Digital first Archives | Scottish Enterprise Design blog

Make the service standard work for you

David O'Brien — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 21:41:50 +0000

The way service assessments work is changing. As a service designer, I was initially wary of service assessments. I feared they might be burdensome and bureaucratic when we needed to move fast. In reality, the opposite was true. When we were developing findbusinesssupport.gov.scot, we were the first team in Scottish Enterprise to be subject to …

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How we provided evidence for the Digital First Assessment

Stéphanie Krus — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 13:22:00 +0000

Last November, we used this website to tell the story and provide evidences for our project Find Business Support (FBS) during our Beta Digital First Assessment. What’s a Digital First Assessment? If you are launching a new digital public service or redesigning an existing service in Scotland, it needs to go through the different stages of the …

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Fidelity increases as uncertainty decreases

David O'Brien — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 19:16:41 +0000

No, this is not a couples counselling site. I and others on my team have had a lot of discussion recently about what we are doing, why we're doing it, what we can test and why we are testing it. In an agile team, this is healthy. As long as the discussion remains respectful, talking …

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Service Design – How we work

Martin Kerr — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 15:37:22 +0000

Everybody has a methodology for how teams should work. Some of them are great but most of them are complicated. Here is how Service Design works at Scottish Enterprise. I am showing three diagrams but the middle one is the one I love best. Let’s begin: 1. Super simple We are not a software house. What …

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What digital transformation really means

David O'Brien — Sat, 30 Jul 2016 20:13:37 +0000

First, the bad news: it doesn't mean everyone gets an iPad. Digital transformation isn't about technology, it's about the change the technology enables. Think about the railways in the 19th century. You didn't have to be Robert Louis Stevenson to understand that being able to get from Edinburgh to London in day, rather than a …

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Team on tour at Explore Export 2015

Siobhan McDermit — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 12:21:07 +0000

On Friday 6 November the Digital First Service Design team packed up post-its, whiteboards, sharpie pens and blue tac from our Paisley offices and set up shop at the UKTI Explore Export event in Edinburgh. Why? We’ve been busy over the last few months, developing and launching the new Export Health Check. In September we launched …

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Trust the Force, Luke

Martin Kerr — Tue, 27 Oct 2015 10:39:30 +0000

A young Luke Skywalker was told to Trust the Force. It was difficult for him until he eventually started to see results. This blog is about a similar leap of faith. Think about these two statements… If you are truly committed to building customer value, then you will be building what the customer wants (needs) …

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Designing for mobile first

David O'Brien — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 20:17:54 +0000

We recently released a Beta version of our export health check diagnostic. It’s a simple thing that asks you 7 questions with yes or no answers. You can run through it in 2 minutes. We know this, because we tested it through a rapid series of iterations. We made a prototype, put it out for …

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Embrace uncertainty

David O'Brien — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 23:10:53 +0000

OK, here's a quiz I was going to write some whizzy code for this, but then I thought: be agile. What's the quickest, cheapest thing you could do to test this idea? So I'm going to trust you. All I'm asking is that you read the question and answer it without thinking too hard about …

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Open up

David O'Brien — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 23:20:45 +0000

Those of you with a 4 (or even a 3) ominously close to the start of your age will recognise the title of of a song by Leftfield with John Lydon on vocals. For us, it's about being open, honest and transparent about what we're doing. We don't want to hide the successes – and …

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Making it up

David O'Brien — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 21:55:01 +0000

I remember childhood games where my friends and I would say: Make it that you’re a baddie and I’m the goodie. Then 5 minutes later someone would declare: Make it that we’re hiding and you cannae see us. Or: Make it that we can fly so when you find us we just fly away. I’ve …

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Love’s the needle, not the North*

David O'Brien — Fri, 06 Feb 2015 00:16:44 +0000

In a previous post, I said that big design up-front was a recipe for disaster. And it is. So what’s the alternative? The answer is not to plan less, but to plan more. Just don’t do it all at once. Plan the next week or two, do what you planned, and learn something. We plan …

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Stop starting. Start finishing

David O'Brien — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 23:36:33 +0000

Can you run this report and get it to me by Thursday morning? Eh … OK. But it’s now 4pm on Tuesday. And I’ve got to do … … I need it by 10am on Thursday for a management meeting. Can you do that? Yes … but … … Is that OK? Sure, yes. 10 …

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It’s unexpected. But it’s also unexpectable

David O'Brien — Thu, 08 Jan 2015 00:48:37 +0000

I can claim no no credit for the headline of this post – it’s a direct quote from an article on the Guardian about the remarkable resurgence in the sales of vinyl. It’s an interesting article, though a long read. It illustrates well how and why Big Design fails so often. No-one expected vinyl to …

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Go on then. Motivate me

David O'Brien — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 23:05:52 +0000

So, here I am. I turn up for work, regularly on time, frequently early. Occasionally late. Trains… I sometimes leave the office early, but, if I do, I will always check emails later, when I get home. Well, mostly. (We’re being honest here. And we are talking about email. As motivations go, it’s not up there.) …

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Faking it

David O'Brien — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 22:31:24 +0000

This week, I did something I thought I’d never do: I deceived our users. Our visitors. Our customers. That’s pretty much a sacking offence, so maybe I should explain. As part of the digital first team, we’re looking for ways to get user feedback. After all, how will we know if customers think our products …

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Why Big Design fails

David O'Brien — Thu, 27 Nov 2014 22:03:29 +0000

When businesses take on big IT projects (or any kind of big projects, I suppose), they puff their cheeks out and say, metaphorical hands on not-at-all-literal hips: Gonna cost you guv. They’re thinking: we’re going to have to plan this. We’ll need a risk register. We’ll have to fix the scope, gather all the deliverables, …

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Complexity. It’s not complicated …

David O'Brien — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 16:15:35 +0000

I’m part of the digital first project, the team that’s looking into new ways of working that will help Scottish Enterprise improve its projects’ performance. One of the things the team is doing is a 12-week training course on Value, Flow, Quality. That probably doesn’t mean much to most people, but basically it’s a methodology …

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Our first live event: the facts and figures

David O'Brien — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 15:23:35 +0000

On 22 and 23 July, we set up a live stream from the Commonwealth Games Business Conference. As well as the YouTube video stream, we used every channel at our disposal – twitter, LikedIn, Google+, our websites – to stimulate the debate. It was a huge effort for a small team. Three of us – …

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Digital first is … what?

David O'Brien — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 22:58:32 +0000

There’s been a lot of talk about ‘digital first’ recently. But precious little about what that actually means. So here’s my take on it. Very much off the top of my head. Digital first is … Digital first is not … open, transparent, and sharing closed, opaque and controlling engaging and engaged trying to “own” …

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