Weeknotes #203
This week I did:
Changing the rules of the game for charities
Reuben Turner from Good Innovation wrote an article about the need for a change in how charities approach fundraising to think more about engagement over efficiency and flourishing over formulas, and I wrote a response about how Friedman’s ‘rules of game’ for an organisation (including a charity) being to maximise profit is a narrow view that doesn’t take into account of human behaviour, and that profit, whilst a good measure, might not be the best target.
Schmenner’s Service Process Matrix – but for charities
Schmenner’s Service Process Matrix classifies services by the amount of in-person support is required from employees to enable the service to function, and by the amount of customer contact and/or customisation the service requires. I looked at a way to apply the model to identifying the type of service a charity might develop based on its available resources and the needs of its users.
Charities need better digital technology for communicating with their service users
I wrote about the things I’ve learned recently about digital communication technologies used by charities based on The Catalyst’s article ‘The top ten digital challenges facing the charity sector‘ which showed how a number of charities were struggling with identifying and using the right platforms for communicating and providing digital services with their service users (number 2). I think charities are facing this struggle because the products on the market are not designed to meet their needs. They need a different kind of digital communication technology, one that is built with privacy and security in mind that allows people from within the organisation to talk to people outside.
How the COVID-19 crisis is changing the debate on digital transformation strategies
I watched the online seminar from Birkbeck about the effects of a crisis on the digital transformation of businesses. It concluded with the obvious, that there will be winner and loser businesses and industries, and that the crisis will accelerate the transformation (not just digital transformation) of businesses that do survive.
The steps of a service
I applied some of the thinking I learned from Good Services to helping us articulate the steps we were putting into a service and the language we used to describe and refer to those parts of the service. I put the ten steps that we settled on into a single document and all of the people involved inputted their knowledge about each of the steps so that we could be clear about what happens for each. It was a really good example of collaborative working that progressed us towards the next step in designing the service. I would what we’d see if we had a separate service design team investigating how we go about developing services?
This week I studied:
Digital enterprise
“How digital technologies have changed the way organisations collaborate and network. It explains how digital social platforms have enabled new ways of organising and building relational networks. Based in industry research, the lecture shows how different corporate departments are benefiting from the advance in digital technologies for collaboration and communication, becoming networked enterprises. It also discusses how to engage the workforce and customers in these transformations, and how to explore new forms of organising (such as open innovation and crowdsourcing).”
The most interesting idea we discussed was that these social platform technologies have enabled the creation of organic networks and social ties in contrast and in addition to the hierarchies of an organisation. The weak ties between people in different teams become channels of information and innovation in ways that fixed structural information flows never can.
This week I thoughts about:
Working in the open
Following on from Oikos Digital’s building in the open approach, I’ve been thinking about my workflow for learning and writing, and making it more open. My public Trello board includes a column for what I intend to do this week, which gets filled with things from the other columns such as books to read, lectures to listen to, blog posts to write, etc., and then are moved to the Done column. It occurred to me that my three objectives map quite nicely to a pipeline of inputting, processing, and outputting. ‘Getting an effective education’ brings information into me, ‘Live an intentional life’ fits what I do with the information, how I learn from it, being focused, etc., and ‘Have an impactful career in digital charity’ fits the outputting of the knowledge I develop. Next I want to think about how I turn my workflow from a pipeline into a platform, and why I would/should do that.
Good Service
I’ve been reading Lou Downe’s Good Services – How to design services that work. It’s a fantastic book and I’ve learned things that I’ve been able to apply successfully at work the next day. To me, that’s a sign of a good book. It has so many good ideas, even if your job isn’t building services (good or otherwise) like mine. The idea that I’ve been thinking most recently is about how a team is only as strong as the weakest link, and it seems to me that specialists create more risk of weak links and generalists reduce the weaknesses. So maybe delivering something that relies on a chain of specialists probably has less chance of being successful than generalists who can overlap their skills and abilities.
How products and services work together
I’m still thinking a lot about how products and services fit together. My latest idea is that they should fit together like a zip, with the customer journey coming together and running through the middle. This means that we can still define differences between what a product is and what a service is, that they can be separate things, but that they rely on each other in order for the customer to be successful. I think maybe that the parts in the customer journey where the user has to stop and do something they use the product, and that when the user has to move onto the next step, to know where to go and how to get there, then they are using the service. This means that product and service need each other to succeed. Still struggling to explain the difference between them though.
