May 1, 2015
Comparing Services: Working Bottom-up and Top-down
We’ve been looking across the different services we deliver and seeing some interesting patterns. Whether its service design, strategic planning, space programming, or organizational design, we are always working bottom-up and top-down simultaneously to:
- Understand the context, inside and outside the organization
- Identify individual services, actions, spaces, or roles – let’s call these planning “units”
- Relate these units into meaningful “groupings” based on things like customer journeys, organizational structure, physical proximity, or workflow
- Connect the units and the groupings to some larger and unique organizing idea that helps make decisions and provide direction
- Tie the units, groupings, and organizing idea to a set of measurable outcomes that can be used to track progress and enable continuous improvement
We’ve captured this in the table below:
| Service Design | Strategic Planning | Space Programming | Organizational Design | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Units | Service | Action | Space | People / Roles |
| Groupings | Service Portfolio | Goals | Neighborhood | Departments / Groups |
| Organizing Idea | Business Model | Vision and Mission | Building or Campus | Organizational Structure |
| Selected Success Measures | Customer satisfaction Net Promoter Score Response times Revenue and profit Acquistion and retention | Internal / external integration Connect people and purpose Competitive position Coordination and prioritization Action / goal completion | User satisfaction User productivity User attraction / retention Space utilization Brand / values expression | Attraction and retention Personnel – role fit Ownership and accountability Clear, concrete expectations Employee engagement |
Interested to hear if this fits with other services or if there are other rows we could add. Let us know!
– Elliot