Outside In. Her research, analysis and opinions appear frequently on sites such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company. Follow Kerry on Twitter at @kerrybodine.

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How to Stay Relevant Moving from what we do to what we deliver

The business field of service design is maturing, as more organisations have embraced the ideas and methods of design thinking and customer centricity as a way of improving customer experiences to drive profitability. Ten years ago, the challenge was to convince business leaders and organisations to adopt a customer Daniel Ewerman is the CEO and founder of Custellence. Previously he was Co-founder/ CEO of Transformator Design, and is as well a board member, columnist and a frequent keynote speaker on the topics of customer experience, service design and service innovation. He has published Customer Experience - Why Some Organisations Succeed ... And Others Don’t, in Swedish. He is also co-initiator of the Swedish SDN Chapter.

Sabina Persson is Head of Customer Success at Custellence. She has broad experience in marketing and sales, customer communication, CRM and customer experience from a range of business sectors such as banking, insurance and retail.

12 Touchpoint 10-1

centric point of view. Due to the work done by the service design community, many organisations now understand the value of the customer journey and strive to work systematically with it. The challenge today seems to be how to go from designing services and experiences to fully operationalising them. To tackle this, the role of the service designers will have to change, but in what ways? New possibilities for service design Once the subject and practice of a few, service design has now been embraced by large parts of the business world. As a result, many organisations are now building their own service design departments or functions, and the number of consulting companies with service design as a core skill is growing. In addition, considering the acquisition craze of recent years, in which design agencies were acquired by large management consulting and IT services firms, it seems obvious that service design has something worth investing in. Despite this, only a part of all great service design output follows through to implementation. Why is that? First, not all organisations are able

to harness the power of service design, and we believe this to be one significant reason. To be able to make true shifts in growth and profitability through service design, organisations need to have put service design close to their core agenda: — Service design and customer experience must have proven relevance and have representatives at a senior or executive management level. — Service design needs to be involved throughout the lifecycle of a project. — Processes, control functions and incentives based on customer/user experience need to be in place. — Performance tracked on customer KPIs must be set.

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STR ATEGY AND DESIGN

OPER ATIONAL ISATION

BUSINES S RESULTS

The business effect of service design output depends on how well the service design strategy gets operationalised. After all, one mediocre service design concept delivered all the way through is worth more than ten brilliant concepts that never made it.

While many organisations are moving towards this customer centric shift both strategically and in their operations, there is still much work ahead. Now is a great time for service design to contribute to the development of a culture in which service design is seen as an asset and a way of creating both customer and business value over time. However, this will require a bit of adaptation and adjustment on behalf of service designers. Perhaps the most important change is to make sure that the output of service design better resonates with the business logic of the organisations applying it. Secondly, and a natural shift, is that service designers need to turn their focus less to the frontstage insights and actions to include more of the backstage dimensions, such as processes, people and technology. In this article, we will highlight a few key topics for reflection. New ways of practicing service design To ensure that we create business value and enable service design implementation, it is time to stop regarding service design assignments as time-limited projects with one-off deliveries, and instead think of them as ongoing processes within the customers’ businesses. Consider the following common scenario: Service design is purchased as a project. It is well defined with a clear scope and cost estimate, as well as dedicated project members. By the end of the project, the deliverables are

lots of insights and a set of service design concepts for the organisation as well as a customer journey map and a service blueprint. The problem here is that there is seldom enough knowledge, money, mandate or incentives to secure the operationalisation of the service design outputs. In many cases, the operational departments who are responsible for managing the solutions and keeping them going are not prepared for the hand-over. Hence, the service design project sadly becomes a bubble of its own, with little connection or relevancy to the ‘real business’. Worse, by being irrelevant, this type of project and the associated costs can easily be deprioritised next time due to lack of resources. So, instead of practicing service design as one-off projects, how about finding ways to argue for and create structural capital for continuous change? Service designers have a long history of showing others how empathy is essential for creating customer centricity, but that just one side of the coin. The other side is the business case. Whether in-house or an acquired expertise, for service design to be considered valuable and worth investing in, it is crucial that it can produce continuous output that contributes to the business benefits. To do so, it is up to service designers to earn their own areas of responsibilities in business operations and to ‘own’ the outputs that drive customer experience and business performance KPIs1 . For instance, let’s assign the service designer to the customer experience agenda. Touchpoint 10-1 13

AC T UAL VS. MISPERCEIVED COSTS OF CUSTOMER CEN TRICIT Y

High

COS T

Misperceived cost

Actual cost Low Low

CUSTOMER CEN TRICIT Y

High

The rationale for not investing to deliver a great customer experience is often that the cost is high. But delivering great experiences actually reduces the cost to serve customers. It is the unhappy customers that are expensive as they are more likely to complain or to require support or even return products. By solving the source of dissatisfaction, customers are more likely to return, and we will also reduce the amount they cost us to serve.

everyone’s tool to use. Consequently, the way service designers use customer journey maps will have to change. In other words, we need to go from agreeing on the customer journey map as a change platform, to using it as one. As we touched upon earlier, many service design projects end up with a static customer journey map and/or service blueprint. That is a sure way of giving up the possibility of influencing and orchestrating the operationalisation of service design. Because even if the project is finished, no customer value has yet been created. To create value beyond solutions, we need to look closer at how we bridge the gap between delivery and implementation. For service designers, maybe it is time to reclaim the customer journey map and make it into a customer centric change plan. What if the service blueprint and journey map could be used to enable service designers to bridge the gap between design output and operationalisation? Treated this way, as living and evolving maps of change, holding up the holistic view of both the frontstage and the backstage, the journey map would offer not only a support structure for service designers leading the way forward through implementation, but also help to build a necessary structure and credibility for the service design profession.

A very concrete activity that drives value could be a quarterly update on the customer journey map. Or how about owning the monthly customer centric business intelligence reports and actions? The point is, that when constantly visible and proven to have a lasting impact on the business results, service design will transform from something that's an occasional nice-to-have, to an asset worth investing in all the time.

From methods to skills and superpowers There are as many tools and methods as there are designers. If service designers are to build credibility within a business context, we should consider sticking to and mastering a few good methods and tools. The great painters usually don’t use 50 colours, or new colours for every artwork, but rather 10 colours, which they master to a high degree of excellence. Also, when too much emphasis is put on methods and tools, it’s easy to forget the abilities that makes great service designers. Or superpowers2 , if you like.

New ways of using the customer journey map Once a trademark and a mark of quality of the service designer, the customer journey map is now becoming

1 Some typical customer centric Key Performance Indexes are: Customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, First Response Time, Problem Resolution Time, Contact Volume by Channel, Social Listening Stats, Referral & Review Rates

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c ro s s - d i s c i p l i n e

Read Touchpoint Archive Online In fact, organisations need the service designers’ unique set of skills now more than ever. To ensure end-to-end understanding, to tear down silos by involving crossdisciplinary team and experts. And for orchestrating the variety of skills and practices needed to change the systems and values and support structures of an organization or an experience. Perhaps it is time to consider the service designer more as a true change leader with a clear business case than an innovator? Although it might seem like a big task ahead, let’s remember that after all, one mediocre service design concept delivered all the way through is worth more than ten brilliant concepts that never made it all the way. Right? At the end of the day, service designers haven’t delivered value until it has reached the end-customer and made an impact on the balance sheet.

425 + articles free access

2 Erik Flowers (https://www.slideshare.net/helloerik/service-designsuper-powers) uses the term ’superpowers’ to describe the core skills of service designers, and these are empathy, communication, facilitation, systems thinking, synthesis, future visioning, storytelling, visualisation, making and leading.

Touchpoint, the Journal of Service Design, was launched in May 2009 and is the first and only journal dedicated to the theory and practice of service design. Published by SDN three times per year, it provides a written record of the ongoing discussions within the service design community. To improve the reach of this unique resource, Touchpoint has opened its Archive (all issues except the three most recent). That means more than 425 articles related to service design are freely available on our website. Enjoy the opportunity to search articles by volume and issue, by authors or keywords. Visit the SDN website and sign in for a free Community Membership to dive into the Touchpoint Archive! Full issues of Touchpoint may be also read on-screen and on mobile devices via the Issuu website and app.

www.service-design-network.org Touchpoint 10-1 15

Innovation Labs to Scale Up Service Design Implementing a service innovation lab for a Brazilian healthcare organisation Over the last ten years or so, innovation labs, under a variety of names, have been the weapon of choice for a number of large organisations attempting to accelerate product innovation and change. Even though the rise of such labs has been spearheaded by the tech, financial services, retail and telecommunications Gustavo Correia is a business strategist by education and a designer by choice. He is DesignOps Lead at Livework Studio and has more than ten years’ experience helping startups, companies and governments create their own futures. He is a specialist in conducting diverse teams and steering companies towards more user-centered, digital and agile operations. gcorreia@liveworkstudio. com.br

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industries, how they operate is still unique to each organisation. In late 2016, we at Livework helped conceive, implement and execute a Service Innovation Lab for the insurance branch of the biggest health assistance organisation in Brazil, with more than 18 million customers. In such a well established (and large) organisation, our mission was to improve customer experience as well as to provoke real, long lasting, cultural change towards a more digital, agile and user-centric operation. But, before diving deep into the design itself, we had to truly understand the business model we were facing, and it is safe to say that every insurance company operates as a platform. When understanding a organisation, we tend to think of it as a value-chain-like type of business, meaning it has a linear flow in which value is created starting from something that is being provided by suppliers (raw materials, data, expertise, etc.), passing it through business and support processes, generating market

value that is compelling to customers, and finally delivering this value directly to the them. That model has been named a ‘pipeline business model’ by Van Alstyne, Parker and Choudary in their Harvard Business Review article about the new rules for strategy. In contrast, a ‘platform business model’ is all about mediating the interests of two or more users. In effect, the overall value delivered by the platform is the sum of the values generated between individual users. The platform’s success depends on how well it provides the tools and the incentives to make everything flow simultaneously. In effect, improving the service of a platform means designing for the interests of two or more users in the same journey.

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Having five different actors and six insurance offerings meant – in theory – that we had to map out 30 journeys. But, instead of looking into dozens of different customer journeys, we clustered these offerings based on what they actually aimed to deliver to the customers, bringing it down to just two fundamental deliveries: asset protection and healthcare. Within those, we identified three actors participating in the first delivery, and five in the latter, meaning there were eight different journeys. We then proceeded to the field to understand how the business could better deliver what each actor was looking for, and what the other participants of the platform should bring to the table and receive in exchange. That web of interests is summarised by the Platform visualisation shown here.

ASSET PROTECTION

HEALTHCARE

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Choosing the best structure Early in our discussions we set up a workshop to deliberate with top and middle management the scope and the high-level goals of this new entity, which would later become Seguros Unimed's Innovation Lab. Out of five possible configurations, we chose the one that would address more effectively the kind of change we wanted to affect. Our benchmarks were as follows:

and testing new concepts and ultimately developing new services, interfaces or even completely new businesses, if they can prove promising or mature enough.

STARTUP

SEGUROS UNIMED

Benchmark three: Startup Benchmark one: Internal innovation team

This is an internal team focused 100 percent on innovation. In these cases, the innovation process relies significantly on the existing organisational maturity in terms of governance, user centricity (or lack thereof) and openness to change. The decision-making processes tend to be slower because they are subject to budgetary and controlling procedures. A benefit of this setup is the speed and ease in which it can be implemented, but some friction may occur with the current operation due to having a segregated team working internally, but without concerns for day-to-day struggles.

This represents a complete disruption in the relationship with the ‘mother’ organisation. In this case, the parent operates as the startup’s major investor, with a number of seats on the board, but with no active participation in its day-to-day operations. It aims to explore business opportunities in a much more agile and free operational model. The goal here is often to ‘steal’ market share from the larger parent company. Startups are extremely prone to unprecedented innovation and often do not feed the mother company with innovation and change of any kind. It entails much higher risks and upfront investment but also brings bigger potential results.

STARTUP

INNOVATION LAB

SEGUROS UNIMED SEGUROS UNIMED

Benchmark two: Innovation lab

Innovation labs can work in many ways, perhaps the most common being a small team allocated to a space created to foster creativity and collaboration, following its own processes which are modeled to be more agile and experimental than what a more traditional internal innovation team would probably have. Its mission is usually performing market and user research, producing 18 Touchpoint 10-1

Benchmark four: Tethered startup

A tethered startup only partially disrupts the relationship to the parent organisation. It shares some of the backstage with the parent, and it aims to explore business opportunities in a more agile and free way. In general, it responds to the specific expectations of the holding company, and it is allowed to innovate in specific areas (technologies, business models, interfaces, etc.) and may

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or may not feed the parent with innovation and cultural change. The risks and the potential gains may vary with the level of empowerment the startup has, and the specific innovation it’s entrusted to accomplish.

STARTUPS

SEGUROS UNIMED

Benchmark five: Startup incubator

The incubator’s objective is to bring together several startups in a complex ecosystem, highly prone to innovation. They can co-locate free, tethered and (mainly) third party seed or early stage startups, as well as allowing other ecosystem actors to actively participate in the innovation process. In general, incubators require higher levels of investment, which can even be shared with other partner financial agents, reducing risks and diversifying profit sources. In the end, we chose to go with the Benchmark two – the Innovation Lab format. This would give us more of the internal transformation that we were searching for, while at the same time delivering new designs that could be conceived and put in place on a systematic basis.

In this lab, the team consists of a design lead, co-ordinating two other service designers and a team of front- and back-end developers. In addition, the lab regularly invites staff from the parent organisation to come and work on full- or part-time assignments, and on the designs of specific solutions. Lastly, the lab has a senior advisor with access to the board of directors, to assure regular alignment with the most up-to-date business guidelines.

Transforming design research into a powerful deliverable A month or so into the research phase we realised that it was crucial to bring the senior managers closer to the design process and, ultimately, to have them understand the actual experience that was provided to the users, and realise it should be improved. The lab requires the buy-in of top management, but operates without the need for micro-approvals at every step of the way. In this way it is truly empowered to perform at its best. For that, a steering committee composed of the CEO and some directors was formed to make key decisions on a bi-monthly basis. As we prepared for those meetings, we had to figure out how the executives could be made fully aware of the pain-points, and the desires and needs around the current journeys, to be able to decide what to prioritise. To do that, we designed a circular, three level 'mandala'-like infographic, that would not only show

USER JOURNEY

SERVICE SYSTEM SERVICE CONCEPT

DESIGN CHALLENGES

GOOD EXPERIENCE BAD EXPERIENCE

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design sprint

solution refinement

week 2

week 1

solution specification

MVP development

week 3

week 4

USER INTERVIEWS

week 5

KEY USERS

IDEATION

USE CASES

BETA TESTERS

QUICK PROTOTYPING

WIREFRAMES

LANDING PAGES

EXPERT INTERVIEWS

INTERACTION REQUIREMENTS

FIRST ROUND OF TESTS

SERVICE DESIGNERS / PRODUCT SPECIALISTS

SERVICE DESIGNERS / DEVELOPERS

Service concept – What are the attributes that the — service should deliver to the user, on a macro level, based on their needs and desires? Service system – Through which channels, physical — or digital evidences and/or human agents does the user interact with the service? What are the primary use contexts (which touchpoints most often come into play)? What touchpoints are controlled/not controlled by the organisation? Which touchpoints are digital? The actual experience - What are the moments of — service, the tasks performed by the user and how does the user currently feel when carrying out the tasks? Working ‘off-the-cuff' – but with full strategic alignment Each of these journeys/ecosystems presented us with a number of design challenges which would go through their individual design processes afterwards, in a roadmap continually defined and adjusted during the bi-monthly steering committee meetings. Overall, these infographics were very helpful, bringing the company

USABILITY TESTS MOMENTS OF TRUTH

the experience curve and touchpoints along the way, but also clearly show the essential points of intervention in sufficient detail, together with the design challenges that come along with each hotspot. These infographics consist of three main areas:

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testing

SERVICE DESIGNERS

closer to the lab and clarifying the current issues from the users’ points of view. The goal was to iterate new prototypes regularly, delivering new service prototypes to the internal teams so they could take over and continue iterating further with the lab’s assistance. We collectively decided (based on the teams’ estimated velocities) which team would tackle which design challenge every five weeks. The initial design phase consists of a one-week design sprint session, followed by four weeks of design refinement, development and testing sessions. In order to streamline the production of new designs and avoid losing the very essence of the actual concepts, a three-gate process was developed to hand over designs from the innovation lab to the the internal operations, with the IT team being the primary interface. All the gates occur within the steering committee meetings. Gate 1 kicks-off the five-week ‘Imagine’ phase mentioned above, during which one of the design challenges in the mandalas is chosen as a priority. Gate 2 takes place once the prototypes are produced and tested, and the decision to move forward is based on the results gathered during the week of testing. It starts a period of documentation, preparing for the actual handover. Gate 3 evaluates if the concept/feature/service/interface is sufficiently well-documented to be finally implemented.

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GATE 1 WE WANT IT DESIGNED RESEARCH PHASE

GATE 2 WE WANT IT DOCUMENTED DESIGN PHASE

A challenges

GATE 3 WE WANT IT IMPLEMENTED HAND-OFF PHASE

B prototypes

IMPLEMENTATION PHASE

wireframes use cases service blueprints

While the decisions made during each gate are the key topics of the steering committee meetings, what happens during each phase between gates is completely up to the lab. A first significant learning is that we have identified the risk of having a ‘no action zone’ between the lab and the business operations, at Gate 3. Therefore, this is a point that needs constant attention, and perhaps even a better process for it to work properly. Because the company does not have a product managing structure per se (product owners or similar), the interface between the lab and the organisation ends up occurring with the IT team. In our view, this is not the best scenario because it lacks the business drive necessary to give implementation the proper stamina once the prototype is handed over. As a result, we would suggest having a squad-like structure to receive the prototypes and work with IT and other teams to follow the implementation through.

new feature/service

Allow the lab to create in-between the gates, including — the timeline in which things are delivered. Creative solutions take time to mature, and they can vary significantly from one another; — Give extra attention to the handoff and implementation phases. If this does not go well, it may compromise the effectiveness and, therefore, the future of the innovation lab itself. We hope this case ultimately contributes to the discussions around making service design more widespread. Innovation labs can be powerful tools to achieve this, but we need to further discuss ways to integrate them more seamlessly with design, product and development teams, especially in more complex organisations, which are the ones that can truly give service design practices a much broader reach.

The other main takeaways we have are: — Ensure a process exists that regularly puts the lab in front of the executive management to gain momentum and reduce potential anxiety within the board; — Make the research an important deliverable to generate buy-in to the lab’s and, ultimately, the users’ ‘cause’;

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f e at u re

From Design to Implementation f e at u re

Title

Organisational Capability and the HBTO Model The missing link to design success in business Designers today are increasingly accountable for the execution and scale of their projects. These conditions demand not only including the perspectives of human desirability, technological feasability, and business viability (‘HBT’), but also organisational capability (‘O’), so their ideas can gather the support necessary Daniel Gomez Seidel, MBA, is a design strategy manager at Capital One in New York City. When not reimagining banking experiences with his team, Daniel enjoys being a visiting teacher on design, strategy and culture at universities such as Cornell, U. Penn, Harvard and others. daniel.gomez.seidel@gmail. com

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to make it to market. After shifting from the consulting world to a recently-formed team of 400 designers at US-based Capital One bank, I noticed a peculiar pattern. About half of the time, our teams’ activities were directed at understanding complex organisational dynamics, aligning partners, and managing processes so that key decisionmakers invested resources to continue scaling our projects. None of these are activities that come first to mind when thinking about design. Responsibilities traditionally owned by the client began stacking up on my to-do list, demanding excellence in results, and to my surprise the designer’s toolbox was lacking resources to help. Even if our team followed the traditional steps to release a new product – sized the business opportunity, conducted research to pin down customer needs, and worked with engineers to build a working prototype – we ultimately depended on the people and processes of

the organisation being capable and willing to follow through all the way to launch. Therefore, most of our work focused on solving for this set of challenges. But what was this missing component called? I decided to name it ‘O’, for ‘organisational capability’. The HBTO Model As the designer’s role continues to expand, so should its perspectives and skills. The domain of organisational capability adds to the HBT1 model by recognising the designers’ responsibility to influence and transform the organisation, so it can effectively bring innovations to market when business, technology and customers are aligned.

1 The HBT model was introduced by IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown as a framework to describe design thinking. Available on Brown, T. and Katz B. (2009) Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. Harper Collins

f ro m d e s i g n t o i m p l e m e n tat i o n

BUSINE S S viability

TECH feasibility

INNOVATION that makes it to market

ORG ANISATIONAL capability

HUMAN desirability

New products and services are more likely to reach the market if the organisation is internally capable of delivering them.

Have you ever had a concept shut down because the departments responsible for launching it had communication issues? Has a stubborn leader ever stood between a validated idea and customers who wanted it?

Organisational capability can be defined as the ability of a given organisation to adapt its people, processes and policies, so that innovations can make it to the market. A skilled designer today will recognise the need to proactively influence these elements at the outset of a project, to hedge risks, and to have a better chance of bringing ideas to life. When I discussed this model with peers and colleagues, they were quick to recognise their own challenges within the organisational capability realm. The HBTO model has different implications and demands different skills for designers at all levels of maturity. Directors Having a better understanding of organisational capability will drive leaders to fine-tune their emotional intelligence, facilitate hard conversations, encourage partners to embrace ambiguity, and accept failure as a necessary outcome for learning. They will influence the organisational culture to focus on customer experience, and align processes and structures to support it. At Capital One, a team of designers strengthened the bank’s organisational capability when they shifted an entire department from teams assigned by products,

to teams assigned by stages of the customer experience journey. This change not only solidified the leadership’s commitment to focus on the customers, but also minimised the risk of inconsistencies and gaps across the touchpoints experienced by the end user. Managers Designers in management positions often must coordinate multiple projects and partners. Sharing design methods with non-designers, breaking silos between teams, and reimagining business-as-usual processes to learn from customers earlier are some examples of organisational capability that may set those projects up for success. Last year, our team worked on a project that aimed to disrupt a traditional business process. Knowing we would encounter resistance down the line, we invited our risk and compliance partners, and some of the most conservative executives, to join us for customer research. After hearing first-hand stories of people clamouring for change, these partners became our champions. Involving these stakeholders later could have caused bureaucratic bottlenecks or perhaps stopped the initiative. Juniors Tapping into organisational capability is not a skill reserved only for experienced designers. Becoming savvy in this domain can help new practitioners land projects and mentors that will accelerate their chosen career path. Asking simple questions about organisational climate and dynamics, and involving stakeholders on early conceptual work, may result in interacting with more experienced leaders, and being part of higher-level conversations. One of our interns last year was smart to ask which of the available projects had visibility to most executive leaders. By investing energy in one that had a clearer path to executive support and funding, she increased her potential to have a portfolio piece launched to market. While the skills and activities associated with increasing organisational capability might not seem new, they’re most likely practised and learned ad-hoc. It’s important to recognise the attention and necessary rigour that this domain demands, so that the next generation of practitioners are better prepared to not only imagine, but also deliver the promise of design to the world.

