Service qualities: journey shape and position

Services are best described by the ‘qualities’ that make them up, rather than trying to define the meaning of ‘service’ as a singular concept.

Service is one of those words, it’s a bit topical and like ‘Brexit’ it means different things for different people. With this in mind, I always recommend defining services by their qualities and avoiding trying to define the meaning of ‘service’ within your organisation.

We should think about collecting all the defining features across a number of vectors. (The way Richard Pope described this is to me was to think of them as ‘tags’, which is a nice way to visualise them in a practical sense.)

Journeys don’t always have an end

Some ways of describing service journeys are linear and event-based, circular or cyclic.

Its important to remember that not all services conclude, many people especially in health will be continually in a relationship with a service.

Using the term ‘End to end’ can be a barrier to considering a wider range of service types. I recommend using the term ‘whole service’ is more inclusive of the different shapes a service might take.

Service can take many shapes

Using the term ‘service’ doesn’t define the type of service it is. It can be a ‘whole’ journey, a part, cross-cutting (vertical or horizontal) or a larger chunk of tasks added together. It can be under the hood infrastructure or customer-facing. You can see some of my older work on this here).

The important things are;

• To consider the wider context and intentionally design integration so the people using the service are not exposed to organisational lines created by these parts.

• To identify opportunities for modularity and repetition, these can be user needs, business needs or existing services that can be consolidated.