Service Design for Government
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How to Tidy Up Your Government Services

The Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo has taken 2019 by storm in part because it acknowledges that we all get so carried away with the things we acquire that we rarely have time to take a step back and ask why we need them. But armed with her KonMari method, Marie Kondo offers some simple tools to take back control and focus on things that are truly important.

Tidying Up got us thinking: a cluttered house and a cluttered government service portfolio have a lot of similarities. And with that in mind, how might we add a KonMari layer to our practice of service management and apply it to the work we do in government?

Consequences of a cluttered service-portfolio

Government managers are under constant pressure to improve performance and reduce the costs of the services they deliver. Under the guise of continuous improvement, agencies get caught in the allure of shiny new solutions despite the lack of new funding or resources. With all of the “buying” and none of the purging, these service portfolios start to look like the clothes closets at the beginning of a Tidying Up episode: overflowing, disorganized collections of garments complete with ugly sweaters, random brimmed hats, and a bunch of old pants that don’t fit.

In government, the immediate consequences of untidy service portfolios are angry customers and declines in service performance. Managers then rely on their help desks to detect the most emergent problem areas and triage customer issues before things spiral out of control.

There are also long-term mission impacts when a service portfolio gets cluttered. Energy and resources are constantly diverted towards competing priorities and this means customers are not being fully served somewhere else. Managers begin to lose sight of the true costs of service delivery and what it takes to deliver an exceptional customer experience. This is not the  way to sustain loyal customers long-term but it is today’s reality for many government programs and services.

What “sparks joy” for government services?

When you empty that closet and begin culling through the volcano-like pile of clothes on the bed, Marie Kondo’s “spark joy” principle is straightforward. Unless you have an emotional connection to an item–a little zing of happiness when you hold it–get rid of it. Government service managers, however, have to consider factors well beyond whether a service delivers an emotional connection.

Customers use government services to achieve some kind of result or outcome. Government services “spark joy” when they meet the needs of customers and achieve the overarching policy objectives. Services have to be relevant, be usable, and deliver an exceptional experience.

How do you know if your portfolio needs tidying?

Cluttered service portfolios can sneak up on us because new requirements grow organically over time. Small, incremental additions eventually dilute the services being offered until the services cannot be sustainably managed.

Having a documented catalog of the service offerings and a governance process for adding or retiring services is one way to manage service creep. Monitoring customer behavior is another way to detect whether the service portfolio is being diluted. Low customer engagement or abandonment may indicate that the services being offered are not relevant to the problems customers are trying to solve.

Five steps to tidying your government service portfolio

Tidying up a government service portfolio simply means making decisions about which services provide the biggest value to customers in the context of the agency mission. By choosing to invest in the services that matter most to customers, we then free up resources by stopping services that are of little or no value. We have five recommended steps to tidying:

1. Define “spark joy” for your customers

Services that are designed to be easy maximize value for the customer and give the service provider the best shot of delivering the service in a cost efficient way. The specific definition of “easy” varies for each service.

Service designers immerse themselves in the customer’s world through both quantitative and qualitative analysis to define what “sparks joy” for the customer. This could be factors like speed, availability, security, or privacy. Grounded in this understanding, service designers can determine how well each unique service contributes to the things that matter most to customers.

2. Empty the closet

Service portfolios often resemble cluttered closets in that this year’s fashions bury last year’s trends. Yet, for many psychological reasons, we can’t bring ourselves to part with our now-useless purchases. Likewise, services that outlive their relevance but continue operating in the background drain limited resources. Simplifying a service portfolio to make it easy for the customer means disentangling each service and discreetly defining its value.

The way you “empty the closets” in government services is by cataloging each service in your portfolio. Pull each of these services out into the open by cataloging each one. This task can be fraught with challenges, especially among mature enterprise portfolios. Services can share the same name but behave very differently depending on the people, process, technology, content, and environment in which they operate. Each of these factors potentially impacts how easy it is for customers to use the service and how efficiently it can be delivered.

Once each service has been cataloged individually, it is now possible to document the cost to deliver each individual service and determine its perceived value to customers.

3. Decide what to keep

A service designer’s goal is to make it as easy as possible for customers to use the services. This requires eliminating unnecessary complexity from the customer journey. This is complexity that can come from redundancies, dependencies, inconsistencies, gaps, and just plain confusion of who is responsible for doing what. Before we can truly simplify each service, the initial service catalog may need to be refined and consolidated several times before it resembles the intended service model.

One successful technique is to marry the newly forming service catalog to a customer journey map which visually depicts how each individual service aligns with customer experience. This is a powerful tool for service design teams because it informs how customers perceive value at specific touchpoints. It also points to the underlying processes, technologies, and talent that are responsible for delivering the value.

