In the seconds section of the review, you will work collaboratively with your students. As a programme leader or director, you have three essential pre-requisites to apply this service design method really well:
1.Access – you have access to your students, your colleagues and a lot of information
2.Authority – you have the ability to apply your leadership and incorporate this review method to your practice, show benefits and implement changes
3.Time – you are able to carve out time in your students’ timetable and get them all together. Your time is very precious so investing this time will ultimately reduce reactive and firefighting timewasting activity later.
The method builds on engagement of the full cohort that you have on the programme. If this is not achievable, please, try to engage as many students as you can without focusing on student representative only. If you engage a smaller subgroup, be mindful of voices that have not been heard and verify whether the information collected is representative. You can do this by asking the students to do a presentation for the full cohort and collect some feedback.
The three stages described below form three parts of a workshop that is designed to be delivered in one go as a full day or half day event depending on the size of the class. The time is needed for this activity and trying to rush it or shorten to one hour will not work for this method.
Duration: 4-5 hours depending on the size of your cohort (plus breaks)
Venue: Flat space with movable furniture where students can work in groups of 4 and move around easily
Materials: paper (A3 card), large roll of paper or flipchart paper, marker pens (variety of colours), black pens, photos of students cut out from old prospectuses or magazines, tape, masking tape to put personas on the walls, postits
Optional:emoji and other fun stickers
And most importantly: free food (they are students after all) to keep the energy levels up – snacks and drinks
And one more: invite your programme team to join you, service design is a team sport.
Each section of the workshop will be described in the stages below. When you are designing the workshop, split it into these three sections and incorporate breaks between.