Highlights: Savings of £10bn were announced by the Efficiency and Reform Group this week – the part of the Cabinet Office in which GDS sits. Technology and GOV.UK have made a big contribution to that figure. We also announced the move this week of the G-Cloud team into GDS, and we’re looking forward to developing the front end of those services for suppliers to government. Service manager training has been continuing, as has development of the 25 exemplar transactional services, spread out across the UK. DFID have launched a new beta platform using open data to track overseas development expenditure. Next week we’re looking forward to a major improvement in the way search works on GOV.UK – we’ll write more about that when it’s released.

(Full transcript below)

Interviewer:
Hello, Mike. What have you been up to at GDS this week?

Mike Bracken:
I’m very well, Matt, yourself?

Interviewer:
I’m very well. What have we been up to at GDS this week?

Mike:
We’ve been announcing lots of savings. The Efficiency and Reform Group, the part of the Cabinet office in which the GDS sits, has announced its savings on Monday. Francis Maude led the presentation and it’s £10 billion, an astonishing amount of money to save in one year.
I’m very happy to say that we have been a big part of that for IT and for GDS; we’ve saved over £500 million of that amount of money. That’s come from stopping stuff, doing stuff differently, GOV.UK, doing a lot of work on platforms. Particular shout this week on that goes to Seb Tallents, Alex Holmes – the gang in Liam Maxwell’s team – because they’ve driven a lot of those savings out of the last year. It’s hard work and thankless, but it’s a great announcement.
The other big thing this week is the move of G-Cloud into the GDS. I should really give a huge amount of thanks to Denise McDonagh and Chris Chant, who actually preceded me. They’re the real sponsors of that programme when it was unloved around Government, and they’ve really driven the development of cloud-based procurement. We hope now to really crack on and develop the front end of that and develop the service for all suppliers out there.

Interviewer:
Excellent. We’ve had a few visitors as well.

Mike:
We have and we’re training service managers. It’s one of the most fundamental things that we have to do, is to get service managers empowered and trained right across government. Matt Edgar and Sheila Bennett are leading that on our behalf. We’ve had the first cohort of those in this week and we’ll have lots more to be done in the next few months.

Interviewer:
Service managers are a big part of the exemplar programme as well.

Mike:
Yes, we have 25 exemplars, remember; 25 of the largest 50 public services are going to be transformed end-to-end in the next 18 months. They’re happening all over the UK, in DVLA in Swansea, in Student Loans in Glasgow, in Newcastle, in Preston, and in Reading, and all these places.
In those places, we’ve got to get service managers who understand that discipline of digital product creation and service management, and really get them trained and empowered. That’s what we’re doing now and it’s great fun to link them up.

Interviewer:
Excellent. We’ve also been seeing some good work from people already out there doing the work of transforming services.

Mike:
Yes, blazing a trail as usual, DFID, with the aid platform – went into beta this week. John Adams up there and the team doing extraordinarily good work in bringing that open data approach to our platform, so terrific stuff.

Interviewer:
We’ve got a few releases next week at GDS as well.

Mike:
One or two, and the biggest one by some distance is Search. We’ve been working on this for some time; Search is one of those things that always polarises opinion. We know that it can be improved; it’s the single biggest thing that we all want to improve on GOV.UK, based on a lot of user testing, a lot of data. We should see a real step change in our search provision the middle of next week.

Interviewer:
We’ve also got to bid a fond farewell to a few folks as well.

Mike:
We have, Paul Annett, one of the first few people through the door, when we were in a little room in south London, doing the discovery for an alpha for what became GOV.UK. Paul’s leaving us to join Twitter, and you can’t get a better send-off than that; it’s just a testament to the quality that we’ve got here.
We should also welcome Kim Townend, who’s going to be leading on social media with us, a really big name in that field. She starts next week as well, so as one leaves one comes in, but it’s great that we have this level of talent in the Government Digital Service.

Interviewer:
Fabulous; until next time.

Mike:
Onwards.

Last week the Efficiency and Reform Group (the part of the Cabinet Office that includes GDS) announced savings figures for the last financial year. In 2012/13 we helped departments save £10 billion, or about £600 for each household in the country.

Of this £10bn, GDS has been responsible for over £500m.

What’s helped us achieve that? In large part it’s because at GDS we focus on user needs. Relentlessly. This might sound at odds with a drive towards efficiency, but we have found it to be the best way to reduce cost.

The techniques we use are straightforward and, as much as possible, transparent:

• We ask departments to justify costs via our spend controls process.
• We examine costs using the principles we’ve now enshrined in the Technology Code of Practice.
• We look to break down large contracts to encourage competition.
• We always look to use commodity services across government.
• We look to commission services rather than enter into long term procurement deals, so that there’s a constant downward pressure on prices, and it costs us less to change our suppliers when we need to.
• We insist on costs that match user needs and expectations.

In return, we attempt to get all requests for expenditure through this process in 28 days, and help departments and agencies to seek better for less, wherever we can.

Crucial to delivering these savings are reforms to the way we do procurement. G-Cloud has created a mature and open market in enterprise commodity technology services. There’s still a long way to go, but at its new home in GDS it is well positioned.

In the next couple of years we believe that our focus on user needs will make it inevitable that we seek better technology solutions: costing much less than the systems they replace, as well as working better.

Mike Bracken & Liam Maxwell

Recently, we asked the Centre for Information Design Research (CIDR) at the University of Reading to review the GOV.UK Style Guide to ensure it meets the needs of users online. They’ve completed their review, and we asked them to write about how it worked.

Information design research

At CIDR, we extend the influence of design research into projects that make a difference to people’s lives. Examples of these kinds of projects include work with the National Offender Management Service to develop a structured communication tool for reducing conflict between staff and prisoners, and with the NHS to improve communication between carers of people with dementia and clinicians.

We use research-based knowledge of how people seek out and respond to information, how they read on paper and on screen, and how text can be written and organised visually so that it helps them understand and use information effectively.

Our work involves multi-disciplinary teams – much like GDS – typically bringing together insights from human-computer interaction, psychology, information science, linguistics and graphic design. We test different solutions to problems, often working in partnership with companies or organisations to help us get feedback from their members or users.

Government communication traditions

At its best, UK government writing has set standards for style. That classic of style, ‘Plain words’, was first written in 1948 by Sir Ernest Gowers, a senior civil servant, to help other public servants express themselves clearly to fellow citizens. It was published as ABC of plain words in 1951 and then expanded to The complete plain words in 1954. Since then it has never been out of print.

Common sense tells us that plain words are as important today as they were in the 1940s and 50s, and this approach has been promoted in the new GOV.UK content style guide. We reviewed research into what works stylistically – on paper and on the web – and came up with endorsements and recommendations for GDS based on academic or pragmatic research, including papers by Jan Spyridakis (download, PDF 863kB) and Ferris Jabr.

Guiding style

The research suggested that a number of ‘text features’ should be built into writing for the web. Online reading patterns tend to be less linear and sequential than reading from paper. So writing for the web can be adjusted to support non-linear behaviour. Some adjustments are already common practice in highly navigable web sites but some are less intuitive for writers and designers.

Style features that support reading from the web include:

• repetition of company (or department) names, redefining particular terminology, and spelling out acronyms on each page
• use of summaries or abstracts with links to fuller discussions
• reduction of word count through tightly edited text
• use of the ‘inverted pyramid technique’ (giving the conclusion of a paragraph first) for relatively straightforward and short paragraphs, where the connection between initial information and subsequent detail is clear
• substituting bulleted and numbered lists for continuous prose
• including motivation statements that encourage people to complete complex tasks when they are ‘reading to do’.

