Lead Service Designer

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social, and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution, and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime, and migration.

Digital Services (DS) delivers critical digital and technology capabilities for the whole organisation. Our purpose is to enable innovation at speed and scale to keep the ONS at the forefront of providing high quality data and analysis to inform the UK, improve lives and build the future. As a trusted partner, we work collaboratively to identify leading-edge technologies and ways of working to deliver technical and digital solutions that meet the needs of the ONS and wider government.

This campaign is for external candidates who wish to be based at either our Newport or Titchfield site. Therefore, this campaign has been linked with the internal advert 463883 Lead Service Designer. If you are an internal candidate to ONS please apply via the other campaign. The selection and interview process will be combined, so you do not need to apply to both campaigns.

As a Lead Service Designer, you will play a lead role in articulating the transformational aims of the programme, statistical and operational design and will be committed to continuous improvement and optimization with an emphasis on stakeholder and end user needs. Having a goal of ensuring the service designs of the various components of end-to-end statistical production are brought together to form a consistent design.

A Lead Service Designer is an expert practitioner who influences and mentor’s others.

Role Responsibilities:

• Lead, understand and communicate the big picture while working to assure the overall goal is maintained in the development of the artefacts that high-level design and its application.
• Be responsible for engagement with programmes and projects, promoting the service design approach to ensure that plans / solutions are aligned to our design, key performance measures and are user centred.
• Define scope whilst shaping and challenging business priorities and value through collaboration.
• Bring together the component service blueprints to develop one consistent end-to-end view.
• To be an advocate for end users and ensure their needs are identified in strategic designs.
• Create models demonstrating how products, operations and systems interoperate within the organisation.
• Work with ONS enterprise architecture, data architecture and business analysis colleagues to deliver a holistic view across these disciplines, ensuring consistent processes, standards and working practices are adopted.
• To lead collaborative design activities, recognising that teams have different working styles so you will need to adapt to accommodate.
• Deliver at pace using agile methodologies and principles.
• Actively participate in service design communities to refine and develop standards, working practices, sharing of knowledge, and understanding.

Essential Criteria:

• Design Communication (Expert): Recommend design decisions and design strategy to senior leaders. Communicate design strategy across organisational boundaries. Coach others in how to effectively communicate design. Develop or introduce more effective methods of communicating design and working in the open.
• Designing Strategically (Expert): Work with others to promote the adoption of design in the implementation of your organisation’s strategy. Work with leaders to support the inclusion of design in policy, technology and delivery processes early enough to inform effective decision making. Promote use of reuseable Service Architecture across the organisation.
• Evidence Based Design (Expert): Guide the organisation in how to use evidence to improve services. Promote a practice of hypothesis- driven design in a team. Analyse, synthesise and use evidence to improve the way the organisation works. Ensure user insights are shared with and used by the wider organisation or across government. Evidence that design aligns user needs with business aims and benefits.
• Designing Together (Expert): Effectively plan and run design sessions that include senior leaders or stakeholders. Help teams connect and work across organisational boundaries. Coach other designers in how to involve stakeholders of any level in the design process. Develop or introduce more effective ways to design together.
• Community Skill (Expert): Act as a champion for community-led initiatives, supporting their delivery and encouraging broader engagement. Foster engagement and encourage active participation in the community, role modelling collaborative behaviours. Advocate and role model knowledge sharing (for example, mentoring community leads). Work with the Head of Function/Head of Practice/Community Lead to develop the maturity of the community and professional growth of its members, providing leadership, feedback and insight

We’ll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Changing and Improving
• Communicating and Influencing
• Seeing the Big Picture

We’ll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Design communication – Expert
• Evidence based design – Expert
• Designing Strategically – Expert
• Designing Together – Expert