Service patterns — building consistent and repeatable services at scale
Services Week is a yearly event hosted by the Government Digital and Data community with the aim of bringing the public sector together to share best practice and learn from others. As part of Services Week 2025, the Ministry of Justice and TPXimpact hosted a panel discussion on service patterns. Some of my fantastic colleagues have been involved in developing service patterns, and our project has directly benefited from the approach, so it was great to hear more from across the sector.
What the sketchnote says
Service patterns #servicesweek 19 March 2025
Nikola Goger, MoJ
- service patterns means something different to all of us
- sharable, useful, centralised, productionable
- like a box of Lego (but we don’t even have the box yet)
Martin Ford-Downes, MoJ
- we’re trying to stop people building the same thing over and over again
- service patterns don’t replace the need for design, they help us to focus on the knotty problems by taking care of the repeatable stuff
Amy Ricketts, Barnados
- working on service models
- of all the services that Barnados runs, which are the best? From that, what can be repeated?
- 760 services across the UK
- patterns are a core part of growth strategy — more efficient is more competitive
Kirsty Sinclair, Scottish Gov
- 420 services, 22 patterns
- how far down the tech stack should a pattern reach to balance being repeatable and helpful?
- how do people stitch them all together? How can they be rearranged?
What goes in a pattern?
- 15 categories of “stuff”
- common libraries and processes — UR libraries, service assessments
- vision: a self-serve soup of useful parts
- what are the common roles? What are the capabilities within the roles?
- what are the common user needs across gov? a person in prison requesting stuff is similar to buying a phone
How will we do this?
- we need a new culture and way of working to enable sharing
- contribution and collaboration models — a decentralised model but with a strong core
- needs buy-in from leadership to commit budget — cross gov examples, find allies, measurable
TPX scenario
- mapping services across organisations
- spotting commonalities and patterns
- looking for opportunities to use common patterns
- defining good standards for use, re-use and recording
About the sketchnote
This note was my fastest yet. I used Procreate on an iPad. I did most of it in the session, added the drawings on the tube on the way to the office, and then added the highlights while in a meeting. It was shared the same day. There were a couple of things that helped with the speed:
- I used layers for each distinct idea or section — making it easier to resize and move around during the session.
- I didn’t capture everything — this allowed me some time to play around with what was on the canvas already, rather than frantically writing and moving stuff afterwards.
- I used a big pen (syrup, 5%) for all text, meaning that it could be shrunk. It does pixelate when resized, but that’s a trade off for being able to move quickly.
- I didn’t fret about upper case and lower case — I just wrote in the fastest way possible (lower case). It’s less legible — but again, that’s the trade-off for speed.
- Practice! I’ve done a lot of sketchnotes recently, so I’m naturally speeding up a bit as it becomes more instinctive.
