How to Redesign Service Delivery in Large Organizations? Proven Strategies for Sustainable Success

How to Deliver and Lead Successful Services, Sustainably? Service Organization Transformation: Actionable Steps for End-to-End Service Excellence in 2025

Discover effective strategies for transforming service delivery in large organizations. Learn how to define services from the user’s perspective, measure real outcomes, and organize teams for sustainable success. Actionable insights for leaders seeking to drive meaningful improvement and outperform competitors.

Ready to elevate your organization’s service delivery? Dive into the full article for practical frameworks, expert tips, and real-world examples that will help you lead successful, user-centered service transformations—start optimizing your service strategy today!

Genres

Productivity, Management, Leadership, Corporate Culture, Career Success

Introduction: Tackle service design at scale.

The Service Organization (2023) argues that as all organizations evolve into service providers, their traditional structures and practices prevent successful end-to-end service delivery in our rapidly changing digital landscape. This guide offers practical, accessible tools for transforming underlying organizational conditions rather than simply modernizing individual services.

Looking to redesign services across a sprawling organization? You’ll soon notice that while there’s plenty of advice for single services, guidance for places with dozens of teams running hundreds of services is surprisingly scarce. Many experts simply consider it too challenging to tackle. That makes sense – most organizational services aren’t deliberately designed but instead evolve naturally, reflecting the disconnected structure of the organization itself.

But don’t worry – it is possible to optimize services at this scale! The key? It takes a mix of scaffolding, problem-solving, and addressing the organization’s underlying conditions – not just the services themselves. This summary shows you exactly how to approach this tough but doable challenge.

Your organization is a service provider

Let’s talk about something that affects virtually every large organization today: service delivery. But what exactly is a service? Simply put, services help us accomplish things – whether that’s commuting to work or paying the correct amount of tax.

Not sure whether your organization provides a service? Let’s clear that up: it almost certainly does. And if it doesn’t yet, it will soon. Every industry is transforming into a service industry. But here’s the challenge: many large, established organizations weren’t built to deliver seamless services from beginning to end.

Redesigning these organizations to support smooth service delivery? It’s tough. There are countless moving parts to coordinate. But you know what’s even harder? Delivering services poorly. This frustrates both users and employees alike. Imagine an airline whose internal booking system becomes more complicated with each upgrade rather than simpler, causing flight attendants to struggle with meal service because catering and reservation systems don’t communicate properly. Unlike redesigning a simple app, improving airline services requires coordinating dozens of interconnected systems across multiple departments.

So how do you begin to streamline services? First, define your organization by the services it provides – not by its internal structure. Organizations often think in terms of departments and functions, but users think in terms of outcomes. A bank provides mortgages, but customers want to buy homes – which is why NatWest now bundles other home-buying steps into their mortgage service.

Remember: define a service in terms of an outcome – buying a house, working in a different country, or getting trash collected. A complete service is end-to-end, and includes all interactions among the user, the provider, and other actors involved.

Thinking of your organization as a service provider is the first step to delivering better services.

Define services from the outside in

Delivering good services comes down to perspective. Instead of looking at things from the inside out, try defining your service from the outside in. This means looking at your services through your users’ eyes, not your organizational chart.

Reorient to this outside-in view by thinking in stages, not processes. Processes are the steps that occur within your organization. Stages represent meaningful outcomes that need to happen for progress to take place. Consider someone applying for a small business loan. The user’s first stage isn’t “Fill out an application form,” it’s “I realize I need funding.” By understanding all the stages in a service’s lifetime, you can design services that meet users where they actually are, not just where your organization enters the picture.

This outside-in perspective naturally leads to mapping the user’s context. If you’re providing wedding flowers, for instance, you’re actually part of a much larger “getting married” service that includes venue selection, photography, and catering. Understanding this broader picture helps you identify how your service fits into your customers’ lives and reveals opportunities for creating more seamless connections that your competitors might miss.