One of the reasons that GOV.UK is such a successful web site is that it has been designed with the needs of its users in mind. It is straightforward and accessible; easy to navigate; the headings are clearly presented and the type is legible. Its design conveys authority, yet isn’t intimidating. Its writing style should have a consistent effect so that whatever part of government a reader may be dealing with, the information they see is clear and succinct.

For GOV.UK writers, it is important to think about alternatives to continuous prose and to remember that many of their readers will be inexperienced web users and therefore likely to need encouragement. If time allows, it can be very helpful to ask a group of potential readers what they think about a draft text, especially when it involves instructions or procedures.

Keeping it simple for readers and writers

GOV.UK’s content principles ensure that the language used is accessible to as many people as possible, and that writing follows good practice for reading from screen.

With so many contributors from different departments contributing content, all with different educational and training experiences that influence how they write, the guide resolves detailed issues of style. This enables writers to focus on producing content that is clear and understandable, and gives coherence across the organisation.

In the past few weeks, a small team in the Government Digital Service has been working to make significant improvements to site search on GOV.UK.

When GOV.UK came out of beta in October 2012, replacing the Directgov and Business Link websites, there were around 3,800 pieces of content. Six months on, and the bringing together of information from 24 departments and 31 agencies has added around 52,000 additional documents. In that time, it’s become even harder for users to find what they’re looking for using site search on GOV.UK. And our analytics data and user feedback have consistently told us that search simply hasn’t been good enough. Time for some improvements.

Here’s what we’ve done in the past couple of months.

1. We started with user needs

Based on existing user testing, user feedback and analytics, the team captured a list of user needs. We pulled together everything we already knew from our research to create 5 personas based on real user behaviour. This helped us to consider the needs of different types of users – from people with limited internet experience through to professionals who use the site every day for their work.

2. We agreed some principles for the project

We wanted to:

• help more people find what they want using search
• always return the most relevant results
• avoid forcing users to understand the internal structure of the site
• allow users to control their results
• give results that feel familiar to users and don’t deviate from established models of what search looks like

3. We designed and developed with data

Our analytics helped us understand our users’ searching behaviour before we started work. We ran four rounds of user testing with participants recruited to represent users with a range of different needs. Week by week, we’ve added and improved new features based on the feedback and behaviour we’ve seen in our lab, making changes based on what we’ve learned. We’ve also tested our search results against our simple ‘health check’ tool (which verifies that the expected results appear for specific search terms) to prevent us accidentally making things worse.

4. We made it much more accessible

The original search results page had been implemented in a rush so we did a major clean up of the code and took the opportunity to make some much needed improvements:

• the search query in the page heading is now legible and less confusing to screen-reader users
• lists of search results are now properly marked up as HTML lists, allowing screen-readers and users of assisted technology to jump through results easily
• the metadata for results is now more explicit in describing what this content actually is, making it less likely that users will become confused and frustrated

5. We give richer search results

Based on our user testing, we’ve recently introduced some improvements to search results:

• changing the approach to tabbed search results (one of the biggest complaints with the previous version) to combine results more appropriately, helping people find what they’re looking for more easily
• showing better metadata in search results, giving users more confidence in finding the right result
• providing top 3 results above the tabs to help users find the most relevant content from across GOV.UK more easily
• providing deep links directly within search results allows users to go straight to the right content without an additional click

6. Better support for ‘power users’

Some of the most frequent users of search on GOV.UK are researchers and other civil servants, often trying to use GOV.UK every day to find specific content to help them do their jobs. We’ve got lots of ideas for improvements (including better support for exact phrase matching, supporting search operators and providing more detailed filtering options) but for now we’ve added the ability for users to filter results by department/organisation.

7. We tried to make it ‘just work’

Probably our biggest improvement so far is improving the algorithm to drastically reduce the number of irrelevant results.

“…everybody expects search to read their minds.”
Martin Belam, 2009

We know that almost half of site searches on GOV.UK use 2 or 3 words. Additional words in a search query are often intended to narrow down a set of results to a more specific set of results (eg horse passports vs. passports) but instead we were returning results containing any of the words, which would often draw in many irrelevant results and frustrate users. We’ve now tweaked the search behaviour to ensure that adding terms narrows down the search results, reducing the number of irrelevant results.

In the future, we’re also looking at automatically handling misspellings and offering a ‘did you mean?’ suggestion.

8. We cleared some technical debt

Making progress in the past few weeks has involved a fair bit of tidying up. We’ve made it easier to make it even better in future.

We’re still not finished. We’ll continue to analyse the data and test our improved search with users, and we’ve already uncovered a list of additional improvements and new features that we think will make search even better.

Over the last couple of weeks keen followers of the service manual will have noticed a few changes to some of the guidance.

Along with publishing pieces like the assisted digital action plan and the guidance on increasing digital take-up we’ve started revisiting everything we published since the beta and bringing it up to style.

Many authors, one voice

Back when we first started the alpha of the manual we expected to publish every piece of guidance on the site with the name and contact details of its author. It quickly became clear that this wasn’t going to work, as guidance:

• often had many authors
• needed to be able to be frequently revised
• had to stand alone, without one-to-one support
• needed to feel like something anyone working on services could contribute to

Besides which, the Github repo does a fairly good job of capturing that information for those who really wanted to know the details. We already link to that on every page of guidance in the manual.

But in the process of getting the guidance written and fact-checked we didn’t do the work we ought to have done to get it up to the standards of the GOV.UK style. With a few days perspective it became obvious that we really should have. It felt like a lot of different voices were offering guidance, and that appeared to be a bit confusing without the author name on each guide.

So we enlisted the help of Louisa Harper, one of the content designers who’s been doing the good work of Inside Government for the last few months. She’s been going through everything with a fine-tooth comb. The first section to get the full treatment was the agile guidance, which we’ve released today. There’s also an open pull request with revised guidance about measurement, due to be merged next week.

Consolidate first, commission later

As Gareth said back in April, the guidance is a living document that will change over time. We know it isn’t ever going to be ‘finished’, not least because we’ll learn more and new things will be developed as we go along. But after releasing the beta we found people were often asking for information we’d already published, so we started working on tools like search and improving the navigation (more on that soon) to surface that better.

Improving the copy itself is a natural part of that. We need to make all the guidance as clear as possible, so we can help people make better services quickly.

It’s also helped kick-start conversations about the content. We’re going to leave revised guidance as open pull requests for about a week before merging them, giving people plenty of time to review it and start chatting about how to improve it.

And, of course, all this means we spot more gaps and commission more content. Every time we answer a question for one person we end up with a piece of guidance that benefits service managers and their teams all over government.

If you want to get involved, keep an eye on the open pull requests on the Github repository or make a pull request of your own. And, as ever, if you spot errors and places for improvement just use the feedback form to get in touch.

Last week, Roo Reynolds wrote about how we’ve been improving site search on GOV.UK. Throughout the past couple of months we’ve been analysing our search data to find out more about how people are searching the site. Here are some of the most interesting things we’ve learned.

Getting people to what they need

First of all, we looked at everything we already knew from the first 6 months since GOV.UK was released back in October 2012. About 4% of visitors use the site search, making more than 2 million searches a month.

