Business design – Create and share a service offering deck, it’ll keep your team aligned

I finished my last article by raising the question of how you could drive a standard set of service offerings across a team (see this article for reference!). In this article I’m going to discuss an initiative I’ve seen work time and again, defining a team’s services. A service offering deck brings alignment and understanding within a team, but also creates a great way to showcase to other teams what you deliver to the organization, what value the team brings.

What is a service offering deck?

Let’s start simply, what is a Service Offering deck? It’s a simple deck, that describes what services your team provides. Think about the team you are in now, the activities you all perform are aimed at delivering specific outcomes. You operate within certain tolerances and have a remit to perform specific activities. That’s what makes you a team of business analysts, finance controllers or HR representatives.

A service offering deck is a simple deck that articulates those activities in a way that people within the team, and outside of the team can understand. It’s a value statement on why you exist, and what value you can provide to the wider organization.

What are the real-world benefits of having this in a team?

At this point you might be thinking, isn’t that obvious to the people in a team, what they are all doing there? But you’d be amazed how often this isn’t the case. When I pose the question ‘What does this team do’ during product positioning or business discovery conversations, I’m often met with confusion or misalignment across the team.

At that point its pretty obvious that this kind of asset doesn’t exist within the team. Which also means that the journey to define it has not taken place. The conversation and collaboration about what the team does, what their shared processes are, and what the expected outcomes are, all hasn’t happened. Its this factor that often results in a team that is pointing in many directions, with individuals experiencing confusion about how and what they do.

Without having lived through that process, how can you possible expect your team to be aligned to the same vision? Consider as well that you might be adding new members to an existing team, likely remotely now due to recent events, and you’ve just significantly increased the complexity of successfully onboarding them. The success of onboarding new colleagues into a team becomes a lottery, solely based on who you happen to pair them up with, so their experience is based entirely on one individuals point of view.

Who are the Audiences?

Internal

The internal audience is the team the service offerings belong to. The owners and deliverers of the services. Key benefits of having and using this deck to the team who actual perform the services are:

A legitimate reason to collaborate, create and review what they currently do, and discuss the approach each member has, to doing it.

It gives them an asset that they can then share out easily to other teams to explain why they exist, and why the other teams should use them.

It also does the inverse, it nicely ring fences off any ‘additional’ services that the team does not perform. If its not IN the service offering deck, we don’t do it. Extremely helpful if you’re a team that is often abused because of capacity issues elsewhere or being knowledgeable.

It keeps a team pointing in the same direction, with common understanding across the length of time it’s in use for. For example, you might create it at the beginning of the year, and refresh it every 6 months, but in the meantime, it creates a backbone document that people can refer to across the year.

External

By external, I mean other teams and stakeholders, so parts of the organization that may call on the team to perform services in collaboration with, or for them.

It gives visibility to these teams and individuals of what the team does, and as above, does not do.

It describes what is needed in each service to succeed, if there are inputs and outputs etc.

It sets the expectations on how to engage with the team, and how long a service might take to deliver for them

What does good look like?

There are a few factors that make your service offering deck a ‘good’ one.

Keep it simple. Doesn’t use knowledge that only people within your team understand. It’s supposed to be something that explains what the team does. No one will appreciate being confused by it!

Keep it short. Its doesn’t need to be War and Peace. It shouldn’t be so long as to require significant explanation.

Define it, and schedule refreshes, such as every six months or so. It’s a living document, and may well change based on organizational changes, team changes or just common understanding. No team I’ve ever worked with has had zero business change across a year affecting them, so keep it up to date.

Lastly, let’s look at an example

Below is an example of a service offering slide. When working with customers, I’ve defined templates for this sort of activity. They typically include aspects such as:

Who performs each service? Sometimes irrelevant, if everyone in a team has the same role, but could be valid if there are many roles in a team, or different seniorities in the team.

- How long it takes to deliver the service, within a timeframe. Extremely handy for engaging with people who plan projects.

What inputs a service needs to succeed. If a team exists within a chain of events, there’s likely to be some inputs they are relying on.

What outputs does the service deliver? Always good to tell colleagues what you’re delivering will look like, so that there’s no surprises later. Particularly as above, if you are delivering as part of a chain, the next link in that chain needs to be clear on what they will receive.

What are the success criteria of the service? You may need to agree this with the teams around you, so it’s a good opportunity to collaborate.

Here’s an example template, click to download it.

Click to download a 1 slide template for a service offering slide