As part of establishing a successful business change programme, it is very important to appoint a Design Lead – someone who owns the design. Failure to do so can lead to considerable confusion and a tendency for the void to be filled by the programme or individual project managers. Aside from the issue of whether […]
Standard Work in Lean Services – proceed with caution
Standard Work plays quite a significant role in Lean practice. But in the wrong hands it can do a lot of damage. Standardisation is very appealing, particularly to managers. They tend to like uniformity, a sense of order – doing everything in the same way. It makes their life easier. As an improvement technique, standard […]
Universal Credit – at least they stopped digging
There has been much speculation in recent months about the health of Universal Credit – one of the largest government change programmes currently on the go. Well, the speculation came to an end last week with the publication of an NAO report, Universal Credit – early progress. Universal Credit was always going to be difficult […]
Harnessing the power of User Innovation
Dropped into a GeoVation event earlier in the week, in London, on “Collaboration and user innovation in Transport”. ‘User Innovation’ is product or service innovation that is driven by “affected individuals”. These are people who encounter a problem in their day-to-day lives, say their journey to work; have an idea to make their life easier; and then […]
BPR Revisited
Pleased to announce that I’ve now added a new article to the Methods section of Design for Services, on Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). BPR has been around since the early 1990s and is still cited on many a business transformation project. Often this is in relation to the use of technology, but BPR is about a lot […]
Rural Payments Agency – avoiding the mistakes of the past
The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) has published its Five Year Plan for 2012 to 2017. RPA administer payments to English farmers under the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), including the Single Payment Scheme (SPS), on behave of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). In terms of failed UK public sector “IT Programmes” […]
Bringing some clarity to service design
As my first post, I thought I would explain some of the drivers behind the creation of “Design for Services” and what I hope to achieve with the site. A major driver has been a long standing sense of a disconnect between a range of business design approaches, due to the tendency for these to be packaged-up and promoted under […]