We regularly review the most popular search terms and check how they’re performing – particularly when people refine their search or leave the site. ‘Refinements’ show how many users are changing their search term and trying again, usually to make their results more specific. Overall, the average refinement rate was 27% – we’d like to get that down so that more people are finding what they want first time.

‘Exits’ show how many users are leaving the site straight from a search results page, rather than clicking on a link within the site. The average exit rate was 15%, but this includes clicks on external links to other useful websites for information that isn’t covered by GOV.UK, such as NHS Choices and the National Careers Service. However, if searches without external links have high exits, it suggests that those results aren’t relevant enough so users are going elsewhere.

Inside Government searches

Around 20% of site searches now start from an Inside Government page (the corporate part of the site with government policy, announcements and publications). The rest come from the services and information for citizens and businesses or from the GOV.UK homepage.

A lot of these Inside Government searches are made from the main department or organisation pages. This may be partly because department websites have recently moved to GOV.UK so regular users are finding their way around the new content. But we’ve also seen in user testing that some members of the public still think in terms of the department responsible for their needs – for example, they’ll go to the Home Office or HM Passport Office to renew their passport, though these pages are aimed mainly at ‘professional’ users (those whose work involves research, the detail of policies or the workings of government).

Many of the top Inside Government search terms are general needs that are also in the overall most common searches, for example: ‘jobs’, ‘visa’, ‘passport’, ‘careers’, ‘ehic’, ‘travel advice’.

This crossover presents a challenge for site search: how do we meet the advanced needs of professional users without confusing members of the public who just want a simple answer? We can’t rely on the page they searched from to define which type of user they are; some people expect to search only within that department, but others have landed in the wrong place and need to find the general results. One of our priorities for this project was to start making search better for advanced users, without getting in the way of less experienced users.

The long tail of search

One of the first questions from the search team was: ‘how big is the long tail?’ Out of the 2 million site searches a month, about 800,000 different search terms are used.

We sliced up a month’s data by filtering on the number of searches: first the top 100, 200 and 1,000 search terms (that is, 101-200 and 201-1,000), which were used about 100 times or more, and then everything searched for more than 50 times, 20 times, and so on.

At one extreme, the word ‘jobs’ alone makes up 1.5% of all our searches, with almost 30,000 a month. The 100 most commonly used search terms (including ‘jobs’) account for 13% of all searches; the top 1,000 search terms combined make up 28% of searches.

At the other end of the scale, more than half a million different search queries were only made once in the whole month – that’s 34% of searches, but 84% of search terms.

We also found that refinement rates increase considerably as you go further down the tail. In the top 100 search terms, most of which are quite specific and well optimised, only 14% of users searched again. In the middle groups, the percentages rose through the 20s, and in the large set of more complex search queries that were only entered once, 34% of users changed their search terms and tried again.

Word count of search terms

We also analysed the length of site search terms, and found that most people use short queries of up to 5 words – half of all searches are 2 or 3 words.

These tend to be simply the name of the thing they need to find, for example: ‘passport’, ‘student finance’, ‘working tax credit’, ‘employment and support allowance’. Sometimes they include the action people want to take, for example: ‘find a job’, ‘renew child passport’, ‘book practical driving test’.

As queries get longer, they start to get more specific, for example: ‘driving licence out of date’, ‘returning to work after maternity leave’, ‘change the date of my practical test’, ‘how long does it take to get a passport’.

Some users enter very detailed queries describing their personal situation, for example: ‘I have a British passport and I had a British driving licence but I have lived in Spain for the last 10 years and now have a Spanish licence, I am returning to UK and need to get a British licence’.

We found that search exits (users leaving the site) increased with longer queries, rising steadily from 14% for 1 word up to 20% for 9 words or more. Interestingly, refinements (searching again) didn’t follow the same pattern; they rose slightly from 28% to a peak of 31% for 5-word queries, but then dropped back down to 27% for the longest queries.

Why does all this matter?

We’ve been improving the search algorithm, to make it better at matching exact phrases or words that appear close together, and to reduce irrelevant results that only match some of the words. Knowing the most common types of searches helped our developers decide where to focus their efforts to make the most effective improvements.

Now that we’ve released these changes, we’ll continue to monitor and analyse search performance to see how much difference they’ve made and to prioritise further development work.

We think videos are a great way to help introduce the teams working at GDS. In past months we’ve focused on the Transformation team, Finance team, Hosting and Infrastructure team, User research team and Procurement. Now it’s the turn of the Product analysts.

Meet the Product analysts – video transcript

Peter Jordan (Product analytics lead, Government Digital Service):

The product analysts look at how people interact with the site, where they come from, and what we’re particularly interested in on GOV.UK is getting people to transactions or to the information that they want.

Why we love search

Lana Gibson (Product analyst, Government Digital Service):

The needs for GOV.UK were based on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) analysis: what were people searching for?

Peter Jordan:

When you’ve got a need, when you’re looking when the train time is, when you’re looking how much your new passport costs, you’ve got something that’s going on in your head…

Tara Stockford (Product analyst – search, Government Digital Service):

Tax disc, car tax, road tax.

Peter Jordan:

…and you try and, amazingly, you try and express that need in a few words that you enter into a search box, and I just find that fascinating.

Tara Stockford:

There are so many different words that people can use to search for the same thing.

Peter Jordan:

By understanding that, you can then help the product managers design the content that answers people’s needs.

Tara Stockford:

We’ll make sure that they get the main tax disc page no matter which of those phrases they’ve searched for.

Decisions with data

Ashraf Chohan (Product analyst):

Yesterday I was finishing up implementation phase one with Google and today it’s browse analysis. I’m going to try and get out all the data I need so I can start working on it tomorrow.

Peter Jordan:

It’s important to make decisions with data because if you don’t have data you’re acting on a hunch.

John Byrne  (Product analyst, Government Digital Service):

We’re focusing very much on actionable analytics, using data to help improve content and user experiences.

Peter Jordan:

What we want to do is identify what in analytics terms is called a funnel, so lots of people start the thing off, it gradually gets narrow and fewer people actually get to the end point. What we want to do is work, by gathering that information, is widen that funnel so a much higher proportion of people actually get to the end.

Lana Gibson:

You publish something, you monitor, you find problems, you iterate, and then you analyse again.

Highlights: This week GOV.UK published the government spending round. GDS hosted the monthly meeting of its senior digital leaders, including presentations from Ken McCallum from BIS (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) and Ashley Machin who told ‘The Digital Story at Lloyds’. Last week, Mike Bracken visited the eGov forum in Singapore, while this week GDS welcomed visitors from overseas, Sixtine Bouygues and Robert Andrecs from the European Commission, and Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand, Bill English. Next week Ministry of Justice launches its Lasting Power of Attorney beta on GOV.UK and GDS is proud to be hosting a number of sessions at Civil Service Live.

(Full transcript below)

Interviewer: Hello Mike. Tell us what GDS has been up to this week.

Mike: Hi Matt. Well, GDS is very much aligned with the centre of government this week. We’ve been publishing the detail of the spending round, which I’m sure everyone will have read by now, and on the day of publication we had 45,000 views of content on GOV.UK. So it’s good to show that our publishing system is well in place and being used. 

