Two years ago, we set out to change government. We gave ourselves 400 working days to transform 25 major public services, building digital “exemplars” so good that people would prefer to use them. Those 400 days are up. Here’s how we did.

Of the 25 services, 20 are publicly accessible. Fifteen of those are fully live and the rest are in beta – safe to use, but we’re still tweaking the user journey. This is a huge achievement and we’ve done it by putting user needs first.

These transformed services are an unending source of big numbers. Register to Vote has seen 4.3 million registrations. Your tax account has 1.5 million users. More than 70,000 drivers view their licence information online each month. Renew a patent online has seen a digital take-up of 94%.

But behind all those big numbers, these services are really helping people. They’ve made it much much easier to do important things like applying for Carer’s Allowance, booking a visit to see someone in prison, or making a lasting power of attorney.

These 20 services in public really are success stories – and the departments deserve the credit for them. With the exception of Register to Vote, which we developed at GDS, the exemplars were designed and built by digital teams in their respective departments. Our involvement with many of them has ended, but teams around the country will be improving them for a long time to come.

Learning as we go

As we’ve said before, GOV.UK isn’t finished, and the same goes for the exemplars. As government, we will continue to iterate and improve our digital services.

In the past, projects like these have been launched with a big bang, and glitches and problems weren’t discovered until the service was live and started to fail.

As we tested the Rural Payments service, for instance, we found issues that stopped us scaling the service up in time for this round of applications which had a fixed deadline.

Building these services in agile, iterative ways allows us to do the right thing; improve services if they aren’t ready, before they have an impact on users. We’ll continue to work with the RPA and others to improve these exemplars over the year.

Digital transformation continues

The programme has ended but transformation goes farther and deeper than the exemplars. GDS is working with Home Office, Ministry of Justice, and Department for Transport to find ways to improve and expand more services, and we’re working with departments to bring the benefits of digital technology to civil servants.

We used the transformation page on GOV.UK to track the progress of the exemplars. Now the programme’s ended we’re archiving that. The GDS blog is now the place to keep track of the digital transformation of government. We’re only just beginning.

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As some of you might have seen earlier in the week, I’ve just been appointed as the government’s first Chief Data Officer. I am honoured, and I think that it’s right that we have a CDO now, but I’ll continue as Executive Director of GDS in addition to my new responsibilities. Here’s why: in many of the areas of data we work across in Government, I believe we are doing outstanding work.

Many organisations such as the Office for National Statistics under the leadership of John Pullinger, Paul Maltby’s Government Innovation Group, the Data Science Partnership convened by Melanie Dawes and Richard Sargeant who leads GDS’s work on the Performance Platform and Data Science, have been doing excellent work on data in government. It’s important this work continues. I intend to connect the strong foundations they have laid.

The UK government has never had a Chief Data Officer before. So why does it need one now? Because, despite all the great work that is going on to improve government’s use of data, we’ve lacked the central coordination needed to really move the data agenda forward. Much of the work so far has been delivered as discrete projects, and we need to align our efforts so that we’re as effective as possible in using public data for the benefit of citizens and businesses.

My work at GDS over the last few years has given me the opportunity to speak with many of those working on the data agenda in government, at both the operational and legislative ends of the spectrum. In many of those discussions, the need for government-wide data standards and a mechanism for enforcing them was a recurring theme. Many also recognised that the skills required to make the best use of government data aren’t yet distributed throughout public services, and that there is still work to be done to make our open datasets more useable. These are some of the things I’ll be focusing on in my new role.

Now we’ve started making public services digital by default and moving towards Government as a Platform, the need for clear and consistently applied data standards is even more clear. Just as we talk about “software as a public service”, we should talk about “data as a public asset”.

What does a Chief Data Officer do?

In this role I’ll be responsible for:

• transforming the management and use of data within Government, by setting standards and principles and opening up data flows across Government
• championing open data, and opening up existing government data wherever possible
• driving the use of data as a tool for making decisions in government, including developing data skills and professional capacity

The role has come about after a consultation with over 50 parts of Government, nearly all of whom recommended a central convening and standard setting function. One of my first tasks will be to consult even more widely. I want to have deeper discussions with people I’ve already spoken to and with people I’ve not yet met. I’ll be looking to make the connection between operational realities and data policy stronger.

Over the next few months I want to draw the map so that we can then plan the route towards public data as the foundation for Government as a Platform: better services for citizens at lower cost to the taxpayer.

To everyone and anyone in government who handles or manages data, or has a view about how that should happen: don’t hesitate to get in touch. I’m counting on your help.

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Last November, HMRC published its digital strategy. Among many other things, it said:

We will enhance the systems that provide and support our digital services by building a multi-channel digital tax platform, upon which all new digital services operate.

That digital tax platform is an essential component that’s helped HMRC’s new digital team (mostly based in Newcastle, with a few in London) put together 3 services which, just in this last week before the start of the pre-election period, passed their Service Standard Assessments to go live.

Those services are:

• Your Tax Account – making filing tax easier for small and medium sized businesses. Over 2 million users so far.
• Digital Self Assessment – allowing people to go paperless for their personal tax affairs – 1.2 million have already done so.
• PAYE for employees – making it easier for people to tell HMRC about changes that affect their tax code (such as using a company car)

Your Tax Account makes paying tax much simpler. More like paying your gas or electricity bill. It shows you a dashboard page that summarises everything in one place – what your company owes (or perhaps is owed) and when it needs to be paid. Click a link to pay there and then. It will save time and money for millions of small business owners across the UK.

Digital Self Assessment is one of those services (a bit like Register to Vote) that’s so quick and simple to use that people can be forgiven for thinking “Is that it?” It’s a simple idea – you provide HRMC with an email address, which it checks is valid by sending you a confirmation message. Once everything’s confirmed, you’ve gone paperless. Instead of being bombarded with paperwork, you’ll be sent emails. Everything will be stored for you online. The service sounds simple, but that’s because the team has done the hard work to make it so.

