Decision: Service Flow – Engagement Model

The decision, Service Flow, is one of the more challenging decisions within the service design branch of the Decision Driven® Strategy decision pattern.  I’ve framed this decision as “What series of steps will deliver this service?  How will the engagement flow?”

Here’s the criteria pattern that I recommend when evaluating alternative service flow designs.

I’m certain that most folks use a Design-by-PowerPoint approach for this type of decision.  They pop up a blank slide or copy an old slide with boxes and arrows and proceed to draw up their service flowchart one box at at time.  Maybe I’m being too kind – many folks will just create a bullet list of steps.  They may think about some of the criteria above as they add or rearrange steps, but they never formally define more than a single alternative.  Design-by-PowerPoint is a recipe for tunnel vision.  It confuses the ability to decompose a service into steps with the real thinking challenge of DESIGN.  This error is then compounded by failing to evaluate their single alternative against any criteria; they assume it will work and work well enough to launch it without further analysis.

I’m not naive enough to think that I can kill off Design-by-PowerPoint.  There’s nothing wrong with drawing flowcharts to describe alternatives; but it’s always wise to create at least 3 alternatives that differ significantly to stretch your thinking.  By doing so, you’re asking “How else might we meet the objectives of this decision?”.  This opens the door for a flood of new service innovation.

The Service Flow decision is very similar to the Functional Model decision within the design of a typical hardware/software product.  The decision is challenging for just that reason – the alternatives are abstract pictures with lots of abstract components (steps, interfaces, work products), not something tangible.  If the alternative flowcharts have more than 5 steps, it becomes very difficult to compare them at a glance.  This is where a proven set of criteria is very helpful; the criteria help you think about the overall or end-to-end effectiveness of each alternative flowchart one factor at a time.  They force you to ask the right questions.

A typical Service Flow decision will only take an hour or two to complete if you start with a proven criteria pattern.  That’s quite a small investment with very high payback compared with Design-by-PowerPoint then trial-and-error delivery.

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