Service Design Lead

Closing Date: 23 June 2024

Ref 6740

We are looking for 2 proactive and collaborative individuals to join the People Team as Service Design Leads.

These roles present an exciting opportunity to work with the People team, Organisation of the Future team and cross-organisationally on our transformation programme, shaping a new approach to Service Design at Save the Children UK.  

Please Note: We have one permanent post and one 16 month contract post available. 

 About Us

Save the Children UK believes every child deserves a future. In the UK and around the world, we work every day to give children a healthy start in life, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm. When crisis strikes, and children are most vulnerable, we are always among the first to respond and the last to leave.  We ensure children's unique needs are met and their voices are heard. We deliver lasting results for millions of children, including those hardest to reach.

About the role

As part of our organisation wide transformation programme, Organisation of the Future (OoF), the People Team at Save the Children has been on a journey to be more agile, data driven and customer experience oriented.   We are now looking to bring this approach to all our central services and are looking to redesign the way we offer services internally. We hope that this will help build our muscle as a human-centred organisation from the inside out.  This will also help us realise our ambition of becoming an Agile organisation.

These new Service Design Leads will be key in ensuring that we align and embed design thinking and a customer centric approach into all our colleague-facing products and services. The role-holders will collaborate closely with all Central Services Teams and lead on service design of products and services that impact the employee experience, ensuring that colleagues' needs are understood, and solutions are designed with our people at the heart.

These roles will be a highly visible and an integral part of the People Team and Organisation of the Future team. The change in the People Team's way of being and working is a pilot for the wider Organisation of the Future Change Programme and so it is crucial that these roles are Champions for the People Team across the Organisation and role model the design principles of the Programme (Agile, Adult, Experience, Iterative).  

In this role, you will:

• Work across multiple projects and complex systems to design/redesign colleague facing services, providing expertise in design thinking, guiding the team to see and think about the service as a part of an end-to-end journey.
• Undertake user research to ensure that all services and related products are intentionally designed based on a deep understanding of the needs of the people using them, ensuring inclusion and accessibility at all stages.
• Research and analyse data and internal processes to give a full understanding of existing challenges (the ‘as is').
• Design and deliver service design workshops, customer journey mapping, prototyping, and testing; bringing Service Design expertise to Agile teams/squads and making sure that solutions are designed with users at the centre.
• Mentor, train, and develop the People Team and wider Central Service teams and colleagues in Service Design and Design Thinking methodology, tools, and practices.
• Work with Organisation of the Future team to define, implement, and embed an Organisation of the Future Service Design approach including establishing Service Design Communities of Practice.

About you

With high levels of self-management, you'll be committed to continuously learning, adapting, and responding to change, and working with others in an agile way.

Joining us during an exciting period of organisational transformation, you'll be open-minded and comfortable working in an agile and emergent way.

To be successful, you'll bring:

• Service design expertise in designing customer-centric end to end solutions.
• Experience in mentoring and developing other people's capability and confidence in design thinking customer/human centred service design.
• Experience of working as part of a multidisciplinary project team, with the ability to engage people meaningfully in customer-centric service design and drive forward the delivery of a user centred design solution.
• Experience of working in Agile teams and participating in/facilitating discovery, design, and development sprints
• Effective at communicating design ideas using a variety of techniques, including service models, story boards, user journeys and service blueprints and the ability to create service design documentation, communication, and prototypes utilising online tools (e.g. Mural).
• Excellent facilitation skills and experience - able to elicit desired outcomes from end users through workshop facilitation and user research and able to facilitate engaging and impactful meetings and learning sessions.
• Self-awareness and excellent relationship building abilities.
• Willingness to constantly learn, including from feedback and to flex approach as needed to deliver impact with others.
• Good written and spoken communication skills, with the ability to engage confidently with multiple audiences, in multiple formats and on multiple platforms.
• An agile mindset: able to adapt, learn and collaborate to achieve impact.
• A deep understanding and awareness of diversity, inclusion and belonging/ EDI and a proven ability to bring that awareness and understanding to life in your work.
• We would love it if you were familiar with an adult mindset (see here). However, being keen on learning about this is equally great, and we will support.

What we offer you:

Working for a charity provides one of the best benefits there is – a sense of purpose and reward for helping others. However, we understand the importance of giving back to our employees to ensure a happy and healthy working environment and work/life balance.

• We focus on flexibility, inclusion, collaboration, health and wellbeing both in and outside of work.
• We provide a wide range of benefits which will reward your hard work, motivate you, and inspire you to work to improve the lives of children every day. 

Please note: To avoid disappointment, you are advised to submit your application as soon as possible as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if a high volume of applications are received. This is to ensure that we can manage application levels whilst maintaining a positive candidate experience. Unfortunately, once a vacancy has closed, we are unable to consider further applications.

Ways of Working:

The majority of our roles can be performed remotely in the UK, but there are likely to be times when you will be required to come to your contracted office (up to 2-4 days per month or 6-8 days per quarter).  This will be agreed with your Line Manager and team and is intended to be time spent on collaborating with colleagues and relationship building. 

Please note: travel costs to your contracted office will be at your own expense. 

Flexible Working - We are happy to discuss flexible working options at interview.

Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion: 

Save the Children UK believes in a world that is fair, inclusive and equitable where all children have the opportunity to change their world. We apply this to our workforce and we are committed to developing and supporting a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organisation where all employees have a sense of belonging and feel that they can be "Free to Be Me". We are not looking for just one type of person - we want to recruit people who can add fresh perspectives, innovative ideas or challenge that disrupts the risk of group think. 

We are especially interested in people whose childhood experiences - of life on a low income, of migration, of being in a racialised community, of the care system, of being LGBT+ or in an LGBT+ family or living with (or with someone with) a disability - help us to see things we might otherwise miss. Whatever your story is we want to hear it because we know that different voices, ideas, perspectives and knowledge, working together will enable us to better the lives of children around the world. This is the reason why we are all here.