Senior Service Designer

Summary

Royal Greenwich is a vibrant borough, with a rich history and diverse community. We’re proud of the work we do to serve our residents.

We have a vision of a happier, healthier and more connected borough. To achieve this, we’re investing heavily in our digital services and we’ve published our first ever digital strategy. It’s what shapes what we’re working on for the next four years and beyond.

It’s an exciting time to join us. We’re searching for people-focused digital, data and technology experts to join our new team. We’re focused on improving services for our residents and making our borough truly digital. There’s plenty of opportunity for you to have your say and help shape our work.

Read our blog to find out more about who we are and what we’re working on.

The Role

You’ll be part of our brand-new in-house product function as part of the Digital and Customer service team. You’ll report to the Lead Service Designer.

As a Senior Service Designer, you’ll take a key role in the service design community across Royal Borough of Greenwich, setting standards and leading service design of new, complex products and services. You’ll directly lead on our most complex, risky and interdependent priority areas, working as part of the multidisciplinary team and partner with service areas, acting as the bridge between transformational goals and the practicalities of product delivery.

We’re looking for somebody who is happy to work in a complex, and also political setting to help Royal Greenwich make better decisions and solve real problems for people based on your work. You must be able to build powerful narratives based on users’ needs and real stories, to convince stakeholders to implement change needed.

As a senior practitioner, you will be working through the entire design and delivery process, from framing problems, understanding and visualising service landscape, improving and reimagining end-to-end service, crafting service details, prototyping service to orchestrating work to support implementation. You’ll be an advocate for service design and support challenges in implementing and designing good services for people.

Outside of your day-to-day project work, you’ll be helping others learn best practice in service design. You’ll also be expected to grow our Service Design Community of Practice by expanding knowledge, upskilling team members, and challenging our ways of working. You will also have the opportunity to line manage mid-weight members of staff.

What You’ll Do

• Work with different types of service across digital and non-digital channels and methods of access.
• Help colleagues see their services through a people lens with a design state of mind, helping them to map and discover opportunities for transformation in their areas.
• Help colleagues reimagine their services to improve service outcomes and reduce the cost of delivery.
• Contribute to identify design patterns and reusable components to tackle common problems across the organisation.
• Use data, design thinking and agile ways of working to solve problems, test ideas quickly, iterate what you do and embed a learning culture.
• Take a key role in developing and growing the service design community of practice, codifying ways of working.
• Line manage and coaching people, helping develop our people and managing performance robustly.
• Actively look for opportunities to improve the internal processes of knowledge management, learning and development, getting feedback, running design critique and meetings, etc.
• Work with senior leaders across the council to help them understand service design, helping them see what’s possible.

Who You Are

We want to hear from people with skills in:

• Getting out there and running and facilitating workshops, interviews, shadowing (and facilitating other team members to do the same) to uncover insights using a range of different design research methods.
• Visualising end to end services using different techniques.
• Inclusive design –designing accessible services for our wide range of service users, thinking about the impact this may have on their lives and power dynamics in our practice.
• Prototyping and testing digital and non-digital services.
• Facilitate conversations to build understanding and alignment to help deliver intended outcomes and to support stakeholders to make well evidence-based decisions.
• Designing streamlined services, easy to use and easy to access.

• Giving direction on which tools or methods to use to solve a particular problem.

You Should Be

We are looking for people who share our values and principles:

• Committed to improving Residents’ lives and opportunities
• Demonstrating respect and fairness
• Taking ownership
• Thrive to do things better
• Can work together across the council
• naturally curious – you keep on top of your own learning and development and are up to date with the latest techniques and trends in your field
• an advocate for user-centered practices, embedded within agile delivery
• able to explain complex technical concepts in plain language