Leading a service: creating the conditions for test and learn

This article is included in our book, Adopting the practice of test and learn. It was written by Lara Bird.

You can download a PDF version of this book, or visit this page to request a printed copy.

Services are how most organisations achieve their goals, whether that’s selling products, enforcing rules or enabling access to money, advice or support.

Given that services are typically the main way to deliver outcomes for users, it’s surprising how often organisations focus more on their own functions (finance, strategy, marketing) than on understanding and improving those services.

A test and learn approach to service delivery helps to shift that focus, enabling organisations to prioritise users and the services designed for them. But this shift can’t happen without the right conditions in place - around funding, culture and governance - to support a service-led approach.

It’s the role of a ‘service leader’ to build and maintain that environment, taking accountability for the service and creating the space for their team to concentrate on user needs, making smaller, faster changes and adapting through iteration.

While it may not be their official job title, ‘service leaders’ prove results and build momentum. And in transformation, momentum is everything.

Here are four steps to being an effective service leader, with some criteria to help measure success along the way.

2. Be strategic and clear about what you are prioritising (and what you aren’t)

Services provide an excellent frame for the strategic decision-making which informs test and learn approaches. You’ll need to define the outcomes the service is looking to achieve, and these will need to align with and contribute to long term corporate goals or broader public sector missions, depending on your context. The service strategy will explain how the service will continually improve its performance against those outcomes.

An effective service strategy needs to account for both the short and long term: you need to be responsive to priorities and events, while addressing systemic challenges. It also needs to incorporate both service priorities and broader goals, such as efforts to build shared capabilities, platforms and data sources. This will inevitably involve making difficult trade-offs; the best service strategies are coherent, energising and clear in describing the path through these trade-offs.

Signs it’s going well:

• Your service strategy is communicated in one place

• You are able to strike the balance between improvement, transformation, managing risk, maintaining delivery and operational effectiveness

Signs it’s not going well

• If you asked key stakeholders and the service team what the top priorities of the service are, they would all have different answers

• Your service strategy has not been reviewed for over a year, or since a major event.

3. Inspire and support the teams providing the service

For modern products and services, teams are the fundamental unit of delivery. People working in multidisciplinary teams bring together different perspectives and collaborate on ongoing improvements that make full use of their skills. Strong services do not come from isolated work done by separate functions like policy, operations, design or delivery. They are built by empowered teams working together toward shared goals.

As a leader, you will need to guide a team that looks after the overall performance of the service, alongside smaller teams focused on specific products.

This team must have the right knowledge and skills, but more importantly, it needs trust, open communication and a shared commitment to better outcomes. The team is not just there to deliver. It also shapes the strategy, helps set priorities and responds to changes. Supporting and strengthening this team is one of your most important responsibilities as a service leader.

Signs it’s going well:

• There is a permanent, multidisciplinary team who see themselves as working for the service.

• The service team understands the vision and strategy for the service.

• You are actively removing blockers to your team’s progress.

Signs it’s not going well:

• People in the team see their primary role as being part of their function (e.g. operations) as opposed to being part of the service team.

• People are incentivised based on outputs rather than outcomes.

4. Foster transparency: Get the information you need to run the service well

In many large organisations, functions often operate independently and only share essential information to connect their work. However, testing and learning relies on regularly making informed decisions and acting on them quickly, using insights shared across the team. Successful service teams work much more closely together, making decisions as a group and delivering collectively.

To support this, leaders must create strong transparency within the team and across the organisation. Everyone should understand how the service is performing and what it costs. The strategy, roadmap and backlogs should be easy to find and clearly explained. Teams should openly share both successes and challenges so the service can keep adapting and improving.

Signs it’s going well:

• There is a single source of truth for the data required to assess service performance

• There is a direct link from the information you have to the outcomes the service is seeking to achieve

• Your stakeholders and teams are clear about the priority outcomes

Signs it’s not going well

• You don’t have a clear picture of the cost of the service

• No one knows or is responsible for monitoring the health of the service

• Your team’s backlogs do not reflect your priorities

Service leadership starts with the team

When challenging organisational norms, trust matters.

For an organisation to feel confident enough to abandon traditional processes and approaches, your team must earn the trust of senior leaders by delivering results, communicating transparently and demonstrating value for money.

Perhaps the most important part of service leader’s job, then, can be summed up as helping the team to do the work to earn that trust. That means finding and training the best people, supporting and protecting their work, providing clarity of vision, and creating a space in which they can make collective decisions and take collective risks.