Strategies and Tactics for Service Implementation

In the professional service design community, service implementation is often perceived as a challenge to service designers who are critiqued for having difficulties in following through with their work form concept design to implementation. This paper presents a conceptual framework for service implementation that builds upon and enhances the notion of implementation as a mind-set (rather than a phase) within which service designers operate already from the beginning of a service design project or -collaboration. Through a case study analysis of a service design project from a hospital context, this paper scrutinises the conceptual framework and identifies the characteristics of how a design team accommodated successful implementation of a service solution - a redesigned blood bank service. The analysis shows that the design team followed an emergent and exploratory implementation strategy. The conceptual framework helped grasp the complexity of how implementation was accommodated throughout the project period.