High adoption

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Thus, service design, being substantially different from more established ways of working, requires the sensitivity to understand the extent to which those organizational actors involved are ready to accept it and absorb it. The two barriers to the adoption of service design that have emerged from this cluster portray a higher maturity and awareness of service design. While the sponsors belonging to the previous cluster directed their frustration towards the difficulty in articulating a possible final outcome to secure a budget for the project, or towards the difficulty in fostering collaboration, these four sponsors are more concerned about ownership to secure implementation and the optimum engagement across the project to ensure long term commitment. Their concerns and perceived barriers showcase they have managed to reach a more advanced stage with their respective projects.

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and core team.

Throughout the project, key stakeholders have been familiarized with the principles.

sponsor and core team. Throughout the project, key

stakeholders have been exposed and involved in the enactment of the practices.

dedicated to the project. The team managed to involve a high number of stakeholders across functions.

process and routines.

Lack of IT systems to support the smooth development of the work.

The Insurance project had the objective to customer orient the entire commercial area. The Engineering project had the objective to develop a brand-new service strategy and offering. Both projects were wide and extremely sensitive in their respective organizations, as they touched the very core of business operations and challenged current business models. The two projects successfully reached implementation and, in both cases, the start of the project was preceded by an extensive period of preparation. Also, in both cases, the project did not represent the first attempt to use service design by both sponsors and teams but rather a stage of a journey started years before. The sponsor of the engineering project, for example, shares how she felt that her role prior to the beginning of the project was one of a

“lobbyist” trying to convince stakeholders and ensure their buy-in. That process lasted for a year and half. Another element that emerged as paramount in both cases was the ability to produce tangible outputs from the very beginning of the process.

The team in the engineering organization, for instance, set up a pop-up exhibition to ensure different actors across the organization could be exposed to the work and contribute to it:

What actually worked really well was to have this pop-up exhibition. So, we had a few hours when we put a concept in a room, as it was at that moment, and invited all

the different streams...There were a lot of people coming, and I think that was probably one of the most effective tactics to get them engaged. And then we were really asking them for their ideas and feedback, working with them, and trying to reflect those ideas in the next iteration of the concept. So, they felt that that work was

useful, that it was not one more meeting or one more workshop after which nothing happens.

Such an approach benefitted from engagement, excitement, and ownership. A third element emerging as key for the success of both projects was core team size. Both sponsors had a core team of less than ten people dedicated to the work. This is perceived as an important factor to maintain a strong ownership and keep up the

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pace of the work. The sponsor of the Insurance case corroborates this point as follows:

It makes everything easier because you have fewer people and fewer opinions. And you can be more effective on your time, use of time, and man hours. It gets much less political; people tend to have meetings that are work based and not meetings that are more conversations and discussions. We work together in meetings; we don’t have

project meetings, you see.

Finally, the type of relationship established with the external service design consultants also became extremely important. In both cases, the two teams (internal and external) were set up to work together as one team. This approach facilitated ownership from the organizational actors involved. The nature of the deliverables also changed. In both projects, teams have been investing a considerable amount of time in prototyping and piloting, hence the reports highlight not only the usual customer and stakeholder insights, service concepts, and service sequences, but also learning from prototypes, detailed descriptions of staff behavior, new processes and practices, required capabilities and dependencies, and other projects happening in the organization related to or influencing the service. In the case of Engineering, deliverables included a toolkit and specific guidelines to scale the service and train staff across markets.

Some common barriers to adoption also emerge from the two interviews. A first barrier perceived for the smooth development of the service design work is the lack of IT systems that can effectively support project outcomes. In the case of the Insurance project, for example, this emerged as a lack of a sound CRM system that could support the work. Finally, both projects aimed towards an important organizational transformation in their respective environments; consequently, the ability of the organization to adapt and sustain the new service over time is addressed as a key barrier to the effective development of service design work and the implementation of its outcomes. The sponsor of the Insurance case expresses this point as follows:

And last but not least, the organization’s ability to not just implement, but to adapt it.

Because we see sometimes that the amount of initiatives going on makes it impossible for even the most important ones to be adopted because of the sheer amount of things

that are happening.

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What the interviewer stresses in this sentence is the nature of the environment where service design operates, characterized by several initiatives in different departments showing different priorities. Ensuring the new service is adopted at scale and sustained over time is a challenge that both sponsors stressed as key to be addressed.

The two perceived barriers shared by the sponsors are both related to enabling structures. Issues with uncertainty and resources seem to be overcome.