The Service Organization book

All organizations are becoming service organizations. But most weren’t built to deliver services successfully, end to end — and the human, operational, and financial impacts are abundantly clear. Yet default working practices (governance, planning, funding, leadership, reporting, programme and team structures) inside large organizations haven’t changed. Rather than modernise just one service at a time, it’s the underlying organizational conditions that need to be transformed — anything less is futile.

There’s little practical advice about how to go about changing the conditions inside a large organization, to put services at the heart of what they do. But many individuals, teams and organizations have been finding ways to make this profound change. For the last two years I’ve been writing a book about how to changing working practices in large organizations, so that everyone else can make better services by default. The Service Organization book is the result of years of research and consulting, as well as dozens of interviews with leaders and executives. It’s full of ambitious and practical advice with plenty of real life examples to help us all create true service organizations.

How to change how organizations operate to better focus on their services is outside the remit of most professional disciplines. We tend to think in terms of establishing new digital teams or about the contribution of individual professions, when the barriers to better services are often to do with the flow of work across an entire organization. And when we can’t see the problems and we don’t have good solutions, a huge opportunity to make more successful services with better outcomes, is missed. This book challenges traditional working practice, it shares learning from the experience of others, and it acts as a guidebook for how to have a huge impact on organizations - starting with the reality of where they are today.

Each chapter takes an important aspect of how a large organization operates, that can hinder services and their performance. It shares ideas for how to improve it, the conversations to have, how to communicate the need, and how to relate this to what the organization already considers a priority.

The book includes dozens of examples from behind the scenes of global companies like BT Group plc, the NHS, UK government departments and public services, Citizens Advice, the British Red Cross and many others.

You can buy a copy of the book at Amazon or find out more about it here.