Commissioning Toolkit

2 - Service Design – Designing Solutions

• Make – could you create the service yourself or have you considered in-house transformation?
• Buy – could you outsource to a private or third sector organisation?
• Share – is there the potential to create a shared service or work together with another public sector organisation e.g. the Police?
• Divest – could you devolve responsibility to the community?
• Stop – do you need to provide a service at all?

Co-design the service:

• Which stakeholders - including users, are key to being involved in co-designing?
• Identify the best way to engage with them and get the best out of them.

Make sure you go back for clarity and don't make assumptions.

After considering all the options you need to identify which are your key options to assess.

Complete an options analysis

• Find things to measure and compare by understanding what’s important – e.g. cost
• Use which ever comparison method suits your circumstances, a list of different tools can be found in the Service Design Guidance.
• When scoring each option make sure you consider what barriers there may be to delivering that option.

Whatever option you decide is the best way to achieve your outcomes, this will impact on how you use the rest of the commissioning cycle.

If you decide in-house or shared is the best delivery option, there will be parts of the commissioning cycle that will be useful to performance monitor the service. However, you can utilise the Service Design Guidance, or the HR change documents to assist you through this process.

If outsourcing is the right option, you will move through to the procurement phase.

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