This week people tweeted about:
Working in public
Nadia tweeted about her book ‘Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software’. The open source movement is interesting to me, a little bit because I’ve studied it (and feel a little frustrated with the irony of a university teaching about open source with copyrighted lecture materials that I would get in trouble if I made publicly available) but also because I think of it as a model for more than just developing software. So, this book is on my list.
New to digital ways of working
What would you recommend someone reads if they are new to digital ways of working? Steve recommended the Product Management learning list for government and The UX Coach suggested Books Vs People and What does being digital actually mean?
The cozy web
Maggie Appleton tweeted about the dark forest and the cozy web which makes so much sense. It explains many experiences of using the web, with the dark forest being the big public bits of the web like Twitter and ads on websites, and the cozy web emerging in response to that, which we see with the rise of enclaved communities of like-minded people writing email newsletters and communicating in WhatsApp groups.
Schmenner’s Service Process Matrix – but for charities
Introduction
Developing services for charities is no easy task, especially as the need for their services increases and the available funding reduces. What approach can charities use to help select the most appropriate type of service? Perhaps we can learn from research from the commercial services sector, with some adaption for the charity sector, to better understand how to make strategic choices about service types.
Service Process Matrix
Schmenner’s Service Process Matrix (Schmenner, 1986) classifies services by the amount of in-person support is required from employees to enable the service to function, and by the amount of customer contact and/or customisation the service requires.
We could apply the same thinking to charity services, but change the language to help us move away from the commercial mindset and towards a greater focus on the needs of the beneficiaries of the charity services.
‘Customer contact/Customization’ refers to whether the service is offered in the same way to all customers or is customised for each customer. It could be renamed ‘Service-user’s need’ in our charity adaption of the model with more complex needs in the right hand column of the diagram and less complex needs to the left. This axis tells us that there is a notional threshold point at which a charity designing a service needs to decide whether the complexity of the service-user’s needs are sufficient to suggest the service should use a model in the right hand column, or simple enough for a model in the left hand column to apply.
Schmenner talks about ‘Labor intensity’ as a ratio between people and machinery, so a low-intensive labor business uses more technology than people in delivering its services (the top row of the diagram) whilst the opposite is true for a high-intensive labor business (the bottom row of the diagram). For our charity adaption we should keep this definition of labor intensity as it gives us a sense of the balance between people and their time and the technology used, but expand it to include other available resources such as funding and skills as these greatly affect a charity’s ability to deliver services. We can rename it ‘Available resources’. This axis tells us that there is a decision to be made about whether to use a model from the top or bottom row based on an understanding of the resources the charity has to implement the service.
Service Factory
Schmenner gives the examples of airlines and hotels as Service Factory services because of the low customer contact & customization – everyone gets the same service, and low labor intensity – the ratio of effort by people in delivering the service is less than the equipment, buildings and aeroplanes in this example.
An example for a charity might be a website with information about self-examination for testicular cancer or self-service web portal that allows the booking of a counselling session. These require little human effort and utilise a greater degree of technology to deliver the service.
This type of service works well where the service-user’s needs are less complex, such as needing to source simple information, and where technology can be implemented to meet that need.
Service Shop
Services with low labor intensity / resource needs but high customer customization / service-user’s need are classified as Service Shops. Service Shops can provide various types of customized services for the service-users but rely on more technology/capital resources than human effort to deliver the service.
Charities might use a Service Shop model to deliver individualised support pathways for young people getting into training. Each young person using the service receives support, mentoring and training that meets their needs, and the majority of the service is provided through technology such as a Learning Management System for training courses and video calls for mentoring.
Mass Service
Mass Services have low customer contact/customization in combination with high labor intensity, meaning that everyone gets the same service but it requires people to provide the majority of it. Schools use this model, providing every student with the same curriculum which is predominantly delivered by lots of in-person contact with the teacher delivering the service.
