Learn how to communicate the value of user-centred change and build a compelling financial pitch to gain investment and buy in for designing good services
The course
Making the Case for Service Design is a live 1 day course that will give you the skills and tools to communicate the value of user-centred change and build a compelling financial pitch to gain investment and buy in for designing good services
Note: This course was previously called ‘Writing Business Cases for Service Design’ but has been updated and expanded to include new content
What you’ll learn
Identify the areas of unnecessary cost and risk being generated by bad service design in your service organisation
Understand how this compares to other organisations and typical patterns of cost and risk within public and private sector services
Build the skills needed to put a price on bad service design, and identify the cost of improving it to create a compelling cost-benefit analysis for user-centred change
Understand how to improve the outcomes of the business model of your service to support user-centric change
Understand how to navigate the mechanisms of financial approval and case-making in the public and private sector
Be able to put together compelling pitches for phases of services design from discovery to live that speak to the organisation’s bottom line
Construct a compelling financial and risk-based case for change, including costs of the team and resources involved to deliver the work
Who this course is for
This course is for user-centred design practitioners and change-makers looking to gain the skills and confidence in making a business case for investment into user-centred and service design using numbers, risk analysis, storytelling and data
This course is suitable for:
User-centred practitioners / advocates looking estimate the cost of improving a service in order to expand or change the direction your work
Change leaders looking to build confidence in advocating for the benefits of service design
Product or business owners looking for investment and buy in to a more user centred approach
Consultants who need to sell the benefit and impact of taking a more holistic approach to with clients
Product or service teams looking for ways to influence decision makers to give the time, resources or permission needed to make changes to a service
Your trainer
Lou Downe is the author of Good Services, the bestselling book on how to design services that work and the founding director of the School of Good Services. They are the former Director of Design for the UK Government where they founded the discipline of service design, growing a 2000 strong team of designers into one of the largest, and most influential design teams in the UK - winning a Designs of the Year award and a D&AD lifetime achievement award.
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"I really loved it. You made a complex and potentially dry topic really clear and easy to follow, especially for someone new to this kind of thinking"
Designer
Course content
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Understand how money and risk influence the design and development of services at a macro and micro economic level
Review the components of public and private sector business models and how different types of business models affect our services
Understand common financial impacts of bad service design in services
Understand the existing business model of your service and what success looks like
Identify the areas of unnecessary cost and risk being generated by bad service design in your service and organisation
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Understand the key elements of a business case, from costs, to risks and outcomes
Learn which of these is most important based on your decision makers and current business model
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Understand types of costs that affect your service - from overhead costs and opportunity cost to capital costs and identify where bad service design will impact these in your service
Understand how to quantify the risks of not improving your service, or in taking an approach that doesn't consider user needs fully
Learn to communicate the risk-reduction value of taking a user centred approach
Understand where and how to find the information needed to validate the true cost of service failure in your organisation
Quantitatively map user or societal outcomes
Calculate how much your service costs to run and estimate the cost of service failure to identify areas where a case for change can be created
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Calculate the time, effort and cost of change to your service
Learn how to calculate benefit-cost ratio of change and create a benefit-cost ratio statement
Learn how to avoid, transfer or mitigate different types of service development risk
Create a risk register that accurately communicates your progress to your stakeholders
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Understand how to navigate the mechanisms of financial approval and case making in the public and private sector
Understand the different routes to permission and sign off within your organisation
Create a clear pathway for approval for your change
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 one day live course with Lou Downe, author of Good Services, including access to a members area including the tutorial slides and course worksheet. Alongside this you will get:
Access to our Good Services discord community
A 10% shop discount on products
A certificate of completion
