Agile Service Design (£1265+ VAT)

This masterclass is for current and aspiring service designers looking to gain a thorough grounding in how to design services in an agile user centred environment

The masterclass is particularly relevant for anyone converting to service design from another role, or for service designers working in agile digital teams for the first time

• Understand the discipline of Service Design and how to integrate the practice into agile service delivery, from discovery to live
• Understand user research methods and put them into practice
• Create a detailed user journey and set of user needs for your service
• Prototype and scale your ideas into a real, working service
• Understand how to continuously improve your service over time
• Map the costs and benefits of change and gain organisational buy-in for your ideas

Day 1: Defining the problem

1. Understanding Services and Service Design

• Understand what services are and the roles Service Designers play in organisations

2. Defining the problem

• Understand the definition of ‘a service’, what they are, how they work and how they get improved
• Understand why we need to focus on services and what’s involved in creating a service focussed organisation
• Define your service, where it starts, where it finishes and what it delivers
• Understand how to manage shared ownership of services in complex, scaled organisations
• Understand how to balance the conflict between user needs and organisational priorities

3. Understanding service delivery models

• Assess how culturally ready your organisation is for change to service delivery
• Map your organisations service delivery maturity and identify key problem areas
• Understand the collective responsibility of service owners to deliver shared services in complex environments
• Spot patterns in your organisations services and identify a target service delivery model

4. Understanding how agile, user-centred services get made

• Introduction to Iterative ways of working
• Understand the process of agile, user-centred service delivery
• Understand how service design and delivery works at each agile phases of development from Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live

5. Running a Discovery & Understanding what makes a good service

• Learn to define the problem that area of a discovery
• Understand the importance of user research, and how user research happens in discovery
• Understand the team roles involved in discovery and the outcomes they need to achieve
• Plan, scope and create a timeline for your discovery
• Learn how to balance the expectations of your organisation with the needs of your user
• Learn how to manage stakeholder expectations during Discovery
• Use the 15 principles of Good Service design to gauge how well your current service is working

6. User research tools and methods

• Learn about why user research is fundamental to designing user-centred services
• Learn the fundamentals of user research practice and methods for understanding user behaviours and service use
• Understand the basics of ethical approaches to user research

Day 2: Scaling your ideas from prototyping to delivery

7. Prototyping your ideas and testing them with real users

• Learn how to move from user needs to defined in Discovery Into testable hypotheses in Alpha
• Learn how to develop and test hypothesis
• Learn what’s involved in an alpha phase where services are prototyped
• Understand different methods of prototyping and select the right one for your service

8. Building your audience and creating service adoption

• Learn how to narrow down your hypotheses after Alpha and prepare to test with users in Beta
• Understand how to develop a minimum viable service
• Plan to develop your audience and scale your service gradually, selecting trial groups to work with
• Assess your organisational and technological capability to deliver change and plan a sustainable service
• Understand who’s involved in Beta and what they do
• Create a Beta delivery plan

9. Continuous improvement of live services

• Understand how to prepare your service to move from private testing to scaled use with live users
• Learn how to measure the success of your service and create a reporting structure that will allow your stakeholders to understand the performance of your service
• Create a service governance framework that allows your team the freedom to deliver
• Create a plan for continuous improvement to your service
• Understand the different team requirements for Live, and how to build sustainable support for your service and it’s evolution

10. Legal responsibilities of the service & working with service standards

• Understand the legal responsibilities that will affect your service and create a plan to comply with them - from accessibility, ISOs to equalities standards or Information Society Services (ICOs)
• Understand the role of industry regulators, complaints and FOIs
• Learn how to create and work with your own service standards
• Understand the Language requirements of service delivery in both the public and private sector
• Identify spot the areas of non-compliance and create a plan to deal with them

11. Supporting your users and mitigating service failure

• Understand and plan for the common causes of service failure
• Create a sustainable customer support structure and learn how to test this from Discovery to live
• Learn to create feedback loops in your customer support and incorporate these into continuous improvement
• Quantify the risk of failure in your service and create a plan to mitigate those risks
• Create an emergency and continuity plan for your service

Day 3: Getting organisational buy-in

12. Identifying unnecessary costs and calculating the cost of change

• Understand key concepts of financial service planning
• Understand types of costs that affect your service - from overhead costs and opportunity cost to capital costs
• Identify financial problems in your service, opportunity areas and risks when meeting outcomes
• Calculate how much your service costs to run and calculate the cost of service failure
• Quantitatively map user or societal outcomes
• Reviewing the costs and risks of your service to identify areas where a case for change can be created

13. Understanding your stakeholders and what they need

• Understanding the importance of relationships to getting service design to scale in your organisation
• Understand the needs of your stakeholders and how to tailor your work so that they feel confident in what you’re doing
• Learn how to map your stakeholders and use this to shape the direction of your work

14. Getting buy-in for your ideas

• Understand the tools and techniques that will enable you to get buy-in with your stakeholders in the short, medium, and long term
• Identify the right communication channels and tools to engage your stakeholders
• Learn how to communicate in a language that will resonate with your stakeholders - in money, risk, or outcomes

15. Keeping buy-in and staying motivated

• Understand and map the dangers to maintaining continued buy-in for your work
• Learn how to create a governance framework that will maintain stakeholder engagement over time
• Create a compelling comms plan and learn how to build ground-up momentum for your work
• Learn to manage and communicate risk, blockers, and barriers to your stakeholders
• Creating a long term plan for change where buy-in changes or is removed
• Techniques to rescue buy-in and manage work where you can't get buy-in

16. Looking after yourself

• Understand your role in long term change
• Learn when and how to let go, re-focus your efforts or purpose in difficult situations
• Learn how to personally challenge situations
• Identify where and how you can find safety in your work

All classes are delivered live and online in small classes that are a mix of taught tuition, individual exercises, and group discussion

Participants work on a service or case study of their choice so all course takeaways are able to be put into action immediately

This course is taught over a 3 week period, with an immersive 1 day class each week. The class will take place every Thursday from 9.30am - 5.30pm on the 6th,13th and 20th of March 2025.

Sarah Drummond is a design leader, with a specialism in service and strategic design focusing on balancing the needs of people and planet. She co-founded Snook, an award winning service design studio and led the company as CEO for over 12 years, going on to take a role as Chief Digital Officer at NEC.

Sarah has experience of advising executive teams of multi-million pound turnover organisations. She sits on the board of Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park and previously held trustee positions at Withyou, a mental health, drug and alcohol charity and Settle who deliver high impact support services to vulnerable young people.

Sarah was given an honorary doctorate from the Glasgow School of Art for services to design in 2019, awarded a Google Fellowship for her work in technology and democratic innovation and was named as Good magazine’s 100 extraordinary individuals tackling global issues in creative ways for CycleHack, an initiative to reduce barriers to cycling.

This masterclass can be delivered privately for your organisation. Drop us a line here to discuss.

Event Venue

Online