Charities use the Mass Service model to deliver services that are difficult to deliver using technology but don’t require a great deal of customisation in order to meet the needs of the service-user. Charity shops fit this model (although existing to generate income rather than meet the needs of service-users) as they require employees and volunteers to sort stock, serve customers, etc., all tasks that could not easily be automated. Charity shops offer the same service to all customers – buying stuff – and don’t change that based on the customer’s needs.
The Mass Service model is often used where a service needs to grow through replication, that is, in our charity shop example, opening another charity shop that works in the same way as every other charity shop. This is because recruiting more people to run the same service in a different location.
Professional Service
These services have both high customer contact/customization and a high degree of labor intensity, and tend to be highly customized according to the particular situation/need of each customer.
Charities providing expert legal advice for people experiencing domestic abuse or facing homelessness are utilising the Professional Services model. The high degree of education, skill and time required to deliver the service explain why this is high in ‘Available Resources’, and the high complexity of the need, including dealing with landlords, benefits system, courts, etc., explain why this service requires greater customisation in order to met the specific needs of each individual.
How to use this in designing a charity service
Choosing an appropriate service model
When initially designing a service the most appropriate model should be selected from the four types. To design and attempt to deliver a service that uses the Professional Service model when a charity doesn’t have the necessary resources will result in the service only meeting the needs of a few. And to provide a service built on a Service Factory or Mass Service model when the needs of those using the service are highly complex will result in the needs of those service users not being fully met by the service.
Multiple service models to make up a service
The complete service doesn’t have of only use one type, in fact a service could be designed with different parts of the service using different models where the complexity of need differs throughout the entirety of the service and where some parts could use technology to a greater degree than others.
Trading off needs and resources
In reality, there is always a trade off. The service user needs might be highly complex, for example a family dealing with a parent with terminal cancer, and requiring a high degree of resourcing, for example many hours of one-to-one care by a specialist nurse, but the charity simply does not have enough nurses to meet the needs of patient and family members. The charity then needs to decide whether to continue to offer the Professional Service model of support, either to fewer people or for fewer hours, or to redesign the service using a different model. Or sometimes, the difficult decision to decide that they are not the right charity to be providing the service.
Shifting service type with changing needs and resources
Designing a service of one type doesn’t necessarily mean that it should continue to use that type. If there is a change in the needs of the service users (becoming more or less complex over time), or a change in the available resources (introduction of better technology, more time and funding, improved skills) then charities should be able to shift the service to a different model.
If a service is delivered using a Service Factory model because that was appropriate at the time of initially building the service, but then the needs of the service-users become more complex then the service could be moved to utilising a Service Shop model to achieve better outcomes. Similarly, if a charity was providing a service using the Professional Services model but then experienced a reduction in funding that meant they no longer had the resources available to deliver the service in that way, then they should be able to redesign the service using a Service Shop model to ensure a service can still be delivered.
Conclusion
Schmenner’s Service Process Matrix, with some adaption, offers an interesting model to conceptualise the types of services designed and delivered by charities. It provides some practical direction in choosing a service type based on the resources the charity has available and the complexity of needs of the service-users, and guidance on responding the changing needs, both within the charity and from the people who benefit from the service.
Perhaps the important realisation here is that increasing the capacity of an existing service is not the only way to respond to changing needs, and reducing the capacity of a existing service is not the only way to respond to a reduction in funding, and/or employee and volunteer availability. Charities can respond to change by shifting service model.
References
Verma, R., & Boyer, K. K. (2000). Service classification and management challenges. Journal of Business Strategies, 17(1), 5-24. Cornell University, School of Hospitality Administration site: http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/59/
Schmenner, Roger W., How Can Service Businesses Survive and Prosper?, Sloan Management Review, 27:3 (1986:Spring) p.21
Weeknotes #202
This week I did:
Product configuration for online mentoring
We launched the MVP of the platform to enable online mentoring and deliver courses and workshops to young people so I defined the policy settings that control how four user types will behave, wrote six hundred test cases, wrote a user guide, and helped design the feedback loop for support and improvements. It was another fast-paced busy week with lots of individual pieces of the jigsaw being fitted into place and lots to hold in my head and make sure we understand the impact a change in one place affects all the connected parts.
