Mentoring a team through the service design process

A few months ago, I was asked to help one of our services with a new service design project; ‘nothing new’ I thought, but the difference was, that I was asked to mentor the service in doing their own service design work.

Initially, I was filled with anxiety about my ability to do this well, and immediately started to doubt if I was the right person for the job.

Do I have enough experience to do this properly?

I started working in service design 3 weeks before the pandemic. I enjoy and respond well to people, a true people person who loves to be in a busy office with a good atmosphere. This is how to get the most out of me in a work situation. I like to bounce off others and I love to collaborate in the purest of ways. Working from home was a real struggle for me and on reflection, I felt this restricted my development in my new role. So, when I was asked to mentor a service, my first thought was “am I the right person for it?”

What if the business don’t listen to my guidance?

A lot of the time, businesses already know what the issues are within their area, but they don’t understand the ’why’ and part of what we do is to understand what the problems are, so we can help untangle these and make the business processes more efficient and financially viable.

I was worried that if the business area weren’t prepared to reflect on their practices and this would have a negative impact on what they were trying to achieve.

Doing the doing

Thankfully, after a few projects under my belt, I feel confident in my ability as a service designer and love what I do. Plus, I have a great team of colleagues who are always there to ask questions. We have a great bond, are like minded and the best bit for me is, on the most part we have fun and enjoy being around each other, well, most of the time! And that is just my colleagues in my immediate team. The wider team is packed full of knowledge such as, experts in business intelligence, project managers, design architects and organisational development practitioners. You could say, we know our stuff!

The business relationship

When I met the business subject matter expert (SME) I was delighted. Laura was open and happy to absorb our design practices, fully embracing how we go about redesigning services and on the plus side, eager to get on with the initial phase of the design process!

What we did

Together we developed a discovery plan of how undertake the necessary research needed to understand with the current problems were. It was nice to work on this collaboratively and be able to set up a solid plan to understand the current problems in the business.

We had regular catch ups throughout a 12 week discovery period where Laura shared what she had done and I provided guidance around capturing quotes and certain data we could draw on at later stages.

One thing I was pleasantly surprised about was Laura’s commitment to compile and lead on show and shares with minimal guidance from me, just a few suggestions here and there and I have to say, the audience responded very positively to this.

When the discovery period was over, we held a ‘discovery day’ in the offices where Laura invited stakeholders to come along and share the insights and outputs from her discovery period. This attracted a huge number of interested people who added to the research and were genuinely interested in the service. This is great because it not only promotes service design, but it also promotes the positives steps we are taking within the business to improve how we work.

A bit more help from me

Once the discovery period was complete, Laura and I took a whole day to synthesise the research and break this down into common themes. Once we were happy with the themes, we decided on titles for the themes and prepared to hold a problem statement workshop.

For context, a problem statement is usually one or two sentences to explain the problem that the project will address, the themes act as the backbone for the problem statements we create from those themes.

We held a drop-in session as well as a virtual board that we sent out to all stakeholders, so everybody got an opportunity to contribute their views and vote on which theme title they felt was most important. Quite a cathartic exercise for those involved.

On conclusion of the session, we compiled the votes and those with the highest scores were developed into prioritised problem statements. This formulates how we address the work moving forward and gives us a plan to work to.

Laura and I did this collaboratively and involved as may stakeholders as possible to get buy-in moving forward.

Since then, we have begun working on the prioritised problem statements and I am supporting Laura and other members of the business to drive these changes.

Often small shifts can lead to huge change. One of these is simple guidance for our employees who don’t understand the process and just need a bit of help to self-serve. It’s simple but its effective and the efficiency savings are huge. With efficiency comes financial savings too, so it’s a win all round.

In conclusion

I have probably learnt more than Laura in this process, but not about my job, about myself. I do have the confidence and the ability that I was so anxious about to start with and my self-belief has really improved. I have thoroughly enjoyed mentoring through the service design process, and I would love to do it again given the opportunity to do so.