Enabling people to set up cross government service communities

07 Sep 2022 by Ignacia

Image of a group of people participating in a workshop

Context

A service community is a network of people from  across the public sector who work together to design  and deliver an end to end service.

These were set up in 2017 as a response to the siloed way in which  government is structured and operates, to provide  a framework for collaboration that makes it easier  to solve common challenges across organisational  structures.

It had become harder to support and scale, making  GDS a dependency and a blocker to the growth of  communities within government. Because of this,  a team was set up to develop the thinking.

My role and approach

I supported people to set up  service communities across these organisational boundaries and helped scale this approach. As a team, we did this by  exploring and researching incentives for collaboration to happen, helping departments sport opportunities to join-up, documenting and sharing best practices.

I co-designed and  facilitated cross government workshops for the ‘Start a business’ and ‘Import & Export’ service communities, advocating for user-centered design and bringing  together people from policy to delivery and operations.

I also created a repository of artefacts, tools and learnings from the live service communities so the team could identify reusable methods to create good grounds for collaboration on end to end services.

Results

As a result, we reduced the time to set-up service communities and enabled departments  to self organise.

The team and I wrote guidance about working  across organisational boundaries in the Service  Manual, providing ways for  teams to meet the new updated Service Standard on solving whole problems for users.

For more on Service Communities:

Read blog post on How to set up a service community for success: things we’ve learned
Read blog post on Service landscape maps – a tool for mapping public services
Watch talk on How to collaborate with other organisations on end-to-end services

Facilitated workshops with the Import-Export cross government service community

Image of a man participating in a workshop. Behind him there are other people. And on his left there is a wall with coloured post it notes

Image of a close up of two hands writing on a yellow post it note on the wall

Created a repository of tools and activities across the different communities to identify patterns for collaborating across boundaries

Screenshot of the service communities repository trello board. The title of the columns in the board are 'terms of reference', 'service landscape', 'community objectives', 'community trello boards', 'cross gov user personas'. Under each column there are examples of artefacts, activities, and ideas.