There’s no point building something good unless you can keep it that way.

GDS has been training self-certification assessors to help us do that. Their job is to review government digital services in development, and ensure they meet the Digital Service Standard.

The methods and benefits of self-certification are spreading throughout government with some departments taking proactive steps to enhance the skills of their assessors.

People from departments and agencies such as the Department of Education in Sheffield, from the Environment Agency in both Bristol and Warrington, National Archives at Kew, Department of Health in London and the Office of National Statistics in Newport have gone through the training.

While large services (with more that 100,000 transactions per year) are still assessed centrally, all the smaller ones are assessed in-house by each department. That’s what this training is all about: growing a community of assessors right across government.

One place where that community is growing really well is at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

Leading the way at BIS

Sharon Hepworth works in the Digital Team in BIS and is responsible for managing digital and technology spend applications and services assessments for the core department and its 45 partner organisations. It works really well for BIS combining approvals and standards, ensuring that the service standard is embedded from the outset.

In setting up the self-certification process in BIS, the intention was to develop a BIS family of assessors who could use their skills and experience to assess services and also give the assessors the opportunity to learn and gain knowledge themselves.

Sharon shared how they found volunteers from across the BIS group, and have established a group of individuals committed and passionate about what they do, who readily take time out from their day jobs to come together for assessment panels, when needed.

For Simon Buck, one of Sharon’s cohort of assessors, and a Senior Business Analyst at the Land Registry:

Being involved as an assessor gives a fantastic insight into the progress government is making in developing user-centric services, as well as helping to share best practice.

Service assessments require a lot of organisation, not just identifying available assessors and sorting out rooms, but also in working with the service teams and the assessors to ensure everyone is ready for the assessment meeting. Sharon explained the role of the central team is to coordinate and support assessments, hopefully taking the pain out of the process.

Pre-assessment meetings are held with the assessors and service team, as well as post-assessment meetings to discuss the outcome report. Sharon or someone else from the central team observes all assessments to ensure the quality and consistency of BIS assessments and if needed, answer any questions.

This central oversight means BIS is well placed to learn from their experience of delivering assessments. A key lesson learned for alpha assessments is to ask the Service Manager when they feel they are ready to move to beta. This provides a useful challenge and avoids assessment meetings being held too early.

Upskilling the assessors

BIS has a group of 16 service assessors, all trained by GDS, who between them have completed assessments on a range of smaller services from the core department, and partner organisations such as Intellectual Property Office, Insolvency Service, HEFCE and Innovate UK.

‘Upskilling the group is an important part of enriching the self certification process and keeping it relevant,’ says Sharon. As the demand for service assessments increases so will the number of assessors. For now, the focus is to build the experience of this core group, ensuring they have the opportunity to be involved in a range of assessments.

As the group becomes more experienced in assessments, they can provide more meaningful feedback. ‘Anyone can use a prompt sheet. But the value comes from understanding and challenging responses,’ says Sharon.

Sharing knowledge through regular workshops

Sharon brought the BIS assessors together in the summer to reflect on their experiences, discuss changes and how to share best practice across BIS and partner organisations.

It also provided the opportunity to hear the latest developments from a range of GDS speakers, covering case studies of assisted digital support, insights into integrating services into GOV.UK and the Performance Platform.

Recently the BIS assessors had additional training on assisted digital and a further workshop is planned for later in the year.

Workshops are a great way of enhancing core skills, building up assessor’s capability, spreading good practice and of ensuring that the assessors have the tools to self-certify.

They also function as an important channel of communication to explain updates and changes and are a great way of bringing representatives from different departments together. It’s all part of a culture helping people learn across departments.

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Government has always run on data. It drives internal operations, public-facing services and informs policy. Over time, an ecosystem of applications and technologies which store, manage, and access that data has developed. It includes spreadsheets, published PDFs, large databases, and a host of things in between.

This ecosystem isn't the result of a grand design. It’s the result of a series of pragmatic decisions made in the context of individual organisations and services, based on (mostly internal) user needs, cost, and available skill sets.

For the most part, that’s exactly the right way to do things – we learn what works by trying things out. But, as the demand for trustworthy, open data increases for the delivery of cross-departmental services and policy, we need to develop a more coordinated approach to data storage and access.

Expectations are changing

People’s expectations are changing. Not just of government, but of any service provider.

There are lots of practical implications of this for government. For one thing, service users rightly expect from government the type of streamlined approach to service delivery they already enjoy when dealing with modern digital businesses. For example, it’s reasonable to ask why more government services don’t re-use open data that’s managed by another part of government.

Aside from government reusing open data for the provision of its services, there’s a growing expectation of reliable access to government data by other organisations to provide complementary services. So, third-party applications like MunchDB, which reuse food hygiene standards ratings data collated and published by the Food Standards Agency, should become commonplace.

Government’s data infrastructure needs to change too

Improving access to data has been a government priority for a number of years now. Through the creation of data.gov.uk, over 20,000 datasets have been made available, under an open license. Access and discoverability have improved.

But, we publish datasets, and in some cases more than one version of a given dataset, in multiple places including GOV.UK and the Performance Platform. Publishing across the government digital estate isn’t a bad thing, we should publish wherever best meets user needs. But as the range of data available increases we need to continually ensure we make it easy for users to identify authoritative and, by extension, reliable datasets - in terms of availability and format consistency.

It would also be great if more of the data that government publishes across its digital estate had a verifiable history. Otherwise, it can be difficult to see how data has changed over time, or trace its provenance.

Without assurances like these, using government data as a basis for digital services is a challenge for service teams both inside and outside government. Also, APIs – technical rules that specify how software components should interact – aren't consistently available. If they were, this would also go a long way to making government data easier to integrate into web services.

