Capstone: mapping a service's value proposition

This final lesson brings the whole course together. You will follow a fictional organization as it maps the value proposition of a new service using every key concept: value and co-creation, organizations and roles, products and offerings, outcomes, outputs, costs and risks, utility and warranty, relationships and supply chains, experience and measurement. The aim is to show how the vocabulary works as a toolkit for thinking, not just a list of definitions to memorize for the exam. The lesson ends with a checklist you can use on any service and a short review of how the key concepts are tested.

The scenario

Lakeside Community Health is a fictional network of eight clinics serving about 120,000 patients. Patients book appointments by phone, and the call centre is overwhelmed: on Monday mornings the average wait is 25 minutes and about 18 % of callers hang up before reaching anyone. Lakeside plans an online booking service, with a mobile-friendly website, reminders by text and email, and a simple way to cancel or reschedule. The service will run on a software-as-a-service booking platform, integrated with the clinics' scheduling system, and will use a text-messaging provider for reminders.

The project sponsor has asked the service owner to produce a one-page value proposition map before the contract is signed. The map must show who is involved, what value each party expects, what Lakeside will offer, how success will be judged and what could go wrong.

Step 1: Stakeholders and roles

The first step is to identify the organizations involved and the roles they play.

Note that Lakeside is both a consumer (of the platform and messaging services) and a provider (of booking to patients), illustrating the service relationship model from lesson 8.

Step 2: The offering

Next, describe what patients will be offered, using the components from lesson 4.

• Access to resources: the online booking site and app features, available around the clock; patient accounts.
• Service actions: sending reminders, confirming bookings, helping patients by phone if they get stuck, rebooking when a clinician is unavailable.
• Goods: none for patients. (If Lakeside later offered tablets in clinic waiting rooms for self check-in, those would be goods owned by Lakeside, not given to patients.)

The product behind this offering is the configuration of the booking platform, integration with clinic schedules, messaging, the call centre and support processes, and the staff who run them. The service enables an outcome patients want, a confirmed appointment at a suitable time, without patients managing the costs and risks of scheduling systems.

Step 3: Outcomes and outputs

Lakeside separates outputs, which it controls, from the outcomes it hopes they will enable.

Step 4: Costs and risks

Lakeside then lists costs and risks removed and imposed, for patients and for the organization.

Step 5: Utility and warranty requirements

The team writes down what the service must do and how well it must do it.

• Utility: book, cancel and reschedule appointments for any clinic and clinician type offered online; send reminders; let patients see upcoming appointments; support family members booking for children or dependants.
• Warranty: availability of 99.9 % for booking; capacity for 3 times normal peak at flu-season launch; pages loading in under 3 seconds for 95 % of requests; strong security and privacy controls; recovery within 4 hours and no more than 15 minutes of data loss.

Step 6: Relationships and experience

Lakeside plans its relationships: a cooperative relationship with the booking vendor, with monthly service reviews and a shared roadmap; a basic relationship with the messaging provider; and regular reviews with clinic managers as customers. A responsibility matrix clarifies who handles what, for example the vendor fixes platform faults, Lakeside IT handles integration, clinics keep schedules accurate, and patients keep contact details up to date.

For experience, the team maps a patient journey for a parent booking a child's vaccination, testing it with real parents, older adults and people using screen readers. They keep phone booking for those who need it and plan to make the site meet WCAG accessibility guidelines from the start.

Step 7: Measures

Finally, Lakeside sets measures linked to value.

The team also writes one OKR for the first quarter after launch: Objective: "Make booking a clinic visit quick and stress-free for every patient." Key results: online share from 0 % to 30 %; Monday wait time from 25 to 12 minutes; booking completion rate at least 80 %.

A checklist for any service

• Who are the stakeholders, and who plays the customer, user and sponsor roles?
• What is the product, and what offering is presented to each consumer group: goods, access and service actions?
• What outputs will the provider produce, and what outcomes should they enable?
• Which costs and risks are removed from consumers, and which are imposed?
• What utility is needed, and what warranty: availability, capacity, security, continuity and performance?
• Which suppliers and partners are in the chain, and do their agreements support the promises made?
• What does the consumer journey look like, and where are the moments of truth?
• Which CSFs, KPIs and OKRs will show whether value is co-created, without creating watermelons?

How the key concepts are tested

At Foundation level, expect questions that ask you to recognize definitions (for example, which term means "a configuration of an organization's resources designed to offer value for a consumer"), to classify examples (is this an output or an outcome? goods, access or a service action? utility or warranty?) and to identify roles (customer, user or sponsor). Scenario-style questions, like the examples in this course, test whether you can apply the vocabulary. ITIL-101 covers the exam format, and ITIL-160 covers exam technique and practice papers. Remember to confirm which edition, ITIL 4 or ITIL (Version 5), your exam is based on.