Through this process, the service design team begins to zero in on the components that contribute to the overall customer experience and ultimately drive intended customer behavior.

4. Evaluate each piece

As the service catalog begins to reflect the reality of what is being delivered to customers, there is still a need to determine the marginal cost associated with delivering the customer experience. Technical Assent recommends using a pair-wise comparison that results in a ranking of each service relative to the others in the service catalog. We use two criteria–cost and perceived customer value–as shown in the diagram.

This visualization enables the service design team to understand the marginal costs and benefits of specific services in the context of their respective contributions to the customer journey.

5. Develop the service strategy

When a service portfolio is segmented this way, it sets up a productive dialogue among the service design team members and new management strategies emerge. It forces the team to consider the marginal benefit of increasing perceived customer value compared to the marginal cost. It also lends itself to relevant exploratory questions such as “what needs do our customers have that we don’t address?” The table to the right demonstrates four possible strategies that may emerge from these conversations.


Next steps

In a resource-scarce environment, it is critical that government service managers focus on achieving overarching policy objectives through a portfolio of services that delivers the biggest impact to its customers. This requires that managers, who are often policy experts, invest deeply to understand the needs and motivations of their customers.

New concepts emerge when customer preferences for relevance, usability, experience, and ease marry with a service delivery model that values efficiency, consistency, and reliability. Innovative government solutions spark joy when they address what customers care about most and meet the mission needs.

Technical Assent has consulted with numerous federal government agencies to redesign their service portfolios based on customer experience. Read more about service design in these articles.

In Government Service Design-Thinking, Thinking Like the Customer is not Enough

Avoiding the Sugar Crash of IT Modernization

This Simple Meeting Hack Helps a Problem-Solving Team Refocus on Their Customers

Try Our Automated Customer-Experience Self-Assessment for Federal Government

A map that shows a starting point and an ending point

To aid government agencies in fulfilling the new customer-experience requirements from the Office of Management and Budget’s Circular A-11, we have designed a free, automated CX assessment tool for government employees.

Circular A-11 (Section 280) applies to federal agencies designated as high-impact service providers. These designated providers have specific obligations that begin in early 2019. This includes the requirement to conduct an annual CX self-assessment and submitting a CX action plan.

Even outside of OMB’s specific requirements, our CX assessments are a great way to improve your office’s performance and customer satisfaction–whether your customers are U.S. citizens, government employees, private industry representatives, or other government agencies. Improving CX is is a measurable way to improve performance even for programs not designated as high-impact service providers.

These A-11 requirements, along with the Federal Agency Customer Experience Acts of 2017 and 2018, reflect a new priority in government. Being a service-design company founded on the idea that U.S. citizens should have the same high expectations of government service as they do customer-centric, innovative private companies, this is a trend we wholeheartedly support.

Our Standard Assessment is an automated version of OMB’s assessment that includes a report with a graphical interpretation of your score. We are also in the process of finalizing our Enhanced Assessment, which will be more thorough than the OMB assessment and the report will give you customized recommendations for building your action plan.

Email us at getstarted@technicalassent.com if you would like to be added to the notification list once we activate our Enhanced Assessment in early 2019.

airplanes take off on a runway

Technical Assent joins FAA’s eFAST contracting vehicle

We are excited to announce that we have been accepted to the Electronic Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Accelerated and Simplified Tasks (eFAST) contracting vehicle. The FAA divides eFAST work into functional areas and we now hold master ordering agreements in the following areas:

  • Business Administration and Management
  • Computer/Information Systems Development
  • Computer Systems Support
  • Documentation and Training

 

eFAST is the FAA’s preferred contracting vehicle for small business contracts. eFAST streamlines the procurement process for all stakeholders using a web-based acquisition tool and automated workflows compliant
with applicable FAA standards.

Any FAA program management office (PMO) and contracting officer (CO) can use eFAST. For details about doing business through eFAST, visit the FAA’s eFAST page.

“We are eager to serve the FAA through eFAST,” said John DiLuna, President and CEO of Technical Assent. “Each new contract vehicle provides us an opportunity to share how to improve the performance of federal services using a customer experience as a primary driver for change. The FAA’s mission focus on maintaining the world’s safest and most efficient aerospace system makes it an excellent candidate for design-thinking and a customer-driven approach.”

