▶️ What are the different stages of the maturity of Service Design within an organization?

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My two cents

There are different understandings of what Service Design can bring to an organization:

  • Focused on customer experience: There are people who say: "Hey, the Service Design stuff really working well for improving customer experiences." And that's great and we just use it for that.

  • Focused on processes: Other companies say "Service Design is really cool to improve our internal processes". And it's already great that it's used for that.

  • Company wide Service Design: And others say, oh we can really think about our whole company with these tools from Service Design and mixing it with more of them.

A model of Service Design Maturity

At the Service Design Network Global Conference in Canada there was a talk about the maturity of Service Design where the speaker shared an interesting model.

  1. Explore: Some companies say: We are gonna explore it, try it out. We try a few, a few methods."

  2. Prove: Others companies at at later stage have already a track record of trying Service Design in a few different projects, and they can show that it works.

  3. Scale: Other companies are scaling Service Design and make it something that is not limited to just in one department or to a lab, but it's used within the company in general.

  4.  Integrate: And then for some companies, Service Design is really something that is part of their language and their culture. It's like a it's just second nature.

  5. Thrive: Finally some companies go so far with it that a lot of the success they experience come from their approach to Service Design.

How to detect a mature Service Design organization?

So the question is how can I detect how mature a company is on this Service Design stuff?

If they use the term, it's already a good sign of maturity.

If you wanted to use a lot of Service Design methodologies in new job, looking for these terms is already a signal of do they understand it or not. But there is a big caveat here, which is it depends on the country because not every country uses the terms in the same way.

For example Finland, the UK are really mature in the term of language. They use Service Design a lot as a language.

But if you take Switzerland, it's not the term that we use so much. We tend to use all the terms like customer experience, innovation, design thinking, you know, as other terms, but basically doing a lot of the same stuff than Service Design.

Personally, I don't care if people call it Service Design or not, as long as the, the type of project and the type of work has the mindsets.

In my own work people say "This is Mr. Sticky notes. We don't know exactly what he does, but he's a magician with sticky notes." And it's okay if this is the best word that they find to explain Service Design.

I don't need to to school them and say: "No. What we are doing here is Service Design it has a history, and please be respectful of the history."

That's not a problem. It's like when people mispronounce my name, I'm not offended.

When terms maturity leads to stupid conflicts

 But again, we don't all agree on that. So there are people who are very much like, should use the proper term and the proper term is that, but then you create these religion wars where people say: "This is UX, no, this is Service Design. "

Not every company needs to be Service Design mature

There are so many ways to arrive to a solution. Service Design is only one of them.  

Which is, I think the humblest thing to say, and we practice that one. And I think no service designer practices only Service Design. It's just one tool in the toolbox.

And therefore there are places where you can use it because people are willing to use it. And there are places where, it doesn't make sense because people just don't need it and it's okay.

Going further

Service Designers from UK councils have created a similar Service Design Maturity model but focused on local governement with 18 questions to help you measure your maturity.

The model can also be used for other in-house Service Design practices.

You can watch the full talk about the Service Design Maturity to go further.

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