This week, we spent more time at the new ministry with senior stakeholders. When there, I am now acting as a building guide to bring Digital Service colleagues to the press wall for a selfie.
I look forward to the ministry moving to a more central building in the coming months. It will be a much shorter journey from the office and from home.
We tried to scope some work. It’s really helpful to be able to do that with Senior Civil Servants in an interactive format.
- What is in scope?
- What is out of scope?
- What are the criteria for including work?
- What is the estimated effort for it?
- What would be considered success?
- What does it need to support that?
These were some of the questions we asked and collected the answers to.
I’m looking forward to what can happen next in this work stream. I am very interested in this work as it touches service design quality assurance and considers things from a broader perspective.
Hiring more service designers
I spoke to 3 candidates for service design roles this week. While we haven’t formally advertised the roles, people have applied for them or other roles. Sometimes, people apply for product or transformation management roles without an opening, which is understandable.
Last week, I spoke about formalising service design roles in our user-centred design discipline weekly. At the June discipline on-site, I acknowledged that various designers whose work contracts say “UX/UI designer” instead consider themselves service designers. That is reflected on people’s LinkedIn profiles, where designers call themselves “service designer”, “strategic designer”, and “accessibility designer”. None of those are titles in work contracts. I reassured everyone that that is ok. In most cases, at least. And that I would have told them if not.
I told the team about the ‘why’ and the ‘why now’: Because in hiring and staffing meetings, colleagues keep asking for a [name of a person] design profile. That is understandable, but it also hints at problems. It is neither suitable nor effective for colleagues to refer to individuals to describe a particular skill set. The other big reason is that people with a service design profile tend to overlook job ads with different headings. That is understandable. We had references to service design skills in the job descriptions for at least 2 years. But these references were deeply buried in bullet points. It’s rather lucky we managed to hire people with that profile since then. In retrospect, this is bad content and job ads design.
Going forward, we want to do better and call roles what they are and what people do. The role title “Service/policy designer” makes most sense. It’s service design skills applied in policy space, hence the name.
On a side note: It’s interesting that the UK government describes 6 distinct user-centred design roles in their ‘Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework’. The reason for this is probably because policy design sits outside of digital. But, at least in some cases, so does service design.
In my view, it would make much sense to have policy design listed in the framework, too. The role might be on the fringes, but a listing would allow good discoverability. That in return would better align the role with other user-centred design roles.
I’m also asking this as I like to understand how different other design leaders see the
Taking time for planning and exchanges
Quite some time went into planning this week.
We are looking at planning for 2026 – regarding strategic adjustments, project portfolio, and people growth. It’s work that I enjoy. It deals with variables, but it also tries to plot a path forward. That is work in the executive team and with the leadership team.
Kara and I checked in to plan our mid-September workshop in Edinburgh. It still has the lengthy title “How to exit our service design Groundhog Day experience? Making end-to-end service design finally happen”. On Friday, we drafted an outline and collected tasks. We will continue this work in the coming days, asking for input from user-centred design leaders in the UK and elsewhere.
For our public-facing local public sector meetup, we did some more autumn planning, too. The next event will be on ‘Visualising data’. We are looking at either the 21st or 23rd of October as the date. We have reached out to some great speakers. In addition, we have discussed a 5th event for early December.
Marion and I sketched some talk we plan to give to French colleagues at DINUM in late September. It’s in parts about accessibility, our work setup and approach to whole-of-government services.
On short notice, Laurence checked in with me on service patterns. I tried to understand how we can use the material the GovStack UX/UI working group developed on service patterns. For their Amsterdam workshop, Laurence, Betty, and Stefan had developed handy workshop cards that I still have in the office. So, I prepared a little workshop for our designers’ weekly format. My goal is to use the momentum of our migration to the cross-government KERN Design System to identify and fill gaps in service patterns. We have robust work for service.justiz.de, and we can build on the great abstraction work from our GovStack colleagues.
Eventually, we had no time for it anymore as we spent 45 minutes nerding on typeface design, design history and applications.
What’s next
On Monday, project partner Ralf and I will be recording an episode of the eGovernment podcast. Little surprise: We will be discussing the Service Standard’s past, present and future.
On Tuesday, I will be joining an implementation workshop with our justice service teams on moving to the cross-government design system KERN.
On Thursday, I will be on the train to London. That means I have some 9 hours or so of focus time. I desperately need those to finish some writing and communication.
As part of this, I will finish the peer review report, and also work on at least 1 blog post as mentioned in last week’s note.