The limitations of government's current data infrastructure also affects data publishers and policymakers. Data publishing isn't always a priority. As a result, it is often irregular, resulting in stale, out of date data that reduces that quality of any decision-making based on it.

Internal and external data users need a data infrastructure able to provide three things:

• reliability: will accurate and up-to-date data be there when needed
• predictability: will data retain the same format, and will it be consistent with other datasets
• coverage: will the dataset be comprehensive for what it claims to cover

A new data infrastructure and new ways of doing things

The simple truth is that much of government’s current data access and storage infrastructure can’t support the emerging needs of its users. The work we’re doing on digital registers is one of the ways that we’re looking to better meet some of those needs and provide accurate, authoritative sources of data. Paul Downey has written about the early-stage work we’re doing on digital registers. And ther ewill be more to come.

Registers won’t meet all government data storage needs

Not all government’s data will need to be stored in registers. Some data relates to process and management information, not ‘things’. For example, data about processing applications and service requests (generally labelled ‘casework’) isn’t appropriate for storage in digital registers because it usually relates to changes in state on the way to an outcome, and is rarely used by other organisations for reference purposes. Instead, it’s the outcomes of these processes that may become digital registers: for example a list of organisations’ food standards hygiene ratings, or a list of premises licensed to serve alcohol.

Digital registers are designed to meet the needs of users as much as the needs of the data custodians. That makes them less suitable for storing data related to primarily internal processes. Spreadsheets, CSV files, and customised databases will probably more satisfactorily meet those needs.

Creating an ecosystem of open registers

Registers should replace many published lists of things as the recognised canonical sources of data wherever possible. But we won’t get there overnight. To deliver value as quickly as possible we’ll be helping to build open registers that are most commonly referenced. We’re currently working with departments and analysing the use of the open datasets on data.gov.uk to identify what these are likely to be.

The requirements that registers are ‘minimum viable datasets’, with a clear custodian and a clear purpose mean that departments and agencies will have to drive the development of much of the register ecosystem. It will also mean that data interdependencies will become more apparent. Linking between registers will make common naming conventions and standardised APIs important factors for success. Government departments working together will be necessary to achieve this and Digital Leaders, as well as the newly formed Data Leaders Network, will be central to this endeavour. The GDS Data Group will be looking to support departments in doing all these things.

Building a distributed data landscape in this way makes for a robust ecosystem which will benefit users both inside and outside government. It’s one of many steps towards a 21st century data infrastructure.

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Allon Lister and I recently paid what is probably our final visit to our old friends at the Carer’s Allowance Unit in Preston where we had helped build the Carer’s Allowance Digital Service.

GDS has always had a good relationship with the people at the Carer’s Allowance Unit in Preston. Allon and I estimate that around 50 GDS-ers were involved to a varying degree in that particular exemplar.

What we found when we visited this time was encouraging. The team is a tight unit, supporting each other and getting on with delivering a great service to their users.

Football pundits the world over say that successful teams need a strong spine with hard working wingers. Well to stretch that analogy a little, the team at Preston (the Carer’s Allowance team that is, not Preston North End) have a great central “spine” of Adam (Product Manager), Jo (Delivery Manager) and Ali (Business Analyst). These three know the service inside out and are ably supported by the defensive pairing of Ian and Don: nothing gets past their web ops setup.

The front end developer used to be provided by a supplier. However, this role is now being performed by Ian, a civil servant who has been with the DWP for many years. Last year Ian signed up to the DWP’s trainee developer programme, and look at him now. Front end developer on the Carer’s Allowance Digital Service. Proof that bringing services in-house is providing great career opportunities for civil servants.

And there’s Kathryn - who was there right at the very beginning - and Michael, two vital people from within the Carer’s Allowance Unit who tirelessly work the channels between the digital team and the Unit. Indeed Michael, like Ian, has re-trained and is now a user researcher.

Everything ultimately goes to Ray the QA for that crucial pass. Ray ensures that everything released to the user is, well, quality.

The top football teams now all make extensive use of analytics. At Carer’s Allowance, this attention to detail is provided by Dave ‘analytics’ Bower. The tacticians who come up with the insight for the next game (sorry, sprint) are Ali and Michael.

And of course, a good squad needs rising young talent to step up when the superstars move on, and here Carer’s has Henry, the fast streamer whom we all predict will be a fast riser. Henry is learning to be a web ops guy.

Carer's Allowance was the first DWP service to go onto GOV.UK as a public beta. Then in October 2014 it became the first digital service from that department to be accredited as live service. And it continues to break new ground. Much of the technology it uses was new at the department and it was the first to engage and set up cloud hosting.

It’s a numbers game

There are a number of significant achievements that the team in Preston have made to date. And perhaps the most significant is that over 360,000 carers have had their lives made just that little bit easier due to the improvements to the service. But that’s not all.

The team has designed the digital service so that users understand whether or not they are eligible for the benefit at the outset. This saves the user time and the DWP money. Ineligible claims have been reduced by 41% bringing an annual saving of £128k. (There are five times fewer ineligible claims made via the digital service than the existing paper alternative.)

Despite the reduction in ineligible claims, the number of claims to the unit have increased from 5,000 to 7,000 a week. Yet the DWP has been able to reduce head count in the Carer’s Allowance Unit by 11% due to the efficiencies brought about by the digital service.

A staff survey showed that 91% of staff at the Carer’s Allowance Unit in Preston preferred working with digital claims as opposed to paper submissions. A key factor here was the introduction of an agent-facing function last year. Since then staff have been able to process 10,000 cases more per quarter, resulting in quicker service to users.

The printing and distribution of a paper claim pack costs £3.92. Use of the digital service has cut print runs, resulting in savings of over £300k so far this year. When digital take-up reaches 80% this will result in savings of around £1m a year.

