The way you create a service blueprint depends on what you are using it. Are you using the service blueprint to describe the actual state of a service, or are you using it to imagine a future state of a service?

Steps to describe the actual state of a service with a service blueprint:

1. Research: do your research to understand how people really use the service and what employees do to make it happen (for example user and stakeholder interviews, observation, surveys, gathering quantitative data)

2. Build a service blueprint: build a service blueprint that summarises how the service works with multiple stakeholders that share their expertise and use the previous research to ground the blueprint in data.

3. Improve the service blueprint: present the blueprint to other stakeholders who weren’t involved yet to make sure all parts really fit the reality and improve it based on feedback.

4. Make it shareable: make the service blueprint shareable within the company so that different work groups and departments can use it.

Steps to imagine the future state of a service with a service blueprint:

1. Ideation: gather ideas about how the future or new service could work.

2. Build multiple service blueprints: summarise the best ideas in multiple service blueprints that show different approaches

3. Test the idea: use the service blueprint to test the service or guide the prototyping phase.

4. Condense: based on the testing, choose the winning service blueprint and improve it.