The PAYE exemplar is similarly helpful. Anyone who’s ever driven a company car will know the pain of having to spend ages on the phone to HMRC, sorting out all the tax details that arise. That pain’s gone now. Now you just provide information (such as details about you and the car you’re driving) and the digital service does the hard work for you.

All 3 services are fantastic examples of our eighth design principle: build digital services, not websites. With the tax platform doing a lot of the hard interconnecting work behind the scenes, each of these services is built on top. It’s a microcosm of the Government as a Platform future that we’ve already begun to build: platforms provide scalable, sharable components that service designers can use as tools.

Platforms and foundations

Leading HMRC through all this change are Chief Digital and Information Officer Mark Dearnley and Chief Digital Officer Mike Potter. Anyone who’s seen Mark speak (I saw him most recently at Sprint 15) will know that he has an infectious energy about him. When you ask him about the work that’s been done, he says: “The team has delivered great digital services that large numbers of customers are already using. They have also created the foundation of Digital Tax Accounts that will grow in capability over the coming months and years.”

Creating foundations. That’s what platforms do.

I’m delighted by the success of these exemplars, but it’s the structural reform of our tax system which they help enable which pleases me most. HMRC has always been the leading Government department for digital transactions. It crossed the rubicon some years ago by working with software vendors to accept transactions through intermediaries. Yet like any large organisation with a hefty legacy and complex policy arrangement – and there really is nothing as complex as our tax code – it runs the risk of codifying this complexity into its operations and software. HMRC naturally fell into this category, feeling a little like a fortress to others in Government.

Now it has begun a new phase of development, centered upon agile development of services. These exemplars have all been built in an agile way, using technologies including Scala, Java, and MongoDB. The multidisciplinary teams made up of technical and business resources depend on massive amounts of user research, and the exemplars have been through several iterations in private and public beta. The organisation is changing: HMRC is sharing code on Github. Mark’s being written about in Wired magazine. This is not the HMRC of old.

With this level of transactions, it is impossible for any Government agency to claim the agile approach does not scale or is unsuited to transactional services.

These exemplars and the systemic changes they have introduced lay the ground for genuine cross-Government platform plays. HMRC content is one of the biggest sources of traffic to GOV.UK; it successfully piloted the use of Verify for identity assurance for some early adopters in this year’s self assessment peak in January, and you can see a huge amount of tax related data on the performance platform. This commitment to platforms, combined with a new architecture for its services, means HMRC will be able to play a key role in Government as a Platform in the next Parliament.

Onwards!

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With this parliament drawing to a close, it’s time to take what we’ve learned over the last few years and work out how to pick up the pace of digital transformation in the years to come.

As Mike Beaven said yesterday, the exemplar programme has wrapped up. I want to join him in congratulating everyone who has made things better for users around the UK. It’s been astonishing to watch it unfold.

The most important thing we’ve taken from it? Siloed approaches to transformation don’t work. Reinventing the wheel every single time we build a service has led to far too much duplication and waste. That’s not good enough.

We want to fix that by building Government as a Platform.

We need a shared digital infrastructure

Government as a Platform is a new vision for digital government; a common core infrastructure of shared digital systems, technology and processes on which it’s easy to build brilliant, user-centric government services.

Government as a Platform is a phrase coined by Tim O’Reilly in a 2010 paper, although there are differences between the environment he describes and the one we face in the UK. Last autumn we made this video to explain the concept. Our thinking has moved on a bit since then, but it’s simple illustration of the kind of thing we mean.

The world we’re in now, where each service has its own way of doing common things – like taking payments or sending reminders – is hugely inefficient. It’s making things more difficult for users and much more expensive for government.

The platform approach has begun

We aren’t starting from scratch. We’ve already built platforms that are delivering better services at a much lower cost.

GOV.UK, the single domain, is a platform for publishing. It’s used by hundreds of departments and agencies, and replacing DirectGov and Business Link alone saved more than £60m a year.

And, more recently, we have GOV.UK Verify – a platform for identity. A new way for citizens to prove who they are when they use government services (and the first of its kind in the world). Teams at HMRC, DEFRA and BIS are already using it as they build new services.

In our early conversations with departments we’ve found there are probably thirty more platforms that would radically change the speed and cost of building new services.

The Corporate Management Board of the Civil Service and HM Treasury have asked us to explore the concept further. We’re working with departments to unpick what platforms will have the most impact, both for users and in terms of the cost to government. In particular we’re looking at;

• how we’d start building high-priority platforms
• how to speed up the roll out of better technology for civil servants
• what platform services could do to improve the way departments and agencies work

We’re also starting to build prototypes. Payment processing, for example, was one potential platform cited by many as an area to explore and we’ve already started to do some discovery work on what that might look like. Other examples include case management and appointment bookings – common services used all around government.

Redefining digital government

The new ways of working, the new skills we’re bringing to government, and the relentless focus on meeting user needs all demand a solid digital infrastructure. There are teams in departments now capable of building world-leading digital services who need core platforms, and robust, secure canonical datasets to build on.

Over the next few months we’ll be working out how to do that.

While the next wave of platforms has yet to be finalised, what is clear is the enthusiasm government has for the concept; taking a join-up approach to service provision that’s going to be genuinely transformational. I’m excited for what’s to come.

Onwards!

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You may have  noticed we’ve been blogging more than usual over the past week. We’ve had a lot to tell you, and we needed to do this before this Parliament ends on 30 March. Between then and the general election on 7 May is the pre-election period and the Civil Service communicates less, in line with the General Election Guidance.

So you now won’t be hearing much from us in the 5 weeks up to the election, unless it’s to provide information essential to continuing the government’s day-to-day work. That applies to @GOVUK on Twitter, this blog, any other Government Digital Service blogs, and social media channels.

