One piece at a time
Where do I start?! This week looked more or less like the last: more service design, less UX. Just the way I like it.
Things that happened at work
Agreed on a high level journey for our service blueprint (a hard earned consensus between a variety of service actors, sometimes 20 at a time)
Started looking at the deeper-level processes in conjunction with our BAs
Attended another UR session, this time walking through our prototype now in HTML (looking at task analysis, questioning the content/language, validating IA decisions and accessibility flags)
Feedback: I've been a lot more consistent this year with asking/providing feedback, but for some reason it's always something I end up procrastinating (the kind of task that demands more soft > hard effort)
If services were a puzzle
Stakeholder management as a service designer is a massively underrated (yet crucial) skill. I'm very lucky to be able to work with someone I look up to greatly as both a mentor and lead — his way of navigating client relationships, however complex and chaotic — has been truly mesmerising!
We've had daily working sessions (sometimes more) to workshop on agreeing a high-level blueprint of our new service. In practice, this sounds more or less straightforward: if I had one piece of a puzzle, you had another, and another person with the final piece — by working together and trying out different angles — surely we should be able to fit all the pieces together, right?
Alas, in reality (in government services) this is much harder to put into practice. What happens if my piece of the lego had an end broken off, or someone doesn't know if their piece is even the right piece from the jigsaw set? What results is a lot of frustration — somehow many attempts later, none of these puzzles seem to fit perfectly altogether — and no one knows why.
I can probably think of a better analogy than jigsaw, but if services were like pieces of an old toy set — used, a few maybe a little broken, but when put together forcibly with other parts — you could just about make out the overall picture.
The picture will do for now, but it won't be perfect, and it's easy to get bogged down on the imperfections of how each team's piece of puzzle isn't fitting quite as well with their neighbour's. But that's perfectly OK, because the big, complex services aren't actually puzzles — these pieces will rupture and repair. They just need to be in the right place to grow and slot into the right corners and holes, and the picture will gain clarity over time.
^ I don't know how service design became a jigsaw analogy, but I could see Lego as being much more on-brand.
Type A travels
It's my last full working week before I head off to Tokyo! As the only planner of the family, I finally put my foot down and handed over this gruelling task to my parents/sister for a first. Of course, _ weeks, reminders and nudges later… no one has contributed to the Google spreadsheet and collaborative note… so my Type A personality is stepping in last minute, of course. Welcome to the life of the oldest child in an Asian family!
Reads that got me through my week
Organising Design (or why you need to care about spreadsheets), Design Swarm
Design revolution in government, Martin Jordan
Toward Porousness in Policy Design, Wild Thinking Studio
“…policies are ‘windows onto political processes in which actors, agents, concepts and technologies interact with different sites, creating or consolidating new rationalities of governance and regimes of knowledge or power.”
How to build a strategy, not a roadmap, Sepeda Rafael
Improving pace of delivery, Steve Messer
This website is personal (in a good way), David Cox