As you redesign your approach, take time to understand what’s difficult for service provision from multiple angles. A healthcare system, for example, might struggle operationally with appointment scheduling because its patient management software doesn’t integrate with practitioners’ calendars. Meanwhile, management might be focusing on efficiency metrics that don’t actually reflect patient satisfaction. Recognizing these disconnects is crucial for meaningful improvement.

Finally, clearly define what a good service looks like in concrete terms. For a government visa application process, this means transparent timelines, clear instructions, reasonable processing times, and accessible support when issues arise – all elements that matter deeply to users, but might not be reflected in traditional organizational metrics.

The path to exceptional service delivery starts with this consistent outside-in perspective. It’s all about seeing your organization as your users do and designing around their experience– not simply to suit your internal structure.

Track real metrics

Your organization thinks it’s tracking key metrics. But is it really? Typically, organizational reporting focuses on separate functions rather than the whole picture. Think of a restaurant where the kitchen tracks food preparation speed and servers count tables served – but nobody measures whether customers enjoy their meals or return.

What’s missing is a shared understanding of service outcomes. To define these, you need to get crystal clear on the three connected levels of service: policy intent, service, and service outcome. In public health, for example, the policy intent might be protecting the public from disease spread. The service is providing financial support for staying home during a pandemic. And the service outcome is delivering eligible payments in the right timeframe.

With these outcomes defined, you can set meaningful indicators for what “good” looks like across the entire service journey. When tracking metrics, you can now consider how well the service achieves its intent, how often the right outcome is achieved, and what time, effort, risks, and costs are involved.

What to track next? Pain points. Through user research, identify why people experience frustration, then reimagine excellence. If users abandon your insurance claim form because it’s confusing, envision a redesigned process in which forms adapt to specific situations and provide clear guidance at each step.

Beyond basic satisfaction metrics, measure expectations and confidence, too. Someone might be “satisfied” with your government permit process simply because they expected it to be terrible. By capturing their expectations beforehand and confidence afterward, you gain much deeper insights into the true user experience.

As you improve services, avoid optimizing what shouldn’t exist at all. Many organizations fine-tune processes that could be eliminated entirely with better service design. For example, a bank might perfect its paper application processing only to realize later that the entire process could be replaced with a simple online form.

When you shift your reporting paradigm to focus on real metrics, you’ll be easily able to see where your service works, and where it doesn’t.

Set a service strategy

Organizational strategy sets the tone and shapes the outcomes for everything your organization does. So what’s your organization’s strategy on service?

A clear service strategy should comprise four key parts that work together to drive improvement across large, complex operations.

The first key part is stating the job of a service clearly. A well-articulated service outcome, like “a tax system that helps and encourages the right people to pay the right tax,” sets the direction of travel for your entire organization. This clarity creates a sort of North Star by which teams can navigate, even when day-to-day challenges arise.

The second component is to set driving principles to unify efforts. In large organizations, competing priorities and friction between departments are inevitable. Driving principles help cut through this complexity. A driving principle might be a single imperative that overrides other considerations when necessary – like “Pay people now so they stay home during a pandemic.” Or it might be one ambitious goal, such as, “Within five years, reduce time to issue work permits from three weeks to two days.” These principles become decision-making tools that help resolve conflicts and prioritize resources.

Your third priority is to choose an approach for success that optimizes confidence. The default in many organizations seems to be doing everything all at once in parallel – a recipe for confusion and overwhelm. Instead, be strategic and methodical. Consider approaches like joining up delivery, which highlights gaps, overlaps, and risks otherwise not apparent. Or start small across the whole service: Identify the absolute bare minimum needed to create a basic iteration, and bring all teams on board to provide it. Begin with a small offering for perhaps 10 to 100 users, then scale later after capturing lessons.