That doesn’t mean we’re not doing anything. Our work will continue through the pre-election period. We just won’t be talking about it much in the run-up to the election.

There will however be updates and announcements made as a new government forms. These can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/election2015. This page will be available once Parliament dissolves on Monday 30 March.

While we’re on the subject of elections, don’t forget to register to vote. You can do it online. It takes about 3 minutes.

The pre-election period (PEP) is over, and we can talk publicly about our work once more.

First of all, I'd like to welcome our new Cabinet Office Ministerial team: Oliver Letwin, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; Matthew Hancock, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General; Rob Wilson, John Penrose and George Bridges, Parliamentary Undersecretaries; and Robert Halfon, Minister without Portfolio.

Just before PEP began, we published a lot of posts on this blog about what we've achieved to date, and what we plan to do in future. We posted so many things, in such a short time, that you might easily have missed some of them. Highlights included:

• Government as a platform - in which I explain our plans for the future
• Looking back at the exemplars - Mike Beaven on the transformation programme
• Data as a public asset - my first thoughts on being appointed Chief Data Officer

Although we were quiet in public during the PEP, we were by no means idle. Work continued on our preparations for government as a platform, and on many other projects besides.

Some teams have already begun posting updates:

• the GOV.UK Verify team have just published a list of digital services expected to start using GOV.UK Verify in the next 6 months
• the GOV.UK team have been busy with a great deal of work, including keeping everything up-to-date during the election and subsequent reshuffle. It was great to see GOV.UK handle the change of government so smoothly, as it was designed to do. Most people won’t have noticed any difference. That’s the idea.

There’s loads more to do. We will have more to tell you in the very near future, particularly about government as a platform and my new role as Chief Data Officer.

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Just over a year ago GDS produced its first Social Media Playbook. This was designed to support community managers coming into GDS to help them learn how we do things and what best practice should look like. It has since become a valuable resource for government communicators, being referenced and repurposed in other publications and guidance.

A lot has moved on in just 12 months. Not just across the different social media platforms, but also at GDS; in both the shape and leadership of the social media team. This naturally has had an impact on how we approach digital communications. The techniques we’ve adopted and the tools we use have changed.

So we’ve updated the Playbook to represent what we’re doing now. You’ll see similar process and structure, but we’ve now gone into more detail on sections we know are important. We’ve built in the guidance you’ve (those of you working in government comms and beyond) asked us to include. We’ve added direct contacts should you want to speak to someone about, for example, digital monitoring. And we’ve tried to include as many relevant examples as possible to help illustrate our work.

You can expect to find all sections updated, with an emphasis on:

• listening
• user support
• social media and storytelling
• measurement and evaluation
• channel guides - Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Flickr

Plus, new sections on:

• digital content production
• social media and events

As with everything we publish, we do like hearing your feedback - it helps us to make future improvements. So please do get in touch using the comments box below or via Twitter. Plus, we’d love to hear about great examples of digital comms and social media activities which we know are being produced by departments and agencies every day - so again, please get in touch.

It’s worth adding that this Playbook has not been designed to be a definitive guide to social media in government. We are simply sharing what we do and the practices we adopt and hope this will help others when they are shaping their social media activities.

If you are looking for further resources and detailed guidance for civil servants using social media, visit the Government Communications Service website.

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Following feedback from all over government, and working with a host of internal teams here at GDS, we are pleased to announce the new, revised Digital Service Standard.

The Service Standard now contains 18 points, as opposed to the previous 26. Although it's shorter, it continues to capture all the key components needed to make a service that transforms the lives and experiences of users/so good that users prefer to use it.

What's changed

The main changes to the new Standard include:

• the points have been re-ordered so that they are grouped by theme so that they flow better
• the requirement for setting KPIs and for reporting on the performance platform has been separated to improve clarity
• the point on using analytics tools has been amended to emphasise the importance of translating information into continuous improvement once a service is public
• the point on digital take-up has been made more explicit
• assisted digital support is no longer a discrete point and is instead part of other criteria - reflecting that assisted digital support is an integral part of any service

The new standard will come into effect on 1 June 2015 and will continue to apply to new and redesigned external-facing services. The Service Manual, prompts and evidence document, and other related documents have been updated to reflect the changes made.

We'll continue to iterate

In line with GDS’s commitment to continuous learning and getting better, the new Standard will be revised again next year and we will be asking for your thoughts on what worked, what didn’t work and what could have been done better.

Get in touch with the Service Standard team if you have any questions.

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For many of us it may be hard to imagine life without digital technology or the internet. But what about the *20% of UK adults (that’s over 10 million) who don’t have the access, opportunity, or skills to take part in the rapidly changing digital world?

*BBC Basic Online Skills May 2014 research

GDS assisted digital leads Roxanne Asadi and Alan Rider describe their experience over the past 18 months helping services to meet those users’ needs.

Mind the gap

Roxanne: When I joined GDS back in 2013, I knew I was entering the world of digital - where the focus is delivery and users are king. What I didn’t yet know was that by ‘users’ we often didn’t mean 100% of users; instead we meant those who were digitally included and capable. I’m an assisted digital lead - that means my focus is on those people who can’t use digital services (yes they exist and no, they’re not all elderly).

I was part of a new team, brought in to work alongside the Transformation programme to support services to develop assisted digital that meets user needs.

Alan: Plenty has changed since we both started.  When we arrived, everyone was still finding their feet and awareness across services and departments, and even within GDS itself, was pretty low.  Much of our first few months was spent going round departments and services explaining what assisted digital is and why it is important.

Users who need help are not just ‘edge cases’ and getting that message across was vital.  When we started, the full service standard hadn’t gone live. When that happened in April 2014 it  gave everything a real boost.  That upped the pressure on us to support services to meet the standard for assisted digital.

