Homegrowing service design capability in government

Recruiting service designers is hard. So is bringing in contract resource when budgets are tight. But we have a lot of people in government who could be reskilled. Find out what happened when we tried to reskill 7 business analysts as service designers.

A major government digital programme has been in existence for 8 years, and has just had to push back its delivery date by 2 years. It's a chance to step back and take a look at how we might do things much, much better. But it can be difficult to change the wing of the plane while it's still in flight.

There's a great quote by Sarah Drummond that much of service design is brownfield, and it's very true in this case.

Our programme badly needs service designers - but there are problems with that. Tighter budgets mean you can't bring in consultants. Recruiting service designers is hard; government departments essentially compete with each other. However, there are thousands of civil servants who could be retrained if given the chance to do so 'in flight'.

Jen approached the Head of Profession for service design in her organisation with a hypothesis: She could retrain 7 business analysts in her team as service designers.

Jen realises it's generally accepted that that it's much easier to retrain other UCD professions or Product people as Service Designers. But she didn't have those - she just had business analysts! The HoP agreed to be Jen's partner in this research.

Join the session to find out what happened...

Themes:
Leadership, business analysis, capability development.