To review a service, walk around it

When organisations review a service, it's easy to focus on one part of the picture. Cost. Process. Customer satisfaction. Technology. Each matters, but none alone tells the whole story.

To really understand a service, leaders need a way to walk around it - to see it from different angles before deciding what to improve, invest in or change. And this a systems perspective that’s relevant not only to services - but processes, a touch point or policy.

One metaphor I've always found helpful comes from service design: thinking about a service as if it were a theatre show.

Backstage is what supports the show. Photo: November Wong, Unsplash

Every service has a front stage and a backstage

Shakespeare wrote, "All the world's a stage..." It's just as true in local government as it is in theatre.

Think about a night at the theatre. The experience begins long before the show starts: hearing about the show, booking tickets, finding your seat, watching the performance and heading home afterwards. That's the front stage; the part the audience experiences.

What the audience doesn't see is everything happening behind the scenes. Set designers, directors, lighting and sound crews, marketing, and others all contribute to the performance. Their work may be largely invisible, but without it the curtain never rises.

Council services work in much the same way. A resident might experience a permit approval, a library visit or booking a community hall. Behind each of those moments sits a network of staff, systems, budgets, policies and processes working together to deliver that experience.

If we only look at the front stage, we'll miss much of what shapes the customer's experience. If we only look backstage, we'll miss what matters most to the people using the service.

Walking around the service

One thing I enjoy about service reviews and improvement is the opportunity to "walk around" a service. Looking at it from different perspectives changes what becomes visible.

Customers notice different things from frontline staff. Operational teams see different issues from leaders responsible for strategy and investment. Each perspective reveals part of the picture; and together they create a richer understanding of how the service is really performing.

That understanding gives leaders a much stronger foundation for making decisions.

A review is more than an audit - or it should be

It's tempting to think of a service review as checking costs, processes or performance measures. Those things matter, but they're only part of the story.

A good review should also help leaders answer bigger questions. Are we creating the value we intended? Is the service still meeting community needs? Or should we be doing something else? Are our resources being used well? Should we improve the service, redesign it, invest further, or stop doing it altogether?

Those are strategic questions. A review should generate the evidence and insight needed to answer them with confidence.

Seeing the whole performance

This is why I value a human-centred approach to service reviews. It combines operational data with lived experience, customer voice with staff insight, and operational detail with strategic intent.

The result isn't simply a better understanding of the service. It's better organisational thinking, and that leads to the conditions for better decisions.

One of the most valuable things leaders can do is resist the temptation to judge a service from a single viewpoint. Walk around it, and look from different perspectives - the audience, backstage, people delivering the service, and people experiencing it.

The more completely we understand the service, the more confidently we can decide what happens next.

Read more

For readers interested in exploring this further, the front stage/backstage metaphor is a well-established concept in service design, and is discussed in texts such as ‘This is Service Design Doing’ https://www.thisisservicedesigndoing.com