Service Design

Welcome to the service management show. On this month's show, we're going to be talking about service design. I'm Gary Blower. I'm an ITSM practice lead here at Eicode and I'm joined by my colleague from Eicode who I leave to introduce themselves.

Hello, my name is Laura and I work as a senior service designer here at Eficode. Over the years, I have applied service design in a wide range of different projects. I have worked in Eficode for two years now.

Amazing. Right. So we're going to talk about service design, the benefits of service design, and some of the challenges we face. I thought I'd start by asking, can you share your journey in service design? How did you get started?

Yeah. Well, actually, almost 10 years ago, I started to be interested in customer experience and this kind of design approach. I started to learn what service design was, and it was a new term for me but so interesting. I went to school and studied service design, so now I have a bachelor's degree in service design. I started to use that in my previous work and learned more and more. Once you learn the process, you understand how it goes, and this kind of design thinking becomes essential in any project or process.

Yes. Yes. Of course. Most of us in our careers fall into things without intending to. What was the moment when you realized this was something you really enjoyed doing?

Because there are people involved, right? I think companies, especially our customers, sometimes rush into technical solutions and forget the people who are actually doing the work. I like to be with people. I like to understand how they operate, why they think as they do, and what they need. Service design is a cooperative approach to understanding the human aspect, which is why I love it.

Yes, and that's true for a lot of people in service management. Although it often involves IT and technology, it's very much about the people aspect. You mentioned you've worked with several clients and organizations over the years. What’s the main benefit to a business in reviewing how they deliver their services and designing their services?

I think the collaboration and understanding the business objectives are key. In service design, there are three focus areas: understanding the people, the processes, and the business objectives, along with what we can do with the technical solution. If you grasp that understanding during the project, that's the main benefit. When you involve teams and stakeholders in the project and co-create with them, they are more likely to use the new tool because they understand why we do this and how we use it.

Usually, the roles and processes are not clear at the start of a project. Teams may say they do things a certain way, but we dive deep into their daily work to understand how they actually use those tools and how the processes should work.

Yeah, definitely. I have discussed with some customers who implemented Jira service management. They changed the tool without using service design and later realized they should have created new processes around the system. When I talk to customers, they often say, 'Oh, we should have done that.' It's easy to have hindsight after the fact.

So, within Ficode, this is a service we provide. Where can people find out more information about what you do? Is it LinkedIn? Is that the best place?

Yes, you can contact me on LinkedIn, and I have written a blog post about this subject. Can we add the link somewhere so that people can find it in the show notes?

Great. And the blog post is on the ficodes.com website.

Yes, perfect. Thank you very much, Laura. We'll wrap things up there. If you've enjoyed this content and this episode of The Service Management Show, please share this video podcast with your friends and colleagues. You can leave comments on the YouTube video or on LinkedIn. We read all the comments and respond, so please do. If you can like and subscribe to the video to help us reach more people, that would be great. Thank you to my guest this month, Laura.

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. We'll be back after the summer break with another episode of The Service Management Show. I hope you'll join us for that as well.