Finally, create a narrative that tells the story of your strategy and its rationale. This needs to be communicated clearly across the organization. Think along these lines: “We’re starting with making the service work for 100 users, then we’ll expand to 10,000. This means we won’t be looking at scaling technology at all this year.”

With these four elements in place, your service strategy becomes more than a document – it becomes a powerful tool for aligning teams and driving meaningful improvement.

Organize teams around services

The game-changer for large organizations? Positioning your teams around services. Too often, we see one team working on a single component of a service while barely talking to the folks handling other aspects of delivery. The result? A disjointed experience that frustrates everyone.

It’s simply not realistic to have one team handle a service end-to-end – complex services involve frontline and behind-the-scenes work, multiple channels, and various technologies. But you can create powerful synergies by putting services at the heart of your team structure.

In a service-oriented organization, you’ll need several complementary team types working in harmony. Service teams, sometimes called product or delivery teams, focus on tangible improvements that users can actually experience. When they hit roadblocks, depth teams step in – these specialists tackle thorny problems that regular teams don’t have the bandwidth to solve, like complex user research challenges or technical architecture decisions.

Supporting these efforts, common capability teams develop the building blocks that make services consistent across your organization – think shared payment systems or identity verification. Enabling teams plays a crucial role too, removing obstacles and creating conditions for success, whether that’s streamlining procurement or navigating governance hurdles.

Tying everything together, coordinating teams serve as the connective tissue that helps everyone see the bigger picture, while operational teams maintain day-to-day quality and provide critical feedback for improvement.

The magic happens when these diverse teams learn to work together effectively. Create clear principles to set expectations – like “Hands-on design and delivery rather than hands-off consulting” or “Emphasize creating and implementing rather than just thinking or planning.” When teams understand both their specific role and how they fit into the broader landscape, they naturally make better decisions that create seamless experiences for users.

This isn’t just reorganizing boxes on an org chart – it’s fundamentally changing how your organization delivers value. And that makes all the difference.

Plan for change

“Failing to plan is planning to fail,” the saying goes. But when planning services, the key ingredient is actually a plan that can fail. Creating plans that change, adapt – and, yes, even fail – will help you deliver better services in ways that detailed plans with fixed deadlines simply can’t match.

Start with a “wrong plan” – a basic timeline working backward from your desired outcome without specific dates. Redesigning a government benefits service? Map out phases like understanding pain points, prototyping a simpler application process, testing with a small group, then scaling up. This gives teams direction while acknowledging that things will change as you learn – because they always do!

As your framework takes shape, figure out what you need to learn and how. A healthcare organization revamping patient scheduling needs to understand how staff and patients currently navigate appointments. What’s causing headaches? Which solutions might help? Create learning sprints in which teams shadow users, run interviews, and test early prototypes. Think of it as reconnaissance before the main mission.

While learning, hunt for obstacles before they find you. A bank modernizing loan applications should identify security requirements, system integration challenges, and compliance needs up-front. This early obstacle mapping lets you design around constraints rather than stumbling over them mid-implementation – saving both sanity and resources.

Now you can iterate toward an operating model by starting small and using real evidence. A telecom company revamping customer support might begin with one team handling just one common issue using new approaches. This mini-lab lets you see what actually works before rolling changes across the organization. Real results beat theoretical assumptions every time.

Throughout this journey, involve the people who’ll operate the service daily. When an airline redesigns check-in, the ground staff should help design workflows, test technology, and provide real-world feedback. Their frontline insights ensure your brilliant ideas actually work when the rubber meets the road.

This adaptable approach creates continuous improvement rather than one-shot transformations that quickly become outdated.

Conclusion

The main takeaway of this summary to Service Organizations by Kate Tarling is that improving service delivery in large organizations requires defining services from the user’s perspective, measuring real outcomes, and structuring teams around services rather than departments. Success depends on creating adaptive plans that evolve as you learn, establishing clear principles to resolve competing priorities, and fostering collaboration between specialized teams that understand both their specific role and the broader service landscape.