About
How we work
Walk in customers shoes
How does it look and feel to be a customer of your organisation? What are their experiences of your services?
Putting ourselves in their shoes to better understand what they experience and value is the start of every project.
Take a fresh viewpoint
Like a team of curious mechanics, we then take apart the nuts and bolts of complex services to look at the moving parts under the hood.
How they fit together. What’s connected and what isn’t. Where we find friction.
Shape the future
These new, meaningful insights enable us to review your organisation’s structure, culture and policies.
We help you to design new ways of working to shape future services together.
Our approach
Shifting your mindset
After understanding the way you work and the challenges you face, we’ll equip you with the mindset, skills and tools to think differently to fulfil your potential.
Learning together
We work with you to reflect on and learn from what works and what doesn’t. We’ll discover and share together, working iteratively and in the open.
Leaving a lasting impact
Once you adopt the design thinking approach, you’ll see new, exciting possibilities to tackle problems in your services, organisations and the world around you.
Our Team
Jo Carter
Jo Carter
Founder
Jo runs ServiceWorks. She’s an Accredited Service Design Master and experienced consultant, trainer, facilitator and coach.
“I love to see other people grow and develop beyond what they think is possible. I also love service design and the benefits it can bring to people who use services - especially in government, social housing and charities.”
Combining these two great passions. She’s developed learning and development programmes and courses to help others adopt the principles and practice of service design in their work. She has a warm, friendly facilitation style and a particular dislike for jargon!
Outside the office, when Jo’s not exploring with her family in their campervan or drumming with Samba Galez, she’s organising and attending events and meetups with GovCamp Cymru, Service Design Cardiff, Liberating Structures, IAF Facilitators, and Keep Penylan Tidy.
Ffion Jones
Collaboration Partner
Passionate about helping teams get better at being teams, Ffion’s career in Learning and Development has seen her work with and support a variety of people and projects. In a world moving at lightning speed, she helps teams become flexible, adaptable, and collaborative to deliver excellent work and fresh ideas.
Working across industries like financial services and engineering, Ffion established her consultancy, Beautiful Minds to provide workshops, coaching, psychological safety, digital teamwork and collaboration in bid teams to improve innovation and help them rediscover the joy in what they do. A citizen of the UK and Australia, Ffion enjoys spending her time travelling, reading and trying new and interesting things with her children – especially in and around the water.
Leah Lockhart
Service Design Partner
With experience in digital engagement, online workshop design and facilitation, and user research, Leah works across UK public services. In her practice, Leah borrows from co-production, co-design and participatory action research. She has a special interest in understanding how design can be used to dismantle structural inequalities.
Leah has worked with local government, NHS bodies, non-departmental government bodies, charities and community based groups. Her project portfolio ranges from organising small citizen assemblies to guiding teams in large organisations to develop ethical user research approaches.
A native of Arizona, USA, Leah has lived in the UK since 2001. When she’s not in the office, Leah is out exploring with her dog, co-organising the Scottish node of the Design Justice Network and collaborating in various communities of practice.
Michelle Rose-Innes
Service Design Partner
Michelle has run a successful design agency for 15 years, delivering branding and digital marketing to clients across the UK. More recently, she moved beyond marketing to consult startups and well-established organisations on strategy to help them adopt a user-centred approach to their work. She also coaches on the Accelerated Growth Program, manages design projects, and consults on UX and service design projects.
In her free time, you can often find Michelle taking in the fresh sea air of the Pembrokeshire coast or exercising, regularly swapping between her yoga mat, walking boots and paddle board.
Sharon Dale
Sharon is an experienced trainer, facilitator and coach, primarily working with the public sector and public sector adjacent organisations. She is a certified performance coach (moefoundation.com) and specialises in running programmes with people in organisations that want to up their game when it comes to agile.
While working for the Government Digital Service Sharon was responsible for a 6 day learning and development programme for service owners with mixed cohorts from various central government organisations. The programme was designed to develop individuals who had been promoted from an operations or project management background into a digital/product/agile environment. It was designed for the people leading teams, rather than turning the participants into agile practitioners.
Sharon has worked with service teams training and coaching both individuals and teams to create the conditions for them to change their ways of working.
Sarah Prag
Digital & Service Design Partner
Sarah’s belief in design thinking comes from years of experience on the front line of digital product and service delivery. From bringing eBay to the UK, to introducing podcasting at the BBC, to leading the development and launch of GOV.UK, Sarah has spent two decades delivering innovative digital services and helping organisations to change the way things are done.
As a consultant and coach Sarah is focused on helping teams to apply the mindset and approaches of service design and delivery to broader public service challenges.
Away from her own work Sarah also helps run her husband’s pottery school in North Somerset so can often be found up to her elbows in clay or making other kinds of creative mess with her daughter.
Data Orchard CIC
Data and Evaluation Partner
Data Orchard CIC is a social enterprise with a mission to make the world a better place socially, economically and environmentally. It does this by helping organisations understand and improve how they work with data.
The team at Data Orchard honestly believe that data is amazing and that everyone can and should be confident in using it to manage and improve their services. They share our values but with more of a focus on how you can make sure that data and evidence are used most effectively in your service and in your organisation.
They offer training, workshops and consultancy for organisations that want to become data savvy and their work is often complementary to design thinking projects. We’ve worked with them on a whole range of projects across Wales.
Perago
Digital transformation partner
Perago are our digital transformation partners who look beyond the tech - because it’s people that transform; not the technology!
They understand how people, processes and technology are intertwined and interdependent and offer end-to-end business transformation services. They are passionate about giving a better deal to the citizens of Wales.
Often, organisations which are interested in our services, are also interested in what Perago can offer.