Roxanne: Departments have always tried to support their users, that’s nothing new, but this was about moving away from a multi-channel approach to Digital by Default. We’re building great digital services for everyone, so leaving those who don’t have digital skills to carry on using existing channels is the wrong way of looking at it.

Alan: Whilst we were happy to talk to individual services and provide guidance, for me the real value came from getting departments and services together in one room for some workshops to develop a model of assisted digital and share experiences and ideas as a group.  That really helped and we have seen the benefits of this reflected in better assisted digital support.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing but we are all on the same side really - that of the user - and I think everyone appreciates that is why we have to be firm on the need to put good assisted digital support in place.

Summing up

We’ve seen some great research and successful assisted digital in action, and no longer have to explain why assisted digital matters, or what it is (well, not often).  Of course, assisted digital isn't just about helping vulnerable users to access digital services, it's also about improving the capability within government so that their needs are considered right from the off and integrated into every aspect of service design.

The big challenge going forward is about helping and supporting departments to raise their capability in this area and ensuring the right assisted digital help for users is put in place across the whole of Government, particularly as we move towards common platform approaches to delivery.

It’s been quite a ride, but we’ve enjoyed every minute.  And it’s not over yet.

Read our AD blogs to find out more.

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Back in March, just before the pre-election period began and, like the rest of the Civil Service, we had to keep quiet for a while, Mike Bracken wrote this post.

He talked about the next stage of digital transformation - government as a platform:

We’re working with departments to unpick what platforms will have the most impact, both for users and in terms of the cost to government. In particular we're looking at how we'd start building high-priority platforms, how to speed up the roll out of better technology for civil servants, and what platform services could do to improve the way departments and agencies work. We’re also starting to build prototypes.

Today, I want to tell you about the work we've been doing to put all that talk into action.

Preparation work

You've probably heard that old saying: "measure twice, cut once." Anyone who's ever done a bodge job of putting up a shelf in the kitchen knows exactly what I mean. Before you start doing a piece of work, it makes sense to get the preparation done right.

That's what this work is all about: preparation. We're laying the groundwork for government as a platform, making sure we have an excellent understanding of what's needed, where, and to what extent.

This work is divided into four streams:

1. Common Technology Services - We’ve been working with departments to understand how to give civil servants modern, flexible technology that helps them collaborate and do their jobs more efficiently - but at a much lower cost than before.
2. Platforms and standards - the bedrock for government as a platform. We've started work on prototype platforms and registers that could be re-used across government. We're learning by doing, and writing a business case for Treasury that will help us expand this work much further.
3. Agency transformation - finding out how we can help government agencies use digital technology to reduce duplicated effort and build better services.
4. Department transformation - finding out how we can make the structure of government even more invisible to users. When a task requires the user to deal with several different departments, how can we break down those invisible barriers and make the whole thing easier? How can we make things better for users and for the teams running the services?

Within each workstream, there are several project teams working on different prototypes.

Showing the thing

We have a rule here, which you’ve probably heard us mention before: show the thing. It means show your work. Don’t just talk about new services, show them to people with screenshots or demos or alphas.

I'm not going to list all the prototype and discovery projects here, because there’s a lot of them.

But you’ll have a chance to find out about all of them in the coming weeks. Each team will be showing the thing, writing posts on this blog to document what they’re working on and what they’ve learned so far.

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Two friends of GDS have written great blog posts in the last week. So great, we thought we'd mention them here, so you can read them too.

First is Kit Collingwood-Richardson, formerly Head of Digital at the Office of the Public Guardian, and now newly installed as HMCTS service manager at MoJ Digital.

Kit gave a talk called "Digital leadership" to a gathering of service managers here at GDS earlier this week. She’s posted her slides on the web (and unlike a lot of slides posted on the web after the event, they make good sense on their own, even without Kit explaining them in person).

Kit says a lot of wise things in this talk, but we particularly liked her phrases “do things small, it makes them deliverable” and “most Gantt charts are fairy tales”.

We were also interested in the bit about 'digital maturity' towards the end. Kit describes that as a team moving from project thinking (where the focus is on time and budget), through to product thinking (focus on users and shippable code) to service thinking (focus on team and service quality).

Another thing. This time, a blog post by former GOV.UK product manager Sarah Prag, explaining the importance of starting a project the right way: with a discovery phase.

Too often, she writes, teams find "their work began when someone decided the organisation should be using a particular system, so they’re busy trying to implement that, or someone thought a particular process should be put online, so that’s what they’re doing. They’ve been presented with a solution and told to make it work."

The likely result is a disenchanted team and an unsatisfactory end result.

The best way to avoid that is to invest a few weeks in discovery first, allowing time for a small multidisciplinary team to "focus on users and their needs, and to come up with realistic plans that the whole team can buy in to."

Sarah spells out the basic steps for running a discovery phase. At its heart:

Discovery is driven by conversation rather than documentation, so the approach needs to get people talking and thinking and sketching and asking questions.

Yes.

Congratulations to the team at Companies House for taking their new free information service into public beta today.

Their Chief Executive Tim Moss has just published a blog post, saying:

From today you can now access all digital data free of charge … some 170 million company records. This makes the UK register one of the most open in the world and the UK economy one of the most transparent.

I urge you to try it out for yourself. It’s fast, it’s free (in the past, you had to pay - but that's all changed now) and is a pleasure to use. Enter any company name, and you can get your hands on a pile of public data about that company: documents filed, company officers present and past. All of this is public data, it’s all been in the public domain for years. But it's never been so simple and straightforward to actually see it.

The team at Companies House have done this project the right way. They went through an iterative design process, with discover, alpha and beta phases. They did lots of user research (in their own in-house lab). They iterated in response to feedback (for example, enabling legislative changes to ensure that dates of birth stored as part of the dataset can't be misused).

