Are You Delivering Value Regularly?

​ ​ ​ ​ Hello Indiana,​ If you want to put together a digital strategy or even improve your users' experience, sooner or later, you will find yourself stumbling into the world of service design. At least, that is what happened to me several years back, and service design has become an increasingly large part of my work. In case you haven't come across the term service design before, basically, it is about the people, processes, and systems that support the delivery of the customer experience. So, while user experience design focuses on what happens on stage, service design is all about what is happening behind the scenes. One area of service design that I keep coming back to is the inefficient way we run projects. To explain the problem, let's take a moment to talk about manufacturing. Lessons From Manufacturing In manufacturing, one of the significant issues they face is cash flow. They have to buy raw materials, and those can sit in a warehouse for weeks or months before they are turned into products. While in the warehouse, the value of those raw materials is unrealized. The company has spent out but not received anything back. In fact, they are also paying money to store the items. Unsurprisingly manufacturers are obsessively focused on turning raw materials into products as quickly as possible. They want to recover their costs. Now you might be wondering how any of this relates to digital. After all, we don't pay for pixels, and they cost nothing to store! Well, although we don't have raw materials, we do have invested time. Just think about all of the digital projects your organization has on the go. Apps, websites, social media, email marketing, CRM, CMS, the list goes on. Also, not just the ones in production. There are those who have yet to kick off or have stalled for whatever reason. Each one represents hours that the organization has invested. Even projects that haven't started have probably swallowed countless hours in discussions, meetings, budgeting, and planning. All that work, without generating a single cent of return for the company. So what do we do about this problem? Well, for a start, you can run fewer projects. Run Fewer Projects Most digital and UX teams have far too many projects in their backlog. To be fair to them, this is rarely their fault. Various stakeholders across the organization are constantly formulating new projects that they want to run and have digital or user experience components. To address this issue, companies need to put better governance into place to assess and prioritize projects before too many hours get sunk into their conceptualization. For example, you could ask stakeholders to submit short business cases for potential projects that are then assessed and prioritized with a variation of my "digital triage" technique that I have written about before. Unfortunately, running too many projects is made worse when UX and digital teams attempt to juggle multiple projects at once. Stop Juggling Projects To keep all their stakeholders happy, I regularly encounter teams (and indeed agencies or freelancers) attempting to run multiple projects simultaneously. Of course, that is fine if each project has a fully resourced team and adding additional resources wouldn't speed up delivery significantly. However, often this is not the case. Instead, by constantly switching projects, these teams are delaying delivery of any one of the projects. That means that no value is being returned from any of the sunk hours for these projects. If those teams had instead focused on one project at a time, they could have delivered more regularly, creating a faster return on the hours spent. And that brings me to my final recommendation, which is to focus on delivering value regularly. Focus on Delivering Value Regularly Ultimately all of this is about delivering value for the business as fast as possible, and that should even impact how we run individual projects. As I wrote only a few emails back, we have a habit of running large, complex projects that take forever to deliver. Unfortunately, that means it takes a long time for the organization to see a return on its investment. But it also kills momentum and leaves stakeholders frustrated. Instead, we need to focus on creating minimum viable products and then iterate on them post-launch. That way, the business can start to see a return on their investment earlier. Easy to Say, Hard to Do I am aware that all of this is easy to say but harder to do. Unfortunately, that is true of a lot of service design as a whole. However, without addressing these kinds of issues, digital and user experience design will always struggle to thrive in your organization. Perhaps even more importantly, without making these changes, management and stakeholders won't appreciate user experience design or digital because they will not see it regularly creating value. Of course, if you need help or want to know how to start, drop me an email. I am always happy to chat. Thanks, ​ ​ If you no longer want to hear from me, I completely understand and you can unsubscribe from all emails here. Alternatively, if you need to update any of the information about yourself you can edit your profile here. ​ ​