I should say a word about the spending round because it’s great to see the government investing in digital transformation. At the heart of some of those decisions were digital investments in tax, in criminal justice and policing. Actually that mirrors the work and actually is the work of parts of our 25 exemplar programme, which we’ll be talking more about at Sprint Alpha [event for government departments, reviewing progress in digital], the next round of Sprint on July 17th. So it’s good to see support from the Treasury for digital transformation.

 Also this week, we had digital leaders – a monthly meeting of all the senior digital leaders and change agents across government, and a couple of highlights this week: Ken McCallum from BIS (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) presented all the work that some of their agencies have been doing. BIS is a tremendously sprawling digital estate, so it’s really good to see what they’ve been up to, and we should say goodbye to him because he’s going to leave as a digital leader, and say thank you to him. Also we had a presentation from Ashley Machin from Lloyds, who really impressed all of our panel with ‘The Digital Story at Lloyds’. 

On Thursday we had the pleasure of speaking with Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, to a number of existing and new suppliers around the changes we are making, and were able to show them the first wave of our new alpha and beta services. So I think we got a lot of enthusiasm from that crowd.

Interviewer: That’s excellent. You also spoke at the eGov forum last week.

Mike: Yes, we were in Singapore, and that’s the forum for people like us, who are trying to transform government, people like John Sheridan the Australian CTO (Chief Technology Officer), James Yang from Singapore, many other countries there; South Africa, a lot of African countries as well, Saudi Arabia, we met them. The good news is they’re all looking at us and what we’re doing. So we’re very much seen to be leading. I guess the thing that should keep us on our toes is they’re all catching up quick. If ever there was evidence that we’re in a global race, it was the visit last week.

Interviewer: We also had visitors to GDS as well from around the world.

Mike: Yes, we had the comms team from the European Commission, Sixtine (Bouygues) and Robert (Andrecs) came over and visited us last week, and interestingly we had the Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand, Bill English, who is also the Minister of Finance, came over and visited Liam (Maxwell) and our CTO team. So again, some high-profile visitors coming and seeing what we’re doing.

Interviewer: Next week we’ve got some quite big news from outside of GDS, haven’t we?

Mike: Yes, I’m delighted by this; we launch another beta. So the Lasting Power of Attorney, that’s a service run by the Ministry of Justice, that goes live in beta on Monday, and well done to Chris and the OPG (Office of the Public Guardian) team. We started working with MoJ probably about 12 months ago on this. It’s been a long haul to change that service, but I think, having a digital service that everyone can see will give a lot of comfort to all of those people who are still at the early stages of digital transformation in government. 

The other event next week is Civil Service Live, where we will ‘Be Exceptional’ and really proud to be hosting some of the digital forums and hubs at that event in three locations next week.

Interviewer: Finally, a few new starters at GDS.

Mike: Yes, as ever, I should say hello to Elliot (Hughes). Elliot has joined us from Southampton University for a couple of months. He came via a hack day. We have five new starters, but Elliot is probably the highest profile, so welcome to him and the others.

Interviewer: Terrific. Until next time.

Mike: Onwards.

Today the Beta version of the Lasting Power of Attorney application has been released. It’s one of the first of the Digital Exemplar services to reach Beta stage, which has made it one of the most interesting and, at times, challenging projects I’ve ever worked on.

I wanted to share some of the lessons I’ve learned on this journey, in case it’s of some help to the other people working on exemplar services across government.

Screens shot of the Lasting Power of Attorney beta

Some background

A Lasting Power of Attorney is a way to appoint someone you trust to manage your money, property and healthcare, in case anything happens to you. We’ve been building a digital service to replace the current application, which comes in the form of a thick pack of forms and guidance.

Paper forms for lasting power of attorney – as measured against a ten pence piece

The first prototype was a simple, standalone proof of concept to show what was possible.

For the Alpha version we carried out user testing, refined and improved the product and built it on a small, fully secure IL3 environment. We also set up a string and sellotape helpdesk and technical support function to support the small, invitation-only group of users. The Alpha ran from November 2012 to March 2013.

For Beta we have improved the product further, built it on an open Application Programming Interface (API), added online payment and turned it into a full scale production service that is open to anyone. For a new digital service this doesn’t just mean bigger servers but also a whole set of people, processes and tools to support the users and the technology.

Compared to some other government services, the LPA service doesn’t have especially high traffic, but there’s a lot of legal complexity (understandably, as it’s a powerful document) for what appears to be, on the surface, a relatively straightforward product.

What we learned

The challenges aren’t in the product, rather around delivering in new ways in government.

Introduce agile early

I’m fortunate to be working with a motivated and talented team of people from the Office of the Public Guardian, Ministry of Justice (MOJ), Cabinet Office and 3rd party supplier Transform. We’re working really effectively together now and when we sit together it feels like we can achieve anything, but it’s taken a while to get to this stage and with hindsight an early introduction to agile would have gotten everyone speaking the same language sooner.

Colocation, colocation, colocation

I say “when we sit together” because the team is spread across 6 sites in London, Birmingham and Nottingham and we’re often in different buildings. We’ve used a load of tools and techniques to make collaboration easier (with varying degrees of success), though the reality is there’s no substitute for sitting together.

Work with IT Teams, not against them

We’ve been working closely with MOJ IT Teams, who have been really supportive. At first we were coming at the problem from different directions, which was challenging for everyone, not least the SRO. However good, early engagement with IT Teams has been really beneficial as well as helping us set a template for future engagement.

Start thinking about legislative change early

Policy constraints mean that we still require a handwritten signature on the LPA document, so the LPA tool helps create a completed PDF form. The form itself is enshrined in legislation, so we weren’t even able to change how it looked, was laid out etc. This interaction between on and offline has been the biggest design challenge, so we’d recommend starting legislation change as early as possible and expect it to take a long time.

Know how procurement works

Working in an agile way means starting to build early so the ability to quickly buy in a development team was really important. We used Sprint II and G-Cloud to buy capability and services, and I’m really looking forward to the new Digital Services Procurement Framework. Even when that’s ready, it’ll be important to understand the frameworks and how procurement works in your department.

If you’re going to fail do it fast

Try things early. Even though we didn’t have to, we took the decision to make our Alpha version of the service as secure as the final version would need to be. This proved to be a lot more challenging than anyone expected but we were all glad that we uncovered the issues early, rather than during Beta.

Looking after other people’s data isn’t trivial

Even though we learned how to make the technology fully secure during the alpha phase, there was still a huge amount of work to do in beta to demonstrate that we were ready to store and manage large amounts of users’ data. Privacy impact assessments and System Operating Procedure documentation take a long time to prepare and involve lots of people. Don’t leave it until the last minute!

Source and involve operations teams early

One of the other challenges we’ve had to overcome has been related to technical support of the service. This is being handled by the new Digital Services Division in MOJ. We’re using modern, DevOps methods here and that has meant recruiting new people which took longer than we expected. If I could do it again I’d make sure we got the operations team sourced and involved early. The payoff will come now as the team has set up some really slick and efficient ways to monitor, develop and deploy improvements, without long-winded and constrictive release cycles.

Always read the manual

I’ve made it my mission to make this product a real exemplar so we’ve fully embraced the digital strategy, using cloud based, open source technologies, user-centred, iterative design, agile ways of working and modern approaches to operations. There is still a good deal of work to do particularly in the area of governance, though on the whole we’ve now met the Digital by Default Standard. It was hard at first as the standard was in development but there is now a wealth of support, help and guidance in the Government Service Design Manual.