It’s more than  just a website: it's also an API. A register of data open to humans and computers. That's crucial. That means that third parties (consumers and technology providers) can get access to real-time updates from the registry.

Stop for a moment and think about that: real-time access to reliable, dependable government data, via a standardised digital interface. This is what registers are for. This is the model for registers of the future.

Tim and his team deserve our respect and support because it's taken them a long time (almost a decade) and a lot of hard graft to change their business model and their processes. They're laying the groundwork for not just their own future - as the organisation best placed to become central holder of the UK business register - but for many others across the public sector to follow in their footsteps. One day, all registers will be like this.

Tim completely understands what it means to be a registrar and what it means to provide a register in the digital age. It's all about the data. It's all about finding ways to make that data available to others - so that a new ecosystem of services and products can be created on top of it.

Data is the foundation of that ecosystem. Stored separately, but open to all. It's another strand to our vision of Government as a Platform: small pieces, loosely joined. This is one small piece that I'm very pleased to see.

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Government technology boring? Not from where I’m standing.

After years working in the fast-paced mobile sector, I was anxious my new government job as a technical architect might be boring. I was worried about bureaucracy, and having to work with out-dated technology.

As it turns out, my worries were in vain – joining GDS has been a bit like joining a great rock and roll band, but without the wrecked hotel rooms. (I spent a number of years in the music industry when it was at the vanguard of digital change; being personally involved in the transition from analog to digital).

Not only do most people wear a t-shirt at GDS; people just get on with their jobs, creating things that are wonderful. GDS talks about ‘showing the thing’ (a line you’ve probably heard by now if you read these blogs often), and my role on the tech side is to help make this happen.

Why I'm here

I’m here to make sure government stories are a success, using my years of experience within the technology sector. As a consulting architect, I’m to bridge the gap between GDS and other departments and agencies, helping communicate best practices.

It’s my job to help define and design government systems and processes to meet user needs, and this involves making sure all stakeholders are on the same page.

Finding my feet

My first couple of weeks were spent being brought up to speed on the way GDS does things. The biggest eye openers for me were the Service Assessments and Spend Control reviews. I’d have thought these were just guidelines services had to meet, but it’s a lot more rigorous than that. As an observer invited to watch a number of assessments and reviews in action, I quickly realised how seriously these quality controls are enforced.

No public service is allowed to go ahead if it doesn’t meet user needs.

Following those first few weeks at Aviation House (the home to GDS), the time came to let me out into the wild (well, it did feel like a bit of an adventure). I wasn’t let out all alone, but with an experienced technical architect, Dai Vaughan, to a number of government departments and agencies.

Setting standards

I’m here to help them work within certain government standards such as the Digital by Default Standard. For instance, I will work with service teams to help them pass the alpha, beta, and live assessments, and advise them on discovery and technical options.

Many departments and agencies are already doing an impressive job of transforming their technical architecture to meet government-wide standards but, often, like many big things some can’t move as quickly as they’d like. For example, they have legacy systems that aren’t easily uprooted. It’s important to understand these challenges; developing and maintaining positive relationships with teams is vital when it comes to transformation. You can’t just march in and tell people what to do; we can all learn from each others’ expertise.

Sharing the driving seat

One of my assignments is at the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), which is located in Bristol across a number of distributed sites; for me the most interesting one has to be the old coach testing station (it looks like a garage inside with meeting rooms around the sides of the building - a great use of government property).

Part of my job there is to look specifically at how driving services can be transformed by the arrival of Government as a Platform. For example, the whole experience of buying and selling a car involves tons of transactions with government, a process that can almost certainly be streamlined.

Working with a user needs researcher, I’ve looked at how this streamlining can be achieved by analysing user experiences. We interviewed the owner of an MOT station, and drivers who had bought and sold vehicles. We learned about their interactions with the government and existing systems, and how these can be improved for better use. For example, a young woman involved in a accident had her car written off. As a result, she had many separate interactions with government, disposing of the car, getting the tax back, acquiring a new car, taxing that, and then dealing with all the relevant changes of ownership. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she could do one or two combination transactions instead?

It's all about user needs

The focus GDS puts on user needs resonates with my own approach to improving systems. I’ve always taken a user-centric approach to their design and delivery. When it comes to a technical architect’s other must-have traits, I’d say you need:

-    a good understanding of technical architectures and how different systems glue together

-    flexibility and the ability to understand any programming language

-    empathy to understand what different stakeholders are dealing with

-    the ability to easily adapt to different projects, eg, you may be talking about electronic licensing one minute, and then to an MOT owner about how a system works the next

-    diplomacy and the confidence to challenge deep seated ideas

-    a whole lot of diligence and endurance

Above all you need a desire for change. Government technology has had a poor reputation for being slow, inefficient, and full of mammoth IT projects. The Government Digital Service has spent the last few years working with departments to change this, and since joining two months ago, I’ve got a first hand taste of how challenging this shift really is.

Stay tuned for more from us on being a technical architect at GDS.

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A week or so ago, Felicity Singleton wrote about preparing for Government as a Platform.

Felicity talked about four workstreams we’ve begun to look at as part of our preparation work. One of those workstreams is called Department Transformation, which Felicity describes like this:

Finding out how we can make the structure of government even more invisible to users. When a task requires the user to deal with several different departments, how can we break down those invisible barriers and make the whole thing easier? How can we make things better for users and for the teams running the services?

So, the first part of this work is to investigate what that means for users. (Because we always start with user needs).

Where to begin

People get frustrated with government when they have to share the same information with different agencies time and time again. If we can make it simpler to easily and safely share information, we can help them work faster and more efficiently. And, we can make things simpler, clearer, and faster for users.

