An introduction to the Delivery phase

Introduction

Whether you call it “implementation”, “production”, “distribution” or simply “sales”, all offerings have one thing in common: they must be delivered to customers. And whether you’re working in the public or private sector, delivery is a complex endeavor. That’s because, while a product or service might be well-researched, well-designed, and well-tested, the moment it hits the real world, it starts to change.

Almost no business seeks to create value for only a short while. What’s why short term, go-to-market (GTM), launch, or minimum viable product (MVP) strategies are so limiting. These strategies are great to get your work into the world, but if your purpose is to launch and then deliver value for longer than a few fiscal quarters, the overall strategy has to be more evolved than just putting product on the shelves.

It needs to be systemized, measurable, iterable, and drive down costs over time while increasing overall value to the parent organization. And that requires a longer timeline than just launch and a few fiscal quarters. That’s why this Delivery Guide is broken down into four parts:

1. Training
2. Marketing
3. Launching
4. Sustaining

Training and marketing are crucial steps prior to launch. Then, once you launch, delivery becomes the job, and remains so for as long as your product, program, service, or system operates in the world. Iterate it, evolve it, update it, yes, but until you or another team sunsets it, delivering to the customer is the job.

The good news is that this is often a sweet spot for many people: we are natural sustainers! The issue is how to evolve sustainment without compromising the original intent of the offering while keeping it relevant. To accomplish both these requirements, we need to reach audiences most in need of our product, program, service, or system while at the same time being able to change delivery methodologies as situations evolve.

This Delivery guide provides one way to accomplish these requirements. Like all of the HCD Guides, this is only one way to solve for delivery, but if you follow it, you will get results. This is the shortest possible path we have been able to find for delivery based on extensive research and experience in delivering products, programs, services, and systems, but after you master this method, we welcome you to experiment with it and evolve your own systems.

Scoping Delivery

Like any multi-step process, successful delivery requires careful scoping. If you have the advantage of having researched your problem space through the Discovery and Design phases and are now looking at Delivery, that’s great! On the other hand, if you’ve taken on an existing product, program, service, or system, it’s your role to evaluate the current delivery system and evolve it to best meet the customer needs..

For either situation you find yourself in, scope a successful Delivery phase by solving three problems:

1. The Specificity Problem
2. The Hostess Problem
3. The Runway Problem

The Specificity problem

The specificity problem occurs when you are unclear about either the problem you’re trying to solve, or the audience you aim to serve.

Delivery requires that you get very detailed on the problem you’re trying to solve and who you’re trying to solve it for. You’ve got a specific solution to a specific problem [link to Design guide] for a specific audience [link to Target Audience section].

Know with iron-clad certainty that the product, program, service, or system you’ve designed or inherited solves a specific problem for a specific user. The public has been disappointed by government services so often that, unfortunately, they are primed to be disappointed again. The best thing you can do for public trust and for your own career is to design a great, human-centered product, program, service, or system that completely solves a problem for the public.

While the Specificity problem should have been mostly solved during Discovery and Design, the Training and Marketing sections of this Guide will help you get even tighter on these topics. By the end of this Guide, you should feel so clear regarding what problem your offering solves and for whom that you should be able to describe it in no more than a few sentences.

The Hostess problem¹

To solve the Hostess problem, you need to both understand the primary mindset in which your customers come to your door and be able to manage it effectively enough to move them into your solution funnel. Let’s break the public sector Hostess problem into two parts: Delight, the offerings to people approaching the offering enthusiastically, and Distress, offerings to people who never wanted to access such an offering in the first place.

Delight

Some public sector offerings are delightful: think National Parks, the Smithsonian Museums, and the Interstate Highway system (road trip, anyone?). People generally love these services; they love hiking and wildlife; they love art and science; they love zooming through our great national landscape. The Hostess Problem for people working in these parts of the public sector is how to manage audience enthusiasm so that the customers don’t lose that eagerness, but they don’t hurt themselves or damage the offering, either. The first touchpoint with the customer needs to reflect the customer’s enthusiasm but slow them down a little.

Distress

One of the unique attributes of the public sector is that a large percentage of our audience members come to our offerings in a state of distress, distrust, and/or downright fear. This situation exists in the private sector (no one comes to an emergency room at their best moment, after all), but what is further unique about the public sector is that we are specifically positioned to acknowledge that distress without needing to put a smiling face on it. We can and should be honest interlocutors with our customers, even when they’re in a distressed position.

Distressed public sector customers exist in many forms. They could fear for their lives, as when someone receiving atypical medical test results looks up statistics on health outcomes, or in fear of their livelihoods, such as a small business owner seeking to report income to the tax authorities, or fear for their futures, such as a PhD student combing the National Archives hoping to build their compelling, career-making argument.

The individuals in these situations did not voluntarily come to the government’s door, and they most likely want to leave as soon as possible. That means the first touchpoint with these customers needs to acknowledge their distress by getting them into the correct solution funnel as quickly as possible. While that obviously means designing the best solution possible for their situation, that also means clearly signaling what your offering will solve and what it will not. Nothing is more damaging to a customer relationship than getting someone into your sales funnel only to have them realize they don’t want or need the thing you’re offering part way through. At best they feel like you’ve wasted their time; at worst, they feel like you’ve purposefully deceived them. No solution is for “everyone”. Should a public solution be available to everyone? Yes. Is a public solution applicable to everyone? No, absolutely not. If you believe your offering is for “everyone”, you’re confusing availability with applicability [link to section in Marketing], and you will damage your customer relationships.

The Training and Marketing sections of this Guide should help you solve the Hostess problem.

The Runway problem

The last problem you must solve for effective launch is the Runway problem. To solve it, you need to know that you can deliver your solution consistently and to the level of quality expected by your audience for a reasonable amount of time. Since individuals’ relationship with the government is from prenatal to probate, a “reasonable amount of time” in the public sector is safely measured in years, not fiscal quarters or academic terms.

To determine your runway, start with the money. How long are you funded for? If the answer is “forever”, step back and consider how long you’re going to personally stick around this offering. Be honest. Do you plan to be in the job for one year? Two? Six or more? Any answer is fine, but that’s how long this specific offering has, because once you leave, the offering will change, no matter how good your sustainment plan [link to last section] is.

The Launching and Sustaining section of this Guide will help you solve the Runway problem. It might end up that you dial back some of your ambitions, or work with stakeholders to break down delivery of a large, ambitious idea into more defined pieces, but don’t be tempted to try to kick issues of sustainment down the road; you’ll run out of runway. And if you want success, the end of your runway is not something you want to be surprised by.

Wrap up

This Delivery Guide provides one way to successfully bring your carefully researched [link to discovery guide] and developed [link to design guide] offering to the public. This phase has four parts: training, marketing, launching, and sustaining, and should only last a few weeks at most. It is characterized by concrete, convergent thinking, where you solve specific, gnarly problems like identifying your target audience and mapping your sustainment plant. These answers set you up for successful delivery; without them, you risk all your work collapsing.

You’ve come a long way in the HCD process; now’s the time you finally get to raise the curtain. Get excited! The fun part is around the corner: when you get to finally see how your careful work functions in the real world.

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