From a service provider's perspective, delivery is as much about how the service will work in several years time as it is about how it will look when the facility is first completed.
Public services need to be flexible, to respond to changing service needs and policy priorities. There are numerous methods for building flexibility into contractual arrangements. However, the operational experts said they also try to factor flexibility into the design of the building where possible, and where it is likely to be beneficial to future service delivery. For example:
"At [one of the industrial prisons], we built the workshops in a fixed shape, because we thought we knew who our suppliers were going to be, but in practice that is always changing, because suppliers come and go, and the marketplace for our labour changes. So the design of the building cut down on flexibility. In later establishments, we used a much more flexible design: huge workshops of equal size that can be used by anyone, and can even be sub-divided, and offices created using portacabins."
The creation of multi-use spaces in public facilities, making the building design more flexible to respond to whole-of-life service considerations, is an innovation that probably would not have surfaced without input from operational experts:
"We have experienced the need to make expensive changes, and now we make it easier to change. We have an incentive to look for ways to be flexible."