25% of all calls from paper claims are from people asking if their claim has been received. The digital service, however, has recently introduced automatic email confirmation of receipt. This has saved over £60k in reduced customer contact.

The digital service collects all of the information required to process a claim. Paper claims require follow-up calls where customers do not provide required information.

Take-up has risen from 55% to 67% since November and the team continue to aim for an even higher rate.

Continuing to do user research and listening to users’ needs means more people are able to succeed first time. The completion rate has risen from 61% to 83% in last 6 months.

Continuous iteration has seen completion times tumble from 39 minutes to below 25 minutes.

Impressive stuff indeed.

What’s next

As product manager Adam said in a recent blog post, just because the service is live it doesn’t mean that the team’s job is done. Early next year the backend system will be re-platformed enabling the digital service to integrate directly with the carer’s allowance computer system. This will then make it possible for the team to introduce “straight-through” claims processing. This will mean that simple claims will potentially go straight to payment, leaving staff free to concentrate on more complex cases.

It is clear that the Carer’s Allowance Digital Service has been a success. With user satisfaction at 90%, and approaching two thirds of all transactions now using the digital channel, the Carer’s Allowance service is in great shape. If anyone wants to know what good really looks like, they should look at Carer’s Allowance.

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Keeping GOV.UK running takes a lot of work. Like any website, it needs maintenance. And, as an important part of national infrastructure, it’s crucial that it has a team of people available to respond quickly to any problems as they happen.

This is where the Technical Support team comes in. Technical Support is a term used to describe the team who are on call to deal with technical problems like outages, and the day to day running of the site.

This team responds to any alerts that come through the automated monitoring services or via the ticketing system. This team is important: it’s responsible for keeping GOV.UK running.

Despite the important work the team does, it had a problem: no one wanted to be on it.

The team no one wanted to be on

At GOV.UK, the Technical Support team is made of GOV.UK developers and infrastructure engineers working to a rota. Each of GOV.UK’s twenty or so developers takes a turn to work in a team of three, rather than allocating the work to a dedicated team.

In theory this works well for several reasons: the team is staffed by developers who have a good working knowledge of the systems they are dealing with; and by taking their turn on support, junior members can quickly learn more about common problems across the system.

In practice, this wasn’t working so well at GOV.UK. The fact that people didn’t want to take their turn on the Technical Support team had its roots in related problems.

First, the team didn’t have an identity or culture of its own. This became a problem when the rota system meant that people could quite often be working with people who they had never met or worked with before. This also posed problems for continuity and ensuring knowledge wasn’t lost week to week.

The second problem was that people had got into the habit of farming out repeatable tasks to the support team rather than deal with them within their own teams. It had become common for developers to say ‘let’s leave this to tech support’, even when they were the people who made up Technical Support. This meant they weren’t owning technical problems that needed to be solved and it was being used as a repository for routine stuff which should have been managed by other teams.

There had to be a better way of doing this.

What we did

To begin with we tried to tackle the lack of shared culture. We did this by holding a series of workshops and then writing a team charter. Collectively we laid down what the Technical Support team members’ roles and responsibilities were.

We established ‘rules of the game’, that made explicit how people should behave when working their shift on the team. This included practical things like when the working day would begin and rules around how many people should be available at all times. What resulted was a brief document of 7 bullet points:

• tech support is a learning experience, you should aim to learn more about how GOV.UK operates during the week
• work together, be inclusive and don’t leave anyone out or alone
• it starts at 9:30, be there
• feel free to go to essential meetings, but tell people ahead of time and see item 2
• make small improvements to make it better for the next team (e.g. documentation, automation)
• there’s no such thing as a stupid question
• help others and be patient - not everyone knows the same things

Making sure everyone knows the rules

Having these things written down made it much easier for developers to quickly slot into a shared culture. It also meant team members were comfortable calling out behaviour that deviated from what was agreed.

Alongside this, we made a conscious effort to emphasise the positive impact made by Technical Support.

The weekly routines

There were practical measures we put in place too; at the end of the shift it became the Technical Support team’s duty participate in a handover meeting with the next shift.

We also put in place a weekly retrospective to look at the things which hadn’t gone to plan and anything we could improve on. This ritual is now part of the handover meeting.

Alongside this, we identified the repetitive tasks which had been assigned to Technical Support and worked on finding ways for the teams responsible for them to automate them were possible. This meant Technical Support could use its free time pursuing more proactive means of keeping GOV.UK running smoothly.

Lessons for other teams

As is often the case, the challenge was partly technical, partly cultural. This is what we can take from it:

• involve the team in any changes - they know what they need to do
• do everything you can to make it a team, even if it’s only for a week

What we tried to do was to create an environment where there was a clear team, and everyone knew what was expected of them. We involved the team in all the changes, and we started with the team charter.

Keeping the 180,000 or so pages on GOV.UK working will always be a big job, and with it there will come problems. But at least we’ve now made it a job people want to do. Since making these changes, people are now happy to take their turn on the Technical Support team.

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I’m Head of Strategy for the Digital Marketplace, which is part of Government Technology in GDS. We’re helping people who are transforming public services by making it simpler, clearer, and faster for them to buy what they need.

We’re looking into lots of ways that we can do this, but we think that one of them is by opening up government procurement and contract data, and improving its quality.

Being open is best

I recently attended a workshop organised by the Open Contracting Partnership and talked about what the Digital Marketplace team is doing to make the end to end buying process digital by default, supporting improved disclosure of public contract data.

One of my slides illustrated these points:

The aim of the workshop was to talk about potential UK government commitments to open contracting in its third Open Government Partnership (OGP) national action plan (NAP), which is due to be published in May 2016. The second NAP is due to be fully implemented by the end of 2015.