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Building Bridges Making service design deliverables more fit for Agile

How can we as service designers have more impact on the day-to-day work of the people who implement our projects?

Andrej Balaz is a Senior Service & UX Designer at the innovation studio IXDS. Andrej covers every step of the service design process from research, strategy to the nitty-gritty details of interaction and visual design. Andrej helps organisations to understand how services fit into people’s lives and use these insights to find opportunities for growth. andrej@balaz.de

Agile teams frequently struggle to connect with the insights and principles that we as service designers painstakingly generate. There are several reasons for this gap: 1. In an Agile working environment that is optimised for fast delivery, time for holistic thinking is limited. Insights and principles hidden in complex and ambiguous documents have limited impact. 2. Different stakeholders require different views of the service concept at varying levels of abstraction and detail. A onesize-fits-all approach or deliverable does not exist. 3. Service designers often leave the design process too soon. As teams start to plan and build solutions, previously unknown interdependencies and constraints often emerge. With nobody around to adjust the concept in a coherent manner, important aspects of the service experience can get lost in translation. Bridging the gap Service designers help teams navigate complexity and focus on what enables most value for the customer. Invest time

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into understanding your implementation team’s decision-making processes and think about how you can communicate insights to achieve the intended changes in thinking and prioritisation. Keep it simple and optimise for small steps along the way

Few team members will have time to read through complex documentation. Your team will need to divide higherlevel concepts and research into smaller batches of work such as projects, epics and sprints. Adapt your output so that key struggles of your customers and key concepts of your service experience can be referenced, carried across and understood quickly. Keep the language you use simple and close to how your customers speak about your service. Helpful methods:

Create customer demand profiles — based on the data captured in customer interviews that depict situations in your customers’ lives in which they start looking for something new. Describe what they are struggling with and what solutions they tried. This will help your

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timeline List the events and their dates in the interviewee’s journey.

Note: You can refer to the whiteboard and leave the timeline blank for the purposes of the exercise.   In a real project, you would want to keep the timeline and the insights about customer demand in one document.

demand profile for: short description

chosen solution

reasons why

Briefly describe the interviewee’s life situation, e.g. their job, family situation and other important data about the interviewee.

Which product/service/behavior did the interviewee decide for?

Describe the value that the interviewee sees in the solution. What functionality, price and other aspects are important and why? What trade-offs are they willing to make?

competing solutions

reasons why

What solutions does the interviewee see as competition (in and outside of product category or industry)?

Describe what is good and bad about those solutions, e.g. functionality, price, learning curve, etc.

old me – constraints

new me – desires

What don’t I like about my current life situation? What do I want to avoid or be relieved from? What is blocking me from moving towards the desirable or from preventing the undesirable? Write from the 1st-person perspective, i.e.   “I am struggling with…”, “I can’t…”, “I worry that…”.

What will I be able to do that I can’t do now? What new ability or skill will I gain?  How do I want things to be like in the future? Write from the 1st-person perspective, i.e.   “I can…”, “I am able to…”, “I don’t have to … anymore”

Demand Profile – JTBD Workshop, René Bastijans (renebastijans@gmail.com) & Andrej Balaz (andrej@balaz.de)

Download the templates here: http://bit.ly/touchpoint-templates

Demand Profile – JTBD Workshop, René Bastijans (renebastijans@gmail.com) & Andrej Balaz (andrej@balaz.de)

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customer’s jobs to be done

company

old me / struggle / job

new me / life is upgraded / job is done

what business is the company in?

Describe what the customer is struggling with. What are they trying to improve in their lives? Start the job statement with: Free me…, Enable me…, Help me…

Describe how life should improve. How does the customer imagine life to be better in the future? What will they be able to do? End the job statement with: …, so I can…, … so that …

What service does the company actually provide? Example: Basecamp is helping organisations to regain control over their business by facilitating communication and project management.

Example: Free me from the stress I deal with

… so I can have more time to enjoy being a

when figuring out what products won’t harm my parent. children…

what are their real competitors?

Which other solutions did the person consider or tried to use to make the desired progress?

Job Statement – René Bastijans (renebastijans@gmail.com) & Andrej Balaz (andrej@balaz.de)

team to understand how demand and competition for the service is created. — Create a visual storyboard that depicts what your customers are struggling with in a particular situation, how your solution is used, and what their life looks like after the struggle has been resolved. This puts your solution in context and highlights the service’s key benefits and features. Complement the storyboard with short statements that — express what customers are struggling with (or dislike about their current life situation) and what progress they are trying to make in their lives (or how they want their new life situation to be). These short, formalised, solution-agnostic statements1 help your team to inspire initiatives, epics and sprints and connect them to insights from research. 28 Touchpoint 10-1

Foster face-to-face interactions and craft good stories to get buy-in

To get everybody on-board, you need to get your team excited about the service’s proposition and concept. Besides workshops with all stakeholders during service creation, occupy a slot in regular planning meetings once development has started. Highlight interdependencies with other teams, provide context from research and help the team to prioritise.

1 Klement, A. (2017). How Might We Describe a Customer Job? in When Coffee and Kale Compete. [Online] Retrieved May 1, 2018, from https://jtbd.info/how-might-we-describe-a-customer-job65aa5b9a100e [Online Book]

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To do this effectively, craft compelling stories.2 Tell them in day-to-day conversations, presentations, meetings and other face-to-face encounters to pitch ideas, get feedback and evolve the narrative. Prepare to talk about:

How customers’ lives get better by using your service — and what struggles you are attempting to resolve. — Why achieving your vision is worthwhile for your company. — What the common use case looks like that illustrates the ideal service experience. In a past project concerned with designing a new, ondemand public transport service, we highlighted time and time again how switching to our service might benefit people in rural areas with a second or third family car. For example, instead of co-ordinating their day around their school-aged children’s schedule and hobbies, parents would enjoy a little more freedom while the kids used the on-demand buses – a previously unreachable benefit. Telling these little stories every chance we had not only helped us to align stakeholders but also sharpen our pitch, get feedback and evolve it.

Stay visible and facilitate exchange

Keep an eye on consistency during development. Initiate the creation of a design system, contribute design principles, user research and strategic direction, as well as higher-level interaction patterns that tie different touchpoints and stakeholders together. Provide simple ways for your team to ask questions and exchange answers. This could be a Slack channel, a knowledge base or demo presentations. In this way, your team members can see what others are doing and ask if another team has already designed similar interactions. Making communication between teams easier will help increase the coherence of the service experience. By creating more modular and less ambiguous documentation, telling better stories and facilitating exchange, your work can become more visible during the day-to-day work of others. This will form an important pillar in the bridge that will lead your team to the creation of the desired service experience.

Focus on goal setting and prototyping, not planning

Do not waste time drafting elaborate timelines and plans before development has started. Instead, define the effects that you expect to observe on the customers’ side once key features and interactions have been implemented. Help break down the desired service experience into more concrete goals and determine what qualitative and quantitative measures you could use to measure success. Assist your team in coming up with prototypes that will help test potential solutions. This way, you not only promote continuous user research, you also make the concept feel less ambiguous.

2 Cerar, K. (2018). How to Figure Out if Your Product Actually Solves Problems, Create and tell stories. [Online] Retrieved May 1, 2018, from https://medium.com/@katiecerar/the-best-pms-are-storytellers464ecb634344 [Blog].

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Thinking of Organisations as ‘Conversations’ An answer to the challenges of implementation? When we as service designers work with organisations with the objective of changing the services they provide, we often think of these organisations as ‘systems’ consisting of parts and processes that can be moved around. However, thinking of organisations as ‘systems’ may not always be beneficial when we aim to address Lotte Raun has been practicing service design for the past ten years and recently received her PhD in Service Design from Aalborg University, Denmark. She has worked for and within various sectors and is currently working as a Senior Service Designer at the Dubaibased software company Teletronics.

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implementation. This article describes how we can benefit from thinking about organisations as ‘conversations’ when we aim to ensure that change actually happens based on our work.

Six years ago, I initiated the process of writing my doctoral thesis1 on service design and implementation. At that point, I had been practicing service design for some time, and I already had plenty of experience in seeing the results of my work end up on the ‘concept shelf’ and never go live. As a service designer, my motivation was to create exceptional service experiences. Therefore, not being fully able to do this caused a great deal of frustration. In my research studies, my frustration became my motivation. I started to investigate service design projects that had been successful regarding implementation. I conducted several literature studies, placing focus on the domain of organisational change and change management. In this process, I came across the theory of organisational

metaphors2 . Reading this theory was like having an epiphany. It changed my perception of organisations and how to effect change within them, including how to effect changes to their services. Organisations consist of people In short, the theory of organisational metaphors suggests that we can think of organisations in different ways, using metaphor as a tool to describe this conceptualisation. For example, we can think of organisations as either ‘systems’3 or ‘conversations’ and, depending on the

1 Raun, L. (2017). Designing for Service Change. Aalborg: Aalborg University Press. 2 See e.g. chapter 3 in Cameron, E. & Green, M. (2012). Making Sense of Change Management (3rd ed.). London: Kogan Page. 3 The ‘system’ metaphor is often also referred to as the ‘machine’ metaphor.

f ro m d e s i g n t o i m p l e m e n tat i o n

If we think of as If organisations we think of organisations as

SYSTEMS SYSTEMS

CONVERSATIONS CONVERSATIONS

we often assume thatassume that we often changes happen on the changes happen on the basis of a plan basis of a plan being implemented. being implemented.

we assume that changesthat changes we assume happen when we join and we join and happen when affect the ongoing conversations affect the ongoing conversations within the organisation. within the organisation.

perception of organisations by which we operate, we have different assumptions about how changes happen within them. This also impacts how we as designers can effect changes to the services they provide. As service designers, we often think of organisations as ‘systems’ consisting of parts and processes that can be moved around. We make things like system maps and service blueprints that relate to this systems perspective and which are helpful for us in our efforts to design great service concepts. However, to perceive organisations as ‘systems’ often also includes the assumption that change is something that happens based on the service concept, and only after this has been designed. In other words, we first create the ‘plan’ and then we implement it later, preferably as a 1:1 match. However, this perspective is being criticised in the domain of organisational change research. Here, scholars argue that change in organisations rarely happens based on a ‘plan’ being ‘implemented’. Instead, they argue, changes happen when we join and affect the ongoing conversations within the organisations4 . In line with

this, scholars have started to promote thinking of organisations as ‘patterns of human interaction’5 or, in short, ‘conversations’. The argument is that organisations are human collectives consisting of people with free will, that is, people who cannot be moved around as if they were parts within a system. If we want to create changes within organisations, we need to affect the ongoing conversations, which includes what people are saying and thinking and how they are interacting. At present, this criticism and the accompanying new perspective do not seem to have reached the service design practice. Many service designers are probably not even aware of the fact that they are thinking about organisations in a certain way, let alone that this affects how they understand and approach implementation.

4 See e.g. Shaw, P. (2002). Changing Conversations in Organisations: A Complexity Approach to Change. London: Routledge. 5 See e.g. Stacey, R. & Mowles, C. (2016). Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics: The Challenge of Complexity to Ways of Thinking about Organisations (7th ed.). Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited.

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If we think of organisations as ‘conversations’, we acknowledge that changes happen when we affect what people are talking about and how they are relating to each other. This means that we may affect implementation and change every time we interact with people from the organisations; this can take place in numerous scenarios, one of these being an idea generation workshop.

Design activities are implementation activities Thinking about organisations as ‘conversations’ changes our assumptions regarding when implementation happens and how and when we address it. If we start to perceive that changes happen when we join and affect the ongoing conversations within organisations, it means that we potentially address implementation every time we interact with people from the organisation. This means that we address implementation when we arrange a project kick-off meeting, facilitate an idea generation workshop, test out prototypes, and so on. Within these activities, we have an opportunity to affect the ongoing conversation by, for example, affecting how people within the organisation perceive the existing services, their role in providing them, and their mental model of potential changes. In doing so, we also affect their commitment, willingness and ability to make changes happen. Thinking about organisations as ‘conversations’ means that activities, such as the ones mentioned above, are not only ‘design activities’ but also ‘implementation activities’, as they hold the potential to change the ongoing conversations within the organisations. The service concept is an invitation for change Furthermore, thinking about organisations as ‘conversations’ challenges how we perceive the service concept; if organisations do not change based on a ‘plan’ being ‘implemented’, then the service concept should not

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be considered as such. Instead, we may perceive it as a ‘conversation prompt’ or an ‘invitation for change’, the outcome of which we will never be able to control. This, however, does not mean that the relevance of the service concept diminishes. It still aims to set a direction for the conversations in the organisation in that it shows a potential future in an explicit and tangible way. Nevertheless, we should not be disappointed if we don’t experience a 1:1 match between the concept and the actual changes being made, as we cannot control how people within the organisation, from the executive board to frontline staff, will react to it. Furthermore, we may also acknowledge that the service concept is not the only ‘invitation for change’ that we introduce during the design process. A presentation of research findings, a workshop idea or a prototype are also examples of ‘conversation prompts’ that may change the conversations within the organisation and thereby start to create changes to the services that these organisations provide.

Third, we need to create situations and prompts that challenge, move and change how people are thinking and relating. To a wide extent, we as designers are already doing this when we facilitate workshops and create personas, insight presentations, ideas, prototypes and so on. The difference is that we need to be aware that these activities not only have the purpose of ensuring the right changes are identified and explored (the service concept), but that they also have the purpose of changing and creating new conversations within and between people, resulting in increased motivation for changing a certain service and improved confidence and capabilities for contributing to this. So, in fact, we as designers are already changing conversations for the purpose of improving services and many of our approaches and tools already support this. But I also believe that we can become better at it by increasing our awareness of the fact that this is we do. I hope that this article may inspire such an awareness.

Effectively changing conversations Perceiving organisations as conversations implies that our role as service designers becomes one focussed on changing the ongoing conversations within organisations for the purpose of creating better services. But how do we effectively do this? First, we need to acknowledge that we have the opportunity to impact conversations (and thus address implementation) every time we interact with the organisation. This means from day one of a service design project, and all the way through. In fact, we need to think of our design activities as also being ‘conversation change’ activities. Second, we need to identify the people from within the organisation who will need to change their ongoing conversations in order for change to happen and services to improve. This will most likely be people from different levels of the organisation – from C-level to front-line level. Stakeholder mapping is one of the key tools for doing this and luckily something that many of us are familiar with. Touchpoint 10-1 33

Successfully Implementing Service Design Projects Essential preconditions and influencing factors Why is the success rate in implementing service design projects still low? Why do brilliant concepts fail when it comes to anchoring them in the daily business of the client organisation? Where are the barriers to implementing service design projects and where are the optimisation potentials? And are there any influencing factors that service designers should consider in future projects? Finding answers to these questions and better understanding Tina Weisser works as an innovation and systemic organisational consultant in Munich. She is a lecturer at various universities and is certified as Service Design Master Trainer (SDN). t@feedyourmind.eu Wolfgang Jonas is Professor for Design Studies (Designwissenschaft) and head of the Institute of Design Research at Braunschweig University of Art. His research focus lies on systems thinking, scenario building and the development of practice-based design research. Birgit Mager is Professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany. She is founder and director of sedes research at KISD and is co-founder and president of the Service Design Network.

the complex topic of implementation was the motivation behind a three-year international study. The results are 24 influencing factors and the ‘KUER’ implementation model.

Designing for impact means designing for implementation. Today, the focus of most service design projects is on the first phases – only around four percent1 of the methods applied in service design focus on implementation. It is therefore likely that service designers will need to expand their methodological knowledge and skills in order to be more successful in the future. Dealing with this complex issue requires the integration of new skills and approaches. Because the implementation of new concepts requires organisational and cultural changes for the client organisation, techniques from the areas

1 Martins, R. (2012). Poster at Design for Next, EAD 12 Rome.

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of systemic organisational development and management consulting can be particularly valuable. Study design and approach Within the framework of a three-year qualitative study, implementation projects of complex service design concepts were examined at the intersection of external service design consulting and its clients (for-profit organisations). With the support of approximately 50 experts from the areas of service design practitioners (Hellon, Livework, Dark horse, IDEO, etc.), service providers (EON, BMW Group, Océ, etc.) and business and organisational consulting (Capgemini, Etventure, OSB-I, etc.),

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Clarification

PHASE 1

KEY PREREQUISITES

Interventions

PHASE 2

UNDERSTAND & DISCOVER

Support

PHASE 3

ENABLE & DEFINE

Alignment

PHASE 4

REINFORCE & DELIVER

Figure 1: KUER model with its four phases and main activities

explorative interviews and workshops were conducted to identify influencing factors, frequent barriers and future potentials. The many factors found were reduced to a set of 24 and examined for their interrelationships by using sensitivity analysis, an effective system analysis tool designed by systems researcher Frederic Vester2 . Sensitivity analysis recognises that client organisations are not only embedded in complex environments, but are themselves complex socio-technical systems. There is broad scientific agreement that due to the complexity of organisations, the consideration of system relationships provides essential insights and perspectives for successful change initiatives. Through a systemic approach3, many of the obstacles occurring in service design projects could be explained. Also 12 general lessons can be derived for practical use.

spatially for future projects. On the other hand, a result-oriented success is when the new service design concept is introduced into the company's typical way of working, accepted by users and reconfirmed by measurement that it meets criteria such as efficiency, user satisfaction, or return-on-investment (ROI). It becomes obvious that there are different areas of application and success in service design, which in turn depend on the goals and capabilities of the client as well as external consultants. The reasons found for failure are just as numerous. Obstacles may exist on the client side as well as on the service designers’ side. For example, the lack of experience and implementation maturity of external service designers, internal resistance or decision-making dilemmas of top management, lack of user acceptance, or a better offer from competing brands.

Results: Objectives and obstacles A crucial question is what success can mean in the context of service design implementation. Targets can be purely process- or result-oriented, or a combination of both. Examples of process-oriented success are when employees learn service design methods, spaces for co-creative work are established within the client company, and the organisation prepares for cultural change. In these cases, the successes would be based on the fact that the client organisation becomes familiar with new methods and prepares itself procedurally and

Results: 24 influencing factors Recurring patterns and general influencing factors (see Figure 3 ) could be identified despite the heterogeneous projects found in practice. These factors were examined for their effect upon each other and their influenceability. Six of them can be described as necessary ‘hygiene’ factors and eighteen as ‘desired’ factors. The hygiene factors are key prerequisites that must be present to favour result-oriented implementations. Ideally, they must be considered as early as the contract clarification stage in Phase 1. Because, as expected, not only one or two factors were found, it becomes clear that service design projects are not happening in an isolated and context-free space. In many cases, service designers spend several years working on individual touchpoints before commissioning and successfully implementing end-to-end, holistic

2 Vester, F. (2007). The Art of interconnected thinking: Tools and concepts for a new approach to tackling complexity. 3 See also Luhmann. N. (1984). Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Simon. F. (2015). Einführung in die systemische Organisationstheorie.

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customer experiences. When projects fail, it is reasonable to assume that either one or both parties weren’t ready for implementation, or that the hygiene factors were simply not yet fulfilled at the time. Results: The KUER implementation model To date, there is no model in service design research that offers a comprehensive analysis and structure of the influencing factors in the implementation of projects. Based on the empirical results, the KUER model was developed, consisting of four phases and main activities (see Figure 1). KUER stands for ‘Key Prerequisites’, ‘Understand & Discover’, ‘Enable & Define’ and ‘Reinforce & Deliver’. In addition, Figure 2 presents the factors and their relationships. Looking at the KUER process model, it becomes apparent that the entire process begins with the clarification in Phase 1 (‘Key Prerequisites’), but that the phases do not have to follow each other linearly because setbacks and feedback must be taken into account. In Phase 2 (‘Understand and Discover’) a temporary project organisation (‘safe space = physical and mental space for new ideas and thoughts unfamiliar to the organisation and co-creative working’) is set up and extensive diagnostics are carried out. Users, the client organisation and economic parameters must be analysed. Solutions developed in Phase 3 (‘Enable and Define’) are tested in rapid cycles with users, employees and relevant stakeholders and evaluated at decision nodes using a three-dimensional selection mechanism. As activities to support the process and its orientation are used iteratively as required, the transition to the integration Phase 4 (‘Reinforce and Deliver’) is seamless. Results: 12 lessons learned A systemic approach to the implementation process helps service designers to achieve a better understanding of the interaction of systemic elements and their causes. The basic insight that there is an unmanageable number of social (groups such as departments) and psychological systems (the individual actor/human) colliding is an important aspect because the connectedness of the individuals involved depends on it. If systems thinking is applied to service design practice, the following lessons (which are all closely interwoven) can enrich daily project work. Lesson Number 1: Six necessary hygiene factors

It became apparent that the following six hygiene 36 Touchpoint 10-1

PHASE 1

PHASE 2

Clarification

Interventions

Service Design Consultant Client organisation

User diagnosis

Organisational diag.

