The Problem: I was once brought into a major telecommunications project where Australia’s largest private telecommunications company was required, under a government mandate to hand over infrastructure and service delivery to a newly formed, government-run organization. The mandate was politically charged and not welcomed by the private company, creating significant resistance beneath the surface. For months, the handover had stalled, bogged down by complex legal documentation, vague ownership of responsibilities, and heightened emotional tensions between teams. Progress was frozen, trust was low, and no one could see a clear path forward.
What We Did: Together with another service designer, we stepped in to facilitate cross-functional co-creation sessions involving legal, operations, product, engineering, and compliance teams from both organizations. We applied service design tools with a customer-first lens, helping to neutralize organizational tensions and shift the focus toward shared goals. Using methods such as ecosystem mapping, service blueprints, and scenario planning, we surfaced hidden interdependencies, clarified roles, and made invisible processes visible. Most importantly, these tools became a vehicle for building a shared understanding of the end-to-end service landscape and fostering alignment across siloed teams.
Outcome and impact: The outcome was transformative: we uncovered operational gaps, highlighted hidden risks, and, most importantly, built trust and alignment across previously disconnected teams. Within weeks, both companies gained the confidence to sign off on the handover, something that had been stuck for half a year.
This case study is about moving the understanding of service design beyond neat visual artifacts, it was service design in action, grounded in core principles:
• Human-centered: involving real people, challenges, and motivations
• Collaborative: co-created with all stakeholders
• Iterative: refined through dialogue and testing
• Sequential: mapping the full service over time
• Holistic: looking at the ecosystem, not just isolated parts
By moving beyond documentation to creating value during the process, applying service design became a catalyst for clarity, confidence, and collective momentum. The true legacy of good service design.
