Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT in the Digital Service Economy

by Jeff Sussna

Now that we’re moving from a product economy to a digital service economy, software is becoming critical for navigating our everyday lives. The quality of your service depends on how well it helps customers accomplish goals and satisfy needs. Service quality is not about designing capabilities, but about making—and keeping—promises to customers.

To help you improve customer satisfaction and create positive brand experiences, this pragmatic book introduces a transdisciplinary approach to digital service delivery. Designing a resilient service today requires a unified effort across front-office and back-office functions and technical and business perspectives. You’ll learn how make IT a full partner in the ongoing conversations you have with your customers.

Take a unique customer-centered approach to the entire service delivery lifecycleApply this perspective across development, operations, QA, design, project management, and marketingImplement a specific quality assurance methodology that unifies those disciplinesUse the methodology to achieve true resilience, not just stability

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Leadership

303 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 3, 2015

Reviews

[Denis Romanovsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me this book was like a proof of my thoughts - systems evolve basing on feedback; emergent behavior rules things; empathy is important for success; marketing, design, development and operations are like one tightly coupled system. What was new is a theory of promises - really interesting, relationship between systems through conversations, value co-creation and a new role of QA as a detector of gaps between promises and reality.

This book is very hard to read. It is repetitive a bit from time to time. Conclusions are a bit too abstract. But anyway this is a breath of fresh air. I would recommend this book to those who wants to build a more holistic understanding of modern stuff like service design, design thinking and their ties to development and operations.

[Ashkhan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Even though there are only 232 pages cover to cover, I found the book quite long-winded. It is about the nextgen IT organization. There are a lot underlying constructs and theories used to explain couple of basic steps.

Like
* teams should communicate better among themselves
* departments as well
* customers should be always the priority
* etc

These are commonsense practices wrapped into 232 pages.

I liked the introduction to the promise theory though. I looked for something more practical which this book isn't. At least not for me at the moment.

[Roger K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is required reading for anyone involved in IT work. Jeff Sussna brilliantly captures the essential shift of IT from a complicated system run and optimized by a central hierarchy of experts to a complex system that must continually evolve its design by learning and adaptation. Services must now be evaluated on more than whether they are stable:
- they must deliver customer outcomes
- they must be accessible when and where needed regardless of demand
- they must enable coherent customer journeys through accomplishing their work-to-be-done
- they must be able to continually adapt to changing customer needs

He makes a compelling argument that Quality Assurance must redefine its role to allow IT to meet its potential. QA is ideally positioned to help everyone involved in the delivery of IT services improve, yet can only do so by expanding its focus from identifying code defects to propagating feedback on service quality across the full lifecycle.

The master stroke comes from the advocacy for using Mark Burgess' Promise Theory as a unifying language for the various disciplines involved in IT to enable every component to evolve while still being able to coordinate. By thinking in the promises made to customers and to other service components, we can shift our thinking from meeting specifications to delivering value.

The book is well written and deep, with a lot of advanced thinking packed into less than 200 pages. I found myself making notes constantly. Read (and re-read) this book.

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a shame when a smart author with a decent knowledge writes about important topics in such a boring way.
I wasn't able to find something I don't agree with, but ... it was all written in a way that was constantly discouraging me from reading further. Why exactly? Maybe it was too theoretical and 'dry'? Maybe it's just writer's style? Can't tell for sure but there are far better books too read about modern IT.

I'm very sorry to rate it so low (like I've written above, I agree with author's way of thinkinh), but reading this book was just a painful experience ;/

[Nidhal Ben Tahar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Have you ever had a "Déjà lu"? When you're reading a passage and ask yourself "Haven't I read this before?". I had plenty of these uncanny sensations reading this book, because it's too repetitive.

What gets repeated is "build quality in", "empathy", and "conversational IT", etc. We all received advice like "be happy", "be confident", "don't be stressed", and it works right?

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book I wish I would've written! Excellent synthesis of agile, devops, systems thinking and service design/delivery. Must-read for anyone working in the digital economy.