Business diagnosis

Stakeholder management

Communication level, connectivity

Human-centered mindset

Clarity of roles & responsibilities

Temporary project organisation

Enable employees

Inter-divisional staff involvement

Participatory, iterative work (co-creation)

Personnel capacity

Employee commitment & acceptance

Implementation maturity

Compliance: C-level sponsorship

Implement. management all phases

Problem space & analysis

temporary organisation

KEY PREREQUISITES

Goal clarification

Expectation management

Internal ambassadors

UNDERSTAND & DISCOVER

factors are essential for a successful implementation: 1) Implementation maturity, 2) Compliance/C-level sponsorship, 3) Implementation management at all phases, 4) Temporary project organisation, 5) Interdivisional staff involvement and 6) Personnel capacity. Lesson Number 2: Implementation starts on day one

The foundations for implementation are already set at the contract clarification stage. It should be investigated whether (and up to which iteration) the six aforementioned hygiene factors could be sufficiently present. An iterative service design process calls for ‘iterative contracting.’4 If one considers the change curves in the change literature, it becomes clear that integrating something new takes a significant amount of time. It is

4 Mager. B. (2018). Keynote at Service Design Conference, Helsinki Finland.

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Figure 2: KUER process model showing the factors and their

PHASE 3

PHASE 4

Support

Alignment

User Value

relationships

Business Value

Lesson Number 4: Working against the system logic creates resistance

Organisational Value

Prototyping & selection management

Decision gate

Future, solution, and test rooms

Reflection management

ENABLE & DEFINE

Three dimensional selection mechanism

Reduced future and test rooms

Transformation management

Compensation concept

Integration & realisation

REINFORCE & DELIVER

therefore important to accompany the implementation process from start to finish when the new concept is reconfirmed through measurement, testing and anchored in the organisation’s day-to-day activities. Lesson Number 3: Client organisations cannot be controlled linearly and are always context-dependent

Client organisations have their unique history and reason for existence. Therefore, it is crucial to thoroughly diagnose the organisation (e.g., existing culture, stakeholder expectations, expected resistance) and to build upon their knowledge.5 Client organisations as ‘living systems’ cannot be controlled from the outside, because they cannot be reduced to being mere simple machines.

5 Mager, B. (2010). Service Design and Behavioural Change. Touchpoint Vol. 1 Nr.3: 73-75.

It becomes evident that different ‘worlds’ – i.e., system logic, languages, terms, cultures and working methods – meet temporarily when external service designers collaborate with the employees of a client organisation. Resistance from employees is the norm rather than the exception when new and foreign elements are introduced. The unknown endangers the status quo of every ‘living system’ and can create great fears. Lesson Number 5: Systems and people are oriented towards the meaning they give to things

Tangible prototypes can help employees and executives understand both rationally and emotionally the opportunities and risks of a new service design concept. Because the evidence and the design of service design concepts are closely interwoven, prototyping and storytelling are of fundamental importance: they have the strength to make the abstract vivid for non-specialists and to support social interaction processes. In practice, the prototypes must make the ‘meaning’ of the idea applicable to the organisation, in order to reduce uncertainties. Lesson Number 6: Connection capability

Understanding each other is trivial but indispensable. It is advisable to clarify common terms that include both the service design process and internal abbreviations or terms. External service designers should also develop a sense of the existing corporate culture so as not to be unintentionally irritating and incomprehensible. Being able to communicate with executives is an essential prerequisite. Lesson Number 7: Closeness - distance dilemma

Systemic organisation consultants emphasise collaborative approaches, because as employees are empowered by learning new skills and methods, organisational learning takes place and resistance diminishes. Service designers must, therefore, work with the clients in unusual proximity, but always keep enough of a distance to avoid being dragged into the client’s problems. The temporary Touchpoint 10-1 37

implementation maturity

Compliance c-level sponsorship

implementation management all phases

temporary organisation

inter-divisional staff involvement

Interaction of skills (processes), human-centered culture and amount of experience with implementation work on both sides (external consultant and client organisation).

Ensure that staff have permission to devote their time without conflict with day-today business and other commitments. Ensure permission for establishing a temporary organisation, involv. of key persons and budget.

Consider implementation from the beginning, all 4 phases iteratively encompassing. Take into account waves of resistance. Establish long-term project cooperation and relationships because ‘service design work is never done.‘

Install secure areas and spaces (suitable for creative teamwork, test lab). Encourage enthusiasm and establish a common language. Support fresh, non-organisational thinking and integrate an ‘outside-in-perspective.‘

Involve all relevant employees in the process right from the start. Reinforce and respect the team spirit, team dynamics and individual system logic. The aim is to identify and clarify existing gaps between departments.

ClarifiCation

Personnel capacity

Stakeholder Management

level of communication

Human-centered mindset

Clarity of roles & responsibility

Ensure sufficient capacity of appropriate employees across departments and disciplines (apart from dayto-day duties).

Identify all important stakeholders, both internal and external (organisation, users, etc.) and integrate them throughout the entire process. Tools: stakeholder mapping, force field analysis or emotional weather maps.

Establish a level of comprehension and connectivity: clarify service design terms and terms used by the organisation (including departments). Create easy to understand glossary.

Develop an innovative mindset. Principles: Openness for change and experiments, empathy for users and nonlinear thinking. Making ideas tangible through visualisation and promoting a culture of action.

Clear allocation of roles and responsibilities for all participants (in- and external team) enduring the complete development and implementation process.

intErVEntionS

ClarifiCation

User diagnostics

organisational diagnostics

Business diagnostics

Empowering employees

Participatory, iterative work (co-creative)

Identify, check and integrate iteratively user needs and real-time feedback throughout the entire project duration.

Understand and maintain internal ethnography, complexity, dynamics, logic, culture, rules, working methods, power relations and processes. Try to understand/find out why employees build up resistance.

Understand and calculate drivers, strategy, vision, competitors, business case etc. Understand and calculate the complexity of the system. Make potentials and benefits quickly measurable (‘quick wins‘).

Service design method coaching and training.Transfer of know-how (focus on usercentric). Process support and consulting when needed. Initiate team coaching as an accompanying support function.

Participatory working in a temporary organisation and beyond (integration of disciplines and departments). Motivating employees to develop ideas and to be ‘idea owners‘.

intErVEntionS

SUPPort

Employee commitment & acceptance

Goal clarification

Expectation management

internal ambassadors

Prototyping & selection management

Create energy for change, risk-friendliness and openness for new ideas. Potential development, motivation, a sense of optimism, ‘bottomup‘ enthusiasm.

Align strategy, vision with potential solutions. Differentiate between short- and long-term objectives. Create transformation roadmaps early enough. Make goals visible and tangible within temporary and mother organisation.

Identify and synchronize expectations, priorities, goals and time frames of project sponsors. Consider the possibilities and abilities of the organisation. Show realistic expectations and different perspectives.

Appoint, train and empower internal ambassadors in the temporary organisation, motivate them to inspire and motivate others in the mother organisation with the help of tangible prototypes and strong visualizations.

Prototyping allows a meaningful selection. Quick wins support the process. Find out who decides what and why. The risk is minimized by a realistic comparison of the solution approaches at the decision points.

SUPPort

aliGnMEnt

3-dimensional selection mechanism

reflection management

transformation management

Compensation concept

At the decision node, KPIs, business case, organisational capabilities, user needs and the added value of all participants are compared and orchestrated. Prototypes and business cases make benefits tangible and proof is provided.

Reflection work guided by one or more responsible persons. Iterative critical alignment of goal, strategy, differences, process, status, emotional status of staff and resources. Tool: e.g. cross-impact analysis (acc. to Vester).

Estimate the impact of the new concepts on the required movement for the organisation, the effort, demand, employees, structures and resources in a timely manner. Tool: e.g. migration matrices.

Rewards and recognition for employees must be tailored. Try to understand, consider and activate the motivation of the employees.

aliGnMEnt

Figure 3: Brief description of the 24 influencing factors found and four categories Figure 3:interventions, Brief description of the influencing within the four mainthe activities Clarification, Interventions, clearing, support and24 alignment. Thefactors category clearing contains six hygiene necessary if you aim for a result-oriented success‘hygiene’ - the implementation Supportfactors and Alignment. Clarification contains the six so-called factors. of a service design concept.

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organisation provides a good framework for this close cooperation. Through early involvement, employees can experience user problems first-hand, recognise their own meaning in the insights found, and thus develop the necessary acceptance for the possibly new or even uncomfortable changes ahead. A crucial result is a shared awareness of the identified problems. Service designers can experience a first wave of resistance when they conduct the diagnosis of the client’s organisation (or, e.g., an existing user journey), using a purely external view without the participation of internal employees. Lesson Number 8: System logic = survival

If systems (clients) are confronted with their external image (results of user research), which usually involves a lot of negative aspects and an extensive collection of failures, a defensive attitude can spread among the employees, because this can be seen as an attack against the existing system. The system tries to protect itself and restore its balance to ‘survive’. It has been reported that service design projects often come to a halt or lose the necessary priority for the client at exactly this point. Lesson Number 9: Each action is an intervention

Every activity, such as stakeholder interviews or cocreation workshops, are interventions. However, an effect may only become visible or noticeable in the client organisation at a later point in time. This highlights the strong networking of actors and actions as well as the fact that unintended consequences can arise. Lesson Number 10: Risk minimisation

Executives must be supported in decision-making and risk assessment. The prediction that the developed concept can be economically relevant in the market, satisfactory from the user's point of view and successful for the organisation regarding skills, remuneration and general conditions within the desired time window, must be proven repeatedly in the process. The more the system logic, culture and interdependencies are understood, the higher the probability of being able to reduce uncertainties and thus convince top management. Lesson Number 11: Three-dimensional consulting

Ideally, service designers support in three ways: as process, specialist and mindset consultants. Depending on time and role, they can provide both conceptual and

process-related support so that employees remain able to work and process reliability is guaranteed. If service designers are not responsible for or do not want to control the process, a successful later implementation is questionable. Lesson Number 12: Prepare disciplinary borders!

For service designers who are leaving the process at an early stage, because their focus is on conceptual work, it is crucial to think ahead and prepare the disciplinary boundaries for the concepts to not end up in the drawer as “corporate entertainment,” as Melvin Brand Flu (from Livework) calls it. Outlook The KUER model can be used at any time in the process to enable the actors involved to explore new perspectives about the project, to reflect together or to derive options for action. Systematic reflection can promote learning processes and contribute to improving the readiness for implementation. Knowledge of the interrelationships and influencing factors can be used to set up or adapt individual success criteria for service design projects. This prevents negative consequences and unrealistic expectations at an early stage, and preserves both the quality and reputation of the service design approach and the service designers. Service designers have excellent capabilities and methodological approaches to support organisations in change projects. Therefore, it is an advantage for the success of transformations if they are accompanied by an innovation project using a human-centred design process. Service designers who want to support the implementation of projects must acquire skills from organisational consulting – especially business management and systemic consulting – or expand their service portfolio together with partners. Connectivity with the company's top management and employees at all levels of the hierarchy must be ensured throughout the process. A fundamental insight is that organisations as social systems cannot ultimately be specifically controlled from outside or by service providers. They can only change themselves and successfully implement concepts. On the long way there, however, client organisations have a great need for professional support.

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A Story of Failure (Almost) Once upon a time there was a governmental agency which supported entrepreneurs in their innovation efforts. The agency had an internal design team responsible for developing new programmes and services. The team had recently adopted service design methodology as their new approach to project Dorota Wecławska is a service designer and experienced researcher, head of the design unit at the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development, the first to be established within Poland’s public administration. She has co-designed educational programmes, acceleration programmes and grant programmes for entrepreneurs. d.weclawska@gmail.com

Marta Malesinska is a service designer, project manager and user researcher responsible for the development of educational programmes and support schemes at the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development. She is interested in the mechanisms of participatory design from the local to national level. m.malesinska@gmail.com

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development. This is a story of a project that almost failed. Why ‘almost’? Because in the end it was launched and now it serves its beneficiaries as planned. The ‘failure,’ however, relates to the design process that, due to a very basic error, was not as efficient as it should have been. Design process It all started one day when the design team was assigned to work on a new support programme. Programmes developed by the agency are addressed to entrepreneurs and aimed at a specific goal, e.g. participation in international trade fairs. Every programme is handled by an implementation team, which has one or more programmes at any one time. Their job is to create the regulations for the programme, select beneficiaries and then monitor if the beneficiaries act according to the regulations. But this time the implementation team had not fully been chosen at that stage

and the design process carried on without the people who would implement the programme. We, as a design team, had developed a complete project. We consulted all the relevant stakeholders and tested prototypes. We talked to experts. The whole concept was in line with both internal regulations and the legal framework. We had also reached the objectives that we had agreed on when we kicked off the project. In the end both our leaders and ourselves were satisfied with the result. The consequences Once the design process was over, the programme was assigned to an implementation team, which had not been involved in the design process at all. The team leader received all the documentation for the programme and process. However, he and his team had difficulties with accepting it at a face

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The implementation team is about to give a presentation about the project for stakeholders? We offer to prepare graphics for the slides.

value. In fact, they were pretty out of the loop regarding all the work that had been done for the programme to take its final shape. They needed to alter the programme to make it more comprehensible for them and to be able to identify with it. To our despair, they tried to introduce changes that had not been tested on users. The team members were experts in running publiclyfunded programmes, however, they were not used to consulting with the users. Since they were always in a hurry, they often chose solutions that were optimal from their standpoint but more burdensome for users. We strove to strike a balance between those two perspectives. However, at that point, there was no time to properly involve the users in the process again, in order to let the team leader hear their concerns. Consequently, the implementation team was very reluctant to accept the solutions we believed were right but that, at the same time, seemed less convenient to them. We got very frustrated that the programme had been sent back to the drawing board, and it took us all a considerable amount of time to agree on a final version. This case showed us clearly the consequences of not including the implementation team in the first place. Therefore, since then we have urged decision makers to

appoint representatives of an implementation team at the start of every initiative. Having an implementation team on board doesn’t mean everything is settled, for it remains a great challenge to keep them involved on the same level throughout the whole process. Why? Well, for our internal clients, designing new programmes is just a part of their work and they pay just a fraction of their attention to it. The following set of rules is grounded in the ordeals we went through several times. Team building The first thing is to have a complete team in place. As obvious as this might sound, it’s the first step to significant problems if you don’t do it right. Our teams consist of us – designers – motivated, excited by the new topic and eager to dive into the research and sweat blood during workshops. And then there are ‘them’: an internal client or implementation team, stressed out, torn between contradictory requirements, up to their necks in daily meetings, urgent tasks, etc. To begin with, let’s make it clear that there is no “us” and “them”. For as long as the process lasts we are one. The implementation team needs to be assured that we are there to assist them in delivering the best service Touchpoint 10-1 41

possible and that this is also our utmost concern. We acknowledge how difficult it is for them sometimes and we do not preach to them how they should obey the sacred ‘double diamond’. We just get things done for and with them: user-interviews analysed, insights collected, the value proposition drafted. Getting started Once a team is in place, it’s time to organise a kick-off workshop. There we say a few words about our previous projects in order to present the process confronted with the realities of the institution. We also explain what jobs are to be done and what results we will get at the end.

Furthermore everyone should know his or her role in the process and agree on how much time they can devote to it. Designers suggest when exactly it is crucial to be involved (e.g. to conduct user interviews and to participate in workshops) in order to follow the process. As mentioned previously, it is indeed very difficult to keep a balance between engagement in the process and all the other obligations the implementation team is faced with during working hours. There will be some friction for sure, but the more detailed we are about the actual time and tasks that will be required during the process, the less likely it is for animosities to arise later. Project room Recently we set up a project room – a space where we have team meetings, where we also keep all important materials such as project progress and the schedule, agreed rules and roles in the project. We call it a room, but if you don’t have enough space, any quiet corner will do. The project room is a place that one can visit any time during the process and check what has been created recently, add inspirations and comment on the process. We additionally create simple handouts showing the process and a list of the rules, which everybody can keep at their desk. This seems like a tiny detail, but when we talk with the participants in our processes, they tell us that this simple paper guide helps them to navigate better through the process and comprehend its logic.

We prepare handouts with infographics showing the information about the process, which everybody from the team can keep at their desk.

If you have some experience with design processes, then everything seems to be ordered and logical. But a newbie experiences chaos and frustration. He or she often complains about “wasting time messing around with Post-its". Because we want the team to really feel on board with us, we suggest co-creating the guiding principles of a particular project: a set of rules that are shared by all, e.g.: 1. Speak your mind, 2. Respect the ideas of others, 3. Be on time, etc.

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Communications manager Paper guides and written rules aside, some unexpected events will always occur. Some misunderstanding at the kick-off meeting, a longer absence or just common confusion and frustration when things don’t go as fast and efficiently as planned. There is somebody whose task it is to find a quick fix for all that: the communications manager. She or he contacts all the team members on a regular basis and makes sure that they are up to date with their work.

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A final touch Finally, we make sure that during the process we produce only as much material as we can really work on. It is necessary for the team to make full use of what was created during the previous steps. Nothing frustrates people more than to see that what they have devoted whole workshops to gets quickly forgotten later on. Follow up Once the final Post-it is placed on the service blueprint, we do not just turn off the lights and end the show. We actually get mobilised once more and think what else we, as designers, can do. We follow up on implementation until the project goes live. Handing over a prototype together with documentation is never enough. We need to be sure that whatever adjustments will be made will be in accordance with the research and general values we agreed on. Therefore we reserve ourselves the right to consult all modifications and if necessary we propose alternative solutions. We have now made a rule that each time the process is over we run through it together as a team and analyse step-by-step what could have been done better. We listen carefully to the implementation team and try to be very sensitive to all the criticism. Although we try to adjust the process every time, our feeling is that there is still room for improvement. But that’s ok – as long it’s alive, it will evolve. Continue the discussion on Slack! Question for the author(s)? Have your own perspective to share with the community? Head over to the #touchpoint channel within the SDN’s Community Slack, and take part in the discussion about this article! sdn-community.slack.com Not yet a member? Join at bit.ly/SDNSlackNEW

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Political Principles Applied to Service Design Power and negotiation are crucial to project implementation Though service design has already proven its relevance, it still has some trouble with the execution of the action plans produced by co-creation. Some designers think that to release the blueprint means the end of the job. However, this ignores the difficulty of getting a service design project not just delivered, but Ricardo Martins is a design researcher and professor at the Federal University of Parana, Brazil. His main interest is investigating the challenges that service designers and project managers face when implementing the solutions co-created by stakeholders. ricardomartins@ufpr.br

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implemented1. In this article, we introduce some factors that can be detrimental to the implementation of service design. We also share available knowledge in other areas – such as political behavior – that can help designers to be more successful in the execution of service design projects. Greater emphasis on success stories Many references address the positive stories of service design. However, there are few references about flaws in service design projects, perhaps because some designers feel dissuaded from admitting that not all their action plans get implemented. They may fear damaging their reputation as a competent and successful designer. Although there is little discussion of failures, the number of projects that fail is not insignificant. The same happens in other fields, such as in IT. When asked about reported failure rates of 65 percent in software and hardware development projects, half of the interviewed managers indicated that these rates are typical2 . The indicators are not better in service design, because it also

deals with complex scenarios and many stakeholders, just as in IT. However, we have fewer statistics on the success rate of service design projects. Possible causes of failure to execute Part of the failure in executing service design projects can be explained by the emphasis on planning, as well as the fact there are few studies and methods about design implementation. First, the act of planning is often so seductive and appealing, that the planning itself becomes more important than the plan. As a result, the plan becomes more relevant than reality3. Mintzberg agrees and makes some critiques to the planning assumption of ‘predetermination’. That is, because the context for strategy making

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Not only after the second diamond

is stable, the process itself â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as well as its strategies â&#x20AC;&#x201C; can be predetermined. This is convenient to planning and planners. However, the world is not predictable because it is not static4 . Some service designers also put too much emphasis on planning, and underestimate the challenges that follow implementation. The lack of studies on this subject reflects the little attention that execution receives. However, it is not just in the service design field that there are few studies on the challenges of implementation. This is a gap in project literature in general5, 27, 28. The few existing studies are retrospective, made after the end of a project. They provide little insight into what happens during execution28. In addition to scarce implementation studies, we also have few methods to help designers make the action plan come true27. Although there are methods for design execution, some designers, such as Sarah Drummond, of Snook, believe that the focus should not be on creating even more tools, but in establishing a mindset that influences all stages of the project6 . Useful theories about implementation Helpful principles about execution are rare in service design, but there is a substantial amount of research outside of the design field7. This article will focus primarily on the theories about resistance to change in addition to power and politics in project management. Here are some factors that undermine the success rate of implementation: Adoption of Change

One of the main problems with implementing change through design projects is getting people to assimilate goals and adopt the suggested changes, with less struggle8. Fear of Loss

but all along the project lifecycle

People do not fear the change itself, but they are afraid of losing something such as appropriate working conditions, freedom, responsibility, authority, status, rights or privileges9,10. In summary, there is a trend towards Touchpoint 10-1 45

stabilisation and maintenance of the fundamental ruling values and present power relations11 . Victim of Politics

Pinto12 states that in his research and consulting experience, most companies spend thousands of hours planning and implementing multimillion or even multibillion-dollar investments, yet still often see a project derailed by political circumstances. Power Struggles

Crozier13 was one of the authors who thoroughly investigated the political and power issues in organisations which can affect the success of the projects. He found that employees spent much of their time carrying out irrelevant activities, preferring to care more about the pursuit of power, influence, and privilege14 . This dynamic of power is also present in service design projects. Refrain from Normalisation

The primary strategy of power struggle is to structure the adversary's condition while disrupting and deregulating one's own14 . So, the scenario service designers may encounter is one in which people want to standardise processes for ‘others,’ but do not want it for themselves14 . Four key factors to successful implementation Given this scenario of conflicts of interest, power games, project management problems, and a resistance to change, how can service designers succeed in implementation? They can increase their success through focusing on some initiatives which are in addition to project management: 1. Learning how to manage stakeholders properly In addition to mastering project management itself, designers need to have a complete understanding of stakeholders. Stakeholder mapping requires a complete analysis of all possible processes that impact stakeholders’ interests. To analyse such a process, 46 Touchpoint 10-1

remember that every stakeholder has specific purposes concerning the project. Depending on whether these requirements and expectations are considered or not, the stakeholder will show different attitudes and subsequent behaviours – whether co-operative or obstructive – concerning the project. A non-committed attitude might be enough to place the project in serious difficulty15. In summary, interests are the key factors behind the attitude and behaviour of stakeholders. Once the project team understands what these interests are, it becomes easier to know how to motivate them to support the service design objectives16 . 2. Developing and using the power of influence, through soft skills

In addition to stakeholder management, service designers need to have a leadership profile and know how to use the power of influence to help drive implementation. On this, Foucault wrote: “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses’, … it ‘masks’, … In fact, power produces; it produces reality”17. Power is not just a negative, coercive or repressive thing that forces us to behave against our wishes, but it can also be a necessary, productive and positive force in society18. If service design projects fail, this can be due to lack or misuse of power. However, notions of power in project execution remain mostly under-theorised19,12 . The following paragraphs present five theoretical principles about the power that can be useful for service designers. Lack of legitimate authority – Service designers — tend to have little power because they often operate outside the standard functional hierarchy. They quickly discover that they have little or no legitimate authority to ensure that people obey the project team’s requests20. — Centrality – The more central a department is in the organisation's mission, the more power it will have. The beginning of the project implementation has the potential to remove the centrality power of a