We are also a part of the following federal government contracting vehicles:

Government-wide

  • GSA Professional Services Schedule (PSS)
  • GSA Performance Management / Continuous Process Improvement Blanket Purchase Agreement (PM/CPI BPA)
  • Service Disabled Veteran-Owned Business (SDVOSB) set-aside
  • Army Research Lab Advanced Expeditionary Warfare Development (AEWD)

Department of Veterans Affairs

  • VA Agile Delivery of VA Imminent Strategic and Operational Requirements (ADVISOR)
  • VA Veterans Enterprise Contracting for Transformation and Operational Readiness (VECTOR)

Department of Defense & Department of Homeland Security

  • Washington Headquarters Service / Acquisition Directorate (WHS/AD) Logistics Services (LOGS) Blanket Purchase Agreement
  • Navy SeaPort-e
  • DHS Program Management and Technical Services (PACTS) II

 

See our contracting vehicles page for more information on each.

many documents on office desk: messy desk

Revitalize Your Work Space with Office Spring-Cleaning

Computer keyboard with keys removed for cleaningNow that spring has arrived, the internet—Pinterest especially—is abuzz with spring cleaning tips. Just like new year’s resolutions, spring cleaning is a ritual of fresh starts and renewal. While spring cleaning is typically associated with your home, the benefits of spring cleaning can—and should be—extended to your work space.

In the past, homeowners embraced spring cleaning to air the house out after being shut up and sooty all winter and to make the transition between running a house winter-style and summer-style. In today’s modern life, spring cleaning provides a way to tackle deep cleaning and organization tasks that don’t need to be done regularly, or ones that should be done regularly and you just…haven’t.

In this sense, spring cleaning is a perfect example of several of the strategies in author Gretchen Rubin’s nonfiction books on happiness, habit-forming, and organization. In particular, spring cleaning is a linking strategy. Rather than perpetually reminding yourself to do things like wiping off the accumulated dust on the back of your monitor, retrieving things that fell down the gap behind your bookcase, and hand-vacuuming the accumulated food crumbs from your pencil drawer, you can now let yourself forget about them. You’ll be tackling all of those kinds of tasks automatically, with the annual prompt of spring cleaning season.

check list of what to clean in an office

Click to go to the blog at See Jane Work where you can down load this checklist

Office Spring-Cleaning Checklist

I’m not the first to write about spring cleaning for the office. When I looked around online to see if there were aspects that hadn’t been covered yet, I came across a beautiful and comprehensive office spring cleaning checklist from 2016 on the blog at See Jane Work. Therefore, instead of reinventing the wheel, I’m going to point you directly to the blog post so you can download the checklist and print out a copy for yourself.

Notice, most of the things on this list are things you need to do yourself, even if you have an office cleaning service. Now, to help you complete the See Jane Work checklist, here are a few quick notes on some of the cleaning tasks.

Wipe Down Monitor

Glass cleaner and a paper towel? Non-scratching cloths? According to a CNET writer who untangled the contradictory advice on the subject, a dry, lint-free cloth is the way to go, followed by a weak solution with dish soap for tougher jobs. Details here.

Untangle Cords

There are lots of products out there to help you with cord control. But even if you don’t buy any tools, the point is to keep the surface of your desk uncluttered. Most desks have a tidy little hole at the back but cords always seem to find their way out of it. Spring cleaning is the time to put the cords back down it, and to purge your overfilled power strip of no-longer-needed chargers.

With intra-device cords (ones that are not so easily hidden down your desk’s cord-hole), try wrapping the excess length around the legs of a laptop riser or the base of your monitor.

Label CordsAsian woman looking at plugs under desk

The labeling of cords is most important for the cords you don’t use on a daily basis, are shared between co-workers, or used at different locations. There are lots of hacks out there for labeling cords (and products you can buy), but my personal favorite is to simply cut a blank address label in half lengthwise, write the product name on it, fold it around the cord, and seal the sticky ends.

Start Purging

In Marie Kondo’s blockbuster organization book, The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up, one of her slogans was, “Discard everything that does not spark joy.” That is a dangerous proposition when used in an office setting, but so long as you don’t apply that to office property or against official recordkeeping requirements, it’s still a good thing to have on your mind as you tidy your desk or office.

Now is the time to consolidate to-do lists, throw away dried markers, comb through the break room fridge with your co-workers, and decide which of the four staplers in your desk will stay and which you will return to the common area.

Computer monitor with mailbox and lettersOrganize Your Email

I’m always surprised by how many people tell me things like, “I had 250 emails today in my inbox today!” It’s not the number of emails that’s surprising; it’s the fact that these people are high-level professionals who have never taken the time to set up their professional email account so that it is organized and automated.

Each type of email has its own instructions for setting up rules and filters, but this article covers the subject in general terms and has several more email best practices. Here is a five-folder strategy from a writer at Fast Company if you want to get radical with your email.