Doing things the right way

I used to do IT delivery using waterfall approaches, with off the shelf packages, using Prince II project management.  I’ve learned a huge amount about agile delivery, custom builds and open source technology working on this project. But, above all, I’ve learned that this is absolutely the way to build and run digital services in government.

If anyone’s interested I’m happy to discuss in more detail. It’s good to share.

@chris_mitch

A couple of weeks ago the content team at GOV.UK won a black pencil at the D&AD awards. Alongside the Design of the Year award it’s been a lovely way to wrap up the first phase of work on GOV.UK.

This short video explains the rationale for the judges’ decision. It’s great that it echoes a lot of what we set out to achieve back when the project first started.

The Writing for Design category started in 1999. The black pencil is only given out for outstanding projects – it doesn’t happen every year – and this is the first time it’s been awarded in this category. It’s terrific to have the work of everyone recognised, both the content designers here at GDS and our colleagues across government.

Of course, there’s lots more to do yet. Right now we’re deciding what shape the content team will take as we migrate over 300 more websites to GOV.UK, and we’re looking at research and feedback to see how we can improve every bit of writing our users read. As ever, user needs come first.

Image: Win Stuff by Roo Reynolds

We know that great work is already going on inside and outside government to help people use digital services. We’re collecting examples to share as best practice and to learn from as we develop ideas for assisted digital support. We’ve come across some really exciting work happening at Stevenage Jobcentre Plus (JCP).

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has introduced a number of digital services to help people move into employment. These include Benefits Adviser, which gives claimants estimates on what benefits and credits they may be entitled to when they start work, and Universal Jobmatch, DWP’s online job search service.

Stevenage JCP introduced a digital suite in January 2013 to ensure that claimants who are unable to access these digital services themselves are supported to do so. Claimants now have access to computer facilities at the Jobcentre with staff and third-party organisations targeting support to those claimants who are unable to use the services independently.

This is how the model of support at Stevenage JCP works for Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) claimants:

• When a claimant completes an application for JSA, they will receive a text message or a phone call with an appointment at the Jobcentre to discuss their claim further. Appointments are booked within three working days of the application.
• At the appointment, an adviser will introduce the claimant to the other DWP digital services, including Benefits Adviser and Universal Jobmatch. The claimant will also complete a bespoke skills health check assessment online on a computer at the Jobcentre with the National Careers Service (NCS). This assessment identifies possible areas of skills development for the claimant. A private organisation provides help to complete this process digitally to those claimants that need it, using resources available on the NCS website.
• Employment advisers also offer help to those claimants that need it to produce a high-quality electronic CV, which will improve the claimant’s employment prospects.
• Finally, if needed, advisers signpost the claimant to longer-term, basic computer training, provided by local training providers.

This model provides access to digital services to all claimants. It targets support at only those claimants who need it. This is provided right in the place where claimants are most likely to go for help – their local Jobcentre. The support offered to claimants, is sourced through locally brokered agreements with local service providers, and it encourages claimants to use digital services independently in the future. 

We hope this case study gives an example of what support assisted digital services could include. However, a single model of assisted digital support will not fit all transactions. It’s essential to get insight from users and those who support them, and also to bear in mind the complexity of a service when deciding how people could be supported to use it. We’ve put together an assisted digital action plan to provide departments with a guide to developing assisted digital support.

We’re always on the lookout for great examples of people being helped to use a digital service, inside or outside government. If you know of any, get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.

We’ve been interviewing colleagues across the civil service to establish a clear set of user needs as part of our review of the governance of technology provision in government. We’ve spoken to senior leaders across government – Chief Information Officers, Digital Leaders and colleagues in Cabinet Office – as well as experts outside government. Some common themes are starting to emerge.

Accountability and transparency

Government needs inclusive forums where all departments can see their contributions translated into a clear strategic direction. Some past boards were described as ‘talking shops’; good for networking, poor for coordination.

A focus on vision and outcomes

We have already written about how we are improving and putting outcomes first. Any new models must have a stronger emphasis on defining good outcomes rather than just focussing on inputs and costs.

Consistency and simplicity

The world of government technology is vast, federated and complex. Departments have to talk to multiple Cabinet Office functions, and vice versa. Inconsistency on both sides can create delays and confusion. We need to reduce the layers of governance and speak with fewer voices.

Data not dogma

Instead of relying too heavily on theories and models, we need better data to support the choices we make – and to gather that data with a clearer idea of what we are using it for. Without that, we risk being inflexible in the face of fast changing technology.

Early, effective engagement

We at GDS need to admit that we haven’t always engaged departments enough in important decisions. Whether that’s developing strategy or the application of spending controls, we need to do that earlier and better. Processes like spending controls should be presented as an early opportunity for improvement, not simply a hoop to jump through.

Trust, autonomy and context

The balance of responsibilities between departments and ‘the centre’ is loosely defined. Most departments expressed a desire for greater autonomy, but also that this should be earned through demonstrable results. We need to be clear about what good looks like so people can work towards that.

Growing in-house capability and skills

There was universal agreement that governance had to go beyond just defining strategy and also provide a strong steer on developing in-house technology skills which reflect departments’ needs. The Civil Service should be full of intelligent technology customers and commissioners.

What is striking about these needs is that they aren’t unique to technology – the same could be applied to any number of areas. We’ll be using them as the building blocks for our work, which we’ll share an alpha version of soon.

For now though, we’d like your views on these needs. Do they ring true? What’s missing? Please let us know.

Highlights: This week the Office of the Public Guardian released a beta for the Lasting Power of Attorney. We attended Civil Service Live and spoke on Digital by Default, G-Cloud and GOV.UK. Mike Bracken met Mark Sedwell the new Home Office permanent secretary and spoke to Jennifer Pahlka of Code for America who is seconded to the White House. Visitors to GDS this week were HMRC, Anne Fenninger from French Government Agency SIG and students from Goldsmiths. Welcome to new starters this week Hadley Beeman, James Duncan and Zaheda Bhorat. Happy birthday to MCO Francis Maude this week and it was the 2 year anniversary of Mike Bracken starting in government. Looking forward to the SPRINT Alpha event and next year which is all about delivery. 

(Full transcript below)

Interviewer: Hello Mike. Tell us what we’ve been up to at GDS this week

Mike: Big launch this week, Matt, the Lasting Power of Attorney (beta release) from the Office of the Public Guardian. It’s a thing that you have to do to transfer assets between family members. Often when someone dies or you take care of a relative, you have to go through this process.

We launched a beta on Monday. Kit, Simon, Andrew, the OPG (Office of the Public Guardian) guys and Tim, Chris, Lorena, Mateusz at Ministry of Justice (MoJ). It’s been a real team effort with the department and with the agency to get this in place. It takes a whole load of paper out of the process. It’s something that you don’t want to have to do, particularly not at a time of life when you might be dealing with an elderly relative, so to make it a simpler and clearer, faster digital service is a great achievement.

We also attended Civil Service Live and had the pleasure of speaking there on Digital by Default. We got a good set of audiences. But the major thing was other people literally could get messages out. Tony Singleton spoke very well around the G-Cloud, which we’ve taken on, and how we plan to develop that. James Thornett and Andrew Greenway talked about what we’re doing in GOV.UK and recruitment.

Interviewer: They’re not the only people that we’ve been speaking to this week

Mike: We’re spending Friday afternoon with Mark Sedwill, who is the permanent secretary of the Home Office. Mark’s the new permanent secretary; a real force for good and force for change there. His team are working on the exemplar (service transformation), so we’re going to see his team and see how they’re getting on.

