Service design can be chunked into agile pieces - it’s a delicate dance of looking at the big picture (systems, holistic thinking re: silos, connected services, ecosystems, and operations), then ‘zooming in’ to work on small components at a time - maintaining clarity on how it all fits together, being open to change as we try, test, and learn Early on, e.g. when conducting design research in the “understand” stage, let’s say you need to run a fairly large study because there is significant uncertainty, complexity, and a diverse customer/user group (necessitating a larger sample to be representative of the humans you’re trying to understand): you can still chunk the work into sprints and defined tickets, breaking down phases of research and tasks (discovery, planning, recruitment, writing scripts and developing your research materials, running the research, analysis and synthesis, sharing and integrating the findings…) A significant benefit: this can help surface collaboration points, e.g. Product Owner and sometimes other key employees who are part of delivering the service should be involved in developing and refining a research plan, getting it into the backlog and calling out the collaboration ensures folks are aware and available It can also help us anticipate when we’ll need to involve folks outside our team, e.g. when working on connected services, engaging folks in your service ecosystem, or running participatory design sessions. Being proactive and looking ahead in your backlog can help identify when to start scheduling collaborative sessions. Sometimes working around availability can slow the work down, but I believe it’s important to “go at the speed of trust” and “go far together” vs “going fast alone”. Service Design is most impactful and successful, long-term, when solid relationships are slowly built with everyone involved in the service ecosystem. Service Design, especially when new, can be quite threatening to folks - if it isn’t introduced/framed carefully, there can be negative reactions and assumptions given it can involve change, optimization, ‘efficiency’ etc. - important to consider this in context of the broad psychological safety and trust at BCPS (I’d assess that baseline as pretty low, today) You can prioritize a smaller number of people or groups at a given time to be agile, vs. boiling the ocean and trying to address an entire ecosystem of relationships all at once
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