We’ve started by looking at three user journeys where users have to share information with several different organisations:

• people’s experience of the criminal justice system
• moving goods across the border
• people coming to and remaining in the UK

Bringing things together

Previously, departments and agencies have often worked in relative isolation when faced with the challenge of service delivery and transformation. The size and scale of their operations are so large and complex that some of their main concerns are the duplication of processes, services, and requests for information.

For example, there are more than 70 IT systems that manage similar sets of information for the criminal justice system and they are managed by different organisations. Systems such as the Police National Computer, the case management system for the magistrates courts (LIBRA), and the system that holds information about all prisoners in the system (NOMIS). We’re working collaboratively across multiple organisations to find out if shared platforms will transform these user journeys.

If we can make building blocks of code and functionality that can be re-used more widely across government, this can help to transform more departments and services too. We believe this will save money and provide better services.

Start with discovery

In recent weeks we’ve been in the discovery phase - speaking to users (citizens and businesses), government departments and agencies, service providers and colleagues from across GDS to make sure we have a really good understanding of what the user needs are.

That discovery work will be finished soon. When it is, we’ll write another post here with some findings and thoughts.

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Last week we welcomed visitors from the US Digital Service and 18F over here for the best part of a week to swap stories, experiences, and mistakes.

It. Was. Great.

What did we learn? An awful lot. We learned that, despite our very different political and organisational structures, we have a lot in common.

We realised that sharing is the most important thing we can do in the future. Those stories, experiences, and mistakes become so much more powerful when more people hear about them.

And we concluded that the best way to keep sharing is not just by swapping those stories electronically, but in person, face to face. We need to share people, just as much as we share pain and process.

Thanks once again, American friends. You're welcome back here any time. But you knew that already.

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Jamie Arnold has been part of GDS since the very beginning, working on the early stages of GOV.UK and many other projects since.

Back in February this year, he posted a drawing that sums up his experience of agile service delivery. We’ve re-posted it above, and you can see the full-size original over on Jamie’s personal website.

As part of this week's focus on all things agile, we asked Jamie to talk us through what the drawing means. In this short audio interview, he talks about the importance understanding user needs, iterating as you go along, starting with a small team, and much more besides.

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Transcript

Jamie Arnold: This is an illustration of some of the concepts I’ve used in the past to deliver services for government using Agile techniques, i.e., iterative and incremental delivery of software and service.

Interviewer: What are the different bits of this? Can you take us through each one as briefly as possible?

Jamie Arnold: Yes. So, it’s trying to say the importance of a clear and inspiring vision with a set of goals that describe an outcome rather than a set of deliverables. It’s suggesting that drawing that service, drawing the thing, is a really useful technique to help align your stakeholders and team around a vision, and a service delivery. And it tries to describe how using user needs and the language of service capabilities can help you understand, and deliver bits of that service incrementally in alpha, beta and live stages. And then it makes the point about, you should be careful about growing your team. Don’t throw people at the problem because the problem won’t be solved that way. In other words, start small and grow organically.

Interviewer: You’ve drawn this down on a single sheet as a summary, but I’m trying to understand where it’s all come from. How did all of this get into your head?

Jamie Arnold: It’s through experience of running different types of teams within government. So for example, GOV.UK, it was mostly a software programme but there were other aspects to the service that was nothing to do with the website. For example, a service desk where people send you an email saying, “I don’t understand this or this is wrong, or can you help me with this?” And so a real person responds better to that. That started me thinking that we should be using Agile not just for software delivery. There’s lot of non-software bids within government services that are good to deliver in an Agile way.

Interviewer: And although this is not necessarily relevant to the picture you’ve drawn, what are the big myths or misconceptions about Agile?

Jamie Arnold: I would say, things like, it’s hippies and sandals, things like there’s no plan. It doesn’t give you the certainty that people are used to with methodologies like PRINCE2 and big Gantt Charts. I think that’s a myth. What other things? Myths that there is not enough upfront planning.

In other words, people are - the focus with Agile is to always deliver something within a short time box, say two weeks. Whereas traditionally you design the system upfront, you hand over a big set of documents and say, “Build this.” And then three months, six months, six years later, something pops out the other end. So I think, yes, the myth is, there’s not enough planning with Agile but I think that’s totally wrong. The opposite is true. There’s more planning in Agile.

Interviewer: But that doesn’t seem to go with the description of Agile, which - Mat Wall's famous thing where he says, “What do you want by Friday and how can we make it better than we did last week?” If it’s myth that there’s no planning, then how do you make the planning happen in Agile? If I’m somebody in charge, where do I get my plan from in Agile?

Jamie Arnold: What I’m describing in this drawing is, for example, rather than have a big plan that designs everything upfront or decides when everything is going to be delivered upfront; you typically have a bunch of deliverables. With an Agile approach you would describe a set of outcomes using a roadmap. So you’d say, “The first waypoint is that we have a service, the core service we can test with 100 testers or 1000 users.” That might be your first outcome you want, rather than say, “The service must have this deliverable or this deliverable.” So you’re describing the outcome, so that is what you plan. You plan for a set of outcomes.

Interviewer: Can you briefly explain why scoping of user need is so important?

Jamie Arnold: Good question. I’m just thinking out loud here.

Interviewer: Yes, that’s good.

Jamie Arnold: I think if you view the service through the eyes of a user, what are you actually, what service are you trying to give to users? If you think about their needs first rather than the organisation, the government’s need, you’re building the right service. So many projects I’ve seen in government and outside of government start with what the business needs and you forget that actually, it’s people you’re trying to deliver the service for. So, a list of user needs defines your scope or your service. Obviously, it doesn’t give you all the detail. You’ve got to work out a lot from this list of user needs, but typically, 80% of users need only 20% of the features of a service, so that’s maybe a clue. That’s where you might start.

Interviewer: What is so good about drawing the thing on the wall? Why does that help?

