Service Designer/GDS service manual/standards £725 pd London/Manchest

Project overview

I am looking for a Senior Service Designer to work in Government or Local Government based in either London or Manchester-Hybrid working, and working towards GDS standards and must have GDS Service Manual experience.

Start date Beg December for 6 months

Interviews 2nd November

Rate £650-£725 p/d UMBRELLA

ROLE

The team has been tasked with working through Discovery to reimagine a service for all of the Capability offer from the skills in the framework to learning, talent development, resourcing support and workforce planning and Reward that will support our users (from professionals across central and local government to capability leads and HR professionals responsible for GDS professionals).

User groups include the data capability leads and government digital data professionals. This is a service for experts, thus level of experience is key here.

Currently, learning and talent apprenticeships are separate, this service is due to combine the two in a centralised service following a user journey.

Experience of the GDS service standard/manual is essential.

This could be within Government (Preferred) or outside of government, where they have worked on a service implementing the service standards and service manual rules to GDS level.

User journeys experience, as the current team does not have this would benefit from an advisory person on this. This should include how to map the journeys and user mapping based on user research.

You will have things like :

a.Service Manual

b.Service Standard

c.Agile mindset and ways of working, the team works in an agile way

d.The team is adopting a test and learn approach (sacrificial research), testing assumptions and moving on to others if needed. The successful candidate must remain open to what the research tells them and flexible to pivot where needed

e.Confident advocating for service design with senior stakeholders

f.Within the CVs, please provide additional detail on the candidates' experience of what happens when things go wrong and what they did for this

a.Government experience is going to be much more interesting for the team to bring that context and experience of service design within this environment and use of the GDS Service Standards

b.Private sector experience will be welcomed, provided that they have that GDS Service Standards experience

SOFT SKILLS

Ability to work well with others, this is a closeknit team with an agile mindset

Confident admitting mistakes and areas where pivoting is required

Curiosity Deadline 27/10/2026 at 10:00am.

• SmartSourcing are a Disability Confident Employer and we promote, celebrate and value diversity, we are committed to promoting equality and inclusion for all.

Project details

• Start: ASAP
• Duration: 6 months
• Location: london, UK, GB