How to create the conditions for success

Designing and operating modern, internet-era services is different from what you might be used to, but it’s not rocket science. It’s the application of a few simple principles, a simple flow of work and some tweaked behaviours.  If you’re a leader thinking of doing service design for the first time, these are some of the things you can do to increase your chances of success.

As a leader…

✅ Openly acknowledge that understanding the problems to solve, especially those of the user, is the place to start

👉 Increase the chances of delivering the right thing

By understanding challenges, opportunities and the needs of users you increase the chances of delivering the right thing. As a leader, pick an area of opportunity that has potential to deliver on your strategy, but where the edges are unclear.

✅ Set up a small, 100% dedicated, cross-disciplinary team to explore a problem space

👉 Create the beginnings of a committed, empowered team

👉 Understand the users and their real needs

Investing in discovery activities like this saves wasted effort later on and creates the beginnings of an inspired, empowered team, committed to solving a problem with a habit for learning. As a leader make sure you stand up a 100% dedicated team with the relevant expertise.

✅ Build a working prototype (an ‘alpha’) and test it with potential users

👉 Quickly explore the art of the possible

👉 Test your riskiest assumptions

👉 Create shorter feedback loops

An alpha is a a quick and effective way to test your riskiest assumptions, explore the art of the possible and better understand the needs of the user.  As a leader, empower the team to meet the needs of the users free from the imposition of political constraints so you can avoid building a product or service that sub-optimally reflects the shape or behaviours of the current organisation.

✅ Trust the team to own their process and choose the tools they wish to work with 

👉 Establish new ways of working

👉 Signal an empowered team

There is no simpler, more powerful way for a leader to signal empowerment than by allowing a team to break some long-standing but innocuous rules. As a leader, you need to provide the top cover for the team them to shape their working environment in ways they want.

✅ Co-locate a 100% dedicated, cross-disciplinary team where you want to see the change happen

👉 Team can demonstrate they work well together

👉 Team demonstrate they understood complex areas of the service

An essential measure of success is landing new ways of working into the organisation. As a leader, you can vastly increase the chances of that happening by co-locating a 100% dedicated, cross-disciplinary team where you want to see the change happen. By doing this, the team should be able to generate sufficient political momentum to surmount the internal barriers to the service going live (usually as ‘beta’).

✅ Put a live ‘beta’ service in front of users quickly – say within a month or so

👉 Deliver value quickly

👉 Demonstrate agile, user-centred delivery practices

For organisations not used to working this way this is an important psychological hurdle to overcome, and a condition for success for delivering modern, internet-era services. As a leader, let people know it won’t be complete but it will be the beginning, a thin slice, of a real service with real users.

✅ Ensure the approach to delivering the service remains incremental and iterative, driven by desired outcomes rather than a fixed plan

👉 Iterate the service based on real-world use

👉 Learn how to operate and scale

It doesn’t matter how big or complex the imagined future service is, break it down into smaller parts and build in short, timely feedback loops.  Learning this habit and way of working will help you build a service that better meets the needs of end users and front line workers who provide the service.

✅ Ensure everyone understands it’s better to start small and grow organically

👉 Less noise, faster delivery

👉 Self-organising, motivated teams

Over engineered programme-level hierarchies or overbearing governance produce noise; noise slows down self-organising, motivated teams. Your role as a leader should be to support the team to figure this out as they go. The organisation must resist the temptation to impose programme structure on a beta team, or believe that by adding more people, workstreams or management layers it will deliver faster – it won’t.

✅ Commit to challenging the status quo

👉 Committed leadership

👉 Simplified governance

Provide the top cover, including committing day-to-day leadership from within the organisation – someone who is trusted and capable of navigating and challenging the status quo.

In fact, it should be understood that the beta will be outside the norms of programme management and governance. Part of the beta will be to explore how both need to adapt.

✅ Go and see delivery for yourself

👉 Better view of real progress

👉 Listen to real user feedback

👉 Assure as you go

You’ll know this approach is working and whether you’ve nurtured a good team if they can demonstrate they can regularly deploy and iterate the service based on real user feedback.

Encourage all stakeholders to commit to going to see what and how the team is delivering and to listen to how users are responding. They will see the service coming to life and continuously improving week by week.

This is a far more effective way of assessing true progress and providing timely challenge than by reading and responding to an emailed report sent from afar. Get out of the meeting room and go to see delivery for yourself.

This note was originally published on jamiearnold.com. It’s been reformatted and re-published here