Jamie Arnold: So this is from experience. I’ve been in teams where someone has been able to say, “Well, I think the service is this,” and they’ve drawn a conceptual model on the wall. It’s not necessarily tech architecture or a user journey, or a mock-up of a user interface. It can be a mix of loads of things.

If you start with that, people go, “Yes, I can see where we’re going. I know what this service is. I don’t know the detail of it but I can see the breadth of it. I can see that it’s not just a website. There are phones involved. There are trucks delivering piles of paper to and from, let’s say, DVLA or something like that.” You can see the breadth of the service in all its parts.

And I think that helps teams say, “We’re doing this,” pointing at a wall and saying, “We’re doing this bit.” You can create your user stories from that. If, on the other hand, you don’t have a drawing, you’re always trying to describe the service in a list of user stories, a bunch of cards, and that’s just noise. You can’t take in, let’s say, 100 cards, to understand what the service is trying to do. A drawing, a picture paints a thousand words.

So the drawing helps you understand the shape and possibly the size of the service, and that allows the team to all be on the same page. Annual stakeholders, we’re building this, pointing at the picture, and allows you to get the right user stories out. It’s just a - in teams where you don’t have a drawing, you spend a lot of time crafting words on cards or in a tool, and you don’t get the same understanding.

Back in January, the Australian government said it would be setting up a new Digital Transformation Office. That was great news. We were happy to welcome Australia to our international community of governments who are making simpler, clearer and faster digital services.

We're lucky enough to have close working relationships with colleagues all over the world, so I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities to share knowledge and experience with the Australian team as it grows in the years to come.

The New Zealand government has already adapted the source code for GOV.UK while building govt.nz. We’ve all benefitted from sharing tales of success and shortcomings with our fellow D5 members and, most recently, with our friends and colleagues from the USDS and 18F. Building an international digital government community also means, I hope, that we’ll be sharing people.

On that note, Paul Shetler is leaving GDS soon to become Chief Executive Officer of the new Australian team, reporting directly to Minister of Communications Malcolm Turnbull. Here's the official announcement.

Paul has worked here at GDS and at the Ministry of Justice, where he helped set up the MoJ Digital team and deliver 4 of our transformation exemplars. He has two decades of experience working on large scale IT and organisational change projects. We wish him every success in Australia.

While he's moving to the other side of the world, he really won't be far away. Our best wishes go with Paul as he travels south: let us know how we can help. We're only a Slack channel away.

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A few months ago I decided to take my experience  as a communications manager in the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) and go on secondment to GOV.UK to discover more about the work of Government Digital Service (GDS).

Those of us who work in the Whitehall family - I’ve worked in 9 departments - have years of experience of successfully delivering what ministers want. Confidently, credibly, and creatively. I was excited to see what the latest news was from our youngest family members in GDS.

Based on my time at GDS, I can see a whole new way of working that can make policy development and delivery more joined-up across government. It’s about using the best evidence possible to provide the backbone for decision making. And through GOV.UK, making government more democratic by working with citizens to give them information on what they want, when they want it, and how they want it.

Plain English and putting users first

I spent time with GOV.UK content managers writing material on a range of policies from visas and passports, to child protection, and shared parental leave. This material was put together based on the style guide focusing on clear language, easy to navigate pages, and using current user evidence. For me this was a whole new way of writing compared with my previous experience as a speechwriter. A real learning curve.

Think differently about digital delivery

The service manual team have a crucial role in helping government departments to create the digital services they need to support their policies. They create a bible, if you like, of how to create the best services. A guide to how to work in an agile way to analyse user needs before you start, map your users’ journey, design, and write for specific audiences. A way of creating evidence-based policy from the bottom up - rather than the more traditional top-down.

Show the thing

Working with the performance platform team, I learnt how they help departments build dashboards that they can use to measure and, importantly, showcase the work they are doing within their teams and more widely around government.

Information (usually statistics) is gathered around key performance indicators (KPIs). These are used to produce a dashboard to show exactly how a policy is progressing. I think this is a fantastic innovation which gives policy officials a stream of live-time information about how their work is going for that all-important ministerial meeting. Goodbye to constantly updating excel spreadsheets for programme boards.

Transformation, communication, and innovation

I also spent time with the digital engagement team, GOV.UK Verify, and the user research team. Highlights included the fascinating research into the use of the Welsh language on GOV.UK which shows that Welsh speakers tend to revert to English when dealing with officialdom, even if they speak Welsh at home. This is not because they prefer to speak English, but because the Welsh translation needs to be simplified.

Also, the process for booking prison visits (which moved online last year) has had a huge take-up. Interestingly, research also shows that the majority of bookings are made via mobile phones - not desktops.

Both these research projects have thrown up evidence of “unknowns” that will be used to continue to build better citizen-facing services.

What I’ll be taking with me

A better way of crafting messages in the right way, for the right audience, at the right time.

Showing how amazing analytical data and audience insight (there is so much of it) can make policy better targeted and effective.

I’ve learned loads in my time with GDS, the youngest members of the Whitehall family. They are clearly thriving, and as with any visit to the relatives, I am taking back gifts. These are agile, user needs, evidence, discovery, KPIs, single government platform, GOV.UK Verify ... and so much more.

I hope other Whitehall relatives take the chance to visit.

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A little rant, if you’ll forgive the indulgence. It includes a confession, to make up for the ranting.

You might have heard talk about new project management methodologies that try to combine bits of agile and bits of non-agile into one unified thing. I don’t think that’s a good idea, and I want to explain why.

We’ve been doing a lot of talking about agile recently. We’ve always said we’re pragmatic, not dogmatic, about it. Each team uses agile in the way that suits them best.

Confession time

Of course there are different approaches to project management. Waterfall is one. So now’s the time for the confession: believe it or not, I am a qualified PRINCE2 Practitioner. I got my certificate back in 2007. I suspect it’s lapsed by now. The point is: it has its place. We’ve all used roads and ports built this way, all of them useful pieces of infrastructure.

