Lead Service Designer

Job summary

HM Land Registry's services form part of the critical national infrastructure, safeguarding land and property ownership valued at £8 trillion. This enables over £1 trillion worth of personal and commercial lending to be secured against property across England and Wales.

It is an exciting time for HM Land Registry as we continue a major transformation programme. HMLR's ambition is to become the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data.

We are looking for a Lead Service Designer who can help HMLR transform the way we serve our customers with Land Registration services that are customer focused, easy to use, accessible and work across multiple channels, devices, browsers and platforms.

As a Lead Service Designer, you will work on key strategic programmes and contribute across the full-service lifecycle of complex services. You will work as part of one or more agile, multidisciplinary teams designing new services or enhancing existing ones. You will be responsible for shaping seamless user experiences across both digital and offline channels, setting the direction for service design across a programme of work, ensuring joined up service thinking, consistency of experience and service design standards are met, and that our service design processes are being followed by all designers. You will lead and co-ordinate service design activity within your teams and strike a balance between hands-on service design practice and strategic decision making. You will move confidently between these roles and adapt your approach to meet the needs of different projects and stakeholders.

At practice level the work you will do with the Head of Design will inform and guide the practice strategy.

As a senior member of the design community, you will help drive design maturity across HM Land Registry by modelling best practice, communicating the value of user-centred design and championing the role of service design.

Check out the video below to find out what it is like working in our Transformation and Technology Directorate.

Job description

The role holder will have the below main duties:

• Lead and co-ordinate the service design activities in your multidisciplinary agile teams in your programme area to improve existing services and shape new ones that meet user needs and align with HM Land Registry’s policy objectives
• Partner with senior stakeholders and digital, data, and business leaders to identify opportunities across services and products, define complex problems through the lens of user needs and organisational priorities, and influence decision-making across your programme.
• Analyse and interpret user needs and business objectives across complex service areas to make expert decisions that balance the needs and outcomes of both parties
• Persuade senior stakeholders to implement design concepts and solutions that help re-imagine how services can be delivered end-to-end and from front to back
• Facilitate problem-framing, mapping, and service concept development workshops with multidisciplinary teams, senior project stakeholders, and users to ensure shared understanding and alignment on service improvements and build consensus around a design approach
• Lead and promote our design system and related Service design patterns; develop and maintain service design standards ensuring patterns and components are consistent, accessible, and easy to use across our digital products and services
• Work with your wider project team to ensure that services meet the digital service standard, establishing user-centred ways of working and coordinating and leading in service assessments as necessary to provide service design evidence to support the relevant points
• Present and deliver your/teams work, whether that is within your agile team, with the design community of practice that you will be part of, or outside of the organisation
• Mentor other service designers, contributing to their growth and development through providing feedback on their work, guidance, coaching and constructive challenge
• Collaborate with other service designers across government to identify and design scalable, cross-government design patterns and standards

Person specification

Essential technical criteria:

• Creating a strategy to deliver usable, consistent and accessible end to end services consistently across programmes of work
• Understanding senior stakeholder needs, and using design to inform and persuade these audiences
• Creation of service design artefacts, selecting the right tool and fidelity given the context of your work, for example, paper sketching, creating service prototypes, blueprints, experience and user journey maps and problem statements

Essential experience criteria:

• A strong grounding and experience in end-to-end service design, from discovery to final delivery
• Experience in a lead or strategic design role, leading other designers at organizational level, and making tactical, pragmatic decisions to influence strategic goals and develop service design maturity across multiple programmes of work
• Experience of managing senior stakeholder expectations, setting direction and navigating difficult discussions within the team or with diverse senior stakeholders.
• Knowledge of what good end-to-end public services look like and how to direct designers to design in an inclusive, accessible way
• The ability to absorb large amounts of conflicting information and use it to produce simple designs, removing complexity from services and solving problems
• Experience of autonomously planning and managing backlogs of design work across an organisation, making key decisions that help the organisation meet planned objectives and strategy
• The ability to identify and understand high level organisational constraints and adjust how design work is approached across the programmes they lead service design in to work within those constraints
• Experience of collaborating and making strategic decisions at a project level with your lead counterparts in design adjacent practices such as user research, business analysis, software development, and product
• Experience of developing people within a design team, collaborating with team leads and head of practice to develop people, capabilities and skills to meet the practices strategic objectives

For more information about the role, please see the attached Job Description.

HMLR expect everyone to spend at least 60% of their working time in the office.

This role will require regular travel and overnight stays away from the home office.

You must ensure you have the appropriate right to work in the UK before applying.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Changing and Improving
• Leadership
• Making Effective Decisions

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• The Technical Criteria section (in no more than 250 words) should be used to demonstrate how you meet the following essential Technical Criteria.- Understanding senior stakeholder needs, and using design to inform and persuade these audiences

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £56,587, HM Land Registry contributes £16,393 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

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