On Thursday I spent an hour online with a video chat with Jennifer Pahlka. Jen runs Code for America, and interestingly she’s been seconded into the White House for a year to try and do some of the stuff that we’re doing here. She’s in the very early stages, and it’s interesting to remember what we were like two years ago, listening to her right now.

Interviewer: We’ve also had some visitors into GDS this week

Mike: As well as the departments, and we’ve had a lot of people from HMRC here actually, but various departments, we had the French government over. Anne Fenninger, who runs Service d’information du gouvernement (SIG), which is the equivalent of GDS over there, was over to have a look round, always good to welcome them in.

We also had students in this week from Goldsmiths University in response to a brief around Assisted Digital. They were showing us some very imaginative prototypes of what government could do.

Interviewer: That’s fabulous. What do we have coming up?

Mike: The week after next, we have SPRINT Alpha. That’s the second SPRINT event, it is 100 working days after the first SPRINT event we had in January. It’s really reporting on the transformation programme as a whole, and how we’re getting on with our alphas and betas. I’m really excited about that. We’re going to have permanent secretaries from all departments, several ministers in place, and we’re going to be able to show some of the alphas and betas for the first time. It’s going to be great.

Interviewer: We’ve also had some new starters

Mike: We have Hadley Beeman and James Duncan in Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), and also Zaheda Bhorat; Zaheda joined us from the open data world; has been working with Google, Mozilla and those sorts of organisations; I think she’ll give us a real step up on that front.

Interviewer: Finally, we’ve had some anniversaries, this week

Mike: We’ve had our minister, Francis Maude’s birthday this week, happy birthday to him. Today is my second year (at GDS), it marks two years since we started in government. Remember we only opened GDS in November 2011, but it’s two years today. So we’ve done quite a lot. But I do remember my first day being in a particularly unlovely, sweaty room in south London; we’re no longer in that office, it does seem a very, very different place now.

Interviewer: What does the next year hold for GDS?

Mike: Delivery. Particularly delivery of transactional services; complete end-to-end transformation of 25 services, 8 departments, 14 agencies. What we have to do is deliver those alphas and betas and replace existing services, and at the same time we’ve got to get 300 agencies onto GOV.UK, and also roll out our identity play. We have a lot to do on Assisted Digital and Digital Inclusion. But next year is really all about delivery.

Interviewer: Terrific. Well, onwards?

Mike: Onwards

Now that the application process for our new Digital Services Framework has opened, we thought it would be useful to say a bit more about what it is.

What’s a framework, you ask? It’s a list of suppliers who’ve been pre-approved to bid for government contracts. It means the public sector can reduce the time it would otherwise take to buy services under European Union procurement regulations.

This particular framework has been put together jointly by  Government Procurement Service (GPS) and the Government Digital Service (GDS) specifically to support the Government’s Digital Strategy.

We need this one because none of the existing frameworks specifically give us access to the deep pool of agile suppliers that we need to help us do what we need to digitally. We think it will attract a big range of suppliers, old and new. We’re looking for a wide geographical spread of expertise.

It’s also a good way to keep up quality. The Government Service Design Manual sets out our approach for how government will build services so good that people prefer to use them. Before joining the framework, we’ll ask suppliers to ensure that they recognise and meet the expectations set in the manual, and ask them for evidence. They’ll also be expected to support departments in building and running services that meet the Digital by Default Service Standard.

We’ve taken inspiration from agile contracts used elsewhere, and designed our initial set of terms and conditions to be relatively lightweight. They’re also standardised as much as possible between projects, leaving some detail to be completed based on the specific needs of a project.

As ever, we’ll seek and act on user feedback on all aspects of the framework and iterate for the second version.

Next steps

Applications are now open and the next step for suppliers will depend on whether they’re already registered with GPS.

• Suppliers not registered with GPS will need to register to access the GPS eSourcing Suite
• Suppliers already registered with GPS should express their interest in this framework by e-mailing ExpressionOfInterest@gps.gsi.gov.uk detailing their organisation’s name and interest in the Digital Services Framework Reference RM1043
• Once GPS has registered your ‘expression of interest’ email, you will receive an email from GPS with instructions to log into the GPS eSourcing Suite.  Once logged in you will need to accept the ‘invitation to tender’ which will give you access to the documentation you need to proceed.

Applications for the framework are expected to close on 7th August 2013 with the framework up and running during September.  The full provisional timetable is:

9 July 2013: Publication of the OJEU contract notice and GPS eSourcing Suite open for supplier applications

25 July 2013: Clarification period closes

1 August 2013: Deadline for the publication of responses to Clarification questions

7 August 2013 at 15:00 hours: Deadline for submission of Tenders to the Authority (“Tender Submission Deadline”)

8 – 29 August 2013: Compliance checking and evaluation

2 September 2013 (PM): eAuction Training Sessions – Webinar

5 September 2013: eAuction for Pricing

12 September 2013: Intention to award notification issued to successful and unsuccessful Potential Providers.

13 – 23 September 2013: 10 day standstill (in accordance with Regulation 32)

24  September 2013: Expected “Commencement Date” for Framework Agreement(s)

You can also see the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) notice.

There has to be an element of price competition to be accepted as a supplier on the framework. The way we will do this is just a little bit too involved for this blog but interested suppliers will be able to read about the process in the OJEU notice.

We’ll continue to communicate with suppliers but please bear in mind that there are some regulatory obligations on how we do this, so questions about the framework or specific applications will need to go through the GPS eSourcing Suite.

We’ll write more about how we’ll be supporting departments to use the framework in a future blog.

Following Louis Hyde’s blog post about the Digital Service framework on 9 July, we’ve received a few questions. The framework has been a collaborative team effort between GDS and the Government Procurement Service (GPS) and so Kris Ross, the GPS lead, has kindly agreed to write a guest post to answer the questions.

The first thing to say is that because the procurement has started, the European Union (EU) rules around fair and open competition mean that GDS and GPS can’t engage individually with you about the new framework.

So, if you are supplier and have any queries please go to GPS who are managing the formal procurement process. You can do this by registering on the GPS eSourcing Suite.

If you work in the media and have any queries please go to the Cabinet Office press office.

Framework value

We estimate that £40m will be spent in the first 9 months of the framework. This is indicative of the potential spend through the framework. The procurement is being conducted in line with EU regulations and provides a fully compliant procurement route for the public sector to access digital services.

Unfortunately, there is an error on the Official Journal of the European (OJEU) notice on the EU website which says that the framework value is £100m, it should say £40m. We have sent a correction through to the EU website.

Deadline for submission of tenders

The deadline for submission of tenders is 15:00 British summer time (BST) on 7 August 2013. Please note that this is shown as 14:00 Greenwich mean time (GMT) on the EU website.

G-Cloud

G-Cloud provides access to commodity, cloud-based services. The Digital Services framework will allow Government customers to commission bespoke digital project build services via GDS/GPS. We’re aware that G-Cloud contains some agile software delivery suppliers, which will give some overlap for suppliers who are also successful in their application to join the Digital Services framework. We’ll see if there’s any overlap between the frameworks over the next few months and be in a better position to review the scope of future G-Cloud frameworks.

If you have any queries about G-Cloud, please send them to the G-Cloud team.