Why open contracting is so important

Increasing the transparency of public sector procurement and contracting is important because it:

• builds civil society’s trust in government
• reduces corruption and fraud, and helps detect collusive arrangements
• promotes an open and competitive market for a more diverse range of government suppliers and service providers, e.g. SMEs and voluntary or charitable organisations
• supports sustainable development in supply chains
• encourages innovation in supply
• increases collaboration within supply markets and with government
• leads to greater efficiencies in public sector procurement and contracting processes
• improves value for money to the taxpayer

I could go on.

Quality and availability of procurement and contracting data

I believe that, through its procurement and contracting practices, the public sector can deliver better services for citizens at a lower cost to the taxpayer. To help this, we need a quality set of procurement and contracting data. At GDS, we’d like to make that data a public asset.

UK government procurement policy wants to increase the accessibility of procurement and contract data to the public through Contracts Finder. This is a great start, and in addition we’re looking at how the Digital Marketplace can support implementation of the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS).

Open data in other countries

Other governments are also making progress on their commitments to open contracting. They’re developing legislation, policy, and public dashboards to increase transparency of their procurement and contract data.

Here are a few examples:

• Mexico and Paraguay are focussing on data analysis and visualisation
• the Czech Republic has approved procurement law following Slovakia’s example, where a government contract won’t be official until it’s published
• the Ukraine’s platform ProZorro claims to save 10-20% each tender
• Russia’s Clearspending platform gives access to contracts, grants, purchases and violations, and publishes infographics on state expenditure
• Vietnam has committed to implement open contracting principles, the OCDS, and improve its monitoring and evaluation of the procurement process

Public registers will help

Having authoritative, trusted lists or ‘registers’ of public sector buying organisations, and suppliers to the public sector, will be a major step towards improving data quality.

A recent blog post from the Open Data Institute (ODI) highlighted the need for some basic registers of information for the UK public sector, and listed the top five authoritative datasets they wanted to see from the UK government.

Two of these five registers are:

• buyers - every public sector body in the UK, from central government departments to county councils, transport authorities to schools
• suppliers - every organisation the UK public sector buys something from

We’re looking at how development of the Digital Marketplace can support GDS's work on registers.

Interactions between buyers and suppliers

I think there’s a real opportunity to improve the quality of data on procurement and contracting activity that takes place between public sector buyers and suppliers.

It’s the conduct, interactions, and decisions made between buyers and suppliers that are subject to legal obligations of fairness, openness, transparency, equal treatment, and non-discrimination of suppliers.

Improving the quality of this data and making it open by default will help the public know:

• who is doing what
• why they're doing it
• when it's being done
• when it's completed
• how much it cost
• when opportunities for new suppliers will open

We’re looking at how the Digital Marketplace can capture the data of these interactions between buyers and suppliers.

An exemplar of data quality and disclosure

Creating registers of buyers and suppliers, combined with quality data on procurement and contracting activity that’s published in an accessible, structured and repeatable way on Contracts Finder, will represent a paradigm shift in terms of transparency in these areas.

I think the Digital Marketplace could then be considered an exemplar of data quality and disclosure in public sector procurement and contracting.

Some things we’ll be looking at in 2016

Working with the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) we’ve started looking at creating simpler, clearer contracts with user-centred design. We’ve also been looking at how we can use the OCDS for the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework.

We’ll iterate our approach to open contracting as we make more digital and technology products and services available through the Digital Marketplace.

As always, we’ll blog regularly about what we are learning along the way.

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A few weeks ago, GOV.UK celebrated its third birthday. Today, at the D5 summit of digital governments in Estonia, Lord Bridges announced that we’re marking a new milestone: we’ve just passed 2 billion visits since the site went live in October 2012.

GOV.UK is now part of the UK’s national infrastructure, helping millions of people find the government services and information they need every day. Services like renewing vehicle tax or claiming Carer’s Allowance, and information like calculating how much maternity leave and pay you’re entitled to, or the rules for running a limited company.

Popular pages

The most popular page on GOV.UK is Find a job with Universal Jobmatch, with 56.3 million page views between October 2014 and October 2015.

Desktop vs mobile

You can see the unstoppable march of mobile devices reflected in our site statistics. In 2012, just 21% of visits were from mobiles and tablets. By 2015, that figure had gone up to 40%. On weekends, it goes above 50%.

The service with the highest percentage of mobile device visits is Book a prison visit, at 62.9%.

Users first

We always start with user needs, not government needs. Our users are why we’re here. Reaching 2 billion visits is great news, but ultimately it’s not about numbers, it’s about making a material difference to people’s lives. Here’s a couple of short film clips from interviews with real users that explain what we mean.

First, here’s Nyasha talking about Register to vote:

And in this film, Ann describes using the Lasting power of attorney service:

Some other things you may not know about GOV.UK:

• with 922 million visits to the site in the last year, GOV.UK is one of Britain’s biggest websites - outperforming three major UK news sites and two of the leading entertainment sites
• in the last year, GOV.UK was visited an average of 29 times every second - that’s 1,730 visits per minute, or 103,800 visits per hour
• GOV.UK also simplifies many of the tasks that used to take days and lots of form-filling - The new Carer’s Allowance digital service removed 170 questions (49%) from the application process saving precious time for those who spend their lives caring for others
• GOV.UK is designed to reflect users’ changing online behaviour - 40% of visits to the site are now via a mobile or tablet - with prison visits the most likely service to be booked this way - an increase from 20% when the website was first launched in 2012.
• people now access GOV.UK in many different ways - 16,500 visits came from games consoles in the last month (Xboxes/PlayStations/Nintendos) - including 65 sessions from a handheld Nintendo 3DS
• you can use GOV.UK anytime you like - its busiest hour is 11am (8.1% of total visits per day). 24% of user sessions take place between the hours of 7pm and 7am - 3.1% of sessions take place between midnight and 6am. Surprisingly, 20,000 people a month sort their vehicle tax out between 1 and 3am.
• April 20th 2015 was GOV.UK’s busiest day ever, with almost 4 million visits - This included 750,000 visits to the register to vote page in advance of the 2015 general election

GOV.UK is here to make UK government services simpler, clearer, faster. To see how the site is serving citizens live, visit http://www.gov.uk/performance/site-activity.

