Digital

Iteration and continuous improvement – a Blockbuster story?

February 12, 2025 by Stewart Hamilton No Comments | Category Digital, Digital Public Services, Digital Scotland, Social Security Scotland, User-centred design

Guest blog from Jayne Purcell, Service Design Lead, Social Security Scotland.

Iteration and continuous improvement are words I hear a lot. What I have observed over the years is that iteration and continuous improvement usually means iterating and improving the current design, with not enough effort put into exploring the future and the vision to provide a direction of travel to the work.

Let’s add reducing budgets to the mix, and what you have is a reductionist model, where doing more with less has been the mantra and has equated to doing the same, but faster.

These two factors do not give us the environment or the headspace to be innovative. I worked for local authorities before working for Social Security Scotland and had many years of austerity and saw lots of local authorities manage the cuts via a reductionist model and iterating on the current design. I’m not saying that is why local authorities are struggling but it is a significant factor. It’s hard to change a historic design, it’s a big ship to turn around.

Let me expand historic design. Folks in the User Centred Design team have heard me say: a horse will only go as fast as the design of a horse. New saddle, polish the hooves, diet, training will improve performance. However, it is still fundamentally a horse and has a maximum performance relative to its design. You will iterate to the point of plateau. Beyond the plateau you enter the realms of high effort, minimal impact. At this point you have missed the sweet spot where you should have been iterating towards a new design e.g. for this analogy let’s say a car.

So what?

To meet our budget challenges, a proportion of our iterations and continuous improvements need to be future informed, working towards a future vision, purposeful design with meaningful iterations and improvement towards that vision/ new design. If we look at Social Security Scotland in relation to local authorities, it’s new. We don’t have the level of historic design to deconstruct, we can maximise on that sweet spot of designing for the future.

The User Centred Design Team at Social Security Scotland has articulated a future design. A design where our benefits are more aligned, we manage demand based on the levels of support to access our service and the right levels of skills and knowledge to make a decision.

Any organisation should have the balance of keeping the lights on, while designing for the future otherwise like Blockbuster you miss the future informed iteration and go bust.

As an organisation, we need to ask ourselves, are we clear which iterations and continuous improvement activities are working on the current design or pointed to the future design? Do we have the right balance or are we Blockbuster? Email us at: usercentreddesign@socialsecurity.gov.scot to get in touch.

Tags: digital, digital public services, scottish government, Social Security Scotland, user centred design

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