Purpose of the framework

The Digital Services framework will give public sector customers easy access to suppliers of all sizes with the right digital capabilities to help them produce public services that are digital by default and focused on user needs. It will be a flexible and speedy route to meet customers’ needs for digital project expertise.

We are aiming for the framework to be available for use by September 2013. The framework will be in place for 9 months, but we aim for it to be refreshed after 6 months.

The framework will be delivered as a GPS managed service to central government departments. GPS, GDS and departments will work together as a team to develop the digital project requirements and select suppliers. Wider public sector customers will use the framework outside of the GPS managed service.

Departments will be able to access either complete digital delivery teams or individual specialists to join an existing digital delivery team via GDS/GPS.

Initial demand is largely represented by the 25 transactional services identified in departmental digital strategies for digital transformation and implementation by April 2015; projects that are approved under the GDS digital spend control process.

Information for suppliers

• The framework is open to all suppliers of agile digital services. The OJEU notice alerting the marketplace to the procurement sets out the specific roles and capabilities that we’re looking for suppliers to provide.
• Current suppliers on other frameworks are welcome to apply to be on the new framework. Existing contracts under other frameworks are unaffected.
• This is a 9-month framework, not a contract, and there is no guarantee of business for any supplier. The procurement process establishes a legal mechanism by which the government can set up individual contracts with suppliers should they be selected against a particular set of needs.
• Call-offs under the framework will be for a maximum of 2 years.
• It doesn’t matter where suppliers are based but suppliers must be able to deploy their staff to where the delivery teams are working.
• This procurement will include a simplified set of entry criteria, and smaller chunks of work combined with simplified and shortened terms and conditions, to make the process more accessible to SMEs.

Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU)

OJEU stands for Official Journal of the European Union. The term “OJEU‟ is used as shorthand for the “OJEU Contract Notice‟, which is the official way that a government notifies the market that it wants to buy something.

The OJEU contract notice for the Digital Services Framework is available on the OJEU website.

Mike Bracken discusses the launch of the digital services framework, digital capability as part of the Civil Service Reform One Year On report and the SPRINT Alpha event next week. David Rennie from the ID Assurance team visited the Cloud Identity Summit in California, Vernon Everitt and Phil Young from Transport for London came to GDS to discuss open data and John Oates joined the Content Design team.

(Full transcript below)

Giles: Hello Mike.

Mike: Hello Giles.

Giles: What’s been going on this week?

Mike: Two big things this week. One of our biggest reforms to date started this week, with the launch of the Digital Services Framework. It’s a new framework to allow us to commission and procure services from all suppliers, but crucially around agile services, bespoke, timed materials and specialist skills; stuff that has always restricted government from being able to do stuff quickly. So far we’ve had great interest; over 180 expressions of interest in the first four or five working days. It goes on till August; all the details are on our blog.

But when that’s complete, as well as a G-Cloud for commodity services, we’re going to have a new framework to allow us to buy bespoke and timed material services around digital content, digital technology and so on and so forth. So it’s a real big win for us, and it’s one of those structural changes that have really bedevilled government for the last, what, 15 years, I would say.

Giles: And the second thing?

Mike: It’s one year on from civil service reform, and we’ve come out of it quite well. The digital changes that we have delivered or are on track to deliver have been recognised as changing the civil service. That’s good. There’s a lot of conversation at the moment around our work on recruitment, and bringing new skills and capability into the civil service. You can find out more of that next Tuesday the 16th at 1.30, when Sir Bob Kerslake, the head of the civil service will be hosting an online conversation; the hashtag is #asksirbob.

Giles: What’s going to happen next week?

Mike: Internally there’s a big meeting next week, we’re going to do a bit of press around it. It’s called Sprint Alpha. It’s 100 days since we launched the Sprint programme, and our 25 exemplars that we revealed in the government digital strategy and the departmental digital strategies. We’re showing progress on those. We’ll be able to show six or seven of those.

I’m delighted that our minister and other ministers will be attending that, and crucially, we’ve got the Permanent Secretaries, who have sacrificed their Wednesday meeting to take some time to host a panel debate around the exemplar. We’ve really got buy-in all the way through the system. Next week is a time that we start to show some of the work that particularly the Transformation team and others here have been doing with departments to show how the transactions are coming to life. It’s a big event, and I’m really delighted that we’re getting the alignment between some of the political level, ministerial and all the departments.

Giles: Where have GDS staff been visiting this week?

Mike: Well, we get out and about around government, and around our exemplar sites. But one notable thing this week is a little further afield, where David Rennie, who leads on our commercial relations in the identity area, has been out in America at the Cloud Identity summit, because what we’re doing is seen to be leading around the world. We’re looking forward to hearing what he has had to say when he’s out there, and how well received that’s been.

Internally, we’ve had a lot of people visiting GDS from inside the system. Perhaps most notable would be Vernon Everitt and Phil Young from TfL (Transport for London), and they came to show us what they’re doing with open data and how that is transforming transport services in London. It’s very interesting to see what they’re doing.

Giles: Anything else interesting been happening?

Mike: Well, we’ve been looking at user traffic for GOV.UK. You always want to know if what you’re putting out there is being used by people. We had some good indicators this week. Firstly, with all the trouble in Egypt, we saw a six-fold increase in our Egyptian content, and content about Egypt on GOV.UK, our travel advice service as well, so that was useful to see that people are using it.

Probably more obviously, last Sunday we had a dip in traffic on a Sunday afternoon, when there was a certain tennis match going on. Well done to Andy Murray, he shows that he can affect traffic to GOV.UK. Apart from that, it’s a good week. I’d like to welcome a few people. We’ve got new people coming in to help us deliver our exemplars, and to roll out GOV.UK. I just want to give a special mention to John Oates, who’s joined us on the content design team.

Today we published another important update to the Government Service Design Manual to help departments recruit and retain staff with new digital skills. This is one of the services the new GDS Recruitment Hub is offering departments.

Increasingly we need to bring in people with specialist skills that the Civil Service hasn’t been able to call upon before – designers, web ops, product managers, and the like. We’ve created template job descriptions for a set of leadership and specialist roles and we’ve provided organisational design guidance about how people in these roles should work together. We’ve also given advice on salaries.

As well as getting hold of the specialist capability that teams need to build great digital services – we must recruit great technology leaders. The governance review that we’ve been working on over the last couple of months has highlighted the importance of getting in more leaders with experience of transforming big organisations through technology and driving culture change. GDS will help tailor senior job descriptions, sift and interview applicants, and we’ll provide specialist recruitment support to help find the best people for these roles.

We’ll be updating the manual; we’re currently working a framework for technology recruiters, which we’ll tell you more about in the autumn. Over the next few weeks we’ll be adding more digital specialist job descriptions.

For now though, please email us any questions you have on the Recruitment Hub.

G-Cloud moved across to GDS at the beginning of June. This ground-breaking way for the public sector to buy IT services as commodities was set up by Chris Chant, and then later implemented more fully by Denise McDonagh and her team. Since taking it on we’ve been reviewing G-Cloud, and I want to share our thoughts on where we want to take the programme.

So what have we been up to?

The Major Projects Authority annual report highlighted some concerns about how the G-Cloud programme was resourced. I’m pleased to say that we now have the budget we need to make sure this programme of work continues; and we’ve appointed a team that’s nearly double in size.

The team will focus on working with the Government Procurement Service (GPS) to help and advise suppliers already on G-Cloud, as well as potential suppliers in the future. It will also continue to work with government and the wider public sector to raise awareness of the programme and its benefits; and it will help government departments understand and use G-Cloud so that they meet their commitments under the public Cloud First policy.

