Co-Designing Farm Natural Capital Profiles To Empower Farmers in Their Natural Capital Journey

Challenge

The LLS Board had endorsed a new program to support farmers and land managers in natural capital profiling, with a high-level strategy approved in early October 2023. LLS had entered the start-up phase of establishing this program, focusing on aiding in natural capital management and integrating environmental markets with existing landholder activities. The LLS Natural Capital team had sought an experienced service design consultancy to support them in co-designing and building an on-farm natural capital profiling service. The resulting service was intended to benefit target farmers and land managers, providing an end-to-end service experience delivered by on-ground staff.

Approach

Employing a customer-centric approach to service design.

The project objectives included helping LLS deeply understand their customer's expectations and needs for the service and designing, testing, and validating a service prototype and outputs with customers and stakeholders.

To achieve these objectives, the following activities were undertaken:

• The project began with customer, market, staff and third-party stakeholder research to deeply understand needs and preferences and uncover key service requirements
• These findings informed the development of a self-service portal prototype and service output documents which were rapidly tested with customers and iterated upon
• A service blueprint, technical use cases and high-level delivery roadmap were developed to support the build and piloting of the service

Outcomes

A path forward for the piloting of the service.

The project resulted in a clear path forward for LLS to begin piloting the service:

• By identifying key considerations for the service's iteration based on customer and stakeholder findings and developing a roadmap of the next steps, the Natural Capital Strategic Coordination Team is now prepared to effectively plan for the service's piloting with customers
• By developing a service blueprint, technical use cases, prototypes of the portal, and service output documents, LLS’ IT and Digital Comms teams are prepared to build and develop the service infrastructure
• By bringing LLS staff along the service design journey, teams are now familiar with the service and empowered to deliver the pilot to customers