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department and transfer it to another location: the project team2. Shifting centrality means transferring the power that some groups have, to another team or department. When the team runs a service design project, this can take the focus off other departments, which may then feel jealous or resentful enough to sabotage a project. — Need for leadership – The power of influence of a service designer manifests itself primarily in the form of leadership and interpersonal skills that impact the communication and work coordination associated with the execution effort2 . Need for negotiation – A designer's leadership — depends to a large extent on their ability to negotiate agreements. According to Davis21 , designers today are no longer seen as experts who decide on the attributes of a finished product that is delivered to management to solve a problem. Under an organic, systems-oriented definition of practice, opportunities and insights emerge from anywhere within the organisation or system, not only from the designer. The designer steps into this context as a facilitator who builds consensus around ideas that continue to evolve under changing conditions21 . In this sense, designers are agreement negotiators, balancing different stakeholder interests. Involvement is key – Sometimes, service designers — need to deal with sabotage to their leadership role. In this case, identifying non-supporters and involving them in critical functions is recommended. Recognise that the stakeholder has much energy invested in their resistance. If you can re-direct this energy to constructive participation, the service design team will be using one of the most effective resistancemanagement techniques — involvement22 . 3. Seeing politics as something healthy and legitimate Senior and successful project managers have long known the importance of fostering strong political relationships throughout their organisations to achieve project success. The political behaviour will occur wherever there is competition for resources (budget, physical space,

equipment, software, better assignments, ability to interact with influential people and so on)23. Each group in the organisation has its interests, and this makes it necessary to negotiate. In this case, the policy serves to resolve conflicts of interest that arise20. In addition, service design has the potential to create conflict once it aims to make a change to a touchpoint. Some designers avoid the idea of politics influencing their plans, but to defend the absence of politics is a kind of politics, so, this is a contradiction. The effort to eliminate the politics or conflicts in a project is an innocent behavior2 . In a Foucauldian interpretation, suppressing conflict is suppressing freedom, because the privilege to engage in conflict is part of freedom24 . So, within an organisation or service design project, conflicts are legitimate and demand political skills to deal with them. A relevant study revealed that performance correlates positively with political skills, regarding the amount of work generated, quality of results and work precision. Also, political behaviour has a positive effect on people's reputation, which in turn is associated with superior performance25. The more professionals understand how political games work, the more prepared they will be to avoid being victims of them, using politics ethically to counteract questionable tactics of potential saboteurs20, 26 . 4. Taking implementation into account from the beginning of a project Finally, the last helpful concept about power for service designers is that being aware of the political dimensions in design projects makes it clear that everyone in the organisation exercises power in one form or another. Indirectly this means that the concern about the impact of power and politics is not something that should surface only at the beginning of execution. One aspect that is common to many projects that failed in execution is that low-performance ‘seeds’ were planted early in the planning phase2 . The changing mindset that includes political aspects is not something that happens only after the second diamond in the design process, but throughout Touchpoint 10-1 47

the process, following the immersion phase. This is because just one question in an interview can affect the wounds of the organisation, generating fear, anxiety, and conflicts from the beginning, which in turn can sabotage the execution. Conclusion The research presented here represents another step towards building a framework that supports service designers in their efforts to make action plans come true. Furthermore, we should remember that the limited amount of design implementation studies does not change the fact that execution is a vital stage for a service design project. Fortunately, there is a growing movement to bridge the gap between implementation principles and service design, as we can see elsewhere in this edition of Touchpoint. It is crucial that these theories include political behaviour and power issues, because if the execution is weak, it may be due to the lack of such knowledge and skills. Lastly, politics and conflicts of interest in projects must cease to be seen as a problem, and instead be seen as something natural, that service designers must learn to cope with. This way, they can be the leaders of innovation, leading organisations to the future they want.

1 Letts, D. (2016) How to get beyond the blueprint. Service Design Fringe Festival. November 2016. London, UK. 2 Pinto, J. (2013) Power and Politics in Project Management. Project Management Institute. 3 Sutherland, J. (2014) Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. Crown Business. 4 Mintzberg, H. (1994) The rise and fall of strategic planning: reconceiving roles for planning, plans, planners. The Free Press, NY. 5 Caron, F. (2014) Project Planning and Control: Early Engagement of Project Stakeholders. In: Journal of Modern Project Management, May-August 2014, pp 84-97. 6 Martins, R. (2018) Informal interview with Sarah Drummond. Personal annotations. 7 Studies outside of the design field: Bolman, L. and T. Deal (1991). Reframing organizations. SanFrancisco, Jossey-Bass Publishers Dejours, C. (1987). A Loucura do Trabalho. São Paulo, Cortez Editora. Floridi, L. (2015). “The New Grey Power.” Philos. Technol. 28: 329-332. Gonçalves, V. and C. Campos (2016). The Human Change Management Body of Knowledge. Rio de Janeiro, Brasport. Kotter, J. P. (1995). “Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail.” Harvard business review 73(2): 59-67. Laraia, A.; Moody, P.; Hall, R. (1999) The Kaizen Blitz: Accelerating Breakthroughs in Productivity and Performance. Wiley. New Jersey, NY. Latour, B. (2005). “Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies).” Mayers, J. (2005). Stakeholder Power Analysis. I. I. f. E. a.Development. The Netherlands. Pinto, J. (2013) Power and Politics in Project Management. Project Management Institute. Womack, J., et al. (2007). The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production – Toyota’s Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry. NY, Free Press.

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8 Silva, J. and S. Vergara (2003). Sentimentos, subjetividade e supostas resistências à mudança organizacional. RAE 43(3): 10-21. 9 Kisil, M. (1998) Roteiro: pontos a considerar em uma mudança organizacional in: Gestão da Mudança Organizacional, volume 4. Faculdade de Saúde Pública da Universidade de São Paulo: São Paulo. 10 Kets de Vries, M.; Balazs, K. (1999) Transforming the mind-set of organization. Administration and society, v. 30, n.6. Jan 1999 11 Fleury, M. (1993) Cultura da Qualidade e Mudança Organizacional. Revista de Administração de Empresas. EAESP/FGV, São Paulo. 12 Pinto, J. (2000) Understanding the role of politics in successful project management. International Journal of Project Management 18 (2000) 85-91. 13 Crozier, M. (1964). The bureaucratic phenomenon, Transaction Publishers. 14. B auman, Z. (2011) The fate of social inequality in liquid modern times in: Collateral Damage (Social Inequalities in a Global Age). Polity Press: Cambridge, England. 15. O lander, S. (2007), ‘Stakeholder impact analysis in construction project management,’ Construction Management and Economics, 25, 277- 287. 16. C aron, F. (2014) Project Planning and Control: Early Engagement of Project Stakeholders. In: Journal of Modern Project Management, May-August 2014, pp 84-97. 17. Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish: the birth of a prison. London, Penguin. 18. G aventa, J. (2003) Power after Lukes: a review of the literature, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. 19. Blackler, F. (2011) Power, politics, and intervention theory: lessons from organization studies. Theory and Psychology 21 (5) 724-734. Schein, V. (1976) Individual Power and Political Behaviors in Organizations: An Inadequately Explored Reality. The Academy of Management Review. Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan. 1977), pp. 64-72 20. Pinto, J. (1989) Power and Politics in Project Management. Project Management Institute. 21. D avis, M. (2012) Graphic Design Theory: Graphic Design in Context. Thames & Hudson, NY. 22. Alsher, P. (2016) 9 Effective Tactics for Managing Resistance to Change: Do What Works. Published on Implementation Management Associates. https://www.imaworldwide.com/ blog/9-effective-tactics-for-managing-resistance-to-change-do-whatworks. Accessed on April 26th, 2018. 23. Kacmar, K.; Ferris, G. (1993) Politics at Work: Sharpening the Focus of Political Behavior in Organizations. Business Horizons / July August. 24. Flyvbjerg, B. and Richardson, T. (2002) Planning and Foucalt: In Search of the Dark Side of Planning Theory. In: Allmendinger, P. and Tewdwr-Jones, M., eds., Planning Futures: New Directions for Planning Theory. London and New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 44-62. 25. Liu, Y.; Ferris, G.; Perrewé, P.; Zinko, R.; Weitz, B.; & Jun Xu (2007). Dispositional antecedents and outcomes of political skill in organizations: A four study investigation with convergence. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 71, 146-165. 26. Vecchio, R. (2007) Leadership: Understanding the Dynamics of Power and Influence in Organizations. The University of Notre Dame. 27. Martins, R. (2017) Analysis of Available Design Implementation Methods. A Study About Scarcity of Implementation Methods. The Design Journal. Volume 20, 2017 - Issue sup1: Design for Next: Proceedings of the 12th European Academy of Design Conference, Sapienza University of Rome, 12-14 April 2017 28. Marion, J., et al. (2016). Project Execution: A research agenda to explore the phenomenon. The Journal of Modern Project Management 4(1).

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Service Design Pattern Language Service design is penetrating deeper into large-scale service organisations and confronting business-system complexity. The focus of the design community is mainly on innovation and the creation of new services (including digital services). This means that implementation and maintenance are not sufficiently considered, despite the fact that many large organisations are struggling with these aspects. Implementing a service in large business systems is already a daunting task, simply due to scale. But complexity, dynamics and constant changes within the system provide additional challenges. We can observe two distinct types of system1: In ‘monolithic’ systems, the organisation’s dynamics revolve around a small number of projects. On the other hand, ‘fragmented’ systems involve a large number of concurrent projects and many decisions are taken (sometimes unilaterally) that affect the service. While one person or a single team can lead and manage design efforts in a monolithic system, in a fragmented one this might not be physically possible.2 Fragmented systems rely on managers and employees, so managing design and design implementation requires a systematic approach. But the reality is that managers and employees are (usually) not designers. That means the usual service-

concept designs must be developed further and presented using appropriate forms of communication to ensure the concept can be fully understood, embraced and absorbed by the whole organisation. It is the organisation (its managers and employees, to be precise) that must take the service concept and bring it alive at the operational level of its daily activities. And, even more crucially, it has to understand what impact future changes and improvements have on the service. How does one create such strong bonds and ensure employees and managers embrace the design concept? Can we communicate with the usual service

1 Source: Bain&Co “Capital Effectiveness in Telcos”, July 2017 by Franz Bedacht, Herbert Blum and Darryn Lowe 2 Increase of yearly capital investment ratio to revenue increases the number of concurrent projects. Telecom industry standard is approximately 20 percent.

Luka Baranovic is Managing director of humanact, service design firm. luka.baranovic@humanact. design Branimir Spajic is Director of Customer Experience Management department in Croatian Telekom. branimir.spajic@t.ht.hr Natasa Dereta is Head of Customer Experience section in Croatian Telekom. natasa.dereta@t.ht.hr Mladen Tica is Program Manager in Croatian Telekom. mladen.tica@t.ht.hr Viktor Hlaca is CX Journey Manager in Croatian Telekom. viktor.hlaca@t.ht.hr

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design tools? Even in large fragmented systems? Service design tools are well suited to the design process, but have limits if used for large-scale mobilisation of an organisation. There are several challenges when applying current service design tools to implementation efforts: 1. Linearity – Organisations don’t deliver service in a linear way. Linearity in customer journey maps or service blueprints is great when designing, but it prevents effective implementation of a service. One employee’s work may be positioned at the intersection of many journeys. Even several concurrent journeys may be involved. The usual situation is for employees to understand all aspects of a service when it is presented at a workshop, but then find themselves unable to adapt it to their reality when they return to their workplace. 2. Abstract ion – A designed solution is usually too distant from an employee’s daily work perspective. Insights on customers’ anxieties and challenges are often too far from employees for them to easily understand. 3. Reach – Most current tools are designed for co-creation. And that means workshops. Unfortunately, it is not possible to put several thousand people through workshops and expect effective results. 4. Ownership – Every customer journey touches many departments within the company. But it is rare that a single department or group is responsible for it. Each manager tends to focus only on those service elements under his or her responsibility. 5. Consistency – As with all co-creation tools, the output of design processes depend on the quality of inputs and research involved. And these tend to be inconsistent unless there is strong management. Professional biases also impact how the information is extracted from those tools. 6. Focus – Service depends on details. And, unfortunately, those details are hidden in massive journey maps. They are usually missed because everybody’s focus remains on the overall service flow. 50 Touchpoint 10-1

7. Language – This is the biggest challenge. We are missing the words and a language to communicate or discuss what we are actually designing. Service design language is currently focused on tools. We have developed a vocabulary that is great for describing methods and tools, but not for describing the content we actually design. Language is important because words provide meaning and meaning gives context. And context empowers behaviours. Other creative industries are better at exploiting the power of language. For example, fashion: naming different types of trousers (jeans, beach shorts, chinos, cargo pants, formal pants, bell-bottoms, etc.) gives us an understanding of what type of garment they are. The name communicates their appearance, social context, where and how to wear them, and how to combine them with other clothes. The name also helps us to discuss them (size, performance, fit, etc.). If we were to name parts of a service in a similar manner, it would enable the design to be shared, understood, discussed, challenged, implemented and improved by employees. Therefore we must build a language for service. A common “pattern language” to be precise. Christopher Alexander created the “pattern language” concept, in which a language consists of a system of architectural “patterns”.3 What Alexander calls a “pattern” is an element of architecture that can be repeated with an indefinite number of variations (e.g. a street, a type of house, a room, a wall, a room, a window, a garden, etc.). These patterns are not instructions telling one how to build something, but rather sometime that provides context for design. Alexander’s original concept has been extended to many areas, including graphic and digital design and programming. The idea of a service pattern language follows the same logic. The easiest way to describe a service pattern

3 Source: Christopher Alexander: “Timeless Way of building” and “Pattern language”

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is as a part of a service (or a service segment) that can be observed as an entity. For example, in telecoms, patterns might include “waiting for installation” or “issuing and paying first bill”. Language represents a set of patterns covering a service, end-to-end. Patterns provide focus by breaking large services down into smaller entities. They provide context, describe challenges and enable a bigger audience to fully understand a specific service element. They help managers and employees to bring abstract service designs to an operational level. They enable the creation of procedures and the structuring of day-to-day activities to be in line with an original design concept. They also enable ownership. For example, a dedicated manager could be made responsible for the performance of a specific pattern. Patterns also ensure consistency over time, especially in fragmented business systems. But the process of creating patterns is more sophisticated than just breaking down the service into segments. It requires an iterative process that goes through three levels. The first is the ‘System’ level. Patterns (segments of service) are identified at the level of the whole system. They emerge from the study of customer journeys, lifecycles and experiences. We would argue that companies within the same industry would have very similar systems and patterns. For example, for telecom operators, one pattern could be “waiting for broadband line installation”. The second level is that of ‘Design’. The original ‘System’ patterns are expanded with brand attributes, the organisation’s capabilities and its design principles. At this level, each pattern gains its full form, its meaning within the service system, its attributes, affordances, signifiers and quality elements. So “waiting for broadband line installation” could be expanded to “anxiety-less waiting” or whatever you want to achieve with this specific pattern. The next step is to create a solution for an actual pattern: a service solution. However creating a complete solution requires a third layer. The pattern design layer crucial to secure sharing and discussion among managers

is the ‘Business’ level, in which each pattern is defined along with its own measurements and KPIs. There are three things to measure: operational performance related to a particular pattern (for example, installation time), customer behaviour as an effect of the pattern (such as number of unnecessary inquiries for information while waiting for installation) and, where possible, sentiment (for example, satisfaction with service after installation). The final pattern description should have a similar structure to that in Alexander’s original approach. A pattern must have: — An engaging name that everyone can relate to and use for communication. A position that describes where the pattern fits within — the whole service system and how it relates to other relevant patterns. A problem statement that concisely describes the — challenge – why a particular pattern has been set up. — The body of the pattern gives a full description and elaborates the context. The solution is a set of directives that provides explicit — instructions on how to approach pattern design. The performance indicators, which will assist — managers in tracking pattern service performance. We would like to conclude by saying that this particular approach came from the challenge of managing service design within large system of a telecom service provider. The concept described here is one the team is working on and should be considered as one of several possible versions. We invite everybody to discuss this topic and welcome suggestions for improvements.

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Approaches to Service Design and Delivery Using Lean and Kanban “A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

Tim Macarthur is Service & Experience Design Manager at a connected vehicle company. His career has seen him work in the enterprise, in consultancy and in software products and services. Tim is Chapter Lead for the SDN in Ireland, and is an SDN Accredited Master Trainer.

Since ‘Bucky’ Fuller first said this towards the latter end of the last century, this list of potential designer roles, and the meaning and context of each, has grown in scope exponentially as we design for an ever more complex world. As service design is progressively adopted by the enterprise, moving from being a consultancy speciality to an in-house capability, the need for better delivery methods and measurable success from concept to customer has crystallised. As such, service designers need to understand how agile delivery methodologies can help with moving beyond initial ideation and prototyping. In this article, I want to explore how one of these agile methodologies – Lean – can be applied to service design and delivery. Lean Service Design and Delivery First of all, why should you think about using a Lean approach in the context of service design and delivery? Let’s have a look at one current definition of service design: “Service design choreographs processes, technologies and interactions within complex systems in order to co-

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create value for relevant stakeholders.” (Mager 2015) This bears striking similarities to this definition of Lean: “Lean is doing more with less. Use the least amount of effort, energy, equipment, time, facility space, materials, and capital – while giving customers exactly what they want.”1 (Womack & Jones 2003) Both definitions refer to the organisation of work in stochastic systems to deliver value, with Lean introducing the importance of efficiency to this endeavour. That is an attractive proposition. Traditionally some aspects of Lean theory rankle with designers, who look at Lean’s manufacturing heritage and misconstrue concepts like minimising variability as meaning ‘make everything the same’ and therefore as anathema to a design mindset. This misinterprets Lean, while ignoring the benefits that it can bring, such as minimising Work in Process (WIP) and visualising work across multi-

1 Womack, J. P., & Jones, D. T. (2003). Lean thinking: Banish waste and create wealth in your corporation. New York: Free Press.

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2. Identify the Value Stream

3. Flow 1. Specify Value

Mode 1 Mode 2

5. Pursue Perfection

4. Pull

Lean Service Design & Delivery

disciplinary teams (using Kanban boards). As designers, we should pick ways of working that serve us best. Let’s have a look at the core principles of Lean through a service design lens: — Specify Value. Value can be defined only by the ultimate customer. This agrees with Service Dominant Logic, where value is perceived and determined by the customer on the basis of value in use as opposed to value in ownership.2 (Vargo & Lusch 2004) Identify the Value Stream. The Value Stream is all — the actions needed to bring a service to the customer. Mapping this is analogous to service blueprinting. Flow. Make the value-creating steps flow. This means — optimising work across all of the actors and capabilities in realising a service. Think in terms of shipping service journeys, not features or siloes. — Pull. Let the customer pull the service from you. See what is working from built-in feedback loops in the

2 Stephen L. Vargo, Robert F. Lusch (2004) Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing. Journal of Marketing: January 2004, Vol. 68, No. 1, pp. 1-17

service and scale to meet demand. Pursue Perfection. Put in place the mechanisms that — allow you to monitor performance to iterate and improve on service journeys. The nature of work & modality The nature of work is different at either end of the service design to delivery continuum. Working in the ‘fuzzy front end’ of a design project, both ‘Specifying Customer Value’ (research, co-creation), and ‘Identifying Value Streams’ (blueprinting, validating service concepts) necessitate a specific set of work methods, while the more production-focused ‘Flow’, ‘Pull’ and the ‘Pursue Perfection’ activities demand others (planning, implementing and adapting service journeys across touchpoints over time). Identifying two modes of Lean work – Mode 1 for research and Design Thinking-led service design, Mode 2 for service delivery (based on prioritised backlogs) provides a useful shorthand for the different sets of work methods, as well as introducing a notional point in time when activities switch from planning to execution. Touchpoint 10-1 53

Journey-Level Metrics

Aggregate

Phase-Level Metrics Inter-Touchpoint Metrics Touchpoint-Level Metrics

Service Metric Capture

Lean Service Design - Mode 1 Lean has been part of the product design conversation for a while now, underpinned by concepts like the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and a ‘Build, Measure, Learn’ approach. However, the problem with MVPs using a ‘Build, Measure, Learn’ approach is that in this model, value is first created by the producer alone based on a hypothesis (build) and only then validated with the customer, allowing further iteration (measure, learn). Initial research is a key aspect of service design activities, allowing us to effectively co-create value in use with customers through service prototypes. In his book ‘The Service Startup’, Tenny Pinheiro addresses this concern with a proposal for a ‘Minimum Valuable Service’ (MVS), shifting focus from technology to humans (viable to valuable), and scope from products to services.3 Before a Mode 1 MVS can effectively transition into being a Mode 2 service in delivery however, you need to build-in ways to monitor value and success over time.4 To do this, you need to have an understanding of the ways your service realises customer value, what signals will indicate success in realising that value, and what 54 Touchpoint 10-1

metrics will inform those signals. Instead of giving a detailed list of methods for this here, I invite you to have a look at Yury Vetrov’s exhaustive compilation5 of various frameworks and approaches and see what fits your context. You should build monitoring mechanisms in such a way that they can be referred to over time to help your service adapt to customer behaviour and demand. Lean service design is about researching, co-designing and prototyping services that are valuable and beautiful for customers.

3 Pinheiro, T. (2014) The Service Startup. Eise 4 As Polaine et al say: “You will do yourself and the field of service design a great favour if you always include the definition of performance indicators in your proposal.” Polaine A., Løvlie L. & Reason B. (2013) Service Design: From Insight to Implementation. New York: Rosenfeld Media 5 https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2017/07/applied-uxstrategy-part-52-outcome-driven-design.php

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Lean Service Delivery - Mode 2 I like this quote from Jonny Schneider: “The Lean mindset … helps in identifying the appropriate things to build as well as improving the system of work that delivers value. This is entirely agnostic to the medium in which value is produced; that is, it could be software, underpants, or healthcare.” 6 This for me underlines one of the key differences between Lean and Agile. Agile, realised in methodologies like Scrum, is expressly geared towards the production of software. Lean, realised in methodologies like Kanban, gives us a framework to bring all of the capabilities needed to ship service journeys together to visualise and measure work, whatever that work is – be it policy design or software engineering. One of the key components of Kanban is the use of boards to tokenise work items, allowing visibility and shared understanding of what is ongoing to the entire multi-disciplinary team. These work tokens traverse a workflow of all of the capabilities that are needed to create the service, helping to ensure that we don’t deliver in silos, or create discrete features without thinking of the overall service. Everyone in the team can see the status and dependencies for pieces of work depending on which column they are in on a Kanban board, and rituals such as daily stand-ups can provide an opportunity for input and reprioritisation. Another component of Kanban is limiting WIP – Work in Process. The idea, based on queuing theory, is that pieces of work should be right-sized to facilitate effective throughput to delivery across functions, and only a certain amount of work should be ongoing at any time to avoid loss of time through context-switching of focus. The principle is to do less, more often. This also enables you to effectively re-prioritise new incoming work based on customer needs from your ongoing feedback loops.

