When I was hired by NHS Digital in 2022, my title was “lead designer”. During the merger of NHS Digital into NHS England my official title changed to “lead service designer”. So far as I can tell, this was a simple administrative matter. “Lead designer” doesn’t exist in the list of possible jobs and someone (I have no idea who) chose between the available options, which were “lead interaction designer” and “lead service designer”. On balance I think they made the right choice. I spend a lot of time trying to improve how the diverse set of features, products, and services that compose the NHS App connect to the wider health system, so my new title seems logical enough. The questions that are most interesting to me about this are:
- does this change what other people perceive my role to be?
- what does my job title say about what the organisation cares about?
Names of professions don’t always help others know what you do, and ranks don’t always explain your position in the organisation. Last week, Ralph Hawkins (who I sort of work with), wrote:
After last week’s post on finding it weird when people are simply introduced by their grade and not their role, Sarah Fisher (Deputy Director for Screening services) had some feedback.
Her point (which I hope I’m summarising correctly) was that we all use shorthand for this kind of thing. Introducing myself as ‘service designer’ is probably no more helpful to someone with little digital experience than introducing someone as a G6 is to me.
To me, one of these options should be more useful than the other. Knowing what any given role does helps you work out what sort of things you might do together. Knowing only someone’s rank (a “G6” is a middle management rank in the UK civil service that is not specific to any particular activity) simply tells you how much power you have relative to that person. With the coming merger of NHS England into the Department for Health and Social Care, there is the possibility for serious culture clash on this topic. Ralph’s post was a good reminder that I need to start building bridges with future colleagues now.
Power relationships aside, the basic point Ralph was making above still stands: there are a lot of jobs with names that don’t mean much to outsiders or non-practitioners. When I’m introduced to someone who has a job title that I don’t understand or have never heard of, my first reaction is almost always “that’s interesting, tell me more!” Perhaps I’m curious about jobs and the way things work because I read a lot of David Macaulay books as a child, but I think there is tremendous use-value in learning that a job you’ve never heard of exists in your organisation. Working out what job titles are meant to represent is a good first step to knowing what the organisation’s priorities are.
People I speak with may not know what a service designer is, but I know that service design matters for the place I work. The NHS is massive, confusing, and complex. This is as true for the org chart as it is for the projects we work on. A function dedicated to understanding and then planning ways to improve how this messy situation is organised? There is no more important thing I can imagine doing here.