Closing a service

Recently I learned that my favourite bookmark service was closing, pocket.

It is/was so handy to save things to read later, with a browser plug-in and an easy to save feature embedded on my phone. I will miss it.

On closing their service, it feels like they thought about the process.

It was easy to understand what was going on and they produce simple guidance, they made a service to export my data and download it as a CSV that came directly to my email, and they gave me plenty of time to do this. (It’s still open until October)

They were also clear on when, what and how my data will be deleted. And that I needed to take no action on this. 

Many organisations come to decisions to close services. It might be that what people need has changed or it doesn’t fit the strategic direction they are heading in.

Most often though, stopping doing something is a clear cut financial decision. If it is cost orientated, these decisions are usually made under pressure, to ensure organisation sustainability.

I’ve been ‘at the senior table’ when these cuts are made and usually, it’s a budget line being erased with orders being given to management layer somewhere to close something down with a tight timeframe.

There is often very little time, or thought given to these closures, and even when people do care, they lack the resource and time to thoughtfully design to reduce the impact on users.

Usually the focus is on reducing the highest risks to the organisation like reputational damage.

The impact is usually burdened by users. A gap in provision, something they relied on, complicated new routes for them, no way to reach the outcome they wanted.

Much of the time, I’m sitting there thinking, sure we’re closing this thing down, but what else are we doing to deliver on our strategy. Closure and ending things is an important part of service design and strategy delivery, but it should come hand in hand with a wider holistic look at how what we’re delivering overall delivers on our outcomes/purpose/mission/ambition (enter chosen language there!).

Anyway, it got me thinking about questions we should consider when closing things down, and some of the questions I ask when these decisions are made. These help me to form more narrow questions to help design the change that needs to happen to the service infrastructure, whether it’s about creating something new in place, signposting done well, changing marketing or ‘front doors’ to services or transitioning services which are temporary to help users with change.

These questions are not extensive list for every scenario, just some quick thoughts:

At a senior level 

What is needed to support users with this change? How might it impact them?

What resource can we commit to closing this thing down? 

What risks might we have as an organisation in closing this, and not stopping this service/thing well? 

For staff/org

What else relies on this service? Do other services connect with ours?

Will closing our service, stop something else from working?

What message does closing this service or thing down send?

What do we think the response might be from our staff, what will this mean to them? 

How can we explain the reasons we are closing this service/stopping this thing? 

What else can we do to tell the story of this closure to our teams?

What narrative and communications support do our teams/staff need to communicate this closure? 

Have we considered other options beyond closure with our teams?

For users 

Will any users be at risk of harm from this closure? 

How can we help users who will still need help get it?

What’s a good timeframe to give people notice? 

How can we design a way to help users transition to a space where we don’t exist anymore? 

Where are the different ‘front doors’ or edges to our service and what do we need to design or put in place to help users with this change at each of these entry points? 

If we are signposting users somewhere else, have we checked the capacity for other parts of the system to manage this?

What else would you ask/consider when closing a service/shutting something down? 

As always there are people who have been doing good work in this space for a long time, a few shout outs for you to check out

Cassie Robinson with Stewarding Loss

Joe Macleod on Endings in his great books

Iona Lawrence with the Decelerator

Anne Dhir who’s talked about closing services (video link)