We’re hiring a service designer!
We’re hiring a service designer at Adur & Worthing Councils!
It’s our first permanent service designer role — although our ambition for the future doesn’t stop there — and I wanted to share some thoughts about what this role is likely to be involved in going forward…
We’re lucky at Adur & Worthing Councils that our senior leaders are on board with Service Design. ‘On board’ is an understatement — they’ve been championing projects ripe for user-centred, iterative approaches since well before I arrived at the Councils in 2017.
Whether it’s a systemic issue around homelessness or service mapping our customer journey to make improvements to how we work, they pave the way for work to get done and open doors when needed.
And this is paying off — small fires are starting to kindle of people who ‘get’ what we’re trying to achieve. From customer services to HR, waste to wellbeing, economy to our crematorium — people are interested and up for experimenting.
So we’re looking for someone who can kindle the small flames we’re starting to see and grow them to be full-on fires of people who are confident in taking the reigns of service design and starting to fan the flames themselves.
I don’t know exactly what this might look like — it could be spotting where there is some energy to experiment and focusing on that, being a weaver of stories to win over hearts and minds, getting your head down on the doing of service design projects but keeping an eye on spotting where there may be future opportunities.
If you’re someone who needs a clear direction of each step along the way, this role probably isn’t for you. But for those of you keen to make a real difference and create a path of your own, this is a genuinely exciting opportunity!
We know where we want to be — having services that are aligned to our Good Service Standards (see below) and making incremental progress with sticky issues we have as an organisation and place through a service design approach — but we haven’t got all the steps mapped out…and are happy to have some detours on the way if new opportunities are spotted.
Although I say that there’s no step-by-step map to service design, we do have some key milestones that are mentioned in Platforms for our Places: Going Further:
- Delivering service design training to multidisciplinary teams working on Platforms delivery
- Providing design support to a set of Platforms projects, running teams in parallel, learning methods while delivering
- Developing a service design approach to Sustainable AW
- Leading the development nationally of a service design apprenticeship
(Yes, did I mention that we are leading the way in developing a service design apprenticeship for the whole of England?!)
All these things will be work that you, as our service designer, will be front and center of.
So you can see that the role will be doing a lot of different things — training, running service design sprints, leading on projects, networking to learn from others and developing a community of practice — people who can work together with a service design approach…and more.
And you won’t be alone in this.
We know there is lots of work to do and so, where needed, we will call upon established service designers to get involved and bolster our ranks. So you can expect to learn from some greats — whether that’s established agencies or experienced contractors, you’ll work alongside them to cultivate your craft.
This role sits in our Organisational Development and Design function, which is in the same team looking after our learning and people development — but it also has close ties with Digital, Customer Services and Customer Insight teams. So you’ll have great (if I do say so myself!) team to work with, bounce ideas off, plan with…
This has hopefully given you an idea of the ambition of the role and the activities you’ll be engaging with — if you’re interested in learning more, please get in touch (amy.newnham@adur-worthing.gov.uk) and apply for the role by 11 October .