A non-service-designers guide to service design
I published my ‘work in progress’ collection of information, blogs, resources, books, podcasts, and people to follow about Service Design. My tweet about it received more attention than I was expecting, especially as it was late on Sunday evening, but I’m keen to add more to it and take it out of it’s ‘work in progress’ state to where it feels like a complete set of resources. Then I can leave it for a while to work on other sets of resources for things like user story mapping. Anyway, it’s number three on my list of writings to finish this weekend so I’ll see how far I get.
Charities need better technology
I’ve been working on a blog post about how a number of charities were struggling with identifying and using the right platforms for communicating and providing digital services with their service users from The Catalyst’s article ‘The top ten digital challenges facing the charity sector‘. I’m trying to make the point that the digital communication technologies that charities are using aren’t fit for purpose as they are designed either as enterprise tools for communicating between colleagues or consumer tools for communicating with friends and family, and that what charities need is a different type of product, one that is built privacy-first, has enterprise-level security, and enables people within an organisation to talk to people outside the organisation. Hopefully I’ll get it finished soon.
And I studied:
Digital collaborative platforms
This week’s lecture discussed the “crucial change brought by digital technologies in the way we collaborate in organisations and beyond. The topic discusses changes in the business environment, in which organisations become more collaborative. It explores some trends in digital collaborative platforms, using mainly the examples from social media, and building the arguments to expand the logic to proprietary tools such as Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Connections. Finally, the lecture discusses the economics and motivation of collaboration, drawing upon examples.”
It was a really interesting topic and one of the better lectures of the module, probably because I’m interested in collaborative platforms (Go MS Teams!) but especially for the parts about people’s motivations for using or not using these organisational knowledge management tools.
And thought about:
It hasn’t been a great week for thinking, too much stuff requiring immediate attention and not enough space to go deep, but…
Building in the open
Oikos Digital launched their new website, which is cool anyway, but is being built in the open, which is way cooler. I love the approach. I’d love to build a site entirely in the open that starts with a feedback tool and performance dashboard so that people can be involved in the entire build, from thoughts on the design and layout, co-creating content, testing on different devices and scenarios.
Solidarity and widening our ‘us’.
I’ve listened to a few podcasts on the multiple-order effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the structural racism in our society that is being highlighted and tackled by the Black Live Matter movement, utilitarianism and effective altruism’s approach to doing the most good. The theme I see running through all of them is ideas of solidarity (defined as: unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest; mutual support within a group.). We humans tend to have solidarity with those we feel we have something in common. For some people, this commonality is narrowly defined (only men in a certain age group, of certain wealth, with certain education, etc., etc.) and for others it’s widely defined (the majority of people from a nation, a race, or even the entire species). The inequalities in our society come about from a clash of these solidarities. I think diversity of solidarities is probably a good thing, so the solution isn’t about saying everyone should have the same sense of solidarity, but instead if everyone widened the group of people they consider themselves to have commonalities with, widening the number and groups of people they consider to be ‘us’ rather than ‘them, then perhaps the exponential effects could tackle some of the inequalities and make for a fairer world.
And read tweets about:
Systems thinking in context of internet-era approaches to service design and delivery
Tom Loose more tweeted “Hunting an accessible* intro to systems thinking in context of internet-era approaches to service design and delivery.”
That’s one of those fascinating intersecting-worlds moments.
One reply included a link to Design 4 Services for thoughts on system thinking in services,
“This dynamic complexity requires a new way of thinking. It is no longer enough to simply examine and act upon each part of a system in isolation. It is necessary to examine how each part interacts with each other; and work on the system as a whole.” and a reply from Tom, “a good primer… Just need to inject the notion that internet-era agility & analysis let’s you speed up and improve quality of feedback loop”
Another reply had a link to the Systems Innovation’s YouTube Playlist, some of which I’ve watched before (they’re really good and I should watch more).
But still the question, how to apply system thinking to internet-era ways of working? How to create useful crossover between two sets of ideas, take parts of one and apply to another?
Living in the future: reflections from Services Week 2020
Last week was Services Week — organised by the Government Digital Service as a series of events for UK government, but very much a celebration of work across different design and digital teams in the UK. It was noticeable how many teams and organisations were contributing to, or organising events.