Conclusion At the core of Lean Service Design and Delivery is a question: ‘What is the next most valuable thing we can do right now, and how can we best do that?’ Bringing Lean thinking to service design augments not only the up-front research and prototyping activities (Mode 1), it also provides a framework for delivering right-sized, feedback-informed service journeys over time in conjunction with Kanban (Mode 2). When thinking about how best to bring together all of the various actors and capabilities needed to bring a service to life, you should consider using Lean and Kanban as a way to continuously deliver value in your project.

Continue the discussion on Slack! Question for the author(s)? Have your own perspective to share with the community? Head over to the #touchpoint channel within the SDN’s Community Slack, and take part in the discussion about this article! sdn-community.slack.com Not yet a member? Join at bit.ly/SDNSlackNEW

6 Schneider, J. (2017) Understanding Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media

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Implementation by Design Tactics for implementing great services

Soft skills and human relationships are critical to creating services in the real world. Behind every great service is a team of highly organised people working together towards a common goal. It takes hard work to achieve this, but by representing the end user across all aspects of an organisation, service designers are excellently positioned to develop this unity and purpose. Service design also provides the tools and coaching needed to ensure that Karen Barrett is a Service Designer at Engine. She has consulting experience within service design, cultural change and research programmes. karen.barrett@enginegroup. co.uk Ewan Cameron is a Senior Consultant at Engine. He works with clients to build investment cases for whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been designed and translate design into successful delivery. ewan.cameron@enginegroup. co.uk Sam Hirsch is a Senior Service Designer at Engine. His background is in industrial design, strategy and innovation. sam.hirsch@enginegroup.co.uk Martta Oliveira is a Consultant at Engine. She helps organisations design their CX strategy, guiding them through to prototyping and implementation.

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teams can turn this united vision into action on the ground. The tactics we provide here have been developed and applied in work across a range of industries including finance, teleÂ communications, public sector services, aviation and hospitality.

Create and align on a vision In large organisations, consultants are often called on because teams have lost sight of their shared purpose. This was the case in a local authority we worked with, where a series of funding cuts, organisational restructures and conflicting departmental visions had left the frontline service teams unclear and misaligned on their common goal. Consequently, most employees were solely focused on fulfilling poorly designed performance metrics rather than supporting customers to achieve what they needed. We worked with both the executive board and frontline teams to help each

reconnect with their customers and what they needed. Using personas, journey design and collaborative systems mapping gave us a clearer understanding of the broader context that the service operated within. With everyone re-engaged and energised, we were then able to form and frame an exciting vision for the organisation that put the customer back into focus and refreshed the feeling of purpose each employee had in what they did day-to-day. This was important to establish, in order to help move from design into successful implementation. Without a vision that people can align around, confusion can delay getting things done because

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Mapping customer interactions with a client

otherwise individuals aren’t necessarily emotionally committed to making things happen when any design or implementation challenges pop up along the way. Break down silos and open communication channels Many organisations we collaborate with have problems that stem from a lack of communication, visibility, and understanding between business units. A large housing company was facing this challenge, which resulted in a fragmented and inconsistent experience for customers. Helping them apply service design in their organisation and break down silos, we made sure to involve as wide a range of stakeholders as possible in our work. Co-creation workshops are a great way of breaking down silos, and become crucial as teams iterate through design and implementation phases by inspiring joined-up thinking and doing. We make sure workshop attendees come from a cross-section of departments and seniority levels and we facilitate sessions in ways that encourage everyone to have their say. These workshops give us a

means to work cross-functionally early on and begin to build the relationships we require for successful implementation. Co-creation is one of the basic tenets of successful service design, but it’s importance cannot be overstated in getting designs into the real world. In one particular case we recognised that many staff were growing disillusioned about their roles due to near constant organisational restructures and shifting priorities, meaning that they no longer felt as connected to their end user as they could have. To address this, we organised weekly ‘design clinics’ which were working sessions focused on a design activity, but which were suitably open that we could discuss any additional concerns that came from the attendees and their teams. Examples of design activities we facilitated included: mapping the services that the frontline team provided directly versus the many community and support services that they signpost to, or mapping the journey that a customer may have experienced before they come to housing services. The repeated and intimate nature of these sessions lead frontline staff to articulate in these Touchpoint 10-1 57

sessions the complexity of the issues they came across day-by-day, and uncovered many opportunities for early intervention, and to unravel tangles in the system. These sessions were hugely valuable in that they generated engagement and trust in our work while simultaneously creating strong relationships with and amongst the people we worked with. To make sure these critical feedback loops remained open throughout implementation, we worked with management to equip them with the skills needed to run ongoing ‘design clinic’-style sessions from which they could gather and communicate insights that could be acted upon on an ongoing basis. We communicated our findings back to the executive board who were very receptive to these insights and ideas, which we could not have uncovered without building trust in the intimate clinics. Champion the vision Aligning the diverse group of people required to make implementation a success doesn’t happen by chance, it comes through planned and consistent engagement supported by clear storytelling to continuously champion the vision. When working with a health insurer, we realised that some within the organisation seemed to have trouble communicating the project vision to influential colleagues, particularly when their audience wasn’t involved from the start of the design process. We know that disseminating a vision throughout an organisation isn’t a one person or one-off task, and we’ve found it helps to equip people with the narratives they need to excite their peers around the vision, because as external consultants, we can only do so much. One way we did this was through our workshops, which provide a safe space for stakeholders to practice their ‘pitch’ and facilitation skills. The core team would be invited to facilitate the workshop with us, and gave them responsibility for project communication. We took care to coach and mentor our stakeholders so they could confidently engage and report upwards. While this coaching was not necessarily formalised, we tended to make ourselves available informally, as 58 Touchpoint 10-1

and when our stakeholders needed us. For instance, we have often used WhatsApp as a tool to communicate informally with our clients. Additionally, before key engagements we were not involved in, we would offer tips and guidance to communicate the work effectively, rather than simply handing over deliverables and hope they were used in the right way. The team dynamic we create through this process, and the assets we hand-over, become powerful change agents during the implementation phase. We enable stakeholders and our direct clients to repeatedly bring to life the organisations’ purpose in a compelling way. This helps colleagues become more invested in the vision, more ready and willing to advocate why things need to change, and more dedicated to working together to implement great designs well. Stand by your method Successfully re-designing and implementing services can be a creative challenge that takes time, effort and many resilient people working together. Doing it well requires a method to guide different teams. This was the case when working with a large international airport, where designing and improving the customer experience was done at scale, involving many stakeholders. An initial concern seemed to stem from a lack of familiarity with an iterative and non-linear design process. This resulted in situations where we were pressured for outcomes while we were still defining the problem or gathering insights necessary to proceed. To address this, we equipped our stakeholders with an understanding of the design and implementation process stages so that they could share them with others using a clear, visual outline. This explained not only where we were, but most importantly the mindset involved, and the value of each step, to dissuade the team from rushing ahead. This helped everyone fully understand the process so that we were able to move ahead with implementation-ready designs, rather than delivering blueprints and documentation without the necessary depth and understanding of the systems they were designed to support.

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Staff training workshop

A further tactic that really helped was to demonstrate success early on in an engaging way, and to adapt the method to show our willingness to be partners in implementation, rather than judges of it. This increased the resilience of the individuals and organisation at large for the ups and downs that come during implementation, and helped build everyone's commitment to doing the relevant work in the right way to design and implement great services. Get every pocket of the organisation on board A large telecommunications company was concerned that their staff didn’t understand the impact they had on customers, when they did not deal with customers directly. Customer satisfaction was being damaged by this lack of awareness, and it was also an obstacle to implementing a great service. The ‘enablers’ of the experience were not necessarily marching to the beat of the same drum as those directly involved in delivering it. This misalignment was causing divisions within the organisation, because blame for customer issues could be directed away from the cause. The company needed a solution that would scale to thousands of employees across the world. We created simple, self-facilitated learning modules that could be completed in a series of 30-minute sessions, and these were distributed through the organisation’s learning platform. The modules explored the values of the organisation, relating principles of great service design

to them, and highlighting the influence that everyone has on the customer’s experience, regardless of how removed from the customer they think they are. Each module includes animations, activities, worksheets, facilitation guides and theory, to engage the participants in a short timeframe. Today, teams across the world and business units are feeling empowered and energised by the short learning sessions, which often generate broader conversations about the way they work. The modules have also gained momentum because the Customer Experience team has championed them through internal events and social media, creating a movement around customer-centricity, and a hashtag to accompany it. Furthermore, the reflection activities in each learning module have been tied to the employees’ performance reviews, so that the learning content has a broader meaning in their work life. Conclusion As a highly social process, service design is well-placed to build trusted working relationships, engagement and resilience amongst people. Strong relationships are crucial to breaking down silos and developing lines of communication, and by taking a role in this, we can foster high-quality communication through the appropriate use of tools and coaching. We all want our work to be successful, meaningful and valued. For all of us involved in designing and implementing great services, reflecting on the importance of soft skills should inform where we focus our efforts and how we practice our craft.

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Tools and Methods

The Moment Culture Scan Visualising culture and building support for great design

Without a critical mass of cultural supports, even the most impressive service design outputs can end up dead before they make it to customers. As the practice of service design evolves, so does the need for a way to visualise and measure organisational cultures necessary to support it. The Moment Culture Scan1 is Erika Bailey works at The Moment in Toronto, Canada. Her design career has evolved from education, the arts and consulting. She holds a Masters in Human Systems Intervention (Concordia University, Montreal). Erika’s service design practice is rooted in positive deviance, culture change and developing behavioural supports for design. erika@themoment.is

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such a tool. Avoiding implementation sabotage and design theatre When it comes to successful service design work, implementation and results are what matters. Sweeping organisational cultural barriers to implementation under the carpet for lack of budget, or stakeholder availability and willingness, limits the potential for designers to deliver impact. The result can be an exercise in ‘design theatre’ – putting on a show, but getting nothing done. As a people-centred practice, service design exists within a complex system of people and economics. Healthcare is a great example of this. Anyone who’s worked within a hospital environment knows that hospitals have very strong cultures; you can’t just introduce a new design into an area and expect people to embrace new ways of thinking and acting. There are very strong elements of culture at play – both stated and implied. One of my favourite healthcare examples of this is the Bordering on

Zero2 project, an American-Canadian collaboration for the design of hospital unit-generated solutions to critical patient safety problems. The key to enabling change on this project was not only to design for keeping people safe, but also to design the underlying culture to support the work. Because we addressed culture as a primary support for good design work, our project yielded impressive patient safety results well exceeding targets and national standards. By addressing culture as a critical element to the design process, we avoided design theatre, and kept implementation front and centre. That’s why it’s so important to understand and measure culture. And we developed a tool that does just that, called The Moment Culture Scan.

1 The Moment Culture Scan can be downloaded for free at www.themoment.is/innovationculture 2 Designing for Behaviour: Increasing Patient Safety in Complex Environments, www.themoment.is/ projects/mohawk-valley-health-system/

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Two dimensions of measurement: ‘Desired’ and ‘lived’ culture The Culture Scan has two dimensions of measurement: 1. An organisation’s desired culture 2. An organisation’s actual (lived) culture

leadership engage with key stakeholders to establish and document their desired culture. This process can be revealing in itself, because it surfaces differences of perspective and opinion among those who make key decisions.

The first dimension revolves around the desired organisational culture – what Argyris and Schön3 call ‘espoused theory.’ Typically, this is the culture that leadership has agreed to pursue in service of the organisational goals and strategy – the culture leadership claims they do have or should have. You’ll often see evidence or what Edgar Schein of the MIT Sloan School of Management calls ‘cultural artefacts’ that represent this desired culture in written form, such as values on the lobby wall, or patterns of dressing for work. Because desired culture tends to be driven top-down from leadership roles, the Culture Scan first helps

The second dimension has to do with the organisation’s current lived culture. Argyris and Schön call this the ‘theory in practice.’ This is the culture that people see manifested on a day-to-day basis in actions, choices, reactions and behaviours. Typically, people will notice the lived culture when it is at odds with the desired culture; when the two don’t match. For example, when leaders say, “We are an innovative company”, yet service designers observe resistance to change from those they impact, there is a disconnect. The lived culture is established by surveying (preferably) the entire organisation on how often they see the desirable culture at play when they are at work. The key to organisational effectiveness, according to

3 Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness; Argyris, C. & Schön, D., John Wiley and Sons Inc., 1974

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Argyris and Schön, is the congruence between the desired and lived culture. Therefore, the Culture Scan is designed to help designers measure both in relation to each other. Case Study: Muse One notable engagement was with Interaxon, the creators of the Muse brain-sensing headbands. Their Culture Scan results showed several cultural elements requiring attention to realise their potential. Together with their whole team, we undertook a co-creative process to tune culture to support their innovation, design and growth. Jackie Cooper, EVP Sales and Marketing, admitted she was surprised to see the results, but was relieved to have a clear idea of how to use cultural assets and gaps between lived and desired culture to make their team “fire on all cylinders.” Derek Luke, CEO, reflected: “Using the Culture Scan helped us dig deeper into our culture, allowing us to better understand what we need and what we have… The Culture Scan identified specific cultural elements that we can build and leverage to grow our people and our business.” Like most organisations, it has been hard to maintain the same level of resonance and vibrancy that they had in the early days of being a successful start-up. Chris Aimone, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer said, “It’s very easy to think that you have a great culture and that people are really happy, but you have to go and check that.” The Culture Scan provided a baseline diagnostic, and an easy way to check in and measure progress. Taking action based on understanding culture Once the Culture Scan is complete, designers can identify which elements are directly affecting the implementation of their designs. If an organisation scores low on the frequency of collaborative behaviour or trust to take risks, are they going to be able to enact a particular behind-the-scenes process that is critical to service delivery? If there is a gap between what they say they value and the values that are playing out in the organisation, are you confident that the design strategy will be effective? With the Culture Scan, designers and 64 Touchpoint 10-1

leaders can address questions such as these as a service design takes shape. Two hemispheres of measurement: Innovation and unique elements There are many types of culture mapping tools available to designers. Most are intended to help you understand a culture you are presented with. The Culture Scan does that too, but is also deliberately prescriptive. Implicit in the design of the tool is the assertion that in order to remain successful and relevant in a rapidly changing world, organisations must embrace innovation behaviour, infrastructure and activities. Therefore, the tool is divided vertically into two hemispheres: — On the left side: Elements of a successful innovation culture (pre-populated) — On the right side: An organisation’s unique cultural elements (blank) The elements of innovation culture that have been identified on the left side of the tool are primarily based on the work of Langdon Morris4 . Innovation behaviours, infrastructure and activity are measured as a baseline for how ready and active people are in engaging in thought, action and support for effective innovation work to happen. The unique cultural elements – the right side of the tool – represent the elements unique to an organisation, and often reflect the type of business they’re in. A yoga studio and a manufacturing plant both have values, structures and dynamics that define what happens every day, but those things are understandably very different. Therefore, the right side of the tool maps the values, structures and dynamics that people can identify with. Reading them should create a response that “this feels like us,” or at the very least, “this feels like what leadership wants.”

4 Innovation Master Plan: The CEO’s Guide to Innovation; Morris, L.; Innovation Academy, 2011.

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Culture is everything and nothing By design, the Culture Scan defines culture as the collective result of everything that happens and is felt within the workings of an organisation. Everything from innovation infrastructure to processes, team formation, values and rituals is captured in the tool. In this way, culture is more than a sense of what it is like to work there; culture is everything. Culture can also be nothing. If you don’t do anything with the gained knowledge of your culture, who cares? Getting to the truth about the congruence between desired and lived culture is the ‘gold’ of the Culture Scan experience. And using that ‘gold’ to get to action is always a co-creative process.

Ideally, when a Culture Scan is complete (desired and lived cultures are fully mapped), the whole organisation – or a representation of all the parts – comes together to make meaning of the data. This makes space for a changing of mindsets and patterns, and for service design success.

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The Service Teardown: Follow the Money to Better Decisions Service innovations are largely shaped by economic, behavioural and technological market forces. As service designers, we generally do a great job helping organisations understand how people create value and how organisations themselves must advance their technology to differentiate from competitors. Richard Ekelman is the Founder of SERV/, a registered benefit corporation that focuses on building internal capabilities through public service design certificate courses and project based-training. His experience ranges from external consulting to internal roles. He is a Master Service Design trainer accredited by the Service Design Network.

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However, I realised my work did not adequately address how our solutions would impact the organisation. Inspired by the work of CB Insights, the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Service Teardownâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is a concise evaluation of an organisation, from multiple economic inputs, to understand how to better inform key decisions. A service teardown is a flexible approach to understanding the micro and macro economics of an organisation blended with how humans assign value. When I founded SERV/ last April, I worked out of a start-up incubator where I realised that service design considers value in a way that organisations rarely use to inform key decisions. Working around start-ups helped me appreciate how much more I needed to know about conveying and projecting the kind of information people need to know about the risks associated with taking an innovation through to implementation. As an external consultant, many of the projects I was a part of got shelved. Working on internal teams resulted in work that reached implementation,

but many were reduced to quick wins/ slow losses, which was frustrating. In retrospect, the metrics we used for service performance and value were important, but they did not address the risk factors stakeholders consider when evaluating specific costs and trade-offs when calculating risks. We uniquely understand how services create value, but our methods donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t often inform how organisations place bets or construct roadmaps. Conducting a service teardown is part of how I establish a base of understanding leading into and throughout my work. Core elements of the Service Teardown The Service Teardown is a breakdown of

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an organisation’s finances, service portfolio and internal values. This process is much easier for publicly traded companies, but the same information can be obtained through candid conversations. To get started, find annual reports, Security and Exchange Commission(SEC) filings (or other public financial records), and any other fiscal documents related to their fiduciary responsibilities, because organisations are legally required to divulge what they see as issues affecting their industry. Other useful resources for US-based organisations are the Better Business Bureau, Glassdoor, the Department of Labor, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and HR reports when available. A teardown can have many interchangeable parts, but the core elements I analyse are: — Executive summary — Service portfolio evaluation — Risk assessment — Assets and liquidity — Core market strategy — Internal values — Brand alignment Building on these core elements, a teardown can become a knowledge base that builds as a project progresses. Once a few concepts have been identified, they can be modelled for other financial inputs, such as ‘cost of goods and services’ helping to understand the ROI of a service, and ‘total addressable market’ quantifying how much a service concept can grow the organisation’s audience. Adding these established financial measurements helps us evaluate the viability of our work. An example In February of 2018, I evaluated US-based supermarket chain Kroger, following Amazon’s movements into the grocery industry. Kroger, the third largest employer in the US, is a huge incumbent facing new competition. Evaluating their annual reports, earnings transcripts, press releases and SEC filings for the previous 18 months, it quickly became clear that their liquidity and credit were major risk factors in their ability to launch

a new initiative to compete with Amazon. Kroger has historically used fuel discounts to drive store traffic. However, more fuel-efficient cars and rising costs of operation appeared to mean they would have to sell their fuel stations to afford the investments they referenced in their public filings. Kroger’s balance sheet shows zero investment in R&D over the last three years. Analysis of their public documents suggested their ability to innovate was diminished. The implications for a service design team are multiple. Proposed innovations would need to drive engagement without their largest competitive differentiator. Additionally, Kroger wanted to diversify their stores to include apparel and add new levels of service. With these factors in mind, at the outset of an engagement, a service design team would be able to start with an understanding of where the company stands today, and the promises they have made to their shareholders. Designing partnerships and acquisitions could be the most viable solutions, but without a teardown it is difficult to understand the viability of how we solve complex problems. Like any service design method, a teardown must be flexible. I have found this process helpful in business development and at the outset of an engagement to manage expectations. There are many other ways to incorporate this approach. Service design offers organisations a great deal of value. We just need to translate how our outcomes relate to the economic value we create.

Data-Driven Service Design Disruption in design research

Design research has always been an integral part of service design practice. As the services we work with have added more digital touchpoints, it has become natural to perform increasing amounts of research in the digital domain. Research in digital channels has several benefits. Digital research can accumulate more data about Lassi A. Liikkanen is an Adjunct Professor of HumanCentred Product Design at Aalto University and a Business Designer at Fourkind Ltd., Finland. His professional portfolio includes multitouchpoint design for numerous medium and large European companies. His research interests lie in advanced service design practices and perfecting Finnish sauna design.

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customers and scale the research efforts of an individual designer far beyond the means of traditional face-to-face data acquisition. With additional data, service design can notably increase its reliance on data in making design decisions, approaching what I call data-driven service design. This article outlines what is datadriven service design today and what it might mean tomorrow.

The age of ‘data-drivenness’ Around 2010, the abundant availability of data from all business functions released a so called ‘data deluge’1 . Since then trends such as ‘Big Data’ and ‘Internet of Things’ have caused much excitement among technologists. This influence has spread to design, planning and governance. Now, in 2018, we have ‘data-driven’ approaches to a variety of topics. A compact definition of their mutual interest is well captured by Carl Anderson, author of Creating DataDriven Organizations: “Data-drivenness is about building tools, abilities, and, most crucially, a culture that acts on data”2 . However, the term ‘data-driven’ easily evokes reluctance among some

designers. Because many consider design to be a holistic profession of synthesis, data-drivenness may seem antagonistic to the empathetic and human-centred requirements of design work. I personally concur that for now, most applicable approaches to design are more ‘datainformed’ than ‘data-driven.’ This means that increasing amounts of data inspire and inform designers, but do not dictate their decisions. That is not to say that the designer always prevails over data.

