Redesigning Service from the Inside Out
Where’s My Relief Valve…?
I knew something was broken when a Royal Navy maintainer walked into a workshop to ask a technician, face-to-face, about the status of an equipment overhaul. Not because he didn’t trust the process, but because the process didn’t give him the answer he needed, when he needed it.
This wasn’t an isolated event. Whether it was a pump, a motor, a valve, or another piece of equipment, the same pattern emerged: the only way to know what was really happening was to ask the right person. And knowing who that person often depended on experience, relationships, or persistence.
In those moments, effort replaced structure. We had good people doing great work, but without clarity. Ownership was blurred, and good service relied more on who you knew, rather than on how things were designed to work. That reliance on informal knowledge, rather than visible accountability, created pressure, confusion, and inconsistency. It was exhausting for our people and for our customers.
From Value Chains to Service Design
With the introduction of a common value chain across our operation, we finally had a shared map of how value flowed through the organisation. It gave us a way to step back and see the whole picture, and to align around outcomes rather than activities. But while it helped us see the sequence, we still needed to improve how we delivered the experience. That’s where Service Orientation came in.
We didn’t need more energy. We needed a better design for how we delivered our service — not just what we delivered. This meant moving beyond tweaking workflows and instead reimagining the experience holistically.
Rooted in the principles of Service Design, Service Orientation encourages organisations to view operations not just as processes or functions, but as a coordinated experience - for those delivering it and those receiving it.
At the heart of the model is a deceptively simple distinction:
Front-stage is what the customer sees and experiences directly: interactions, interfaces, and touch-points.
Back-stage is everything that enables those experiences: systems, processes, data flows, governance, and support roles.
Where traditional operating models focus on functional accountability, Service Orientation asks a more strategic question: what is the outcome we’re trying to create, and how does each part of the organisation contribute to that experience?
The value of the framework lies in its ability to make the invisible visible. It reveals where delays, disconnects, or duplication behind the scenes create friction for customers. It helps shift the organisational lens from internal efficiency to external effectiveness.
Importantly, it doesn’t mean turning engineers or support teams into customer service agents. It means ensuring that what they do - and how they do it - connects clearly to the value the customer receives.
But Who Is the Customer in B2G?
The re-letting of a major contract gave us an opportunity. While progress had been made to improve service clarity through iterative change, this was a rare moment to step back and rebuild with purpose.
Working with Engine Service Design, we:
Defined the customer as the end user - those people actually experiencing the service, not just the contract owner;
Created a Service Delivery Model that clearly separated front-stage and back-stage activities; and
Re-examined how data, insight, roles, and relationships supported - or hindered - the outcomes we aimed to deliver.
We also introduced a simple metaphor that helped teams understand the model intuitively: coloured T-shirts. Rather than defining people by function - “I’m an engineer”, or “I’m in projects” - we talked about which part of the service ecosystem they supported: the Operations Centre, Service Delivery Centre, Data Centre, or Business Centre.
This shift mattered. It gave people permission to see themselves differently; to connect their technical excellence with the experience they helped shape. Suddenly, people didn’t just see their job. They could see their impact.
The Human Challenge and the Shift
Of course, not everyone welcomed this change straight away. In the early days, I often heard, “we already do that.” And, to an extent, they were right. There was real pride in the quality and rigour of delivery.
But the missing link was often how that excellence was experienced, and whether the effort it took to deliver it was sustainable or scalable.
The challenge wasn’t intent. It was perspective. Most people hadn’t had a reason to consider how their work felt from the customer’s side. It wasn’t that they didn’t care - it just hadn’t ever been part of the conversation.
When we framed the shift not as criticism, but as an opportunity: to make things easier, clearer, and more connected. We began to see change, especially when we celebrated the early adopters. Those individuals and teams who translated the model into better ways of working became beacons of what was possible.
We shared their stories and highlighted practical improvements. We made the change visible and credible by rooting it in people’s own experiences.
Gradually, momentum built. Not through mandates, but through trust. Not through abstract strategy, but through shared understanding.
And the conversation changed from “this is someone else’s job” to “how can I make this better?”
Elevating Service Orientation to Strategic Leadership
The true power of Service Orientation is that it goes far beyond improving service delivery. At an executive level, it becomes a blueprint for how a business can scale, grow, and perform more effectively.
By modularising the business, we were able to take capabilities already proven with existing customers and make them repeatable. Instead of redesigning from scratch for every new requirement, we could configure modules of service that were credible, tested, and trusted. That made it possible to extend to new customers with confidence; scaling not just our operations, but our reputation.
At the same time, Service Orientation helped us improve the gearing of the business. By separating front-stage experiences from back-stage processes, we could:
Streamline and automate back-stage operations;
Create consistency in how services were delivered across different programmes; and
Increase the volume of work we could take on without adding equivalent overhead.
This combination - modular design, scalable delivery, and efficient back-stage operations - turned Service Orientation into more than a framework for customer experience. It became a framework for growth. A way of aligning people, processes, and systems so the business could perform at a higher level while still delivering clarity and value for customers.
Where Structure Meets Intention
In my experience, most people want to deliver great service. They want to know they’ve done a good job and that their work made a difference. But to do that consistently across teams, systems, and moments, they need more than commitment. They need structure. Clarity. Purpose. Space.
Service Orientation helped us move from effort to design, from assumption to alignment, from individual excellence to collective impact.
And that made all the difference.
Closing Reflection
What would it look like if your organisation’s service was designed not around roles, but around the outcomes that matter?
👉 In the next article of this mini-series, I’ll explore the Business Model Canvas: a framework that distils strategy onto a single page and creates alignment across leadership teams.
