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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We tried to scope some work. It\u2019s really helpful to be able to do that with Senior Civil Servants in an interactive format.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These were some of the questions we asked and collected the answers to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I spoke to 3 candidates for service design roles this week. While we haven\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cUX\/UI designer\u201d instead consider themselves service designers. That is reflected on people\u2019s LinkedIn profiles, where designers call themselves \u201cservice designer\u201d, \u201cstrategic designer\u201d, and \u201caccessibility designer\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I told the team about the \u2018why\u2019 and the \u2018why now\u2019: 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\u2019s rather lucky we managed to hire people with that profile since then. In retrospect, this is bad content and job ads design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Going forward, we want to do better and call roles what they are and what people do. The role title \u201cService\/policy designer\u201d makes most sense. It\u2019s service design skills applied in policy space, hence the name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On a side note: It\u2019s interesting that the UK government describes 6 distinct user-centred design roles in their \u2018Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework<\/a>\u2019. The reason for this is probably because policy design sits outside of digital. But, at least in some cases, so does service design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n