Organisational challenges of public service co-design

Even in the relatively short time that Engine has been in business we’ve experienced a change in the language of government around the design of public services.

The Cabinet Office, for example, with input from Engine amongst others has developed a set of service design guidelines for civil servants that describe people-centred service design principles.

The NHS and other public service institutions are developing Units which are similar to manufacturing R&D Departments. The units are set up to carry out design research with users and to experiment in an environment sheltered from the pressures of turning a profit.

The local government Improvement and Development Agency has set up a community of practice online to capture good innovation practice at the local level.

However, some of the challenges for public sector organisations to co-design include;

• There is still a limited understanding of the charateristics of co-design and co-production of services in comparison with conventional approaches. Therefore there is little knowledge about commissioning external expertise including design-facilitation, design research, ethnography and the delivery of service co-design pilots with diverse groups of participants.

• There is often a disconnect between Customer Information Teams and service managers - and to an extent, a misunderstanding of the role of customers in gaining customer insight. Customer information and most importantly insight need to become the new currency.

• Adopting even a slightly different approach to anything can be difficult and design with service users presents many challenges for most service organisations.

• Engagement in co-design isn’t easy primarily because it demands new ways of working and new skills.

• It’s not always appropriate to work so closely with service users and providers to improve or innovate a service. There are or course many kinds of service. The approaches that we’ve been involved in developing tend to be charaterised by the importance of people rather than technology in their design.

Organisations need to focus on designing the processes of engagement to make getting involved an attractive proposition with real benefits. Engine’s work with the Milton Keynes, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Improvement Partnership involves the design of a process through which a District Council can engage older people directly in the design of transport services. The participants will co-design and co-produce their own responses with the Council providing the basic infrastructure.

There’s a need to understand the design of platforms for engagement and of collaborative tools and methods that allow users and providers to work together. Our work with Kent County Council is one of only a few examples in Europe of a local authority developing a support service for social innovation and service design targeting cross-cutting issues building capacity for people-centred approaches to policy making.

In comparison with the commercial sector, the market for service design support across public and government sector organisations is still small. Our work relies on a small number of innovative commissioners who have already seen the value of more formal, creative and collaborative approaches to service co-design. New guidelines, support and procurement models need to be developed to help those who are already working in similar ways and wish to do more - and those who need help to start.

Resources

NHS Institute for Improvement and Innovation
Improvement and Development Agency’s communities of practice site
The Journey to the Interface