Starting Service Design with a New Service

Where to start? This is my account of the work I am doing right now with a local authority in England, continuing on from last year. The brief is to last several months with an outline to focus on certain services, and assist with the Digital front end. And Licensing is not one of the services I should be focusing on, but it needs looking at!

I have also been tasked to work with the Digital team who are in the middle of purchasing and implementing a front end system, to replace the really old CRM. I have written about that in the past, but as each service is examined, I help them to understand what to do with the underlying service workflow. The principle is that if the underlying service is poor, then any Digital implementation is simply going to hard wire in the poor workflow.

Step 1— Setup to allow us to accept other newer ways of seeing management as a role.

This is where I take the manager and director through the background to this design methodology, and difference between traditional and modern management. I tend to use Ford vs Toyota to represent traditional vs modern management approach.

Step 2— Do some familiarisation myself to get an idea of the workflow, so that I am ahead of the group.

I can then guide them from knowledge. I did this two weeks ago, and I found a heap of waste in the flow. The waste is created from:

• Standardisation — each license that is asked for goes through exactly the same process, regardless if it is high risk, or the fact that we already know the organisation.
• Handoffs — There are three members of staff, one that works monday to wednesday, and the other works wednesday to friday. A license flow is then often split between the two officers with an admin person all week.
• Functionalisation— there is one admin staff who only does the admin work, and the officers do the license approval, so the flow is chopped up into fragments.

This year the manager is planning on asking for one extra member of staff because most times in the year the staff can hardly keep up with the workload.

Step 3— Analyse the demands into the service to begin at the front of the service.

I listened to calls into the contact centre, and I looked at emails over a period of a week. For those more familiar with my work, this summary classifies demands into value and failure (V & F). 90% of all demands are email, and the great majority are failure.

Again, the scope for improvement is vast, and implementing Digital ontop of this workflow would be totally the wrong thing to do.

Step 4— The Plan on how to move forwards, based on them designing their own service.

There will therefore be no resistance and they will learn new approaches and behaviours together. As I have not been asked to redesign Licensing, and therefore have little time t put to this, I have to use stealth. I am going to do what I always do in the second phase and then leave it to the service manager to take it forwards themselves (with a tiny bit of my help).

So, I asked the service manager and the director for a couple of hours each. And I asked the service manager to then sit with me at the front line, watching an officer do a temporary notice from end to end. We left the staff to do it, and we only asked questions when we needed clarification. It took almost two hours. Then I did the same with the director who only had one hour available.

At this point they had no idea what I was then going to do next, andI booked in two hours the next week with both of them together.

Step 5— The reveal where they begin the first steps to see their service as a system.

We are in a room, and I ask them to start mapping the workflow that they saw. The manager starts and simply does the main sections of work. I stop them after a few minutes and show them one I completed earlier.

They look at the flow ansd realise that I have recorded every single event/ activity. So there are lots of steps, much more than they realised. They seemed reasonably satisfied with this flow.

Then I asked them about the other part of the flow. What? Yes, the bit before.

OK, they are shocked. So much that happens before it gets to Licensing that they were not aware of. Why? because we almost always automatically see our own department only. They are getting a bit uncomfortable at the addition of a whole new flow.

Step 6— Purpose, the whole reason we do the service that then defines how the whole service should be defined.

I ask them what is the purpose of the license, from the position of the customer? Answer, to manage and ensure a safe event.

Me; “Which steps in this flow directly contribute to that purpose? “

Answer… after a couple of minutes they find 3. Out of a total of 61 steps! So, I exclaim, “58 steps are waste!”

Oh shit.

Me; “Can you design a workflow that only does the 3 steps?”

After some thought and help they start to see some causes of the waste, and see ways of designing the flow so the waste is eliminated. These are some of the ideas:

• Allow the admin to do one whole flow, end to end. There will be no need fort the progress sheet checking. The admin can also do some simple value work. Detailed training is not needed.
• If we have a customer who we already know, then do we need to go through all the checks each time? The church that puts the same Christmas event on every year for instance?
• Why do we do so many checks, they are not needed if we give the staff the time to do them without batching them into groups and passing them around each other. Give the the responsibility to ensure they do it right.

Step 7— The Experiment

The managers have seen their service as never before, and they desperately want to make the changes right now! But I ask them what they should really do next. We talk about helping their staff do this exercise, so that they can see it for themselves and that they can come up with the solutions.

I will post a follow up when we have got some progress which will be Experiment, but the design will be for the service manager to take this forward using the techniques that I have shown them.

My time taken:

Listening to demand — 6 hours

Setup — 1.5 hours

Time for familiarisation — 4 hours

Time for the managers — 3 hours

Reveal — 2 hours