Services rather than teams

I want, no NEED, to make our organisation even better for the people who choose to use us. To this end i’ve been wondering if thinking of our organisation’s internal workings as a series of services rather than teams is a better way to define the knotty web of a museum.

I hear frustrations from our users/customers/partners and workforce that aren’t often easy to solve and currently it is very hard to follow the “string” of what we do from end to end in order to better understand it and make it better. Typically a user’s journey with us crosses multiple teams and this often leads to both a disjointed user experience AND disjointed design/running of said thing. Who is responsible? If they are both trying to achieve the same then isn’t it really one team anyway? To be clear much of the problem isn’t org specific but the nature of having lots of competing priorities for any organisation that has more than a handful of people.

You never see a diagram or explanation of how many museums actually function. Instead we have team org charts that look similar, even when different organisations do very different things.

The default reaction when something isn’t working is to either move about the teams or change a team by adding people as the theory is more will be achieved. However in practice it is rarely the case. It’s led me to follow the thread of a team through it “doing” something from start to finish.

Long story less long I really now like to thing of whatever we’re delivering as a “service” which let’s me consider the whole process from end to end regardless of the teams it has to through. As an example, The Home Office have approximately 50 services. I’ve been asking people what services they deliver for a few years and it always seems to make people stop in their tracks as they haven’t thought of it (to be fair they know what they do just not articulated as a whol service). I have found some orgs that have a list of servies rhey sell but never their actual list of services.

Thus I wonder if many of our organisation problems would be better served in the lens of designing an organisation around its services not its teams. A team of teams can be born around service design.

Finally it then begs the question if a named team is needed at all or if it should simply be that you deliver X or Y service(s). Once you can define a service then you stand a much better chance of being able to make it better.

I’m not aware of museums currently using service design across the board so thought I’d share now in the hope others come forward. You can read about service design in the context of digital teams at Museums on the Web 2016 and of course Seb Chan has.