Essex County Council has become involved in a project to build a shared library of service patterns for local government.
It has joined a partnership with consultancy FutureGov to make the information available through a website in an effort to promote more consistent experience for service users.
Named LocalGov Patterns, the library so far covers around 150 services including registering a birth, applying for school places and reporting a flood. Among the information included are types of service pattern, how they work and an understanding of the relevant life events.
The partners are currently asking from input from other local authorities to build up the knowledge base.
Victoria James, the council’s head of service design, said: “We initially set out to create a map of Essex County Council’s services as the user sees them, to ensure that the needs of Essex residents are at the heart of our service design work.
“By highlighting the common elements of services we’re helping teams to see across the organisation, and to understand what good looks like when we design accessible, cost-effective modern services.
“We have had lots of positive feedback from public sector colleagues and are hoping that by sharing our mapping we can support wider collaboration around this approach.”
