Improving the transition from policy to delivery with service patterns
Creating service specifications from patterns will ensure there is a shared understanding of the scope, flow and required functions of the service
What are service patterns and why are they having a moment in the spotlight in government?
‘Service patterns’ are reusable building blocks that help teams to design services end-to-end and front-to-back, in a coherent and consistent way, making them easier to deliver and use. They are created by analysing existing services and abstracting the common steps and elements that make up those services into building blocks that others can use as a starting point for designing new services.
Given the ongoing emphasis on departments finding operational efficiencies, it’s no surprise service patterns are in the spotlight. They are definitely having something of a moment within service design communities across government in the UK. And with the aim of taking this a step further, a cross-government working group has been formed to explore whether it could be possible to create patterns that are department agnostic. You can read more about what that group has been doing.
The premise of service patterns is that they enable services to be:
- designed consistently making them more intuitive and therefore easier to use and efficient to deliver
- designed more effectively, with the flow and functions of services clear from the outset
- launched more rapidly because components and models of service delivery can be more readily reused
As ever, while the idea that you can take the building blocks that service patterns provide and throw a well functioning service together at pace is appealing, it doesn’t entirely match reality. They don’t remove the need to do research and design the details of how services will be delivered. But they do provide a framework for sketching out at a high-level how a service should flow and function so those defining the details have a shared understanding of what they’re creating.
How can we maximise the value of service patterns?
The concept of service patterns came from the world of digital design, building on the well established practice of starting with user interface patterns and components to design digital products. Viewing service patterns as a digital tool however significantly limits their effectiveness.
Over the summer I was involved in a piece of work with the Department for Education to determine whether there was value in creating a set of service patterns for casework-based services. We were trying to answer 2 key questions: who could they be valuable to and, if they have value, in what way do people envisage using them?
We concluded that they have most value at the point policy is being shaped, supporting a smoother transition from policy making to delivering policy outcomes in the form of services.
This revealed quite a wide variety of people we’d be creating service patterns for, and critically for people who were unlikely to have any design training or to even consider what they did as a design activity. And yet, when we talked with operational and delivery teams about how they currently worked with policymakers to shape policy and define how whole services would work they were all doing forms of service design work without realising it.
The other thing that became apparent was models of service delivery – that could be described as kinds of service patterns – often existed in peoples’ heads but weren’t consistently documented. To access this knowledge policymakers relied on a relational approach, inviting experienced operational and delivery individuals to collaborate with them to define how services could work to deliver policy outcomes. Of course, this isn’t as efficient as it could be and risks inconsistencies in the way services work.
Developing a service patterns toolkit
We set about defining some service patterns but understood that to be effective they needed to practically facilitate the design of services at quite an early stage. With this in mind we’re currently developing a service patterns toolkit that will enable policy making, operational and delivery teams to develop clear and coherent service specifications.
Creating service specifications from patterns will ensure there is a shared understanding of the scope, flow and required functions of the service. Specialist delivery teams (including digital) can then use this as a better starting point for designing, building and launching services – and crucially, identifying where existing business processes, templates, digital components etc. can be reused to meet those requirements.