The next iteration of the supplier framework – G-Cloud 4 – will be issued as planned, with the OJEU notice published by the end of July, and services being available on the CloudStore by the end of October.

And what’s next?

In her final blog post, when Denise said that G-Cloud had moved to ‘business as usual’ she was both right and wrong. Certainly, our ambition is for the use of G-Cloud to become routine – the default route for public sector purchases of commodity IT services. But that doesn’t mean we’re being complacent. We are not going to let G-Cloud stand still. Like everything else that GDS does, the G-Cloud team is driven by user needs. Just as technology moves relentlessly on, the needs of buyers and suppliers won’t stand still.

We’ll carry out a full product review, which will:

• identify the user need – both in terms of public sector buyers and their suppliers
• look at what government departments are buying that should be on the G-Cloud but aren’t yet
• provide clarity on the differences and overlaps of G-Cloud and the Digital Services Framework with clear guidance for buyers and suppliers, ensuring there’s no duplication of services
• define a robust and auditable set of measures for both savings and spend
• using feedback from suppliers and buyers, identify how we continue to improve CloudStore functionality and usability in both the short and longer term

I’ll keep you posted.

Today we’re publishing our second quarterly progress report on the commitments made in the Government Digital Strategy.

Transforming government services

In 2011 the first challenge we faced was the creation of a central digital estate in the form of the Government Digital Service. The next challenge was to fix publishing. Launched in October 2012, GOV.UK is now an award-winning digital service which will continue to grow as over 270 more government agencies and bodies migrate onto it in the next twelve months.

Since January 2013 our primary focus has been on the third challenge: fix transactions.

That means digital transformation – rebuilding government services for the way people live today. Put simply, it should be as easy to manage your tax online as it is to bank online, and as easy to transfer ownership of a car online as it is to sell a car online.

We’ve started work on redesigning 25 of the biggest and most-used transactional public services – we call them exemplars, leading the way for others to follow. At Sprint Alpha today Ministers, Civil Service Leaders and teams from all over the country are showcasing some of the features we’re already built for those services. People are seeing the live, working software that’s already making government services Digital by Default.

We are running this programme of continual iteration in the open. You can follow our progress at www.gov.uk/transformation, where we’re regularly publishing information about every exemplar. You’ll see performance data, screenshots and status reports of where each service is at, and we’re going to add more to it as each service progresses. It’s in beta, so send us any thoughts, suggestions or errors you see.

Screenshot of the transformation pages

Three months, in brief

You can find lots more detail in the report, but some of the biggest successes of the last three months include:

• attracting digital skills to government – so far we’ve recruited to 11 digital specialist posts for DWP, been involved in recruitment processes for 29 senior technology posts, started running an induction and development programme for service managers, and advised 3 of the 7 major transactional departments on organisational design needed to make digital transformation happen
• publishing the Digital by Default Service Standard and its accompanying manual
• moving the 25 digital exemplars forward – by the end of June, 13 were in discovery phase, 6 were in alpha, 5 in beta, and elements of 1 were live
• moving 6 more ministerial department websites to GOV.UK, and started work on moving across hundreds more websites of other government agencies and public bodies
• announcing that HMRC would be the first government department to use the new Identity Assurance reference hub, from autumn 2013 onwards
• reforming IT Governance in government – this includes creating definitions of new skills needed; closing moribund boards and reporting structures
• announcing a new cross-government approach to digital inclusion
• delivering savings of more than £500m – mostly as a result of IT spend controls and moving government services and transactions to digital platforms, including an almost 70% cost reduction by replacing Directgov and BusinessLink with GOV.UK

Reporting in public

It’s important that we continue to publish these updates in public, that we report on the services we’re transforming, and that we blog about our progress. Publishing this means more of our colleagues can see what’s happening and what part they play in the process. It’s also the best way to make sure that we’re accountable for the things we build. As our design principles say, if we make things open, we make things better.

You’re going to hear more about the transformation programme from Mike Beaven tomorrow. We’ll also be posting more updates on some of the work we’ve completed so far, including footage from the Land Registry’s ‘alpha in a day’ and updates from some of the teams we’re working with across the country.

There’s still a huge amount of work to do, but we’ll tell you more about it week by week as the transformation of government services continues.

Onwards.

For the last six months GDS has been helping government transform public services, making them so good that people prefer to use them. Yesterday, at Sprint Alpha, we gave our first progress report to Ministers, Civil Service leaders and more than 300 civil servants working on digital services.

The transformation programme

In January 2013 we started working with colleagues across government to transform public services. We face a generational change in making all our 650+ transactions digital by default. It’s something we can’t do in one go, so we helped eight of the biggest transactional departments to select 25 ‘exemplar’ services. These first appeared in the departmental digital strategies last November. Delivering the exemplars to become live services is the work of the transformation programme.

By ‘transformation’ we don’t mean making websites. We mean everything: examining the whole business process involved in a transaction to make it consistent, high-quality and digital by default. This approach came about after spending a lot of time working with departments on pilot projects in 2012, and I mentioned some of the methods in a blog post last summer. This helped us understand how best to work collaboratively with departments and agencies, whilst driving a quick and efficient approach to transformation.

The first phase of that has been Discovery, in which we find out exactly what those processes are, what’s involved in them, the underlying technology, what legislation might exist around it and, most important of all, who its users are.

Learning from Discovery

Departments have been incredibly open to new ways of working, developing agile skills and transforming how services function. The limited capability of some departments has definitely been a challenge, but many are working hard to get more knowledge and skills into teams.

Where departments are finding new problems (and new solutions) they’ve helped us to learn too. We’re starting to incorporate that guidance into the service manual, alongside mailing lists and meet-ups for those involved in making services.

Now, as these transformations get under way, GDS will start to focus on wider business change: embedding digital capability within the local teams that support the services. While the services we’re working on will have a measurable impact on users, it’s a fraction of the number of services that will be built over the next few years, so we want to make sure that all of the things we learn are available to help departments build their own capability and deliver world-class services.

Transforming services in public

As Mike mentioned yesterday, you can read detailed updates about each of the services at www.gov.uk/transformation. You can also read information about each of our exemplars:

1. Electoral registration
2. Apprenticeship applications
3. Redundancy payments
4. Patent renewals
5. Property register
6. Student finance
7. Waste carrier registration
8. Rural support (Common Agricultural Policy)
9. View driving record
10. Personalised registrations
11. Vehicle management
12. Claim Carer’s Allowance
13. Claim Personal Independence Payment (PIP)
14. Universal Credit
15. PAYE for employees
16. Digital self-assessment
17. Business tax dashboard
18. Agent online self-serve
19. Registered traveller
20. Criminal record check
21. Visit visa applications
22. Civil claims
23. Employment tribunal fee payment
24. Prison visit booking
25. Lasting power of attorney

The launch of SLC’s 24+ service, and the public beta of OPG’s lasting power of attorney application are some of the earliest parts of the programme to get public use, but there’s much much more to come.

Along with this blog and our transformation updates you’ll also be able to read updates from the likes of MOJ’s Digital Services Division and DVLA’s Digital Services team. It’ll offer a high-level, public overview of where we’re at, show you what’s currently in production and any data about service performance.

Over the next few days, we’ll share more from the programme. In the meantime, take a look at the transformation programme updates to see more.