The Service Organization summary

Delivering good services comes down to perspective. Instead of looking at things from the inside out, try defining your service from the outside in. This means looking at your services through your users’ eyes, not your organizational chart. 

Reorient to this outside-in view by thinking in stages, not processes. Processes are the steps that occur within your organization. Stages represent meaningful outcomes that need to happen for progress to take place. Consider someone applying for a small business loan. The user’s first stage isn’t “Fill out an application form,” it’s “I realize I need funding.” By understanding all the stages in a service’s lifetime, you can design services that meet users where they actually are, not just where your organization enters the picture.

Your organization thinks it’s tracking key metrics. But is it really? Typically, organizational reporting focuses on separate functions rather than the whole picture. Think of a restaurant where the kitchen tracks food preparation speed and servers count tables served – but nobody measures whether customers enjoy their meals or return.

What’s missing is a shared understanding of service outcomes. To define these, you need to get crystal clear on the three connected levels of service: policy intent, service, and service outcome. In public health, for example, the policy intent might be protecting the public from disease spread. The service is providing financial support for staying home during a pandemic. And the service outcome is delivering eligible payments in the right timeframe.

Organizational strategy sets the tone and shapes the outcomes for everything your organization does. So what’s your organization’s strategy on service? 

A clear service strategy should comprise four key parts that work together to drive improvement across large, complex operations. 

The game-changer for large organizations? Positioning your teams around services. Too often, we see one team working on a single component of a service while barely talking to the folks handling other aspects of delivery. The result? A disjointed experience that frustrates everyone.

It’s simply not realistic to have one team handle a service end-to-end – complex services involve frontline and behind-the-scenes work, multiple channels, and various technologies. But you can create powerful synergies by putting services at the heart of your team structure.

“Failing to plan is planning to fail,” the saying goes. But when planning services, the key ingredient is actually a plan that can fail. Creating plans that change, adapt – and, yes, even fail – will help you deliver better services in ways that detailed plans with fixed deadlines simply can’t match.

Start with a “wrong plan” – a basic timeline working backward from your desired outcome without specific dates. Redesigning a government benefits service? Map out phases like understanding pain points, prototyping a simpler application process, testing with a small group, then scaling up. This gives teams direction while acknowledging that things will change as you learn – because they always do!