Service? What Service?

"What was it you needed again?"

Full of beans, you and the organisation are ready to create a rich picture of the service you want to offer.

A trap companies can fall into is to immediately design the service you want to give the customer, based on what you're best at or known for.  So you're already delving in to the how, whether it's delivering technology, insurance or a retail experience.  It's a fairly natural move - it's comfortable, it's familiar.  But it might also stop you thinking what can be done better or differently for a customer or market segment.

An approach I recently used, that flowed very naturally, was using the step sequence below. (Admittedly some of us had dived down to some extent in familiar areas before seeing the holistic picture.  But a little of what you fancy does you good, in our case leading to a richer and better informed discussion.)

The sequence went:

• Create a high level vision for the service.
• E.g. what are you going to deliver, where, when, how quickly, with what level of confidence, and at what relative price?
• What are the high level requirements for the service?
• Examples might be rapid deployment, low management burden but high transparency and control, improved decision-making support, ...
• What are the top level capabilities and skills required?
• E.g. strong project planning & execution skills, excellent supply chain management, efficient global logistics, ...
• What are the required behaviours and culture?
• Are you going to be transactional or collaborative, how much transparency will you give, will you create embedded teams, are there shared outcomes/targets?
• What is the transition and phasing?
• How much due diligence is needed, are there pilot schemes, what are the interim capability levels, how will you phase the roll-out?
• What is the service 'architecture'?
• So finally (!), what activities will you do, what are the logical/physical/information flows, what innovation can you bring?
• What do you want to get paid for and how?
• Are your prices fixed, volume/activity-based, are you going to offer efficiency targets, what is your profit expectation?
• Can you do it?
• Do you have the core skills, how will you address gaps, are you going to team with other organisations? 
• On what grounds are you competing?
• On what grounds aren't you competing, what is your unique blend of skills and capabilities?

Once that all that is sorted, you can begin to use rich pictures, storyboards or executive summaries of the service you are going to offer.  

Service? That Service!