Building a Service Design Capability at Enterprise Scale

BT- October 17- May 18. UK.

* Nomination for best service design project 2018- https://www.service-design-network.org/headlines/fromhereon-da-vinci.

This job was part of a large transformation programme driven by an 18000 people IT department across geographies.

The project aimed at scaling up design and agile practices, in order to design services that increased efficiency and improved the users’ experience of IT services.

Challenge and team

To build a service design capability that coached over 100 staff and supported the development of over 20 IT services.

I was responsible for leading and coaching a team of designers and user researchers to deliver a marketplace of IT services.

In addition to training the team on design processes and methods, I drove the programme’s transformation vision with practical applications on the ground design work.

The team and myself set up agile ways of working and followed a flexible design approach to design.

Approach

Defining a process and developing hypotheses while continuously iterating and validating throughout design sprints

This project was named a priority in the organisation as a key landmark towards digital transformation.

It aimed at increasing the employees’ productivity and improve the way internal teams worked together, in order to produce better results while servicing the rest of the organisation.

Because the team I was responsible for was inexperienced in doing service design, the approach combined lean methods of testing and failing fast, which allowed them to arrive to the ideation phase relatively quickly. 

Iterations of the prototype led by the stakeholders’ insights

We started the design of the service outlining initial hypotheses that were validated with the stakeholders and the future users of the service.

We focused on testing the features of the marketplace, based on the users’ needs but also on the programme’s goals.

The main challenge we encountered was the fact that not all the teams understood the drivers behind transforming, or using agile methods. We overcame these by having clear metrics that measured the impact before and after the service.

Key results and learnings

14 successful service pilots, training of 100 people and upskilling of the IT team on design techniques and agile ways of working.

Besides the scale impact of this programme, an important outcome was aligning an abstract concept driving transformation with the day-to- day work of the teams.

Although this was not an obvious objective, it added value in terms of employee motivation to do their work, learning curve and career progression.

The learning was the need to check and talk with the leadership and play back the experience of the teams in the ground and align with the programme goals.