Service Design Thinking
Posted: April 22, 2015 Filed under: Business | Tags: J Schwan, service design Leave a commentIn a recent blog entry Life’s Too Short, I referenced the emerging field of service design that is focused on the creation of well-thought-out and thorough experiences.*
We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better. —Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon
There are myriad tools available for creating a desired user/consumer experience, including voice of the customer, process analysis and design, business process redesign/reengineering, business analysis, value stream mapping, agile design, user centered design, etc. Does service design differ in any significant way? If so, how?
This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases is a good primer. The authors lay out five principles of service design thinking as their foundation:
- User Centered – services should be experienced through the eyes of the customer
- Co-creative – all stakeholders should be involved in the design process
- Sequencing – the service should be visualized as a sequence of interrelated actions
- Evidencing – intangible services should be visualized in terms of physical artifacts
- Holistic – the entire environment of service should be considered
This list is comprehensive and perhaps even a bit daunting. My initial impression is that it is a refinement, update, and combination of a number of tried-and-true tools or methods. A few key variations that distinguish service design from other approaches include:
- Stronger user orientation generated by observing behavior and understanding context, not simply asking the customer what they want
- More opportunity for flexibility and variations, rather that achieving perfection through absolute standardization
- A focus on experience, rather than product. This may also be stated as value in use, not just an exchange of value (money for product).
- Created together. Experiences are inherently both parties working together to create the outcome
- Allows for experimentation, small scale production environments with soft launches and incremental deployments that include significant feedback to drive product evolution
Regardless of whether service design is truly different or just a new set of words to describe something we’ve always had, I found this book to be clear and concise. It is less theoretical and more practical in terms of basic concepts, approaches, and application. If service design emerges as the hot new thing, user/consumers will be the beneficiaries. Who cares what it’s called?
*Thanks to J Schwan for presenting this as one his three key ideas in his Fusion2015 presentation. See Service Design Slide.
The Business Card Exchange
Posted: April 9, 2015 Filed under: Business Leave a commentI was at a meeting last week in Chicago with other CIOs from the Midwest whom I had not previously met. Instinctively, we continued the time-honored tradition of exchanging business cards. In the era of LinkedIn, Bump, and a myriad of other technologies and methods to connect with others, it surprises me a little bit that this custom has not become extinct.
The Economist offers a reasonable explanation in Why the business card is thriving in the electronic age. The article notes, “The Chinese invented calling cards in the 15th century to give people notice that they intended to visit.” Since that time, there have been myriad iterations and purposes of cards—they may be quirky, clever, or even unique works of art. Personally, I’ve always found it helpful to have a card that is easy to write on.
After some thought, I realized that the card itself is really incidental to the value of the ritual: the introduction, handshake, discussion, and connection. A business card is a tangible souvenir of a physical interaction, a prized commodity in today’s increasingly impersonal, digital world.
Photo by Mark Baker
A Paradigm Shift in Management
Posted: March 27, 2015 Filed under: Business, Leadership | Tags: Agile, Gary Hamel, Management 2.0, Steve Denning Leave a comment
In the 16th century, Copernicus shifted our world by postulating that Earth revolved around the Sun. Prior to the publication of this model in On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in 1543, EVERYONE understood that the Sun revolved around the Earth. It was just the way it worked. More than astronomy was impacted by his scientific work—we began to revisit many things in our culture when this shift occurred.
I believe something similar is happening in organizations today as we are moving to Management 2.0. For background, read Inventing Management 2.0 and watch Reinventing the Technology of Human Accomplishment.
Management 2.0 is customer-centric and employee-centric. According to noted business thinker Gary Hamel, Management 2.0 challenges, “…the fundamental conventions of Management 1.0—the notion that authority trickles down, that tasks are assigned, that strategy gets created at the top, that control must be imposed and so on.” It addresses the question: How do we satisfy customer needs with service-oriented employees within a sustainable business model that provides returns to shareholders?
It’s a shift—a really big shift.
Steve Denning does an excellent job of outlining this (and hitting home with IT professionals) in Why Do Managers Hate Agile? He offers this definition, “For those managers who don’t know what the Agile is (itself a part of the problem), the horizontal world of Agile involves self-organizing teams that work in an iterative fashion and deliver continuous additional value directly to customers.”
Part two, More On Why Managers Hate Agile, also hits home (hard), given some of the current projects I’m involved in. On one hand, traditional organizations are built for predictability. Initiating “agile projects” flies in the face of this predictability, requiring a focus on the customer and allowing the team to innovate with the product owner representing the customer.
Am I part of the problem? Part of the solution? Or a mix of both? Life is all a transition…I’m feeling this one.
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