Digital public services are infrastructure too, but of a different kind. When they’re live, they’re just that - live. We’re not building software projects that can just be signed off: we’re delivering ongoing, maintained services. Services whose users will have needs that will change over time. We shall keep updating and iterating, because we don’t need services to match a prospectus that a project manager, however well-meaning, wrote years ago. User needs should be written into the DNA of a service, not spliced in as an afterthought.

Agile as a way of life

Combining agile and non-agile into a jerry-rigged mishmash misses the point of working in an agile way. Teaching people about agile and agile terms doesn’t need a newfangled management-speak hybrid. Traveling around the country to visit the 25 exemplar services, I saw people who had traditional project manager backgrounds but who had seen the benefits of agile. Agile isn’t just a set of rules, it’s a mindset. An approach to solving problems and meeting user needs. Let’s not lose sight of that.

Being agile doesn’t mean you give up on governance or deadlines. The idea that agile somehow “needs” a waterfall-type methodology to give it control and governance is nonsense. When you work in an agile way, governance is built into every step of what you do. You build and iterate based on ongoing user research. You build what users need, not what you guessed might be a good idea before you even started building. That means spending money throughout the lifecycle of a service. Not throwing a lot of money at a project upfront, without knowing if it’s going to be useful. Or not.

As for control? I guess you have to ask yourself what you mean by control. Does control mean that you build something, on time, on budget, focussed entirely on what you’ve decided at the beginning, before you even started building? Regardless of whatever that might mean for users - today, or in ten years time? We know that people simply aren’t very good at working out what might be needed or what might go wrong before they start a project. You might be lucky, and indeed build the right thing. But that doesn’t sound much like control to me. Listen to what Alan Eccles, the Public Guardian, says about control in this short film we made about his organisation’s adoption of agile: “I have more control now,” he says.

Just go with agile in the first place

In my view, formalising a mishmash approach is going to end up giving you the worst of both worlds. You won’t get the thing you planned on the date you planned it, and you won’t get something that meets user needs either. You’ll end up with something that fails on both counts.

Agile accepts that the scope of the project will change over time. And we know that will happen in government. We know the thing we start working on will not be the same as the thing we get at the end. Requirements will change, budgets will change, the scope will change. Agile lets us deal with all of that, efficiently and gracefully.

So: if you’re working on digital public services, just go with agile in the first place. You’ll save yourself - and most importantly your users - a lot of grief and heartache later on.

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Licence, permit, registration, certification, accreditation - government has lots of different ways for people to get permission to do something. They all do the same thing - they’re all authorisations by government for an individual or organisation to do something (or not do something).

Together with some of our colleagues at agencies and departments across government, we’ve just completed a about what ‘getting permission from government’ looks like now, and what it might look like in a world of government as a platform.

We’re not trying to create a uniform, one-size-fits-all permissions ‘system’. But, we are looking into how common frustrations and similar processes might be opportunities to bring consistency to getting permission for users, and ease of service delivery for government.

What do you mean, ‘permission’?

There are hundreds of  government ‘permissions’ written into our laws. Over 100 million permissions are issued each year.

Each one allows us to do specific activities that would otherwise be illegal e.g. drive a car, import chemicals, cross international borders, transport waste, look after children, sell alcohol, fish with a rod, and so on.

These permissions exist for a number of reasons, from collecting money to upholding a particular standard that keeps people safe, from protecting a natural resource or environment to regulating trade. However, more often than not users need to get several licences, exemptions or certificates to do one activity, like run a pub. These separate pieces often need to be completed in a particular order and are provided by different parts of government - meaning that users need to act as a government go-between to get permission for the activity they need to do.

Users who haven’t done that activity before often find themselves in a position where they don’t know if they need permission to do something or which permissions they might need, from where. At this point, they will often need to consult with someone who has done the thing before, or a paid expert to negotiate government’s technical terms or legal jargon on their behalf.

Changes to the rules of these permissions can also have an impact on their lives and businesses -  something that users often aren’t aware of until the change has been made.

Defining a good permission

We think that the ways government gives permission could be better for users, and cheaper to provide.

Our team (part of Agency Transformation - see Felicity Singleton’s post), have been asking the question ‘What does a good permission look like?’.

Put simply, a good permission should meet user needs, be cost effective and serve the regulatory objectives it was created to uphold (safety, resource protection, fair trade etc).

What we learned in discovery

We’ve spoken to people needing permission to do a broad spread of activities (such as childminding, running a pub, driving a car, buying a fishing boat, selling caviar, getting a job in security) in order to understand where there are similarities and differences in the way they understand ‘permission’ as well looking closely at the ways that agencies across government process and issue permission.

So far, our discovery has revealed two things:

1. While each permission itself supports a specific ‘unique’ activity (or set of activities), the fundamental process of applying for a permission for the user and granting and issuing for each agency is very similar.
   
2. Common frustrations and problems seem to exist for users and agencies along the permissions journey.
   

This is where government as a platform comes in

Common user problems + similar government processes = opportunities for service standards and platforms.

Among other things, we’re focussing on six main areas of improvement:

• help users to find what permission they need for an activity (like childminding) before they do it
  
• help users who don’t need permission, or can’t have permission because they aren’t eligible to know before application
  
• remove manual process steps for users and government - like requesting a criminal record check - and replace them with automated checks conducted with a user’s consent
  
• make the process of change to a permission by government faster and more transparent for users
  
• make proving you have permission easier and more secure
  
• make it more consistent to apply for a permission or easier for government to set up a service
  

We are gradually widening the debate and testing our ideas. Recently we held a Show and Tell for the agencies involved in our discovery work. The feedback was very encouraging. The big question for everyone was: ‘What would this look like in reality?’. And that’s what we are working on next.

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