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Transcripts:

Register to vote: Nyasha

Politics affects you whether or not you’re into it so it’s never been in my head to not vote. Definitely issues that affect young people are important to me. I heard about the Register to vote service when I just went online and searched ‘Register to vote’. It’s just kind of, go on, very straightforward, get your National Insurance number card and then done, sorted. Knowing that your voice is being heard, I think that’s the best part.

Lasting power of attorney: Ann

I’m 67, and I’ve done the lasting power of attorney for my mother. My mum’s grasp on modern-day living, as it were, was a bit limited, so it was decided then that I would pay all the bills, sort everything out for her.

Three years ago I had a stroke and you start thinking about your own mortality, and you start thinking about, “If something had have happened to me, then how would Mum have coped? What would have happened?”

Anyway, looking on the internet, and I literally stumbled across the government site for the lasting power of attorney, started to look at it and I thought, “This is good, because you can download all the paperwork yourself, you don’t need a solicitor, and the instructions that went with each section of the lasting power of attorney, they were in proper people speak, not in legal jargon, so it was very easy for me to follow it.

If I can do it, anybody can do it, you know. It’s easy… the written instructions, you just can’t go wrong. And I would say now to anybody, “Don’t be frightened, don’t worry about going to see a solicitor; do it yourself. And I’m glad I did it and I’m glad I did it when I did it. My mum is really pleased.”

Mapping work processes with DWP’s Personal Independence Payments team

Agile isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. It’s a broad church. This means that there’s a variety of processes and cloud based tools being tried out by groups across the country.

As an example of an agile process I use, I’ve found that it’s worth sketching out a lightweight map of how your team is working. This shouldn’t be a difficult task. If it is, that may indicate that the process could be improved or is not well understood by the whole team.

Putting the post-it notes to use

I recently worked with the Personal Independence Payments (PIP) team in DWP to map how the team showed their work process. We used post-it notes on a whiteboard. In the picture below, a pink post-it note is a meeting, yellow is a quality gate, green is information stored online and orange is information on a physical board in the team area.

Why documenting work was useful

The PIP team found this way of documenting their work useful for a number of reasons. It helped confirm that everyone on the team understood how all the different parts of the group do their work. This is especially helpful for those people who are new to the team.

Showing the benefits of working in multidisciplinary teams, the user stories put together by the PIP team’s business analysts were influenced by insights from user research sessions. Mapping the workflow like this was also useful for indicating how the team tracks technical stories (or “chores”): things like setting up a database. It also allows the team to start discussions about how to integrate the Assisted Digital work with what the rest of the team was doing.

Working in the open like this highlighted how the three amigos sessions between the business analysts, the technologists and the product owner really drove the whole process as well as what steps were needed to release the software. Finally, the map made an interesting talking point for discussions with stakeholders after show and tells.

Richard Joseph, Scrum Master for the PIP team says:

Mapping out a process of working provided a starting point, something for the team to work to and reflect upon over time ... It helped the team to continuously improve, providing a physical representation of how the team worked that could be inspected and adapted.

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Today we have a guest post from GDS alumni. Previously part of the GDS transformation programme, Natalie Taylor now works at London’s City Hall as Senior Manager for Digital Transformation. Here she tells us about how she took her GDS experience and put it to work to improve the Mayor of London and London Assembly website.

After leaving the GDS transformation team last year, I joined London's City Hall, where for the past year I have been responsible for digital, design, and marketing.

Before joining I was briefed that the existing website for the Mayor of London and the London Assembly was old, the user experience wasn’t great, the design was very outdated, and the search didn't work properly. Both staff and users really struggled with its limitations and the time had come to build a new one. The digital team had finished work on an alpha and were just starting on the beta. I was told that they wanted to follow the Digital by Default Service Manual; so I was looking forward to working with like-minded people who understood the way I was used to working.

When I arrived, it wasn't exactly what I had expected. We had a great team of developers on board and the work was being done in three weekly sprints, but with all of the testing happening at the end, so more time boxed 'waterfall,’ than agile.

I was pleased to see that some good research had been done at the start, to understand what users needed from the site, but I was also concerned that no further research was planned or budgeted for.

There were daily 'stand-ups' happening every morning, but they were actually conference calls, with everyone dialling in from their desks and there were no walls( in the office or electronically) to manage the progress of work.

At GDS I’d worked on 3 of the exemplars, I was used to a challenge and was looking forward to getting started.

The team at City Hall and the selected suppliers were also keen to learn and work together to make things better for the user. In my opinion, if you have good people, with the right attitude, then that's half the battle won. One of my personal challenges was to gently introduce some new ways of working without upsetting the apple cart or slowing down delivery.

I started by making the case for budget to carry out more user research.I knew that getting regular feedback on the product from our users, would be crucial to delivering a decent website. Fortunately the senior team agreed and soon we were working with the Web Usability Partnership and GDS to schedule in regular sessions at the lab in Aviation House.

The next thing we did was to have actual daily stand-ups, by a board with all of the stories written on cards in swim lanes. Our developers are based in Manchester, so we had to dial them in on a conference phone, but this set-up was still a massive improvement.

