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 […]
Open data and service design
I take a keen interest in all things ‘open’, be it “open source”, “open data” or “open government”. I’ve been directly involved in the opening up of public data in the past and I am particularly keen on the potential of open data to create new services, or help drive the redesign of existing ones. […]
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 […]
Putting the thinking back into Lean
Lean has become very popular as an approach towards the design of business operations, from product development through to the provision of goods and services to the end customer. But this has not been without its problems, with many Lean initiatives failing to deliver the expected benefits, or in some cases leaving operations in a […]
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 […]
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 […]