Working with frontline service delivery professionals
I’ve been working a lot with local government recently. Last year I supported Newham Council on the redesign of their complaints service and since then I’ve worked with both Essex and Surrey County Councils. I love working in local government because you get the opportunity to influence the design and delivery of critical services that make a difference to peoples lives. The same applies in the charity sector.
I am by no means an expert but I’m learning a huge amount about how to work in partnership with frontline service delivery professionals. This is a part of the work that really interests me because its an important factor in successfully integrating service design into service delivery. Different organsiations will be taking different approaches to this and I can only speak for the experiences I’ve had but I’d love to hear from others on this.
Firstly, when I think about some of my experiences of this, I think about the great talk Katy Arnold gave this year at Camp Digital about being a design superhero. She spoke about how we, as design professionals, are sometimes prone to donning our capes and swooping in to save people. I think this is the thing I’ve been very conscious off, especially as a contractor, and it’s the thing that has led me to reflect on what real value service design and service designers can bring to service delivery.
Firstly, it needs to be said that it’s unlikely you’ll be designing a new service from scratch. The only thing I’ve seen stimulate a lot of brand new service design was a global pandemic! So, with that in mind, as service designers we are usually integrating with teams of people who are already delivering a service on a daily basis. Likely a mixture of front line professionals, people working on the phones and email a lot to support people in the community. People undertaking operational roles behind the scenes. Managers and supervisors. People maintaining digital channels These people will know their service inside out.
In these situations I’m always acutely aware of Katy’s talk. I don’t want to be the superhero. Or the happy clappy consultant. I want to position myself in such a way that I can help them with things they maybe don’t have the time or skillset to do themselves. In my experience, the most valuable things you can bring as a service designer working in a consultant capacity, whether that’s via an agency, freelance route or simply a different team in the council are:
Objectivity: This is maybe obvious but it’s still valuable. People working to deliver a service live and breathe it every day. They know it inside out. While that is valuable, sometimes the ability to take a step back and see the service from end-to-end from both a strategic, high level perspective, but also a detail of experience viewpoint, is valuable. Objectivity is also helpful when bringing together and facilitating multi-agency or multi-disciplinary teams.
Time: Service delivery teams, especially in local government, are usually at capacity. Budgets are tight across the country at the moment with hiring freezes and gaps in resourcing common place. This puts additional strain on teams and while the desire to engage in service design and improvement work is often there, the reality is there are not always enough hours in the day. As design professionals we have the opportunity to bring ways of working that put the minimum strain on service delivery teams, allowing them to simply show up and use their expertise to help.
Alternative expertise: I think this is the one that can trip people up, me included. Sometimes, as designers, we think we have this magical skillset that can change the world. We don’t. But we do have experience in ways of working that service delivery teams might be less familiar with. Things like prototyping and experimenting. We might have a bit more of an understanding of the opportunities technology can offer. We have tools and methods we can draw on to help stimulate creative thinking. The skill is in figuring out how to deploy these in a meaningful and sensitive way.
All this said I have certainly made mistakes. While this is obviously how you learn, and these mistakes have allowed me to get to the point of being able to write this piece, when you make them with people it’s tough. Katy told some memorable stories in her talk about times she remembers with a slight cringe where she approached this kind of work in the wrong way - I’m sure many people working in service design will have similar stories to tell. I’m sure people working in service delivery will have even more stories to tell!
However, I think it’s so important that we talk about this and help each other learn and improve. Services are largely made up of people. Yes the fabric of a service consists of many things, see Sarah Drummond’s Full Stack Service Design for more on this, but at the core it’s about people. There is obviously a spectrum here with a shift towards a greater digital component to services, however in local government and charities services are largely relational. Yes, digital plays a part but people play a bigger part. And if service design is going to cement it’s position in this space we need to focus on how we work with other humans.
If this sounds like the type of consultancy your organisation could benefit from, I’d love to hear from you. I offer consultancy and advisory support and primarily work within the charity, local Government and healthcare sectors. You can find examples of my recent work in the case studies section.