Abstract: At the University of Michigan Library, dozens of librarians and staff are engaged in a series of activities to reimagine the ways our organization designs and implements our services. Between 2016 and 2017, we collaborated with brightspot strategy to develop a service philosophy, framework, and principles to help us begin the process to transform our physical and digital spaces to better represent our expertise, collections, and tools, and to meet the evolving needs of our academic community today and tomorrow. As we look to transform our spaces to serve the needs of our research community, we are taking care to ensure that whatever form our buildings and web presence take, will follow the function and intent of our services. Our efforts in this work are collaborative and distributed in nature, diffusing the shift in design and evaluation across the organization. With it, we aim to facilitate organizational change that puts our users at the center of service design and delivery. It also fundamentally recognizes that our departments play a role in supporting the academic needs of our faculty, students, and staff at the University of Michigan. This work is structured by established approaches in design thinking and user-centered design. Multiple teams of librarians and staff are applying this approach to redesign services. Topics include consultation, digital scholarship, staff innovation, citation management, and developing a persona-based toolkit that any staff across our organization may use in efforts to design new or make improvements to existing services. While each team is using the same overall approach to its service design work, the application and outcomes are unique to each domain. Within four design cycles, each team engages in a retrospective to review the process, the impact of the work, and consider its potential effects on our organizational structures. Additionally, the service design efforts support our organization’s adoption of an assessment-driven mindset through embedding evaluation into our processes. Once the service design phase is complete, each team will generate a series of pilots or prototypes to test aspects of their designs in the context of our organization. In the Summer and Fall of 2018, teams will implement those pilots and prototypes, testing their ability to scale effectively or meet our programmatic and mission-based goals yielding a series of small-scale, but impactful activities or processes that will further diffuse the design-thinking approach throughout our organization. Each of these sets of activities will be assessed before moving onto future stages of the work. We will also evaluate how they help us enact our service philosophy, framework, and principles in the practice of our everyday work. Ultimately this work will yield a culture shift within our organization enabling us to embrace a user-centered, service-based approach to how we develop services, and how we expect to collaborate and con

1. Diffusing Organizational Change through Service
Design and Iterative Assessment
Emily Puckett Rodgers, Head of Library Environments
Rachel Vacek, Head of Design & Discovery
Meghan Sitar, Head of Connected Scholarship
University of Michigan
Library Assessment Conference, December 2018
http://bit.ly/sdtfassess18 @epuckett @meghansitar
@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

2. Hello!
Rachel Vacek
Head of Design
& Discovery
Library IT
Emily Puckett Rodgers
Head of Library
Environments
Operations
Meghan Sitar
Director of Connected
Scholarship
Learning & Teaching
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

3. Introduction & Purpose
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

4. ONGOING
ASSESSMENT
DEEP DIVES
PILOTS/
PROTOTYPES
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

5. Exploring Issues Analysis
Generating &
Exploring Ideas
Synthesis
1 to 2 semesters of work
Dive into issues from
diverse perspectives
against different time
considerations
Clarify what
is important
to who and why
Create and explore
alternatives from
different
perspectives
Define how to explore
implications of new
concepts and build
knowledge
Service Design Process
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

6. Design Methodology & Approach
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

7. User Experience and Engagement
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary
Image: Examples of user story from service design team work.

8. Service Design Teams
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

9. Deep Dives: Staff Innovation
Images: Examples of feedback and
coding from staff workshops
Manager and Staff Engagement
● What does “innovation” mean to
our organization?
● What could a culture of innovation
look like at U-M library?
● How does this impact the ways in
which we invest in our staff and
managers?
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

10. Pilots and Prototypes: Consultation
● Take portions of the service
blueprint and test in physical
settings.
○ Furniture configuration
○ Technology
○ Pedagogical context
Image: Photo of notes from initial
workshop to design space prototypes.
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

11. Pilots and Prototypes: Consultation
● Develop the triage and
tracking portion of
consultation
● Pilot with subject teams
● Explore new technologies
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

12. Stakeholder Engagement: Library Lifecycle
Image: Data from existing research coded in Dedoose.
● Existing library
research
● Campus reports
(enrollments)
● Library traffic
● Peer studies
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

13. Stakeholder Engagement: Library Lifecycle
Image: Identify wheel used to begin
interviews with campus users.
● 30 structured interviews
● Introduced based on
personal identities
● Coded against existing
research
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

14. Findings
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15. Team Experiences
CHALLENGES OPPORTUNITIES TAKEAWAYS
● Time commitment and
schedules
● Dedication to process
and outcome
● Workload management
● Disconnect to
leadership
● Visible application of
principles and methods
● More visible
commitment by
leadership
● Trust and
communication
● Shared team
experience
● Diffusion
up/down/across
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

16. Process Itself
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

17. Value & Practical Implications
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

18. Value to Organization
Service and Space Principles
Enhance the Platform for Discovery through foundational changes to physical
and digital space usability, access, and navigation.
Accelerate Partnerships in Scholarship by engaging with library users and
working with them throughout the service experience.
Deliver as One Library with a shared service philosophy and improved library
staff workspace.
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

19. Our Process and Next Steps
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary

20. Thank you!
libservicedesign@umich.edu
Check out the Library Lifecycle poster
this afternoon!
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@vacekrae @UMichLibrary