The Policy is the Service
A simple guide for service designers to understand policy
The legislation is the service.
The regulation is the service.
The policy is the service.
If you look at any public service and ask yourself, “Why is it like this?”, you can usually find most answers to that question in some form of a policy document. Bad design is less often the fault of any particular team or person. Bad policy begets bad design. When I say policy, I mean policy with a capital P, as a broad term that encompasses all government direction setting.
Bad policy begets bad design
If you pour through the myriad of policy documents that underpin a service you’ll piece together a mosaic of policy directions that form a picture of the service design: Inter-provincial agreements that dictate data requirements, embedded forms in regulation, service times as operational policy, privacy legislation that limits information sharing, internal decision requests that deny or approve feature development, etc.
I’m going to assume that for a new designer to government, spending a few days reading through policy is not at the top of their list when they start a project. For me, this is the first thing I do. As the saying goes, “You can’t play the game if you don’t know the rules.”
As a way to help designers understand the rules of the game, I’ve put together this high-level overview of the different types of policy that enable service operation and how it may impact the service design. This overview is far from comprehensive, and admittedly I don’t have a background in public administration. Just a keen interest in public policy, design, and a reflection on my experience.
I’ll use the service of getting a student loan in Alberta to illustrate some of the concepts and the different types of policy below.
There is a hierarchy of policy, so let’s start at the top.
Legislation
Government is able to do things because it passes laws (legislation) that grant itself the legal authority to do something. Without legislation in place, government can’t legally do things.
So legislation is the place to start for any service because it sets the legal foundations for a service to exist. Each service is legislated by one or more “core” pieces of legislation. For example, getting a student loan in Alberta is legislated by the Student Financial Assistance Act.
The language of legislation can be dense with legalese. This is because legislation is in fact a legal document. You’ll come across awkward phrasing and terms because these words have a specific meaning in the legal world and this creates clarity of legal interpretation. It can be incredibly dense, boring, and inaccessible:
23(1) Notwithstanding section 25, the whole of the repealed legislation, as it existed immediately before the commencement of section 25 but as amended, if applicable, under subsection (2), continues to apply with respect to student financial assistance within the meaning of, and provided before that time under, the repealed legislation as if the repealed legislation had not been repealed.
What?
But, legislation can be interesting because it will outline the intent of a law and provide you with a high-level awareness of what it aims to achieve. If you’re lucky there will be an explanatory note (the TL;DR of legislation). Understanding the legislation will give you a sense of the domain in which your work operates, and will give you an idea of who or what this law is intended to affect. In many cases, this forms the groundwork for service eligibility, the different actors involved, and the different mechanisms of a service.
Besides the core legislation, every service will be ruled your jurisdiction’s privacy and information legislation usually called the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIP/FOIPPA/FIPPA/FOIPOPA) or some variation of that.
Among other things, this is the law that states how information can be legally collected, used, shared, and disclosed. It provides the legal authority for the government to collect and use people’s information to provide services. If this law didn’t exist, government services as we know them today would not be able to operate. Learn it, know it, live it.
Bonus tip: Develop a relationship with information and privacy officers, and involve them early in your work.
At a strategic level, you should also understand how your work aligns and supports cross-government legislated initiatives. For example, in Alberta the Red Tape Reduction Implementation Act seeks to “reduce the regulatory burden for businesses and make services more efficient for people”. You should see a clear connection to service design in that statement. Or if you're in B.C. your work may support the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. The more your work can find connections to these legislated priorities, the better positioned it will be for implementation and support.
Legislation is hard to change. So putting things in legislation that may need to change is best left to other policy mechanisms. More often than not, the interesting material is found in the regulations.
Regulations
Regulations are the legal requirements that start to define the specifics of how a service operates and how it must be delivered.
A regulation will be associated with a piece of legislation, and you’ll find the power to create these regulations in the parent legislation. Carrying on with the student loan example, the Student Financial Assistance Act has the Student Financial Assistance Regulation.
Regulations begin to tell the story of service delivery. You will see the specifics of how and why a service is delivered. Eligibility requirements can usually be found in more detail, and sometimes specifics fees and service delivery timelines will be outlined. Standards of operations, conditions for licenses, and reporting requirements are other types of information you’ll find that have a direct impact on the service.
Sometimes you’ll see actual forms outlined in the regulation (see Schedule 1). This isn’t a good thing if you want to redesign a form.
You’ll find a lot of “must” statements, which often translate into requirements that people, businesses, or government needs to do. These are things the service has to deliver on.
Regulations can be hard to change, but not as hard as legislation. But big changes to how a program delivers a service will probably need some kind of regulation change.
Policy
Policy, with a lower case p, gets into the more operational side of service delivery. Legislation and regulation will tell you the what and why, policy speaks more to how.
This level of policy is the broadest in scope because direction setting can be found in many different forms: procedure manuals, guidance documents, directives, standards, etc. I see it as anything that formalizes how the organization carries out what it does or does not do.
Student aid publicly posts their policy and procedure guidelines that outlines all the rules and processes of getting a student loan. These kinds of policy and procedure documents demonstrate how the legislation and regulation are carried out in operational terms.
Policy documents aren’t always publicly posted and may not even be well maintained internally (or exist at all). If you are working in government it may take a lot of digging to get a full picture of all the organizational policies in place. But bringing together all this information is worth it because this is the real material of service design.
Policy is the easiest thing to change because it is not enshrined within a legal document. It is typically developed and approved internally within the public service.
Folk Policy
Folk policy is the unwritten rules and myths of an organization that presents itself as official policy, but is in fact untrue or not the whole truth. Folk policy often arises because of assumptions or misinterpretation of an existing policy.
Things may be said in a meeting by a person, these statements are taken as fact, and then becomes an official position taken by a person or an organization.
Folk policy isn’t really policy, it’s more the stories and assumptions held by an organization about the policy. It usually isn’t developed out of malicious intent, but it can be an unchecked barrier to change. You might hear statements like “We can’t do that because the policy says so”. These statements may be true, but it might not be the whole truth. Sometimes policy is not so clearly defined and can come down to interpretation. So beware when you hear things can’t be done. Don’t let gatekeepers of change block the path forward by using policy as a barrier. Always verify policy for yourself.
Bonus: Inter-jurisdictional things
Some programs and services have very clear connections to other jurisdictions. This might be through formal agreements, funding transfers, or partnerships in service delivery. For example, Alberta student loans are jointly delivered with the Canada Student Loans and Grants Program. These kinds of formal relationships will add complexity to the work but are absolutely necessary in order to understand how a service can be designed.
Final thoughts
Policy, in all its manifestations, is not of divine providence. Policy is made up, developed, created, and enacted by people. People made the policy so people can change the policy. At the end of the day, changing policy is at the core of what the public service does, and designers have a real role to play in that change.
If you are working as a designer in government you should look at policy as one of the key materials of design and a lever for change. By understanding how it works, what it’s role and purpose is you’ll have a stronger foundation to make that change.