1 The Economist The data deluge. 2010. Retrieved from https://www.economist.com/node/15579717 2 Anderson, C. Creating a Data-Driven Organization. O'Reilly, 2015

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Data may sometimes contradict a designer’s intuition and force to them reassess their ideas. But I believe that data-driven design can help arriving at good designs and decisions faster than ‘data-poor’ design, that is, design that operates knowingly on non-representative customer samples and makes quantitative decisions based on qualitative data. Data-driven or data-informed service design means an evolutionary step in design research when it comes to the extent and detail of research evidence designers have to work on. Digital channels offer an easy, cost effective way to gain insights about customers’ current lives and their interactions with services. For this reason, datadriven design has thus far been more frequently applied in interaction and user interface design contexts, and data-driven service design examples are rare. The Service Design Network Netherlands Chapter was among the first to organise an event specifically aimed at sharing experiences with data-drivenness in service design. The post written about the session3 provides an agreeable statement about their discussion: “…quantitative data must complement, challenge and give a foundation for qualitative data.” Data in Research Service design has always utilised research to produce data and insights. Those insights clarify the problem as well help to visualise the solution. Usually these inquiries dealt with qualitative data and helped improve the understanding of the user and their issues. As already implied, the move in the data-driven direction brings with it large, quantitative sets of data. What good can they do? I believe new, data-rich methods for design research can benefit the efficiency and reach of research. As service design is rarely carried out with abundant resources, it is even more necessary to use them wisely,

it is an essential designer skill to pick the right research method. User interviews, shadowing or contextual deep dives are wonderful methods, but they are difficult and expensive to scale. With new digital tools, we can acquire data across touchpoints like never before. Although this work is most convenient with digital touchpoints, the development of cloud computing and artificial intelligence is democratising the access to techniques such as computer vision. This will allow automated analysis of customer behaviour across public touchpoints such as airport gates, self-service terminals and public transportation hubs. Electronic surveys, digital experience sampling tools and digital platforms for customer feedback all enable designers to scale their research from small, convenient samples to tens, hundreds, or even thousands of informants. Good and bad data The talk about quantitative data easily masks the fact that the quality of the quantitative data also matters, and its collection must be well though-out. Petteri Hertto, a Finnish service designer specialising in quantitative research, says that too many projects feel an obligation to gather quantitative data without a clear reason. They end up with data that is non-actionable from a design point of view.

3 Vos, M. d., Hoorn, E. v. d., Visser, F. S. and Mulken, S. v. Data driven service design - Event impression. Retrieved from https://www. service-design-network.org/chapters/netherlands/headlines/datadriven-service-design-event-impression

A Happy or Not terminal gathers customer feedback adjacent to where a service experience takes place.

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As a suspicious example, I present a Finnish company: Happy or Not Ltd. Their on-premises customer satisfaction reporting solution has been installed in thousands of shops in over 100 countries. For instance, IKEA stores in Finland utilise it. Their device has become a success because of its simple design, context fit and response rates. It clearly has many features of a desirable, scalable research tool that reaches a majority of users immediately after their service experience. The issue is that customer satisfaction â&#x20AC;&#x201C; despite how efficiently it is measured â&#x20AC;&#x201C; is not an actionable figure for design. Here, open-ended feedback processed automatically would be superior.

Crowst is a digital platform and smartphone application for collecting photos, closed and open-ended responses on location.

Another Finnish start-up company called Crowst4 is providing informative feedback at scale. Crowst has created a digital platform that relies on a mobile application. This service offers micropayments in exchange for completing short surveys at determined locations. For instance, the task might require users to visit a public museum to photograph and describe signage. This improves the quality of input and creates very targeted output, although only with selected audiences. For digital touchpoints, the ways to record and monitor user behaviour and attitudes are numerous. In my study of the data-driven design of web services5, I discovered four approaches, each mapping to a score of tools (see table on the following page). In order of decreasing usefulness and actionability, the categories were: Screen recordings, heat maps, experiment management and behavioural analytics. Each of these approaches has their benefits and shortcomings, particularly in relation to privacy. In my opinion, behavioural analytics are synonymous with service analytics, which comprises of web analytics, market and business intelligence. NPS and CES scores also belong to the last category. The methods for digital data collection are rapidly increasing, and are more numerous than is feasible to list here. Before choosing any tool or method, designers must start by thinking about the meaningful questions they hope to answer with data. Then, they must consider the quantitative data collection along with a few dimensions relevant to users: degree of automation (user effort), intrusiveness and ethics. This can range from none (observed behaviour) to major commitment and effort. Intrusiveness concerns both physical requirements as well as privacy. For instance, you may easily track Bluetooth signal from a person in a shopping mall to trace their journey. However, this may quickly raise privacy issues, such as the case of a person who first visits

4 https://www.crowst.com/en/companies/ 5 Liikkanen, L. A. Era of Data-Driven Design in Professional Web Design. Interactions, 24, Fall 2017

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Screen recordings

Heat maps

Experiment management

Service analytics

Depth of insight

High

Medium

Low

Scaling

Poor

Mediocre

Good

Designer effort

Considerable

Miniscule

Considerable

Miniscule

Main drawback

Privacy

Reliable analysis

Ethics

Actionability

several young women’s fashion shops and ends up in a maternity shop. To what ends can this data be used? In the European Union and under the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), informing people and requiring consent for data collection must always be considered, even if you collect data ‘only’ for research purposes.

Classification of data-driven design tools utilised in web design, with their strengths and weaknesses.

In summary: Now or never? The transition to data-driven service design is not happening overnight. I expect that we will see a gradual stream of new, mostly digital services that support different use cases across touchpoints. As a consequence, we will know the customers – their habits and preferences – more deeply than ever before. What comes after research for data-driven service design? Decision making will follow. Because service concepts do not seem – at least for now – amenable to simple validation methods such as A/B-testing, it is hard to say how it will exactly develop. Even more far-reaching is the notion of generative or algorithmic design of services. Could artificial intelligence ever tell us how to solve a design challenge? Technology may yet surprise us if we learn to formulate our design challenges in a way that enables machines to join the effort and solve at least some design sub-problems. It is both now and tomorrow for data-driven service design.

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Taming Organisational Challenges in Service Design As service designers, we could talk endlessly about the times our designs were foiled. Not by customers, but by the stakeholders needed to implement the service. Our insights, blueprints and prototypes may fail to stand up to an onslaught of objections. During implementation, our goal warps and cracks until it is Gassia Salibian is Principal at Future-Proof, an innovation consultancy in San Francisco. Her work removes business risks from innovation processes for startups to global corporations. Gassia holds an MBA, a Masters in Architecture from Columbia University, and a BS from MIT. She serves on SDN’s National Chapter Board. gassia@future-proof.co

Alexandra Pratt is a design strategist helping clients create powerful brand experiences. Having worked across sectors — education, healthcare, finance, and tech — her versatile toolkit brings customer-centred strategies to life. She holds an MBA in Design Strategy from California College of the Arts and a BA from NYU. alexjean@gmail.com

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barely recognisable, diminishing the value of our efforts and of the service. We set out to understand why these objections arise by interviewing 13 senior level service designers across academic, commercial and non-profit sectors, as well as an organisational psychologist. We found four types of objections representing service design risk areas: 1. Legal or Regulatory risks – threaten project feasibility 2. Business and Brand risks – lower revenues 3. Operational risks – increase costs of doing business 4. Organisational risks – spur conflicts among team members 5 %

Interestingly, nearly 70 percent of projects suffer from organisational issues. In response to this, we developed a set of tools to help service designers with some of the most challenging aspects of teambuilding and collaboration. “The essence of team building is ‘ingroup/out-group’,” says Reza Ahmadi, an organisational psychologist.

Operational

9 %

Organisational 18 %

Legal Business/Brand

68 %

Types of Risks in Service Implementation

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“When the individual members in a team are working on a shared goal, they unite. If they are working on different goals, you’ll see the symptoms: breakdowns in communication, disengaged team members, passiveaggressive decision making, slow progress, high stress.” Here are some symptoms of organisational risks being present, and the challenges they present to a service designer:

If objection sounds like:

The service designer’s challenge to address is:

“It’s good enough. Why do we need to change it?”

Misaligned values and priorities. Your goals are at crosspurposes with those of the project sponsor.

“That’s nice, but we’re not going to do that.”

Little political power or no direct control of resources. Someone higher up in the hierarchy has more power and controls a budget. Therefore, they decide what ideas get funded and ultimately realised.

“Why weren’t we informed of this research in the first place?”

Silence or can’t get on stakeholder’s calendar

Lack of effective strategies for stakeholder communication and management. Your research and recommendations reveal shortfalls in a stakeholder’s work and you have just presented it to a large group of people. Lack of buy-in to a shared vision by key stakeholders. A key stakeholder doesn’t see the ‘what’s in it for me?’ or is threatened by your goals for the project.

To be successful, service designers must know how to influence stakeholders, align their goals, and motivate them to prioritise the customer’s needs throughout the project lifecycle, and perhaps beyond. We present two toolkits for service designers to influence and manage stakeholder relationships successfully. TOOLKIT 1 ASSESS Everyone we spoke to agreed that a successful project meant having the right people engaged early on. They reported spending three times as much time on stakeholder engagement than they had planned, and one spent 80 percent of her time, on average, engaging with internal stakeholders. The activities we developed rely heavily on the service designer’s innate strengths in user-centred design. Building on those strengths, our approach treats internal stakeholders as a set of customers.1 PART I: Identify Internal Stakeholders Exercise: Stakeholder Brainstorm

— Participants: Service designers and core team — Materials: Sticky notes and markers Instructions: Post prompting questions. Using sticky — notes, write names of all stakeholders relevant to each question. Include titles and departments. — Prompting Questions: −− Who will be the project decision makers? Our research confirmed that it is essential to have the right support from executives who communicate the project as a priority. Some interviewees said they would not take on a project without that level of executive support. −− Who is sponsoring the project? Checking for executive sponsor is imperative because service designers often have little power and no direct access to key resources.

1 Customer Degrees of Separation concept by Barbie Fink, Director of Customer Experience at Adobe who said, “I treat any internal stakeholder like they’re my customer.”

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−− Who is responsible for the project? If they have high visibility and other high profile projects, it brings valuable clout and credibility to the project and team. −− Who is working on related projects? Are there opportunities to align or collaborate? −− Who could obstruct the project? −− Who else could support this project? To attract the right partners, think of who the project might be a ‘win’ opportunity for. PART II: Empathise with Internal Stakeholders Schedule interviews with stakeholders to understand their attitudes, needs, fears, goals and behaviours. (Refer to Part IV for topics you will want to cover.) PART III: Assess Stakeholders’ Relationships with You and the Project Exercise: Stakeholder Relationship Assessment

— Participants: Service designers and core team — Materials: Sticky notes from Part I, findings from Part II and markers −− Move the sticky notes from the previous exercise onto a matrix of Influence vs. Stakes. ‘Influence’ refers to an individual’s clout within an organisation and ‘Stakes’ demonstrates their level of investment in the success of the project. −− Once all sticky notes are plotted, use a marker to indicate their ‘Customer Degree of Separation’ – how removed they are from interactions with a customer at a touchpoint. Use a 1-5 scale, ‘1’ being someone with direct contact with customers (e.g. the person is a support representative) to ‘5’ for those who are four or more levels removed from customers. −− On a separate sheet, indicate the ‘Temperature’ of each person, reflecting their attitude toward the project as ‘Warm’ or ‘Cold’. −− Using the same set of stakeholders, map them a second time. Move the stickies relative to how much ‘social capital’ you and the core team have with that individual. Reza (the organisational psychologist) describes how social capital works: “If you’ve helped somebody, usually the process of reciprocity is at work, whether it’s apparent or not. Goodwill is built up and asking for help is a lot easier.”

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HIGH

INFLUENCE

SOCIAL CAPITAL

LOW

HIGH

STAKES

WARM

COLD

LOW

INFLUENCE

SOCIAL CAPITAL

Level of Influence and Stake in

Level of Allegiance to Service

Project’s Success

Designer

Combined, these two maps will give you a sense of how much time and effort will be needed to bring certain people on board, who can be activated immediately and who should be ‘benched’ in early stages. Part IV: Synthesise, Reflect and Plan Stakeholder Engagement Translate your findings into a working document with all information from the previous activities. Then decide how to best engage each individual.

Stakeholder Profile Name, title, department, role ‘Influence x Stakes’ quadrant Needs & Wants ‘Temperature’ KPIs their org tracks or reports on What is at stake for them if it succeeds or fails? What do they pride them selves on? How does their success get measured? Degrees of separation from the customer

Engagement Plan Why: Purpose of engaging When: Project phase, milestones, frequency How: Communication & collaboration style What: Content Relationship manager: (who is assigned to manage the stakeholder) What is the next step? Update regularly

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TOOLKIT 2 ALIGN & MOTIVATE How should you go about aligning their interests with those of the customers you’re representing? First, you must clarify what your stakeholders really mean when they use certain terms. As Bernie Geuy, a service designer at University of California, Berkeley related about her team, “While everyone would say ‘we care about service,’ to the developers that turned out to mean delivering functionality, whereas to us it was about making a frictionless experience. We were valuing the end user’s experience over everything. They were valuing the system stability and maintainability. When they have a mountain of work to do for a large, complex project, ‘good enough’ or 'functional' sounded pretty good to them.”

“In retrospect, we should have

“Establishing KEIs with business partners increases credibility in our work because it sets a clearly defined benchmark in a way that is familiar to them. KEIs are especially powerful if you can combine qualitative and quantitative metrics. KEIs describe how the new experience aims to fulfill a customer need while also reaching a tangible business outcome, down to the impact in dollars and cents.” Raphaelle Loren, Experience Strategy & Design Lead, Wells Fargo

established some criteria to test what we, the designers, assumed to be true about the project team – what drove them, and how they collaborated.” Bernie Geuy, service designer, University of California, Berkeley

PART I: Identify Key Experience Indicators (KEI) — Participants: Service designers — Materials: Sticky notes, journey mapping software or physical map −− Using a high level journey map(s), place sticky notes identifying what matters most to the customer — their desired outcomes — at each stage. −− Number the metrics in sequence. These are the ‘Key Experience Indicators’ — the metrics you will care about most throughout the project. Use these as your own goals and metrics in the next exercise. PART II: Clarify and Share Stakeholders’ Goals and Metrics — Participants: Service designers and core team Materials: Sticky notes and markers, poster paper — −− Set up a 1 to 1.5-hour workshop to co-define individual, organisational and project success metrics with all stakeholders.

−− Have each stakeholder write their primary goal or desired outcome(s) for the project. One colour of sticky note should be used to capture their goals as individuals relative to the project, and another to capture their organisation’s goals. −− K PIs: Next to each goal, in the same colour sticky note, have them define the metrics they are measured on as individuals and the metrics that their organisation reports on. These are the goals and metrics that each stakeholder will care about most during the project. −− Targets: Have stakeholders articulate their target outcomes for their metrics (e.g. decrease call volume by a certain percentage, achieve net positive sentiment in social media, etc.) −− Measurement: Have each stakeholder define how their individual and organisational KPIs are calculated. PART III: Align on Shared Goals and the Right Metrics Exercise: Goals and Metrics Clash Detection

— Building on your workshop from Part II, have each stakeholder share their goals and metrics with the team. — The service designer shares the customer’s goals and metrics — i.e., KEIs — and explains where the KEIs came from and why they are important. Touchpoint 10-1 75

Example KPIs and how they map to KEIs

KPI (Key Performance Indicator)

Stakeholders (Who measure KPIs)

MRR Churn Rate (Monthly Recurring Revenue) Tracks existing customers who cancelled subscription

Sales team Business model team

Task Abandon Rate

MRR Expansion Rate Tracks existing customers who upgraded

Sales team Marketing team Finance (business)

Task or Channel Switch Factor

Call Volume / Rate Tracks customer support tickets

Support team Finance (operations)

Positive Sentiment Factor

Engagement / Feature Utilization Rate Measures product usability and usefulness and predicts revenue expansion

Product team Sales team

Customer Engagement Score

Have the stakeholders map each of the KEIs back to — their own KPIs. Have them ask, “Could (or would) my metrics suffer by delivering on this KEI?” If the answer is ‘no,’ then there is no conflict. If it’s ‘yes’ or ‘maybe,’ use the following exercise to resolve them.

Related KEI (Key Experience Indicator)

“Align as early as possible on the specific metrics that are both important and achievable.” Susannah Staats, Service Design Director, Playworks

Exercise: Goals and Metrics Clash Resolution

There is no point trying to coax stakeholders to use the KEIs you identified. They simply don’t have the same goals as your organisation and their success is not measured in the same way yours is. Instead, choose the KPIs that will support KEIs such as ‘low churn rate’ for the sales team, ‘high conversion rate’ for marketing, or ‘reduction in call volume’ for customer support functions. — Together with the stakeholder, ask: ‘How might we deliver on the KEI without negatively impacting the stakeholder’s metric?’ Explore two avenues: −− Change the metric: Ask, “Might there be a different metric for that goal that would not conflict with the KEI?” −− Change the design: Ask, “How might we change an aspect of the designed experience — a process, product, or policy — to deliver on the KEI in a such a way as to support (or interfere with) the stakeholder’s KPI?” 76 Touchpoint 10-1

A — ssess feasibility: For any new KPI you identify, ask “What would it take to adopt the new metric instead of or in addition to the one used by the organisation today? Is it feasible now or should it be left for a future project?” — Agree on Alignment Method: Document and publish the agreed-upon goals, metrics, KEIs and KPIs, including the mapping. Refer the team back to them when new disagreements or prioritisations arise. There is no silver bullet for service design project success. But these tools can empower service designers to keep customer experience at the forefront of what businesses deliver, at all stages of the project lifecycle.

tools and me thods

The Service Designer’s Time Machine Applying data science as a powerful new way to prototype the future The service designer’s prototyping toolbox of role playing, mockups, paper or clickable prototypes offers great ways to model potential new realities. But what these tools don’t help us to understand is the systemic impact that our design decisions can have. By partnering with systems thinkers and data scientists, it’s possible to model adjacent possibilities and gain a better understanding of how our designs might behave in real life, and perhaps reveal some unintended consequences.

Every day I spend about six minutes queueing to exit London tube or train stations. This doesn’t sound like very much, but it equates to around two-and-a-half days of slow, purposeful shuffling every year. Generally speaking, I’m impressed by Transport for London’s ability to operate trains and tubes constantly. But queuing to to exit stations seems like a recent phenomenon across the network that I certainly consider a pain point. To take an example, the station at Shoreditch High Street opened in 2010, and two years later it recorded an annual 3.2 million entries and exits1 . By 2017, that number had more than doubled, to 7.8 million1 . While the volume of trains serving the station is increasing,

1 Train Station Usage, Office for Rail Regulation

Mike Laurie is an independent service designer working with large financial institutions and governments, applying service design and systems thinking methods and practices.

the capacity of the exit barriers hasn’t changed. And as more commuters use the service, the queues may well get longer and longer unless something is done to increase the barriers’ capacity. To me, this is a classic service design problem, the queues are a pain point, but the cause is systemic. One day, while I was leaving Peckham Rye station, I noticed the queues had vanished and I breezed through. The cause was quickly apparent. On the barriers, staff had taped a notice which said, “No power, please contact TfL for a refund”. And this made me think about the problem in a completely different way. If we interviewed passengers about their experiences commuting to and from work, we’d easily see that these queues might Touchpoint 10-1 77

Exit gates at Peckham Rye station left open due to power cut

be pain points for commuters travelling at peak times. I canvassed a few people to generate ideas for increasing the capacity of the gates. Here’s a few of the possible interventions that were named: Speed up the gate mechanisms with faster RFID — readers — Make the gates narrower in order to increase the number of available gates — Leave a few of the gates open at peak times and allow commuters to ‘touch out’ using an app, or place more ‘touch out’ points along walls approaching the exit — Adjust the gates so they allow both entry and exit using sensors to switch between the two What’s the best way to decide which of these interventions might work? Very often it will either be some kind of voting process, or the highest paid person will make the call. There may even be some calculations done in Excel to work out which is the most effective option. There has to be a more rational and scientific way to make this decision. When faced with such a situation, I believe service designers should do what we’ve always done, and 78 Touchpoint 10-1

prototype and visualise the options. However, not prototype the human experience, but prototype the behaviour of the system. By this I mean using the systems dynamics concepts of ‘stocks’ and ‘flows’ to model how people arrive at the station, exit the trains, walk to the gates and tap through the gates. Models like this can be built using tools such as Insight Maker2 . Search for “Stock and Flow” on Google for more details on this. Insight Maker allows one to create a set of interrelated stock and flow diagrams that can be run as simulations to generate data on what might happen when 400 people exit a train, walk to the ticket hall, queue to exit and then exit. The first step is to build a model that reflects the current state. Then a similar model can be created, but with an increase in the capacity of the exit gates until the queues to exit cease to exist. One could also increase the number of gates and try out other various interventions. The trick is to find a sweet spot between reducing the queues (customer value) and the cost to do that (business value). Multiple scenarios where different solutions can be simulated would help us see not only which option might be most effective, but what the optimal number of

2 insightmaker.com

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‘touch out’ points might be. This mean we aren’t overinvesting in new hardware, and instead we’re spending just enough to cover rates of population growth and movement to cities. Over the last few years I’ve been running workshops to help service designers use systems dynamics to understand their service systems better. I’ve tried various way to make it interesting to service designers and UX designers and researchers, but I’ve come to the conclusion that this isn’t for everyone. I now believe this approach is something we can do by working with data scientists or machine learning experts. The learning curve for systems thinking and systems dynamics is steep and it takes a lot of motivation and focus to learn to create the models, and then even longer to build them and the associated scenarios. This just isn’t something that comes naturally to most service designers. Similarly, I’ve seen cases where these kinds of systems thinking-based models don’t effectively change the minds of leadership. Very often, leaders are left wondering what they are supposed to think when they look at complex pictures of demand flowing in and out of their call centre, store or kiosk. It’s very hard for people to make decisions without being engaged emotionally. And showing charts and complex diagrams that explain the optimal capacities of the gates – or how value flows – doesn’t really move people emotionally. Instead, I’d like to propose the use of much more game-like visuals, which tell a story. The idea would be to make the simulations interactive by allowing people to increase or decrease the capacities, and see with their own eyes what might happen. Imagine being able to play a simulation-based game that mimics the service you’re working on, and making design decisions based on what you’ve modelled. I don’t think it would need to be incredibly detailed or high resolution, but simple, visually appealing and animated. The kind of ‘dramatised’ visualisation shown in Figure 2 could also help show what might happen in ten years with the current increases in entry and exits. For example, the blocks might represent people. We could randomly assign personalities to these blocks and

A visualisation of a more engaging system dynamics model to help leadership make better design decisions

show when people start to get fed up or angry by making them turn red or blue and start to shake. Similarly, if we could visualise how angry customers get when they can’t get through on the telephone to a call centre, this might help make very different decisions about how investments are prioritised. This proposed technique may sound far away from the prototyping and visualisation work that we as service designers all know and love. But it’s one of the many things service designers can be doing to help organisation make better decisions. I’m currently working with my clients to explore possibility in this space and would be interested to speak with others who are interested in doing the same or have achieved some success with these kinds of service demand modelling approaches.

