Liberty Spark Overview
Spark is a simple, visual collaboration tool that helps organisations map out how their processes work so everyone can understand them, spot problems, and make improvements.
It uses clear diagrams to show step-by-step workflows, making it easier for teams to collaborate, find inefficiencies, and improve how things get done, leading to better services, lower costs, and smoother operations.
The Engagement Team has been using Spark to support a range of projects, including short-term let licensing, communities fund applications, and primary school registration processes, among others.
By using this tool, we can make complex processes and systems easily understood by all. It creates a common understanding between council departments and helps stakeholders develop critical thinking.
Before you start mapping you should consider the following:
- What is the name of the process to be mapped?
- What is the purpose of the process?
- What triggers it to start?
- How do you know when it’s finished / what’s the final output?
- Who do you need involved (owner / stakeholders / subject matter experts)?
Creating a Process
Activities describe the steps in your process and who does them.
When filling in Activities:
- Activities describe actions – use verb + noun
- Use attachments to capture detailed descriptions
- Use detailed views to capture sub-processes
- Use roles to describe who
Try to avoid passive or ambiguous verbs that can cause confusion.
Examples to try and avoid:
Receive – what actually happens when you receive
something?
Manage – can mean lots of different things, may be used at a
high level to capture non-sequential activities.
Attachments let you capture and link to additional information.
Example attachments:
- More detailed description of the activity
- A link to a procedure, policy, system or website
- An image or video
- Custom information for analysis – risks, issues,
requirements, systems, improvement ideas, wastes etc.
Detailed views let you break a process step down into detailed steps.
Use detailed views when:
- You need to break a process down into bitesize pieces
- You need to create sub-processes
- You need to capture details while working on the high level
- Use roles to describe who
Why Boxes help you challenge assumptions and ensure that every step is adding value.
When filling in Why Boxes:
- Don’t use verb + noun
- Avoid using the simple past tense of the activity
- Think about how the activity is adding value
- If you cannot find a good ‘Why’ it may mean this activity is no longer needed
Why Boxes are powerful tools to help you understand the process.
Questions to ask when filling in Why Boxes:
- Why do you do that?
- How do you know the activity is complete?
- What do you handover when this step is finished?
- How do you know when you’re ready to start the next step?
- Can you measure that?
Process Lifestyle Stages
Know your Audience
- Technical
- Compliance
- Executive
- Management
- External
- End User
- Everyone
The goal is to reach a shared understanding on how things work today and identify the different ways of doing things. Processes may be more complicated than necessary but it’s important to represent reality as far as possible as a baseline for future improvements.
Here the aim is to understand the core business requirements and to identify and quantify opportunities for improvement. The process is not likely to change much but you will add a lot more information to the processes to conduct the analysis. This information is unlikely to be useful to future end users but is necessary to understand to build a business case and prepare teams for change.
This is where a new process is designed to support new ways of working, often around the implementation of a new system, product or team. The process provides technical teams the information they need to build and configure systems. It also provides the foundation for implementation and training.
In this stage the processes need to provide enough information to explain to end users how the work now happens and what tools they need to do it. This stage may also include User Acceptance Testing (UAT) before the system is rolled out. The result of testing may feedback as changes in the process.
Finally, as processes become established they need to be easy for users to locate and use when new joiners start, or when people move roles or perform processes infrequently. In addition to this, users need to be able to use the processes to provide feedback and improvement suggestions as things change in the organisation.
Onboarding and Training Materials
We have a council wide licence for Spark, accessible to any A&B Council employee with a valid council email address. It has Single Sign On (SSO) access for A&B Council staff.
Users will have view-only access when they log in initially, but can request editing access by contacting the Digital Services Team via the Digital Service Helpdesk
Spark – Staff Onboarding Guide
Case Studies and Examples
Below is the process to register a child for Primary School.
Below is a more complex process for transferring a licence for a Short Term Let. This process includes ‘Detailed Views’ which let you break down a process into detailed steps.