When I emailed the facilities team to ask for white board space on the walls in the office, I think they thought I was barking. City Hall is a very smart building, open to the public and understandably they want to keep it clean and smart, but over time, our Head of Information Technology, David Munn, has managed to persuade them that we need walls. We now have a very smart class board on the office wall, which proves that agile doesn't have to mean messy!

One thing we haven't had to change at all is our fabulous team of Content Designers, who had the task of trying to reduce website content by 75% and turn it into compelling, multimedia content, written in plain English. City Hall is much like central Government, just on a smaller scale; so we have lots of different departments to work with, most of whom have different needs, different audiences and different stakeholders and that's just the policy teams. There's also the London Assembly as one organisation and as individual Assembly Members, the Mayoral team, events and City Hall as a venue, to mention just a few. Quite how they've managed to achieve this as a content team of just 4 still baffles me.

We are now doing continuous development and testing, supported by our supplier. Our current model of working feels much more efficient and collaborative than it did twelve months ago. This has been achieved thanks to immense trust from the Senior Management Team, who were prepared to not only let us try something new, but also leave us alone to get on with it and support us when we needed help.

Another important ingredient to our success is the relationship between the digital team, who are part of the External Affairs directorate and the IT department, who, fortunately for us, were already interested in using agile when I joined and are also very firm supporters of the Digital Services Framework.

We launched the beta site to the public in July this year. Between July and November 39,000 users visited the site. So far the user journeys are looking much more successful than the old site and the feedback we're getting is that users like the design, usability and are pleasantly surprised to find information that is genuinely interesting to them. We switched off the old site and replaced it with the new one on 27 November, confident in the knowledge that because it had been built using the GDS design principles, it would be a massive improvement on the old one.

Now the new website is live, we can breathe a sigh of relief and rest on our laurels … well, maybe for a weekend, but not much longer. There is still plenty to be done. For go-live we were focused on delivering the minimum viable product, but there are plenty of improvements and additions to come, so 2016 will continue to be busy.

Personally I am looking forward to doing more work with my colleagues across City Hall to look at how using digital products more widely when developing policy and strategy can help us to engage better with Londoners.

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A couple of weeks ago, our colleagues at NHS.UK wrapped up the first phase of their alpha build. Bringing together experts from across the healthcare system, they built prototypes that demonstrated the possibility a new approach to digital health information could offer.

We spoke to them about how using some of the tools developed in the open over the last few years helped them kickstart that process.

Transcript

Nayeema Chowdhury, Build Team Lead, NHS.UK Alpha

The NHS Alpha brings together the Department of Health, NHS England and NHS Choices which is part of the Health and Social Care Information Centre to look at what the vision of NHS.UK should be.

We’ve brought together people who are strategists as well as multi-disciplinary development teams to work together in a user-focussed way: so actually looking at the research, going out and talking to people, whether its users, clinicians, or health and care professionals to bring together what the ideas should be and what our proposition should be.

Mat Johnson, Interaction Designer, NHS.UK Alpha

At the moment we are user testing a booking prototype. You can user research through paper, through kind of like scenarios, but actually having something that you can present to a user on a phone or an iPad or on a desktop that literally reflects the real experience as best we possibly can is immensely useful to us, I think.

We actually used the GOV.UK prototyping tool. The fact that the tools and the learnings from 3-4 years of user research into like how to get through a public service transaction online is actually there and open for us to basically use is kind of invaluable. It gives us a huge head start.

Nayeema

There’s been quite a lot of new processes across government that we’ve been using. A lot of them have come from the Government Digital Service. So we have been using the Digital by Default services standard. We have things like the design principles.

So having that as a benchmark and then building on it so we have our own principles and team practices has made it easier to do because we’ve seen it done in the past and we’ve seen it done and working as well.

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I’m pleased to announce that Iain Patterson will be returning to GDS in the new year as Director of Common Technology Services (CTS).

Iain was seconded to DVLA in 2013 where he was Chief Technology Officer - leading their digital transformation.

In this video Iain explains more about his work at DVLA:

In his new role at GDS Iain will be responsible for enabling the provision of consistent, high quality workplace IT for civil servants across government. This will deliver benefits through better, more secure IT, more joined-up working across government, and the ability to implement changes faster and at a lower cost.

I’d like to extend thanks to Andy Beale for not just starting this project, but for taking it back on over the summer, listening to customers, building strong relationships and driving it towards the successful spending review result. Andy, as Deputy CTO, remain on the CTS board.

Executive Director of GDS Stephen Foreshew-Cain says:

I’m thrilled to welcome Iain back to GDS. As our leadership team grows, it’s great to have people with as much expertise and experience as Iain continuing to help us transform government.

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Transcript to follow.

The Digital Marketplace is transforming the way the public sector commissions digital and cloud services by making it simpler, clearer and faster for them to buy what they need. All public sector organisations can use the Digital Marketplace to find and buy cloud-based services, specialists who can work on digital projects, and physical data centre space.

This week the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework opened for applications on the Digital Marketplace.

Services offered on Digital Outcomes and Specialists

Services on this framework fall into one or more of the following 4 categories or ‘lots’. These are:

1. Digital outcomes - Suppliers who can provide teams to build and support a digital service. eg a discovery phase for an online billing application
2. Digital specialists - Suppliers who can provide individual specialists to deliver a specific outcome with defined deliverables on a service, programme or project eg service managers or developers
3. User research studios - Suppliers who can provide space and facilities to carry out interviews, usability tests and focus groups; where it’s possible to watch and record people as they engage with designs, prototypes and live public sector services.
4. User research participants - Suppliers who can provide access to a diverse range of user research participants including people who are digitally excluded, as well as those who have low literacy or digital skills, and those who need assisted digital support.

