Senior Service Designer

On behalf of DWP we are looking for a Senior Service Designer for a 6 month (Inside IR35) contract. Hybrid working with 3 days per week in Leeds.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is responsible for welfare, pensions, and child maintenance policy. As the UK's biggest public service department, it administers the State Pension and a range of working age, disability and ill health benefits to around 20 million claimants and customers. As such, we operate on a scale that is almost unmatched anywhere in Europe and most people in Britain come into contact with us at some point in their lives.

Working with DWP, you will be helping us to drive our priorities to:

* Help people to move into work and support those already in work to progress, with the aim of increasing overall workforce participation

* Help people to plan and save for later life, while providing a safety net for those who need it now

* Provide effective, efficient, and innovative services to the millions of claimants who rely on us every day, including the most vulnerable in society

* Improve experience of our services while maximising value for money for the taxpayer.

As a Senior Service Designer you are an experienced practitioner. You will have experience in driving awareness of service performance and improvement needs which have resulted in successful service outcomes. You understand user needs and business or policy goals and are able to visualise whole services, both end to end and front to back, across business areas or departments in order to reduce or remove issues and problems. You will be able to lead a small team of service designers or work with senior stakeholders to establish service design methods, leading communication with stakeholders, leading workshops and using design patterns to support strategy and decision making across their team or business area. You are able to define good practice and make sure that useful guidance, tools and patterns are available across services and teams to solve recurring problems for users. You will support the service design community by organising or taking part in meet-ups to share work openly.

As a Senior Service Designer your main responsibilities will be to:

* Understand user needs and design services that meet them and collaborate with multidisciplinary teams to understand user behaviour and feedback

* Demonstrate good working knowledge of service design in practice

* Analyse research findings, data, insight gathering, critical thinking and concept generation

* Have a strong grasp of qualitative and quantitative research methods to service user needs and work with researchers to conduct these studies

* Lead workshops to drive actionable outcomes

* Align and support the communication with product owners and policy colleagues to define the customer journey and articulate the vision for products and services

* Understand as-is service design and identify improvement opportunities

* Analyse pain points within services and build design solutions that fulfil user needs and business outcomes

* Use prototyping methods to communicate ideas and concepts with real users to encourage collaboration and iterative processes

Essential:

* Demonstratable Service Design experience.

* Experience of implementing best practice service design practices.

* Ability to create high quality service design deliverables, including personas, experience maps, insights packs, user flow maps, and service blueprints.

* Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.

Please be aware that this role can only be worked within the UK and not Overseas.

Disability Confident

As a member of the Disability Confident Scheme, DWP guarantees to interview all candidates who have a disability and who meet all the essential criteria for the vacancy. In cases where we have a high volume of candidates who have a disability who meet all the essential criteria, we will interview the best candidates from within that group. This scheme encourages candidates with a disability and/or neurodivergence to apply. In exceptional circumstances, we may also need to apply the desirable criteria in our shortlisting process which may include holding active security clearance.

Armed Forces Covenant

DWP guarantees to interview veterans or spouses / partners of military personnel who meet all the essential criteria for the vacancy. In cases where we have a high volume of ex-military candidates / military spouses or partners, who meet all of the essential criteria, we will interview the best candidates from within that group. In exceptional circumstances, we may also need to apply the desirable criteria in our shortlisting process which may include holding active security clearance.

In applying for this role, you acknowledge the following "this role falls in scope of the Off Payroll Working in the Public Sector legislation. Any rates of payment quoted will reflect the gross rate per day for the assignment and will be subject to appropriate taxes and statutory costs. As such the payment to the intermediary and your income resulting from this contract will be different".