DeutschI’m a frequent attendee at Lean DUS, a regular event organised by the fantastic folks of sipgate. At LEAN DUS #23 earlier this year Jeff Sussna gave a talk on moving beyond products and unifying design and operations.
Jeff runs a consulting company called Sussna Associates, which aims to help businesses to establish a comprehensive, continuous service delivery process.
He also condensed his expertise in a book called Designing Delivery, which outlines a continuous value creation process involving design thinking, agile software development and DevOps while stretching across multiple disciplines such as design, engineering and operations.
According to this process customer value is provided by services that perform along 4 dimensions:
- outcome: The results a service provides to your customer.
- accessibility: How easily can the service be used?
- coherency: How fault-tolerant and resilient is the service?
- continuity: Does the service allow your organisation to continually change and grow or does it potentially keep you from changing direction in future iterations?
This concept heavily draws on design thinking, which in turn is comprised of:
- ethnography
- empathy
- abductive reasoning
- a continuous, iterative process
Jeff’s presentation at Lean DUS gives an excellent overview over these aspects. A video recording of the talk is available here:
In the digital service economy we need to go beyond product thinking and design for service, not just software. Faced with ever increasing complexity and uncertainty, we have to design for failure and operate to learn. Shipping features is necessary but not sufficient; we also need to transform operations into an input to design.