Service verticals and horizontals
Codifying repeating services and transactions can help teams work together across organisations and related services.
Whilst mapping services for the Ministry of Justice I encountered repeating services and transactions. I had the chance to meet with lots of brilliant people from GDS, MOJ and the court system. We had many in-depth conversations about what services, and transactions and how we can make them better. Heres what I have learnt so far…
1. Services are intent-based
Sometimes a service can be a user goa, more user-focused with higher-level user needs is something Louise Downe, and Amy Whitney in the joint GDS-DVLA team have been working on. Their service becomes ‘learning to drive’, instead of a selection of smaller services like finding a driving instructor, arranging a test or applying for a licence.
Lou Downe at GDS says ‘Services are things that help people do something’ achieve a goal, solve a problem or find a resolution (which is by no means a definitive list.) Often in the justice system the 'something' is more about solving problems and finding resolution.
For example: In the justice system, this looks like 'I want to visit a family member in prison' or ‘My tenants are not paying rent’ are delivered by services.
2. Services are made up of smaller (often repeating parts)
‘Goal-based’ services can contain other smaller or related services these smaller steps come together to deliver a ‘whole’ service — sometimes these tasks are ‘transactional’.
For example: ‘Making a prison visit booking’ and ‘applying for a money claim’ are both transactions. Sometimes these steps are used by more than one service for example, across civil justice the same ‘warrant’ is used for every enforcement.
3. Being clear about how we explain this clarity does matter
The language and understanding we have is important the definitions of ‘services’ and ‘transactions’ can change interpretations of our work. Different understandings mean we might be attributing unattainable outcomes due to misdescribing work and intentions.
For example;
Large-volume transactions get more ‘air time’ due to large numbers however, these are often small steps in a wider service journey. Fixing these smaller tasks can help fix small steps in the journey (especially if its used multiple times like warrants), but within the journey itself, the wider issue or failure might remain even if a small step is improved.
‘Court fine payment’ is a small part in a wider journey. It has 1.9m transactions per year across many different court services and has been mistakenly referred to as a ‘service’. However, to make larger-scale improvements to the fines journey we would make the most impact by addressing upstream issues we uncovered with our partners in the police.
Recommendatons
1. Vertical and horizontal services
Using vertical and horizontal as a way to describe and visualise the type of service can reduce this confusion and mixed interpretations.
Verticals are the depth of the service across other journeys. Covers smaller tasks within a journey these may be repeated across multiple horizontal services.
Horizontal services cover the breadth of a service end-to-end. These can be goals or resolution based such as the examples raised by the GDS team.
2. Service descriptors are like ‘tags’
We started to define what people are trying to do as a way of grouping services we noticed that they can be grouped in many ways depending on who is using them and where they are in the journey. This means the way we group our transactions and services needs to be variable — think of it as kind of more like tagging than a fixed structure. This means the different varied descriptions we use for services or transactions should be more like tags either on or off.
3. Context makes it easier to explain and understand
We noticed that by showing the ‘whole’ service in this way it becomes easier to explain how a single transaction sits within wider journeys and the value of improvement for repeating transactions. We also found this logic worked well across a wide group of people with different skills and experience.
We found showing these in service maps worked well to support the ‘big picture’ and help unite understanding and show the value of upstream improvement.
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This work was conducted with the user-researcher Sarah Herman. I hope our work is interesting and helpful to others working across services in government.