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Introducing the Service Design Scorecard In service design, the evaluation and selection of ideas can often be a painful, time-consuming process. We need tools to help designers and stakeholders confidently select concepts and prototypes worth developing. While we may think we are rational decision makers, typically our first reactions are emotional rather than evidenceSimon Mhanna is an Innovation Designer working at The Moment in Toronto, Canada, where he enables teams to adapt, respond and lead innovation efforts. He has been practicing innovation design across industries and continents for over a decade. Currently he teaches at The Institute Without Boundaries and is Programs Lead for the Toronto Offsite Design Festival. simon@themoment.is

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based. So many designers struggle with this very challenge: “Which idea do we move forward with?”. We developed the ‘Service Design Scorecard’ to assist with this very problem.

Design is not a linear process The design process is divided into distinct phases, and before the final solution is ready for development and implementation, many ideas and potential solutions are generated, selected and refined. The process is by no means linear and often involves multiple iterations. As such, selections and decisions have to be made at critical moments of the process as we narrow down the options to move between the phases. In many cases we don’t have enough evidence, but decisions are necessary in order to proceed in the right direction, or at least in a direction in which we have enough confidence. Where personal tastes and preferences can collide with process and reason, tools are required to facilitate the conversation constructively and give teams the

language and framework to debate and agree which ideas to take forward.

“A good evaluation tool asks – and seeks to answer – key business and design questions.” These questions usually go beyond “Do we like this idea?” to delve deeper into the nuances of the specific concepts or prototypes: “How it will it be implemented? What impact will it have? How will it be received?” A pivotal question always comes to the forefront: “How do we balance head and heart when evaluating your own, or someone else’s, creative ideas?” IDEO has led the charge on creating a framework to help focus the creation

tools and me thods

of innovative ideas. They introduced a visualisation called the ‘Three Lenses of Innovation’, which defines an innovative idea as one that brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. IDEO - The Three Lenses of Innovation “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” — Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO Based on IDEO’s framework, I developed the Service Design Scorecard as a methodological approach to concept and prototype evaluation and selection, with components aimed at both determining the value of a potential solution, and guiding and justifying design choices.

FE A SIBIL IT Y

DESIR ABIL IT Y

In addition to the three lenses, I’ve added a fourth component: 4. Strategic Value: Examines the degree to which the solution is aligned to the strategic goals that the company hopes to achieve on the mission level, brand level, team level, etc. When should you use it? The Service Design Scorecard comes in handy when you need to select one idea from a list of many ideas, or choose one prototype amongst many. It has two versions: 1. The Concept Selection version provides four key, high-level questions about the idea’s Strategic Value, Desirability, Feasibi1lity, and Viability. Ideally, at this stage we have a great number of concepts that are not fully formed. Therefore, the quick and easy version of the tool is appropriate for an early concepts selection that can move into prototyping. 2. The Prototype Selection version is more robust; it breaks down the Scorecard components into more detailed questions, helping your team to evaluate each proposed prototype in more depth.

VIABIL IT Y

— — What is the Service Design Scorecard? The Service Design Scorecard is a qualitative decisionmaking tool in the form of a spreadsheet. It guides a screening process that evaluates and prioritises ideas and prototypes. The Scorecard has four key components: 1. Desirability: Determines whether your proposed solution is addressing the right customer pain point. 2. Feasibility: Assesses whether your proposed solution builds on core areas of strength within the business. 3. Viability: Evaluates whether the solution contributes to the long-term growth of the business.

—

How do you use it? Step 1: Select which version you want to use: Concept Selection or Prototype Selection. Step 2: Under each component, define the criteria against which you will evaluate your ideas. While the main questions are standard, there is room to create your own that are unique to your own project or organisation. Step 3: Decide on the weight you want to assign to each component. In most cases the weights are equally distributed, but in some cases, you may put more emphasis on desirability at the concept selection phase if you would like to be more provocative and want to challenge the team beyond their comfort zone. Step 4: Develop a scoring system to evaluate each option. The proposed system provides a scale of 1 to 5 for each question. Touchpoint 10-1 81

Idea

Strategic Value

Desirability

Viability

Feasibility

Program and Strategy Alignment

Customer Value

Business Value

Technical/ Organisational

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

Does this align with our brand and strategy?

How likely is it to connect with new target audiences? How much value does the donor get in return? How excited might the donor be about participating?

How many potential customers? How much revenue might be raised?

How easy will it be to gain buy-in and resources/skills/ technologies to implement?

RATE EACH IDEA FROM 0 (low score) 3 (average) TO 5 (high score)

1 - Tolerable 3 - Good 5 - Perfect

1 - Does not satisfy 3 - Neutral 5 - Highly desirable

1 - Insignificant 3 - Medium 5 - Very large

1 - Very difficult 3 - Possible 5 - Easy

Total Score out of 20

WEIGHT %

Idea 1: Idea 2: Idea 3:

The Service Design Scorecard â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Concept Selection

Idea

STRATEGIC VALUE

Total Score

Brand Alignment

Strategy Alignment

Degree of Innovation

Team Interest

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

Does this align with our mission and brand?

Does this align with our strategic plans?

To what extent does this stretch our capability and portfolio? How likely is it to connect with new audiences?

How excited would you be to explore this idea? To what extent do you believe in its potential (at a gut level)?

RATE EACH IDEA FROM 0 (low score) 3 (average) TO 5 (high score)

1 - Tolerable 2 - Acceptable 3 - Good 4 - Very good 5 - Perfect

1- Similar to existing 2 - Little to no innovation 3 - Somehow new 4 - Totally new

* only ideas with some brand alignment should be considered

* only ideas with some strategy alignment should be considered

1 - Very low excitement 2 - Low excitement 3 - Medium excitement 4 - High excitement 5 - Very high excitement

WEIGHT %

Idea 1: Idea 2: Idea 3:

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5 - Groundbreaking

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Step 5: List all your ideas that you want to evaluate in — the left column on the side of the template. Provide a clear description of each idea, or reference the visual or artifact. — Step 6: Invite your stakeholders to go through the process of scoring each idea against your criteria, one at a time. You could also invite them to discuss the results. While the final scores are important to ranking solutions, the thinking that goes into the scoring is often more revealing. The discussion helps surface any big issues that may need to be addressed by more research and refinement. The added value of the Service Design Scorecard The contribution of service design to innovation is receiving increasing attention. Designers can no longer simply rely on their gut feelings to make decisions. Starting from the idea of integrating evaluation into the service design process, the Service Design Scorecard as an evaluation tool will:

1. Foster the design and/or redesign of better services 2. Illustrate how service design tools create more value for the business 3. Show the value of designed solutions 4. Guide and justify design choices that can be shared with stakeholders across the organisation 5. Help the organisation document the value of design 6. Provide a failsafe approach to gain consent in bureaucratic or complex environments 7. Provide a fun and safe framework through which multidisciplinary teams can make complicated decisions 8. Instill confidence in the path you choose! To download the template, go to http://info.themoment.is/sd-scorecard

DESIRABILITY (Customer Value) Value Proposition

Level of Engagement

Quality of Execution

Team Interest

How much value does the customer get in return?

How easy is it to get involved? How excited is the customer about participating? To what extent will others be influenced to be engaged?

How appealing and functional is the design?

How excited would you be to explore this idea? To what extent do you believe in its potential (at a gut level)?

1 - Does not satisfy 2 - Partly satisfies 3 - Satisfies 4 - Substantially satisfies 5 - Fully satisfies

1 - Very low engagement 2 - Low engagement 3 - Medium engagement 4 - High engagement 5 - Very high engagement

1 - Does not satisfy, poorly designed 2 - Partly satisfies, design is good enough 3 - Satisfies, welldesigned 4 - Substantially satisfies, excellent design 5 - Fully satisfies, impeccable design

1 - Very low excitement 2 - Low excitement 3 - Medium excitement 4 - High excitement 5 - Very high excitement

Total Score



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Evaporating Empathy How great service design concepts are killed

Too many great service design concepts are dying unnecessarily. Reflecting on some personal failures to secure beloved conceptsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; safe passage to implementation, Karin Lycke and David GriffithJones set out to understand whether this is due to deficiencies in how empathy is transferred during service design initiatives. Karin Lycke is a service designer at Expedition Mondial, focusing on process design and sustainable change across sectors and countries, and combining in-depth user research with business dynamics to grow people, teams and organisations. Karin has lectured widely on the topic of service design and design thinking.

David Griffith-Jones is a service designer at Cybercom, specialising in Business Model Innovation, IoT and automation. He is passionate about humanising the approach to Industry 4.0 and tweets about things that interest him @digitaldavidj.

84 Touchpoint 10-1

As service design practitioners, we have become experts in uncovering empathetic understanding by using a wide variety of methods and tools. By getting into the head and walking in the shoes of the customer, we can create concepts that in theory meet unmet needs, establish an emotional connection and drive real engagement. Regardless of how much emphasis is put on being empathetic, how far can empathy stretch? When empathy disappears, the essence of a great concept disappears as well. Could the reason for so many failed concepts be down to a failure of empathy transfer? We wanted to know how service designers approach transferring empathetic insight to those people involved in taking ideas through to implementation. Interviewing twenty leading designers, working both in-house and with consultancies, the research raised new perspectives on what it means to design with empathy.

Empathy transfer There are literally hundreds of service design methods. From customer journeys to service safaris, all are tools used to uncover and communicate the experience of services. We aspire to produce the best and most informative artefacts, yet, so often we have all seen them fail. Witness the decaying nature of documents at the start of any project when previous research is referred to simply as â&#x20AC;&#x153;an old presentation from XYZ agencyâ&#x20AC;?. The sad truth is that whether your delivery is a report, journey map or canvas, its likely end-point is the same: Another research piece whose essence diminishes along with the presence of its producers. Of the professionals we talked to, all of them recognised the challenge of adequately transferring insights and empathy from research to those who need it. Almost everyone agreed that the best approach is to involve stakeholders throughout the process. Marc Stickdorn, co-author of the book This is Service

tools and me thods

Balanced dialogue for impact and concept development

Design Doing, surmised that, “hand-overs of project documents can become a predetermined breaking point for the project”. You’re likely to fail if you only superficially include the people who actually run the service. Such initiatives will lack co-ownership and lose the flow of empathy. All too often, however, getting people to ‘take part in’ rather than ‘take part of’ the process is difficult due to time and resource constraints. Surely, given the vast amount of tools at hand, there must be more effective ways of transferring empathy in these instances? Humanise the stakeholder for rich personalised experiences When tasked with passing on the flame of empathy to an organisation, we need to become better storytellers. There is general recognition that direct quotes and including rich media can bring findings to life and offer superior empathetic transfer compared to static documents. Visual language built with key decision makers can help abstract visions become more tangible and provide directions for how to start realising the vision.1 Beyond storytelling and visualisation, a service designer also needs to know their audience. Who are the people involved in the different phases of a concept’s development? What are their underlying behavioural

1 Overkamp, T., & Rujis, F. (2017). Involving stakeholders towards service implementation: Co-designing change of practices using a visual language, Design Journal, 20, 531-549.

drivers, pains and gains? If we applied the same rigour to designing for the people within the organisation as we did for customers, we would see that different actors have different needs, priorities and preferences. Developing a deep understanding of the people with the power to kill a concept enables tailored communication, which dramatically increases the chances of the concept’s survival. Transferring customer empathy is not enough; we have to create an ongoing empathetic dialogue between all important parties in the process. From personal experience, when all the focus has been put on creating detailed solutions from a customer point of view – and too little on organisational barriers – even the most perfect of concepts have died. Sealing the empathy leak The resounding conclusion is that whilst different communications tools might be able to improve things by degrees, the very fact that a handover is required in the first place is a symptom of service design’s gravest sickness: thinking of delivery as an endpoint of the process. Successful service designers need to be able to think in terms of transformational organisational change managed across many spectra; their clients at various levels of decision making, the employees making the changes real, and the customers who use the services to create a change in their lives. When implementation is separated from the service design scope, it is all the more important to understand the organisational environment and prepare concepts for survival. Touchpoint 10-1 85

Implementing Services Using the Transaction Pattern How to retain the customer perspective when specifying requirements Customer journeys usually include several touchpoints at which the customer transacts with a business. Transactions occur when stakeholders exchange value, as in “I pay some money in exchange for your product”. There is usually a request from one stakeholder and a response from the other. The tool described in this article, Graham Wilson is a business architect at Robinson Ryan, a specialist data management consultancy based in Australia. Graham has 30 years of experience implementing business systems for government agencies in Australia and New Zealand. He is currently writing a book on transaction patterns to be published later in 2018.

the ‘transaction pattern’, breaks down this fundamental requestand-response exchange into a generic pattern of phases and tasks that recur in most types of transactions. The intent of the service blueprint is retained by using this tool, which facilitates a structured approach to specifying business requirements for system development and process implementation.

So often, it seems, an implementation project loses something of the essence of the excellent service design work that has gone before it. The customer perspective is diminished, or perhaps the internal process journey is implemented in a clumsy manner that is little improvement on the old process. If either of these things occur, then the supposed benefits of an improved customer experience, or of digitising a service, will be lost. Typically, development teams create a host of user stories based on a somewhat loose understanding of ‘what the business wants’ and of the service designer’s work. A tool is needed that ensures the customer perspective is not lost when specifying 86 Touchpoint 10-1

business requirements for system development. A transaction typically begins with a customer navigating to the right place (a webpage, service counter or contact centre, for example) to make a request, and identifying themselves to the business. Then the customer provides information, such as choosing the product they want to buy, or filling in a form. This is the ‘request’ part of a transaction and, once complete, it is submitted to the business via the chosen channel. The business will then validate the request and direct it to the correct processing system or team. The customer’s request is assessed and a decision is made. If human

tools and me thods

RESPONSE

Submit phase

Validate phase

status: Accepted

Operations Team

status: Submitted

Customer

REQUEST status: Initiated

Initiate phase

Tasks get the work done Within each phase there are generic tasks that process the customer’s request. A task is a piece of work that can be assigned to, and completed by, one person or an automated system. Some of these tasks may not apply to a specific transaction, simplifying the pattern even more. Some tasks may be substantial pieces of work that are conducted by humans, while others are quite simple, allowing them to be automated. You will notice that the request stage of a transaction contains tasks that are performed by the customer. The customer will not think of these as distinct tasks, and in fact the customer experience team should have designed a streamlined and seamless interface that masks them. Nonetheless, it is helpful if business analysts and developers adopt the task perspective to avoid overlooking some important considerations that must be specified as requirements. For example, it might be easy to overlook the classification rules of the customer’s request to determine which team needs to receive it. The ‘transaction pattern’ provides a straightforward way to design the operational workflow of the

Decide phase

Complete phase

status: Completed

At the completion of each phase, the state of the transaction changes. The state of the transaction enables the operations team to know what stage the process has reached, and what to do next. ‘Status’ is therefore an essential element of effective operational management. Usually, businesses create a large number of status codes to indicate what has happened to a transaction. However, these status codes often mix processing states with other information such as the outcome of an activity, for example ‘approved’ or ‘rejected’. We have seen transactions with 30 different status codes; this is extremely difficult to manage operationally and adds considerable complexity to the computer system. The ‘transaction pattern’ contains only five states. When all

types of transactions use a matching set of states like this, the implementation of workflows can be streamlined, which also allows the easy creation of reports and management dashboards that consolidate all active transactions into one view.

status: Decided

judgement is required, then the decision will be made by an authorised person, but increasingly, assessments and decisions are automated. The decision is then communicated to the customer and the response to their request is finalised. It may be difficult to discern all these steps in a simple transaction such as an online purchase, but nevertheless they are there. The sequence of steps becomes more obvious in a transactional service such as ‘apply for home loan’ or ‘apply for permit’, in which a clear decision is necessary: approve or reject the application. The requestand-response ‘transaction pattern’ consists of five processing phases: ‘initiate’, ‘submit’, ‘validate’, ‘decide’, and ‘complete’.

Processing the transaction changes its state

A transaction progresses through five phases

Touchpoint 10-1 87

Complete phase

Preparation

Post-submission Validation

Classification

Notification

Profiling

Pre-submission Validation

Acceptance

Evaluation

Record Creation

Commencement Notification

Acknowledgement

Recommendation

Payment

Approval

Future Activity Scheduling

Tasks

Identification

Completed

Decide phase

Decided

Validate phase

Accepted

Submit phase

Submitted

Operations Team

RESPONSE

Initiated

Initiate phase

Customer

REQUEST

Each phase contains generic work tasks

transaction. During the requirements design process, work queues are created to direct work to the right team or person. Work queues allow a worker to see a list of tasks that are allocated to the team and ‘pick’ the next task to perform, preventing another worker from also claiming it. Workflow efficiency has a direct effect on how the customer experiences the service. A structured workshop discovers requirements quickly The ‘transaction pattern’ facilitates a methodical analysis of each task in turn, step-by-step through the transaction. For each task, standard questions need to be addressed, which are shown in the accompanying figure. The answers to these questions form the basis of the business requirements for implementation of the transaction. For example, for the ‘preparation’ task, the question “What new data does this task create?” will reveal the data fields that need to be included in the web form that the submitter completes. The requirements should be discovered by stepping through each of the tasks in turn during a workshop with the key players, using the desired customer experience as the foundation. This approach narrows the focus of discussions and rapidly draws out the important requirements. Good facilitation will 88 Touchpoint 10-1

encourage participants to take a pragmatic and honest attitude, to identify the critical work activities and data needs for each generic task. Our experience is that a straightforward transaction can be workshopped in half a day, while a more complex service may consume a day. This rapid timeframe prevents the endless back and forth of user stories or other methods used to structure requirements.

is ed th e ne Do w ask? t

Who per this t forms ask?

usiness What b be eed to rules n in this applied task?

Questions to ask about each task

What activities happen in this task?

ata wd k t ne as Wha s this t doe reate? c

What ar te does th facts is task create ?

tools and me thods

MASTER DATA

creates

Driver master record

Licence master record

Long-term storage

‘Apply for licence’ transactional service TRANSACTION DATA Status

Tasks

Working data

creates

Attachments

Workers

Short-term storage

Work queues

Separating transaction data from master data improves data quality

Data is at the heart of transactions Transactional services, by their very nature, create new data, for example a new customer or a new permit. How well that data is structured and validated has a direct bearing on whether the data is fit for purpose when it is fed downstream into management reports or used again in subsequent transactions. Poor data quality leads to poor service quality. In this context, data is of two main types: master data and transaction data. In the case of an ‘apply for license’ service, master data holds information about the licenses that have been granted. Master data, which is critical to the business’s purpose, requires long-term recordkeeping; the issuing authority may need to refer to the master record of a license in the future. On the other hand, transaction data stores operational details to help track the license application while it is being processed. Transaction data includes information such as the current state of the transaction, the tasks performed on it, and any data or attachments that workers and systems need to access during the transaction’s short life (such as the application form submitted by the customer and the assessment of the application). Therefore, transaction data loses its value quickly. The ‘transaction pattern’ prevents transaction data, which is relatively short-lived, being mixed up with

master data, which the business needs to keep for a much longer timeframe. This separation improves data quality and streamlines the implementation of services and the operational management of transaction processing. Superior requirements retain the spirit of the service design The ‘transaction pattern’ standardises the workflows and tasks using a simple structure and a common language that service designers, business analysts and solution architects can all agree on. It is an easyto-understand framework that can be used to create business requirements specifications based on the service design products. By using the pattern, the intent and spirit of the service design work is retained because the pattern creates a superior requirements product thanks to streamlined processes, improved data quality and better communication. For example, in a recent client engagement, the requirements specification removed several low-value data fields from the existing web form, simplifying the customer interface and closely matching the intended customer journey.

Touchpoint 10-1 89

Robbie Bates Meet the service designer

In his dual roles as Design Director and Business Director at London-based Uscreates, Robbie Bates juggles the challenges of addressing the evolving nature of service design, and of the service design agency itself. In this Profile, Touchpoint Editor-in- Chief Jesse Grimes chats with Robbie about how the agencyRobbie Bates is a Director at Uscreates, working with organisations to design better services, products and strategies. He is a social designer, mentor, speaker and educator, teaching at design schools around the world.

client relationship is fundamentally changing, and trends in the world of service design.

Jesse Grimes:. At 13 years old, Uscreates counts itself amongst some of the longestestablished service design agencies worldwide. In that time, it's earned a respected reputation based on a strong track record in public sector-focussed service design. Can you share a little more about the type of work your agency carries out, and your role in particular?

Robbie Bates: Seven years since I started at Uscreates, I still find explaining what we do succinctly difficult! In the broadest sense, we’re a service design and innovation agency focused on improving health, wellbeing and public services. Our work is all about designing better products, services and experiences that ultimately lead to better outcomes for people; from health to education. That might be working to design a new preventative mental health service across 90 Touchpoint 10-1

South London, or finding better ways to support those who are being impacted by the housing crisis in Newcastle. My role in all of that is a bit twofold. Firstly, I’m a Design Director. I’m responsible for the quality of our work – ensuring it achieves impact, and leading teams and organisations through the messy and ambiguous design process. It’s often less about ‘doing the designing’ nowadays, and more about creating the right culture and environment so that our teams can produce their best and most impactful work. As a designer-by-training, it’s a big and on-going learning curve for me, moving from being a designer to being a design leader. The second part of my role is looking at where we go next as a design agency. As one of Uscreates’ Business Directors, I’m focused on working with our leadership team to understand some of the big

p ro f i l e s

challenges and changes that might impact how we and the organisations we work work with operate in the future. It’s really about practicing what we preach, and using creativity and design to think about the future. For example, we’ve been using speculative design methods to inform our strategic discussions, using it to think critically about who we are, the people we hire, and the work we might want to focus on in the future. Speculative design is something we’ll be touching upon in the next issue of Touchpoint, as one of several ways we as service designers can ‘design the future’. Are there other instances of new techniques and emergent areas of service design that you’re exploring?

