How Business Analysts can Transition into Service Design

This article is based on the presentation and workshop given at the November 2023 BA Manager Forum, by Jo Frances (Socitm Advisory), David Curtiss (Walsall Council) and Jonathan Hunsley (AssistKD). The purpose of the workshop was to provide insights into the transition from a pure BA role into Service Design and to provide practical take-aways to help BAs break new professional ground.
Socitm Advisory is a consultancy that works with public service organisations, supporting them as they improve the services they offer. In 2022 they partnered with the small BA team at Walsall Council to help deliver a significant change project with a wholly customer centric view.

Challenges and Goals

Walsall has high unemployment, a higher than UK average proportion of economically inactive households and the age of death is nine years below the national average. 20% of the population are in fuel poverty and 24% are minority groups.

Walsall Council’s goal was to create lasting improvement and change in service delivery including customer contact channels, customer service, communications and the council website.

The BA team at Walsall Council were tasked to:

grow and develop the BA team, finding people with the right skillset for transformation and change and developing the BAs of the future;
support council employees to take ‘time out’ of their workday to change the way their services worked;
learn from others to share knowledge, replicate great work and avoid mistakes;
find new and creative ways to transform services to help alleviate budget pressures.

There were big savings targets, yet time and resources were limited. People were already very busy. The BA team was small with a reliance on contractors. The team needed to rapidly share knowledge and justify money spent on achieving change.
The BA team’s first step was to understand ‘as is’ service delivery, working with customer facing services to identify opportunities to improve customer experience (CX) and streamline processes, resulting in savings. To do this they needed to map customer journeys, touch points and pain points with detailed data and supporting information.
Areas of opportunity were plotted against the key areas for service focus in 2022 and in 2023 to see where the impact would be highest. For example, it was found that the impact of a CX Centre on revenues and benefits and on adult social care was very high.
The following areas of focus were agreed:

to establish and optimise the Customer Experience Centre – streamlining contact channels to provide an effective common ‘front door’.
to improve the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System – with enabling technology to support easy digital interactions for customers.
to transform the Council website – enabling the web to be fit for purpose as the key gateway for customers in the future
to switch to a customer centric culture and behaviours – thinking from a customer point of view, having the customers’ interests at heart and working with service staff and customers to manage demand more effectively;
to deliver ‘quick wins’ with rapid process improvements across all services to deliver quick wins and make savings.

The Benefits of Taking a Service Design Approach

Service Design is a human-centred, holistic approach to improving an organisation’s services, systems and processes to be more cost-effective and to better meet the needs of customers and stakeholders. The Service Design approach incorporates design thinking, customer experience analysis and business service design.

Supported by Socitm Advisory, Walsall Council implemented a User-Centred Service Design cycle. The approach has four steps and encompasses many BA and Service Design tools.

Research to create a conceptual view of where the problems were and helped to define a project with a user-centred perspective. Activities included completing a service safari, data gathering, stakeholder mapping, system mapping, customer journey and persona development and analysis.
Ideate in a collaborative way to create and evolve ideas - making iterative adjustments to ensure outcomes were met. Activities included: stakeholder engagement, stakeholder communication planning, service area working group updates, ‘as-is’ process mapping, ‘as-is’ opportunities elicitation and categorisation of opportunities.
Prototype to explore and assess how users might experience or perceive product or service concepts. This helps with selection and evaluation. Activities included: opportunity playback sessions, opportunity development and prioritisation, cost/benefit analysis, user story development and transferring user stories to Dev Ops.
Implement to ensure that services are co-designed, built, tested and implemented successfully. Activities included: handover to delivery, overseeing the community co-design working group and providing end to end BA support.

The customer was ‘in the room’ for all stages of the Service Design cycle. If a particular change did not work for customers, there could be a return to the research phase.

Service Design and Business Analysis Service Frameworks

The business analysis service framework (BASF) was developed by Debra Paul. The framework has helped to build role clarity for the business analysis profession.

Using the approach adopted within the BASF as a foundation, AssistKD have developed a ‘Service Design Consultancy Service Framework’. As with the BASF, the framework is intended to help to build role clarity for the Service Design profession.

While there are unique services offered by service design professionals, there is also overlap with the business analysis service offering.

The Service Design Toolkit

Service Design is a combination of the four thinking approaches, with techniques for each of the approaches, which you can use as a BA or as a Service Designer.

Moving from BA to Service Design – the Challenges

The following insights were obtained from discussions between BA Manager Forum delegates.

There is an overlap between the mindset needed for both business analysis and service design. They both take a holistic view towards improvement of the organisation.
Some BAs are aligned with organisational siloes – it can be challenging to obtain a whole service view particularly when this is not supported within the organisation.
Many BAs are using Service Design techniques already. Service Design as a natural extension of the BA toolkit.
Service Designers can have different behaviours and perspectives. Some BAs are technology or product focussed whereas Service
Designers take an end-to-end view.
All too often BAs are ‘pigeonholed’ as being detailed or technology focussed. We need to challenge this perception and emphasise the breadth of the BA service offer.
Large and complex organisations will require specialist Service Designer roles.
There is a need for role clarity between Business Analysis, service design and Business Architecture. Common understanding of approach, standards and terminology is needed.

The Difference/Overlap between the Business Analyst and the Service Designer Roles

The following insights were obtained from discussions between BA Manager Forum delegates.

Given the overlap between the two roles, some organisations are combining them within ‘Business Design’ or ‘Business Analysis and Design’ teams.
There is a need for alignment between high level and detailed views. Both roles need to collaborate to ensure that these are covered sufficiently.
The Service Designer appears to be a more strategic role that is more relevant the higher up the BA maturity model you go.
There are language and perspective differences. We need to collaborate to resolve these.
Service Design could be seen as an evolution of the BA role – not just understanding the customer but understanding the service and interconnected services.
Service designers are much more interested in the customer and their end-to-end journey. It allows for more flair and visualisation.

Would there be an appetite for a dedicated Service Design Community?

The following insights were obtained from discussions between BA Manager Forum delegates.

Any future community needs to ensure value co-creation, help to evolve the maturity of the role and raise awareness.
It could be useful for the development of standards and sharing of best practice.
A cross discipline community could be useful.