Build the skills you need to design and deliver user centred services in complex agile environments. Understand the full lifecycle of agile service delivery, from research through to live and how to build user centred services at each stage
The course
Agile Service Design is a live 3 day course split over three weeks that focuses on the reality of designing services in changing organisational environments
With additional 1:1 coaching from your expert trainer Sarah Drummond, you’ll learn how to design and develop user centred services in complex environments, and build the skills you’ll need to design user centred services at each stage of agile service delivery
What you’ll learn
Understand what services are and why service outcomes matter
Techniques to identify the edges of your service and it’s outcomes
Understand the materials of services and how organisational design impacts the user experience
Understand the various roles of a service designer across discovery to live from designing for failure, championing inclusive and accessible services and facilitating teams to work together on service outcomes
How to identify problems in service delivery and how to fix them
Understand the 15 principles of Good Services
How to map user journeys, identify user needs and organisational outcomes across this
Understand the discipline of Service Design and how to integrate the practice into agile service delivery, from discovery to live
Understand user research methods, different types of discovery and how to apply this to services
How to prototype services at different levels and scale your ideas into a real, working service
Understand how to continuously improve your service over time and create measurement frameworks for your service
Understand how and when to use service blueprints to map complex service interactions
How to make a compelling pitch to gain buy-in for your service design work
Who this course is for
We have designed this course to be applicable for both people working inside organisations, or consulting with companies.
We have a range of levels of experience come on the course. Some people are looking to build confidence they are ‘doing the right thing’, some are moving into a specific service design role but have practiced design in other roles, and some people are completely new to service design or any type of design.
We’ve designed the course so each of these experience levels can take something away. If you are completely new to design, we recognise there will be alot to take on but there is a 1:1 coaching session available which can be taken during the course or after to support your learning.
If you are an experienced service design practitioner you may wish to consider the Service Design Leadership Course.
This course is suitable for:
Current or aspiring service designers looking to gain a thorough grounding in how to design services in an agile user centred, or live service environment
Anyone looking to transition to service design from another role
Anyone not formally using the title ‘service designer’ but who is involved in designing and delivering services and looking to deepen their skills and confidence in service design
Service designers working in agile, digital or multidisciplinary teams for the first time
User centred practitioners who are new to working holistically on services and looking to expand their scope of work
Anyone new to user centred design or currently practicing the role informally and looking gain the confidence to make more deliberate career change into service design
Anyone in a service delivery team who is looking to gain the skills and knowledge to practice device design in their current role or learn how to better work with the service designers in their team
Your trainer
Sarah Drummond is the co-founder and ex-CEO of Snook, where she built one of the first and most successful Service Design practices in the UK from the ground up, going on to become the Chief Digital Officer at NEC Software Solutions
Sarah brings a wealth of experience, building service design capability inside organisations across Government, third and private sector
She was given an honorary doctorate from the Glasgow School of Art for services to design in 2019, and awarded a Google Fellowship for her work in technology and democratic innovation
Sarah 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
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"I really loved it. It was engaging, insightful, and incredibly useful. I’ve already started thinking differently about how we shape our services. I've learnt more in 3 days than I did in 3 years at university."
Head of projects, Special Olympics
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"I couldn't speak more highly about the course. The material is over and above, with no fluff, and you did a great job of delivering, facilitating and educating"
Content designer transitioning to service design
Course content
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Understand what services are and the roles Service Designers play in organisations
Map your organisations service-centric and user-centered maturity and identify key areas for change
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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
Expanding your brief from focusing on organisational outcomes
Understand how to manage shared ownership of services in complex, scaled organisations
Understand how to balance the conflict between user needs and organisational priorities
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How to map a service and service outcomes
Understanding how to work at a macro and micro level in service design
How and when to use user journey and service maps
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Introduction to agile and 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
Learn how to manage stakeholder expectations during Discovery and service design work
Setting a framework for discovery in designing services
Understand the team roles involved in discovery and the outcomes they need to achieve
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How to ensure your service is findable, understandable and works in a way that is familiar
Use the 15 principles of Good Service design to gauge how well your current service is working
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Learn to define the problem that area of a discovery
Understand the different types and timeframes of a discovery
Plan, scope and create a timeline for your discovery
How to prototype in a discovery
Understand the importance of user research, and how user research happens in discovery
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The different types of service design and changes from improving touchpoint to service transformation
Understanding the alpha phase of agile service design and delivery
Introduction to prototyping and what it means to bring form to ideas you can test
How to write and organise user needs
Developing ideas and new user journeys through storyboarding
Creative methods for facilitating teams to design new and improved services
Hypothesis driven design and creating test and learn experiments
Deep dive into prototyping methods from mock ups to service experiences
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What is the beta phase?
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 and prioritise what you design
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
Understand who’s involved in Beta and what they do
Create a Beta delivery plan
How and when to use a service blueprint as a tool for documenting your service design
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Understand the legal responsibilities that will affect your service and explore a plan to comply with them - from accessibility to consumer rights acts
Understand the role of industry regulators, complaints and FOIs
Learn how to create and work with your own service standards
Understand inclusive and accessibility in service design and what how the design of services can discriminate against users
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Understand and plan for the common causes of service failure
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
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Understand how to prepare your service to move from private testing to scaled use with live users
Understand the collective responsibility of service owners to deliver shared services in complex environments
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 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
Learn how to create measurement framework and metrics to measure service outcomes
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Understanding why services fail from lack of connecting between strategy and delivery
What are services made of?
An exploration of Full Stack Service Design covering the elements that impact the user experience from organisational design to culture and intent
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Why siloes exist and how to overcome them
How to identify what is causing a silo and breakdown in service delivery
The value of service communities to increase collaboration
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Understanding the etymology of the word stakeholder and the different types of interest in your service and work
How to understand who has power and authority in making decisions about your service
How to map decision makers from varying perspectives including service ecosystem lens to who influences and makes decisions about services
How to use service blueprints to bring people together and identify who is involved in delivering services
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Identifying your approach to communications and working in the open
Identifying your levers for change in better meeting user needs and how to pitch these as business outcomes
Making the financial case for investment across discovery to live for user-centred design work
Understanding how organisations make decisions
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The multiple and shifting roles we adopt as service designers
Identifying service patterns and scaling good design
Getting our organisation started or unstuck in designing good services
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Knowing where you and your team’s red lines are
What to do when you work is stopped
How it works
All classes are delivered live and online in small interactive classes. Course participants have the opportunity to work on a service or case study of their own so learnings can be put into action immediately
This course is 8 hours in total and each module is made up a mixture of teaching from your trainer, individual work and group discussions
There are are regular breaks throughout the day and lunch is a 30 minute break in the middle of the day
Our course takes place on Zoom in English with live captioning enabled with Zoom’s speech to text auto-translation in the full range of languages supported by Zoom
The slides are available in advance for pre-reading
Courses are not recorded as we want to ensure people feel comfortable to share their case studies in the joint sessions. We do not allow AI meeting note takers as we we wish to protect the privacy of information shared by course participants
What you get
A three day live course with Sarah Drummond including access to a members area which contains the tutorial slides and course worksheet. Alongside this you will get:
A post course 1:1, 30 minute coaching session with Sarah Drummond
Access to our Good Services discord community
A 10% shop discount on products
A certificate of completion
