Design principles

All organisations have some design guidelines that are used to measure the quality of products and services. In general, such guidelines are based on six principles:

Valued      Innovative      Sustainable      Simple      Safe      Secure

The following describes each of these principles in terms of the attributes of services delivered (it can be applied to products or services). Even if your organisation or process does not adopt this approach, this list can be used to test design quality in almost any context.

Where a thing is built, or a change is implemented that does not satisfy these principles, then unless it is clearly recognised as a design compromise or temporary solution, it will represent some form of project risk. Update your RADIO and ignore it at your peril...

Valued
* Services must be designed from the stakeholders perspective
* Services should enable resource rationalisation and performance improvement
* Services should create and enable process flexibility
* Services should make business processes explicit and autonomous
* Services should be pervasive and support real-time business
* Services should enable transparency of all business costs
* Services should provide clear cost / benefit / process options
* Services must be based on a whole life-cycle cost approach
* Services must drive year-on-year unit cost reduction

Innovative
* Services should exploit the value of information as an asset
* Services must protect and exploit IPR and know-how
* Services should stimulate and support creativity and collaboration
* Services should enable information to be shared
* Services should recognise the critical role of the consumer in driving change
* Services must support the virtual extended enterprise

Sustainable
* Services should be easily maintainable, without disruption to operation.
* Service life-cycle environmental impact must be minimised
* Service total power consumption must decrease year-on-year
* Services should be based on re-usable components

Simple
* Services should be simple and intuitive to stakeholders
* Services should allow access to information through standard interfaces
* Services should be designed to minimise exposure to supplier strategies
* Services must be designed for upgrade and replacement
* Services should be designed for inter-operability
* Services must be built upon open standards
* Services should require minimal integration
* Services should be based on commodity components
* Services should be designed to control technical diversity
* Services must have little if any customisation
* Service complexity should be abstracted from infrastructure through virtualisation

Safe
* Services must be safe to operate and maintain
* Services must be safe to build and decommission
* Services should support and encourage safe behaviours

Secure
* Services must be secure by default
* Services should be sustainably sourced to minimise risk to supply
* Service change must have minimal business impact
* Services must support and enable regulatory and legal compliance
* Services must be manageable and designed for self-management