If you are a freelancer or contractor in the digital or technology industry you can find out if you’re a suitable supplier here.

Why it’s quicker

Successful applicants will have the basic terms of their service agreed with government. Public sector organisations can buy services more quickly through the Digital Marketplace because they don’t have to run a full tender.

The benefits of being on DOS

The aim of the Digital Marketplace is to make the commissioning process simpler, clearer and faster. Buying and selling through the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework will:

• reduce the time and cost traditionally associated with procurement
• allow buyers and suppliers to talk to each other so they can decide whether there is a good fit
• give more suppliers, of all sizes, the opportunity to support digital transformation across the whole of the public sector

All suppliers and services that have been accepted are expected to go live on the Digital Marketplace on 29 February 2016.

Find out more about the Digital Marketplace on the Digital Marketplace blog, join the conversation on Twitter, and don't forget to sign up for email alerts.

Not that long ago on this blog we introduced registers as authoritative lists you can trust, and began to describe the characteristics of a register. In this post we delve into one of those characteristics. We'll explain why registers have links; how links help users of data; and discuss some of the implications of linking for an organisation operating a register.

Good data leads to better questions

An interesting dataset maintained by government is the food hygiene ratings for cafes, restaurants, takeaways and other places serving food. The data arises from inspections of food premises conducted by local authorities, then collected and published in bulk as open data by the Food Standards Agency (FSA).

Food hygiene ratings data is just one of a number of ways the FSA use their expertise and influence to help people trust the food they eat is safe and honest.

Making the data visible helps users assess a single place to eat, but raises some interesting questions such as how does the rating relate to its geographic location? Do food poisoning outbreaks happen in areas with poor hygiene ratings? Does the quality of the premises, or size of the business mean it is more likely or less likely to have a poor rating, and does a restaurant failing its food inspection mean it’s about to fail as a business?

Anyone can come up with other interesting questions, but many of us have needs for understanding the data beyond idle curiosity. Testing hypotheses with data can lead to better government policy, and help ministers to target investment more effectively.

You need a map and directions

Currently, testing hypotheses like these is quite difficult. You’ll need to conduct some research:

1. Firstly, you need to know how government is organised; you need to know about the role of the Food Standards Agency, the Valuation Office Agency, the Land Registry, Companies House, Local Authority, The Office for National Statistics and other agencies.
2. Then you need to know what data each of these organisations hold. You can find some of this information on GOV.UK and data.gov.uk.
3. Some of the data you need will be available through online tools, or periodically published as open data on data.gov.uk or GOV.UK, but you will still need to understand how to download or obtain the data which may be different in each case. Often the data isn’t readily available and you’ll need to enlist someone’s help, contacting the agency directly via their website or call-centre.
4. If you are lucky, the data will be available in a convenient format such as a single file of Comma-Separated Values, but a lot of data is still published in document formats such as PDF which can be difficult to process. Regardless of how it is formatted, you still need to process the data from each source differently — each dataset has different shapes and different names and types for data items meaning you have to work in a different way with each dataset.
5. Then you need to understand if your use is within the licensing terms of the data, which can be quite difficult particularly with data not published under the Open Government Licence.
6. Finally, before you can test your hypothesis, you’ll have to work out how to link the data together. And this is the hardest part. Often you’ll have to do some clerical work. You’ll need your eyes to manually match addresses in different datasets, your brain to relate the name of a food business to the operating company, and your fingers to fix any errors and create the links between the data.

Better data makes data better

I have learnt a new word since joining government: “nugatory”. It’s the name given to boring, pointless activity. The nugatory work of discovering, cleaning and linking data is repeated each time you want to ask a different question, and repeated by many others asking similar questions all across government.
Of course there’s a better way of linking data, and that’s to create links in the data at source, where and when it’s made. This is where registers can help.

Registers offer authoritative lists of allowed values for a field. Using registers helps designers build drop-downs, selectors and other widgets for forms.

A local-authority register will enable the Food Standards Agency to replace their own list with an official one, and a country register will enable Companies House to replace their country of origin with the authoritative list of countries, both of which currently appear as free text fields in forms.

Links simplify the data

Using links rather than text simplifies the data an organisation needs to hold. Using a company number allows an organisation to rely upon Companies House to provide the name of the company and other details which may change, such as the company name, its registered office address, the names of directors, and track if the company is still active.

A link can also connect a register to one of a number of different registers. For example the business running a food premises could be a CURIE (Compact URL), allowing it to be a school in the Department of Education register “school:1234”, a company in the Companies House register “company:9876” or a charity registered by the Charity Commission “charity:5678”.

Links demand trust across organisations

Links simplify the data a single organisation needs to maintain, but need agreements to share data names and data types with another organisation. A good way to scale agreements across a lot of registers is for us to identify and use standards.

Technical standards for data are something we need for linking, but for links to work they depend upon trust between different organisations.

To use company numbers rather than company descriptions the Food Standards Agency need to be able to trust the Companies House number will be stable and continue to identify the same company, and the company data they need will continue to be open and available to them.

Similarly before we can use country codes rather than accept free text Companies House need to be able to trust the Foreign & Commonwealth Office will continue to keep the list of countries recognised by the United Kingdom up to date.

We need data standards to be able to trust the data in a register will be available for as long as it is referenced in open data, and kept relevant for as long as it is needed to operate services.

Meeting data standards and maintaining the trust placed in links are just two of the responsibilities we should expect from the custodian of a register.

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The process that led to the birth of GOV.UK was fast. We transitioned 300+ websites onto one platform in 15 months.

