Most organisations are now familiar with the phrase “do more with less”.
What’s less often discussed is how that’s actually achieved without burning people out, cutting the wrong things, or drifting slowly out of relevance.
Very often, the answer starts with a service review.
Start with the hard questions
When resources tighten, we can’t afford to treat all products and services as equally important. We have to ask some uncomfortable but necessary questions:
- What products and services should we provide?
- Which are most in demand?
- Which deliver the greatest return on investment?
- Which create the greatest value — financial or otherwise?
- Which would cause the most harm if we stopped doing them?
Ranking and prioritising services isn’t about abandoning purpose — it’s about ensuring that when capacity or funding becomes constrained, effort is directed where it matters most.
Prioritisation is only half the story
Once priorities are clear, the next question is:
Are our services actually working as well as they could?
Because the world doesn’t stand still:
- customer expectations change
- demand patterns shift
- costs rise
- technology evolves
Services that made sense five years ago may now be:
- more expensive than they need to be
- slower than customers expect
- misaligned with current needs
- delivering less value than assumed
That’s why effective organisations routinely review:
- service scope
- cost and effort
- performance measures
- efficiency and effectiveness
- customer experience
Not as a one-off exercise — but as an ongoing discipline.
Driving the car vs building the engine
A useful metaphor here is the difference between driving a car and being a mechanic.
You don’t need to be a mechanic to drive well — and we wouldn’t expect every service owner to understand every system, process, or technical dependency under the hood.
But someone does need to:
- design the engine
- tune the performance
- service it regularly
- spot problems before they become failures
Occasionally, rare individuals combine both skill sets — like elite driver-engineers who can get extraordinary performance because they understand both machine and motion. But most organisations don’t (and shouldn’t) rely on that.
Instead, they need:
- drivers who run services day to day
- mechanics who understand process, systems, cost and improvement
Think pilot and co-pilot.
Or rally driver and navigator.
Business as usual and change — at the same time
One of the biggest myths in organisations is that improvement happens instead of delivery.
In reality, we have to:
- keep services running
- meet customer needs
- hit performance targets
while improving how those services work
That’s not something best done through old models where strategy is created in isolation and “handed over” for implementation somewhere else.
Modern service improvement works best when it is:
- collaborative
- iterative
- co-created with those delivering the service
- supported by specialists, mentors, or small task-focused teams
Different skills, working together.
Tools matter — but they’re not the point
Approaches such as:
- Lean
- Business Process Reengineering
- Six Sigma
- continuous improvement methods
are powerful — but only when applied thoughtfully.
They are tools, not ideologies. Their purpose is to help organisations:
- reduce waste
- improve flow
- improve quality
- respond faster to change
Not to impose complexity or strip services of humanity.
The risk of not reviewing services
When services aren’t reviewed and refreshed, organisations drift.
That drift might show up as:
- rising costs
- outdated processes
- procurement inefficiencies
- declining customer satisfaction
- services that no longer match demand
Just like a car that’s never serviced, things still run — until suddenly they don’t.
The simple truth
Business as usual does not mean repeating the same thing every year.
It means:
- continual maintenance
- small adjustments
- regular checks
- occasional upgrades
- and sometimes a rethink of what really matters
If your services aren’t evolving, it’s worth asking:
Has the world stopped changing — or have we stopped looking?
Service reviews aren’t about radical overhaul every year.
They’re about staying fit for purpose in a dynamic and challenging environment.