Weeknotes #201
This week I did:
Another whirlwind week
I worked quickly to take high level business requirements for online mentoring into detailed implementation requirements and onto a defined scope for the MVP. One of the things I found interesting about defining the MVP was to stick to what we are certain about. If we had any questions or doubts about a feature it was taken out of scope. It’s a good principle for being able to meet the launch date. Next week we’ll be working through configuration and testing so we can launch the week after. It feels great to be working at pace and focused on delivering something useful so quickly.
And I studied:
Disrupted by digitisation
This week’s lecture was about Digital Marketing.
“Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably. Digital marketing is the process of achieving marketing objectives through applying digital technologies.”
Chartered Institute of Marketing
We broadly discussed tools & techniques, benefits, models and growth. Mostly obvious stuff, but interesting to think about how marketing has been at the forefront of the digitisation of business.
And thought about:
Waking up in beautiful places
I have a few essays that I’ve been thinking about for a while, some of which I’ve started, and none of which I’ve finished. I want them to be more interesting than just reading what I think and so they’ll include videos, links, quotes, etc. to create a fuller and richer picture of the topic than if it was purely written. The one I’ve been working on this week is about designing an intentional life, art, stoicism, minimalism, being a bit of a hermit and living in a car.
Service design for non-service-designers
In addition to essays, I’ve also been thinking about ‘collections’ as a different way to group content about a particular thing, kind of following on from my Compendium Of Ideas project that never went anywhere. The first collection is about Service Design, because it’s something I’m interested in and have been doing a bit of research on. My collections will be single pages of multimedia (is that still a term?) content around a particular topic, so that could include tweets, videos, podcasts, a list of links, quotes, books, etc. The hypothesis is that people who don’t know about a topic need somewhere to start, and I need a means of putting my research together in a considered and reflective way.
Approaches to validation
I was looking around on Product Hunt, a website where product creators list products they are working on to get feedback from visitors. It’s always interesting to see the wide diversity of how different people approach the same problems (again and again, there are only a certain number of problems to solve) and the product process they go through. Three of the products I looked at seemed to be at different stages of validating their hypothesis. Better Wiki – The ultimate people operations wiki on the internet – are using Notion as a public site, perhaps to validate their product/market fit without having to develop a site (wiki’s a tough thing to get right in my opinion). Mental Models by Edvo – Tools to navigate life better – is an iPhone app only, so the website just directs visitors to download the app, and Tools for better thinking – Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems – have the most most polished website. There are all working on similar problems; how to present information in ways the drive behaviour change through thinking change,
Product management in a non-product organisation
I feel like most of the information and rhetoric around being a product manager is underpinned by the assumption that all product managers work at product-orientated organisations. There is a big difference in how to approach product management when the product is core to the business and when the product is a tool used by a small section of the business to achieve a particular outcome. The idea that product managers should be ‘leaders’ (whatever that means) only works if the entire organisation values product enough to consider that leadership as key to success for the organisation. I guess design, innovation, etc. all suffer from the same problem. More traditional functions like marketing and finance have earned their place in the leadership circle, but the newer functions are yet to establish their value. I feel like the ‘what kind of organisation are we?’ question is a big part of this. If the core business model is service orientated, then trying to product-ised the thinking and discussions can unintentionally disrupt the business and cause negative consequences. If the goal of a product manager is to deliver value for the organisation then sometimes the strategic thing to do would be to let Product take a back seat in the organisation.
And people tweeted about:
Tuning out ‘Digital’
John Cutler tweeted about tuning out the word ‘digital’, which spurred me on to write my ‘In defence of digital’ post about why we can’t dismiss digital in our lives, organisations and society.
The Charity Digital Code of Practice
The COVID-19 digital checklist for charity trustees and leaders from the Charity Digital Code looks really interesting. It was developed from research done by The Catalyst. It’s also great to see more charities contributing to The Catalyst Service Recipes. I wonder if anyone is using any of these resources?
Top 100 Nonprofit Blogs
I tweeted a link to the Top 100 Nonprofit Blogs. The most noticeable thing is the lack of charities on the list. Obviously, many of the organisations on the list are using their blog as part of their content marketing for lead generation so it makes sense that they post more often. Compared to the amount of open working and transparency in government digital teams expressed through blogs, the charity sector seems very quiet.