The projects I lead require a range of different expertise and skill-sets from our teams and networks – from the more traditional and established service design techniques to more experimental approaches like speculative design or open data expertise. Over the past six months we’ve been experimenting with how these ‘next practice’ techniques and methods can benefit the work we do, and the outcomes we achieve through our work. For example, we’ve been working with the EU Commission to design fictional prototypes and artefacts that help policy-makers across the EU consider the ethical, social and regulatory implications of emerging technologies such as Blockchain. On work like this, we’re blending skills in product design, foresight, socio-techno policy and systems change. One of the key elements of the SDN’s mission is to work towards ensuring that service design becomes the ‘new normal’. What evidence have you seen, and steps have you made, towards making that a reality?

One of the biggest trends we’ve witnessed and been part of over the past few years, is how service design is being increasingly taken in-house, and organisations are building their own design capabilities and cultures, rather than just outsourcing ‘design’. We’re really seeing design being framed as an attitude rather than just a technical skill. For me, that’s a fascinating and complex process, and one that is symptomatic of service design being taken more seriously as a way of supporting meaningful and lasting change.

Fictional magazine article exploring how Uscreates’ business model may evolve in the future, and scale design’s impact

This provides a real opportunity for us and many other service design agencies, to really think deeply about our role as a consultancy, where we’re not just ‘doing the work for clients’, but we’re really partnering to help organisations think about the value of design, build the right teams, and shape lasting culture change that enables design to thrive once we take a step back. It’s an incredibly complex process to really embed ‘design as an attitude’ within an organisation, and requires us to really understand the DNA of an organisation, its history and the often ‘unspoken’ values or power dynamics that sit underneath the surface. For us, it’s about really allowing teams to feel what it means to design, and understand the emotive factors that result in impactful design work. Design-thinking has been great at raising the profile of design and for putting a recognised process in place for many to understand design in principle, but where it often falls short is in by setting design up to be linear and a process that is one-size fits all. This often means that people understand Touchpoint 10-1 91

Speculative prototype helping EU Policy makers explore the ethical and social impact of emerging technologies.

the principles and theory of design, but struggle with it’s ambiguity once they are actually ‘in it’. It’s therefore increasingly our role to support and coach people through this, helping to not only understand ‘the process’ (i.e. tools and methods), but the softer, emotive parts of working collaboratively with people, understanding their needs and being able to know when something isn’t working and course correct. The opportunity to have matured alongside the UK service design market for more than a decade must put you and your colleagues in a position to step back and see some broad trends. What stands out for you?

Design education in universities is often a space where we see some of the interesting trends emerge across the industry. Whether that be the cross-over of design and social innovation, or the practical application of speculative design, it’s a space that breeds experimentation and encourages the mixing of practices such as business and design, or fashion and electronics. Outside of Uscreates, I’m a teacher and mentor, and have been fortunate enough to teach service design and innovation across the UK and around the world, from Stanford’s D.School to the University of the Arts, London. It’s taught me a lot about what we can expect from the future of design, and also what skills and attitudes are coming through the next generation of designers. It plays directly back into our work at Uscreates too, where shifts 92 Touchpoint 10-1

in the industry are encouraging designers to not only be design practitioners, but also teachers, coaches and mentors. Another interesting shift we are seeing is a move from services to systems. The nature and complexity of the issues we are designing for means that a single service or solution isn’t going to solve the systemic drivers that underpin the issue. There are many levers that need to be pulled to create lasting and meaningful change, and they often require more than one person or organisation to pull them. It’s an interesting shift from singular design projects, into much more collective design practice, where we’re asking ourselves what it means to design for a ‘living system’, where there are thousands of causes, drivers and players within it. It’s complex, and requires us to acknowledge its complexity and work within it. For me, part of being a designer is now about understanding the notion of power and really thinking about how design can play a role in shaping new power dynamics that underpin the systems that we are trying to influence or change. Lastly, and perhaps less of a trend and more of a personal observation, is the importance of intentional and collective imagination in the design process. We’re living in times of rapid and monumental change (societal, political, technological, economic and environmental), and we are often in the position of responding or reacting to these changes as they occur, or shortly before. Because we’re increasingly being asked to use design to support bigger ‘transformation’ efforts or to explore broader macro shifts — such as ageing populations and the impact of AI — the role of imagination has never been more important. It’s important because, as we design for the future, we should be carefully considering what it is we are collectively designing. As we design products and services, what is the impact that they might have in the future, what are the unintended consequences we might be creating or the bigger impact we might be having on people or society? Imagination is a powerful tool for asking the ‘what if’ questions, and experimenting with the ‘art of the possible’. For me, the power of imagination is something that can get lost in the linearity of a ‘design process’, and as human beings, something we should consider as one of the most powerful assets – an ability to imagine the future.

inside sdn

Thank You for a Great Service Design Day! Service Design Day 2018 was the biggest yet! It is great to see the service design community come together for Service Design Day. This day is all about celebrating the power and spirit of service design, as well as connecting

@Azarakhsh Damood

@kekakoba

our amazing international community.

For the first time this year, we had a theme for Service Design Day. The theme borderless was interpreted in may ways, from breaking silos to bridging geographical borders, we also had a conversation about how service design breaks down border on our Slack channel. But thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not all! Our awesome Chapters held events around the world to raise awareness, educate and celebrate service design. There were more than 500 people that attended a Chapter event worldwide. A big thank you to our chapter representatives for dedicating their time to help grow and connect the service design communities, it wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be the same without you. And of course, service Design Day couldn't have happened without your support. Thank you to all the service design enthusiasts around who shouted loud and proud on Service Design Day. Your creativity, passion and cake baking skills continue to inspire us. We were delighted to see students, professionals and organizations interpret the event in their own unique way with service design talks, events and activities. We look forward to making an even bigger impact next year with more events, activities and discounts. Stay tuned for next yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Service Design day and be prepared to raise your voice again in celebration of service design on June 1st!

Touchpoint 10-1 93

Celebrating Touchpoint Vol 10

The issue of Touchpoint you hold in your hands (or read on your screen) represents a significant milestone. With this issue, Touchpoint enters its tenth year of publication, having first been published in early 2009. Thanks to the tireless volunteer efforts of an evergrowing community of peer contributors and editors from around the world - supported by a small and dedicated production team - Touchpoint has moved from strength to strength. While the general format has stayed the same, the level of discourse and the quality of insights it has helped disseminate throughout the community has grown alongside the discipline of service design itself. 94 Touchpoint 10-1

r u b ri k

While the first issue (Vol. 1 No. 1 “What is Service Design?”)

vol 9 no 3 | april 2018 | 18 € vol 9 no 1 | july 2017 | 18 €

Service Design at Scale

really was about laying the groundwork for a discipline

Education and CapacityBuilding vol 9 no 2 | november 2017 | 18 €

measuring impact and value

8 HOW TO SCALE SERVICE DESIGN Kerry Bodine 50 HOW TO CREATE 70,000 SERVICE DESIGNERS Geoffrey Lew 73 PRODUCT-SERVICE SYSTEMS Ivo Dewit

32 The Three Layers of service Design impacT Craig Cisero, Veronika Ji, Stefania Marcoli, Chiara Diana 46 Designing for impacT anD vaLue Bernadette Geuy, Rachel Hollowgrass, Titta Jylkäs 70 Design meThoDs for sTrengThening sociaL cohesion Aran Baker and Valentina Branada

the journal of service design

22 SErviCE DESign in thE BuSinESS CurriCulum Joan Ball, Martin Dominguez 36 EDuCating

earliest issues were almost ahead of their time. Issues in

the journal of service design

September 2010 and September 2011 were already looking

vol 8 no 1 | may 2016 | 18 €

vol 8 no 2 | october 2016 | 18 €

service design and CX: Friends or foes?

Design Thinking and Service Design Doing

at the “Business Impact of Service Design” (Vol. 2 No. 2)

vol 8 no 3 | february 2017 | 18 €

Business as Unusual

18 SHAPING THE ENTERPRISE BY DESIGN John Gøtze, Milan Guenther 44 DESIGN-LED CHANGE: GETTING MORE OF THE RIGHT SERVICES TO MARKET FASTER Oliver King

in its infancy, it’s interesting to see how some of the

for BrEaDth anD DEpth Mark Jones 60 moving towarDS nEtwork ConSCiouS SErviCE DESign Martina Caic’, Dominik Mahr, Gaby Odekerken-Schröder, Stefan Holmlid, Roy Beumers

30 REINVENTING FROM WITHIN Maik Medzich, Pia Drechsel 38 TRANSITIONING DESIGN OWNER -

SHIP Joumana Mattar, Beatriz Belmonte, Filipa Silva 46 DESIGN WITHIN ORGANISATIONS NEEDS SUSTAINED THINKING AND DOING Ewan Cameron

16 Bridging the gap by Lynn Stott 46 Breaking the Blueprint by Chris Ferguson, Chad Story

64 MAPPING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Lennart Overkamp, Kim Liefhebber, Yuan Lu

the journal of service design

and “Organisational Change” (Vol. 3 No. 2).

58 Customer Journey measures by Asbjørn Følstad, Knut Kvale

vol 7 no 3 | january 2016

Both community input and careful trend observation

Selling Service Design

stand behind the selection of themes for each issue.

vol 7 no 1 | april 2015

vol 7 no 2 | august 2015

Service Design Policy

In-house Service Design

32 THE PATH TO VALUE VIA SERVICE DESIGN by Paula Giles 58 EASY TO BUY – NOT EASY TO SELL by Daniel Ewerman, Anders Landström 80 MAKING A SERVICE DESIGN MOVIE by Satu Miettinen, Mira Alhonsuo and Heikki Tikkanen

10 EnablIng a CulturE of InnovatIon by Carolina Garzon Mrad, Matthew Vandertuyn, Katy Mahraj 46 through thE lookIng glaSS by Jamin Hegeman, Patrick Quattlebaum 56 So What DID You SaY SErvICE DESIgn IS? by Paula Bello

the journal of service design

18 euro

This issue (Vol. 10 No. 1) is dedicated to the challenges

18 euro

volume 6 | no. 3 | 15,80 euro

December 2014

the journal of service design

18 euro

volume 6 | no. 2 | 15,80 euro

volume 6 | no. 1 | 15,80 euro

August 2014

April 2014

of implementing service design, a subject so worthy of attention it will also be the theme of this year’s Service

Blurring Boundaries

Better Outcomes by Design

Empowering BBVA with a 360° Work Experience by Juliane Trummer, Sofia Loreto

How to Design Social Relationships for Disabled Citizens

Transformation through Service Design

Human-Centred Mental Wellness

Real-Time Service Design

by P. Jones, J. Robinson, A. Yip, K. Oikonen, A. Starkman

by Lydia Howland

by Joel Bailey

by J. Kronqvist, M. Koivisto, K. Vaajakallio

looking forward to the next issue (Vol. 10 No. 2) which will

The New Seriousness of Design

Service Design for the Other 98%

Building Brand Futures

Design Global Conference in Dublin. And I’m already

Go Deep or Go Home

Going all the Way

by Mette Reinhardt Jakobsen, Laila Grøn Truelsen by Lee Sankey

by Melanie Wendland

by Jenny Comiskey, Chris Grantham

volume 5 | no. 3 | 15,80 euro

volume 5 | no. 2 | 15,80 euro

volume 5 | no. 1 | 15,80 euro

January 2014

September 2013

May 2013

look at the theme of “Designing the Future”, which has some fascinating contributions.

Beyond Necessity, the Beauty of Service

Deep Dive: Collecting Relevant Insights

Designing Citizen-Centred Public Services

Discovering the Beautiful in ‘Service as Expression’

Social Innovation in Local Government: Sustaining Success

by Kipum Lee

By Julie McManus and Emma Barrett

Aesthetics, Provocation, and the Social Enterprise

Public & Collaborative: Designing Services for Housing

by Terri Block, Elsa Wong, Spencer Beacock

By Chelsea Mauldina and Eduardo Staszowski

True Beauty

Are Free Public Libraries Still Needed?

by J. Paul Neeley

The Service Design Promise By Ben Reason

Purpose-Driven Research as Key to Successful Service Design By Stefan Moritz and Marcus Gabrielsson

When Design and Market Researchers Join Forces By Remko van der Lugt and Gerrita van der Veen

By Mikko Mäkinen and Richard Stanley

volume 4 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

volume 4 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro

volume 4 | no. 1 | 12,80 euro

January 2013

September 2012

May 2012

I’d like to thank all those that have played a vital role in contributing to, editing and producing Touchpoint since its launch. Despite a growing body of quality books,

Cultural Change by Service Design

Service Design on Stage

Living Service Worlds ¬ How Will Services Know What You Intend?

Shelley Evenson

Eat, Sleep, Play

burgeoning offers of trainings and courses, and more and

Design Principles for Eating Sustainably

A Performing Arts Perspective on Service Design

By Michelle McCune

By Raymond P. Fisk and Stephen J. Grove

Complete Small, Affordable and Successful Service Design Projects

By Chris Brooker

Hospitality Service as Science and Art

Boom! Wow. Wow! WOW! BOOOOM!!!

By Kipum Lee

By Markus Hormeß and Adam Lawrence

A Time Machine for Service Designers

By Julia Leihener and Dr. Henning Breuer

Reinventing Flight. Porter Airlines: a Case Study

The Lost Pleasure of Random and Surprise

By Christopher Wright and Jennifer Young

By Fabio Di Liberto

volume 3 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

volume 3 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro

volume 3 | no. 1 | 12,80 euro

January 2012

September 2011

May 2011

more academic programmes aimed at educating service designers, Touchpoint still occupies a unique and valuable role in further shaping the discourse and future of our

Organisational Change

From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet

Learning, Changing, Growing

• Overcoming the

• Being Led or Finding the Way?

‘Monkeysphere’ Challenge

Service Design Creates Break through Cultural Change in the Brazilian Financial Industry

Mary Cook and Joseph Harrington

Jesse Grimes and Mark Alexander Fonds

• Better Services for the People

By Tennyson Pinheiro, Luis Alt and Jose Mello

• Innovating in Health Care –

Sylvia Harris and Chelsea Mauldin

an Environment Adverse to Change

Francesca Dickson, Emily Friedman, Lorna Ross

Learning the Language of Finance Gives Your Ideas the Best Chance of Success

discipline.

• Using Service Design Education

to Design University Services • Service Transformation:

By Jürgen Tanghe

Jürgen Faust

Service Design on Steroids Melvin Brand Flu

Designing Human Rights By Zack Brisson and Panthea Lee

01 01

volume 2 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

volume 2 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro

September 2010

volume 1 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

January 2010

Touchpoint the journal of service design

Jesse Grimes Business Impact of Service Design

Connecting the Dots • Service Design as Business

Change Agent

Beyond Basics

Touchpoint Editor-in-Chief

• Make yourself useful Joe Heapy

• Service Design – The Bottom Line

Mark Hartevelt and Hugo Raaijmakers

Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason

• Do you really need that iPhone • MyPolice

App?

• How Human Is Your Business?

Lauren Currie and Sarah Drummond

Mark Jones

Steve Lee

• Service Design at a Crossroads

• Service Design 2020: What does

• Stuck in a Price War? Use Service

Lucy Kimbell

the future hold and (how) can we shape it?

Design to Change the Game in B2B Relations.

Bruce S. Tether and Ileana Stigliani

Lotte Christiansen, Rikke B E Knutzen, Søren Bolvig Poulsen

service design network

volume 1 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

January 2010

Touchpoint the journal of service design

tou c hp oi n t | t h e jo ur n al o f serv i c e d esi g n

volume 1 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro

October 2009

Touchpoint the journal of service design

Joe Heapy

SDN Vice President

volume 1 | no. 1

April 2009

Touchpoint

First Issue

the journal of service design

Health and Service Design

Beyond Basics • Make yourself useful

What is Service Design?

• A healthy relationship • Dutch Design:

Lavrans Løvlie, Ben Reason, Mark Mugglestone and John-Arne Røttingen

• Do you really need that iPhone

Time for a New Definition

App?

Marcel Zwiers

Mark Jones

• Designing from within Julia Schaeper, Lynne Maher and Helen Baxter

• Design’s Odd Couple

• Service Design 2020: What does

Fran Samalionis and James Moed

the future hold and (how) can we shape it?

• Revealing experiences Christine Janae-Leoniak

Bruce S. Tether and Ileana Stigliani

• Service Design:

From Products to People Lavrans Løvlie

• Great expectations: The healthcare

journey Gianna Marzilli Ericson

service design network

to uchpo int | th e jour n a l of service design

service design network

tou c hp oi n t | t h e jo ur n al o f serv i c e d esi g n

service design network

tou c hp oi n t | t h e jo ur n al o f serv i c e d esi g n

Touchpoint 10-1 95

Volunteers Help Deliver a Successful SDN Finland National Conference SDN Finland hosted its second national conference in Helsinki on April 25, 2018. More than 300 participants and volunteers attended the one-day event, which focussed on the theme “The Evolving Role of Service Design”. Thanks to the interesting topic and speaker line-up, the event was sold out in advance.

Service design – Business almost as usual Service design is close to being “the new normal” in many Finnish organisations. The practice is starting to be well known, and professionals with service design competence are much sought after in the workforce. With around 200 paying members and 800 community followers, SDN Finland is proportionally the largest national Chapter within SDN. Despite the positive trend in our country, there is still lots to do in order to make service design truly integrated in all organisations. Helping members to develop professionally One important mission for our Chapter is to help our members to keep up with the fast-paced work life and societal developments. Therefore, we chose a topic that allowed us to track where the field of service design is going, and what kind of competences are needed from service designers in the future. The participants represented professionals from business and nonprofit organizations, as well as those in academia and in agencies.

A day full of service design energy Twenty-five speakers added their perspectives to the changing role of service design and that of the service designers. The day was full of positive buzz. As highlights, the attendees mentioned the high quality of the talks, gaining new 96 Touchpoint 10-1

inside sdn

offered deeper focus on selected themes. Workshops were very popular and were sold out fast.

knowledge, and especially the networking possibilities. The keynote presentations are available on our chapter www pages for everybody to enjoy, at www.service-designnetwork.org/chapters/finland. Good sponsoring was crucial for making the event happen. A few sponsors had recruitment stands and several promotional activities included fun things such as glitter face paintings and an ice cream stand outside the venue. A networking event for all The effort started six months beforehand. SDN Finland was able to mobilise a good crowd for contributing to the event. An organising team of around eight people joined forces with a four-person content team, all of whom volunteered their time outside their normal jobs. As the day approached, another team of

committed conference volunteers started planning for the actual execution. Most speakers, too, volunteered for a good cause, and the quality of talks and workshops was consistently high. The success of the event was thanks to a great team effort from many people who helped out willingly. One might wonder why so many busy people wanted to give their time and energy for this kind of commitment. Teija Hakaoja, Chapter Representative for SDN Finland, said, “You give and you get. One of the most rewarding things in our SDN activities is connecting with like-minded people. The networking enables me to follow the field, give new perspectives and find important contacts. As an example, my employer agency hired a new employee at the conference.” Teija concludes, “I get a lot of energy and inspiration from our

network. Learning something new is always very motivating.” Many of our Chapter ‘activists’ would agree with her. Tarja Chydenius is the co-founder and active member of SDN Finland Chapter. She works as senior lecturer at Laurea University of Applied Sciences and volunteers also as SDN National Chapter Board principal.

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Making Meaningful Connections: The SDN Midwest Conference “I'm a conference junkie. I've been going for years and I really love the energy I get off of some… This one was so different... I learned something! Several things, in fact. And I have that same energy I've been longing to regain.” Aniela Chertavian, SDN Midwest Conference attendee

On April 15, 2018, more than 130 participants – from not only the American Midwest, but also the East and West coasts of the USA, as well as Canada – gathered for the first SDN Midwest Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The organisation of the event was a dynamic collaboration between leaders of the MinneapolisSt. Paul and Chicago SDN Chapters. The one-day event was full of discovery, and hands-on doing and learning, with ten talks and six workshops lead by more than 20 presenters and facilitators.

The theme of the conference was ‘Meaningful Connections’, which was expressed in a wide range of ways throughout the programme: From a presentation of a case study on how a community was engaged to improving equality and health, to a workshop on how service design can be aptly applied through the lens of biomimicry. The conference also expressed a strong local flavour, with the Brave New Workshop (a satirical comedy theatre company) opening the day by engaging the attendees in an

icebreaker improv activity, and students from the High School of Recording Arts (HRSA) closing the day with an awe-inspiring hip-hop music performance. “I've read in detail about critical design and have been eager to experiment to simply learn more about it. This workshop gave me that opportunity.” – SDN Midwest Conference attendee “The variety in the program made for a great narrative.” – SDN Midwest Conference attendee In addition to overwhelmingly positive feedback about the day, according to a survey, there were some other noteworthy findings. Firstly, 90 percent of the attendees say they found at least one compelling idea that they could put into practice within the next week or two. Secondly, this was the first service design event for 51 percent of the attendees. Overall, the SDN Midwest Conference created meaningful connections and further strengthened the SDN community.

Conference organisers and authors:

Erin Borreson, Experience Design Strategy. Thomas Brandenburg, Adjunct Professor, Illinois Institute of Technology. Molly Fuller, Service Design Strategist, Stella. Michelle Kwolek, Employee UX Generalist, United Airlines. Michelle Maryns, MSP Hello Coordinator, Greater MSP.

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vol 10 no

1 | aug ust

â&#x201A;¬ 2018 | 18

n to From Desig tation Implemen

as, fgang Jon Weisser, Wol tta JEC TS Tina Hirsch, Mar DESIGN PRO eron, Sam SERVIC E Ewan Cam LEMENT ING n Barrett, SFULLY IMP DESIGN Kare ATION BY Liikkanen ENT A. i LEM Lass er 56 IMP E DES IGN Birgit Mag EN SERVIC DATA-DRIV Oliveira 68

34 SUC CES

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100 Touchpoint 10-1

Touchpoint Vol. 10 No. 1 – From Design to Implementation

Articles inside

Taming Organisational Challenges in Service Design

Implementing Services Using the Transaction Pattern

Meet the service designer: Robbie Bates