7. Bridging the Gap Between Service Design Specification and Technical Specification

Well implemented services can have a transformative impact on any organisation. The implementing team receives service design specifications once the design phase is complete. These specifications include blueprints, storyboards, touchpoint guidelines, among many other custom artefacts. Implementation of technical touchpoints, as envisaged by the designer, will bring the experience alive not only for service users but also for all stakeholders, including those from the service provider. However, after the handover, inconsistencies may often be introduced during the development of touchpoints. The touchpoints may differ from the designers’ original vision and affect the stakeholders’ unified experience. The place where touchpoints’ implementation went wrong is hard to trace. Hence, the long-term involvement of the designers with the development effort is recommended but may not always be feasible. The handover process, and the form and content of the service specifications are critical to reducing the strong dependency on the designers post-handover. In this paper, we propose a framework to map service specification to technical specifications, focusing on traceability and completeness. After scrutinising various technical specification templates to find the essential components, these components were mapped directly or indirectly, by diving deep into multiple artefacts of service specifications. Mapping this extensive technical specification with design specifications early in implementation makes it comprehensive and complete. They are hence reducing the dependency later in the implementation cycle. Such a technical specification document leads to seamless implementation.