2 Demand Analysis — Day 3–4
Well, the client agreed with me to focus on those areas that we wish to put some attention to. So, were going to focus on repairs calls, and any calls that have a high failure demand rate. But, were not finished with the demands, I am looking at walk-ins, and talking to people to see if their teams get demands when they are out in the area. Then we have housing officers out there talking to tenants in their communities — they get demands and resolve them. Thats a group that is not going to be easy to record, so I am having conversations about the work they are doing. In this case, for me to get to know the demands and what matters, I will be going out with them in the near future.
The other obvious place, before you ask, is online. Well I am going to study emails soon, as we get some. And the council has an online registered account that anyone can set up. From there they can do a few key transactions. But, this is interesting, it is a version that is now quite outdated. It is little more than a website where the person completes documents, and that document then goes to the back office, where it is manually keyed in! They are going to replace this with a completely new version, and there is little point in looking at a system that will be replaced.
Getting into the workflow
We talked with some people in repairs today, because I heard a call from a elderly lady who wanted to find out where the tradesperson had got to. He was meant to come back but it was the afternoon and he was not there.
We found that she had an medical condition, and she has been without hot water for two days. So, immediately the supervisor passed the issue onto the internal repairs inspector — who then began to chase up the contractor.
It took until the next day to discover that the boiler had finally been repaired. The problem had been that the tradeperson had gone out, and realised that the boiler was so old it needed replacing. The left to figure out what to do. In the meantime the information between the contractor and the council was not very close, and an email bounce started to grow. I used this demand as a way to get into repairs, and follow the flow of how the system works. And I found that I did not really understand what was going on!
Leadership
In the afternoon I took the Director and the repairs manager through two hours of the back ground of how traditionally managers create organisations and Command & Control standardisation principles, and how that thinking creates our top down management, department functions, targets, and poor staff engagement. Then, I went through looking at their organisation as a system, using systems thinking as a base; complexity and variability, outside-in perspective, self managed teams, staff bringing their whole self to work, and end to end understanding of their workflow. I also went through a detailed case-study where they saw a very similar system as theirs, how dis-functional we found it to be, and the radical and innovative solution can emerge if we think about our service starting from the outside-in, and looking end to end. Before the session the repair manager was talking about his department, and that those other problems were not his fault, we need to push the others departments. After the event with me, he was very quiet.
The Chief Executive later asked the Director what she thought of the session with me and she said that he it was really interesting and he was looking forward to getting stuck in to starting to diagnose the service. Lets wait and see if that enthusiasm is real!
Service Design Methodology
How I Started
The high level design for the work is based around a few steps. But, this is not always followed, and there are some additions
What I have to do, before charging in to start some work, is a couple of steps to get the work setup right. Familiarise I spend a couple of days with the client, listening to demands, talking to their staff, familiarising myself with the work and culture. This helps me to gain a background to them and I judge at what level of change are they willing to do (regardless of what they actually told me).
I also setup the design or plan with the owners of the services. This about identifying the problem to solve, who and how will do this, and the next steps.
With this client, because they were familiar with me and my methodology, there is little written down, but a good and emergent design that is decided by getting the right people in the room at the same time, and agree.
The Understand Phase
Much work that service designers do is connected directly to the customer experience and how to design the service elements that the customer interacts with. The approach that you are seeing here is about the whole end to end workflow that the organisation has. A workflow is the actual flow of work from the moment it starts, through all the IT systems, and the interaction with the staff, the process, everything. The system itself covers much more that just the workflow. I use a diagnostic model (from John Seddon) as a start to examine the system, and this is what I have shown to the Directors, some managers and the staff I work with. You can see the extent of the scope this approach to service design will cover.
(For those who watched the video, you will probably realise that the diagnostic model is simplistic. Demands to not just come in at the front of organisations of this type, much of the demand is in-process demand… No model is a real representation of reality, but it is a help to those I am helping to start with this.)