Delivering at speed had consequences: as we moved existing content from the 300 sites onto GOV.UK we didn’t have the opportunity to understand how the information all fitted together and how best to structure it.

As a result users’ ability to get around the site suffered. That’s why we’ve made improving the search and navigation systems on GOV.UK one of our two main priorities between now and April 2016. And now we’ve begun to work with departments to make this happen.

The Finding Things team

Central to this task is the Finding Things team, the largest single team on GOV.UK. It’s our job to fix search, navigation and orientation on GOV.UK: helping people find what they are looking for; help them move through the site; and help them understand where they are on GOV.UK.

This work is complex, and for it to be effective we need to address fundamental problems with how content is organised and what is published. It’s a big task, that will take time.

We’re starting with education

We’re now working with real users in the education ‘theme’, starting by looking at early years content. On 19 November we met with representatives working within the education sector, including Department for Education, Ofqual, Ofsted, Skills Funding Agency, and others; it was a positive session. We talked through our findings, and started to think about how we would work together over the next few months.

This way of working is informed by our discovery work, in which we defined who we would work with across the different content themes.

Working closely with GOV.UK publishers

We chose to start this process with early years (a sub theme within ‘education’) because it’s the right size for us to identify processes that could be applicable to other subject areas. Our intention is to build better tools in the GOV.UK publishing system and processes that we can use across government for categorising and curating content. We’ll be building and iterating, based on what we’ve learned, as we move onto other themes.

To do this, we’ll need close collaboration between the departments and agencies who publish content on GOV.UK, and the full multi-disciplinary team within GDS. We know we can’t do it on our own.

The meeting we had in late November between people working on education was a great example of the collaborative working that will help this project.

If we can keep up that shared sense of purpose, and the humility to listen to each other, we'll get a lot done.

We’ll keep you updated on our progress and let you know when we’ll need your help, too.

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The new Government Service Design Manual recently passed an alpha assessment. Special thanks go to Holly Garrett who led the team from the beginning through to the alpha assessment. Holly’s now moved on and Tom Scott is the new product manager.

What we learned from our alpha

The alpha assessment report highlights some of the things we’ve learned and decisions we’ve made since we blogged about our discovery phase.

Here’s the most important ones:

1. we’re building the new service manual on GOV.UK. We chose this because being on the GOV.UK platform provided the tech support model we wanted, offered a technical development roadmap that we can benefit from. The service manual is also within proposition for GOV.UK, since we learned from our discovery that expert community discussions about contributions could appropriately be hosted off of the service manual itself
2. the new service manual has a narrowly defined proposition for the minimum viable product: “the service manual provides guidance for teams creating government digital services. It’s designed to help teams meet the Digital Service Standard and pass their service assessments.” We’re only including information necessary for building good services and we’re linking to information that’s more broadly useful
3. the new service manual will not be updated on a volunteer basis: it’s going to have a permanent team proactively updating it. To lead this GDS appointed a managing editor responsible for the whole organisation’s content. Elena Findley-de Regt took the role in November.
4. the communities are pretty different from each other. We started writing content in October, asking the GDS community leads to nominate the most appropriate experts within their community for us to work with. We’re still looking at the best ways to include the experience and expertise of the cross-government community

What’s next

We’ll be launching some new content early next year. Redirecting sections of the current service manual to ensure saved links and bookmarks don’t break. We’ll be exploring navigation patterns in greater detail. We already know we need to tag content in a meaningful way. We'll be able to take advantage of future developments of the GOV.UK publishing platform. Helping everyone find content they want.

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It’s that time of year when everyone starts compiling their best of 2015 lists so we thought we’d do the same.

Government as a Platform

This year's most popular post talked about the next phase of digital transformation: Government as a Platform. This video shows our approach to platforms across government, and we’re currently working on a status tracking platform, GOV.UK Pay, and improving technology for civil servants.

A few other popular posts talked about how platforms work. Mapping new ideas for the digital justice system explained how we’re working with the Ministry of Justice and its agencies. Building a platform to host digital services is about the infrastructure behind how a lot of our platforms work. Registers are not strictly platforms, but they often hold the data needed to build a platform; this post helps to explain what a register is, and why we’re doing this work.

GOV.UK

Our readers have been really interested in the new phase of work that we’ve been doing but they’re also interested in business as usual over on GOV.UK. This post explains why GOV.UK isn’t finished, and why we want to keep making it better.

Agile

Agile underpins our work and in July, as part of a 'week of agile' we did a periscope on design in an agile environment. Our most popular post on this subject saw Mike Bracken explaining to readers that you can’t be half agile. Another favourite was how to be agile in a non-agile environment. Both of these posts created a healthy debate on what agile means with Mike's post being the second most commented on post this year (after the registers one above).

New leadership

There were some big changes in our leadership this year. As expected, the posts announcing these departures were well-read. Mike Bracken announced his departure in August, and Stephen Foreshew-Cain, the new Executive Director, talked about the new senior leaders at GDS.

The quirky, niche and really good

There’s a few other posts that we want to draw attention to, for being quirky or niche, but also really good.

Mark Branigan, one of our user researchers blogged about how he became a civil servant by accident. Another user researcher, Caroline Jarrett, specialises in the usability of online forms and wrote about her new favourite form. Really. (this was our Head of Editorial's favourite post of the year).

A junior developer, Tatiana Soukiassian, gave a talk at Cambridge University to teenage girls about coding. You might have heard us use the phrase, “fail them faster” and Tom Adams wrote about why we did this for the Carer’s Allowance online application.

So that’s the best of 2015 on the GDS blog. Have a fantastic break and we'll see you in 2016.

Just before Christmas, we held the first meeting of the GDS People Board.

The Board's job is to make GDS a better place to work. It's a mechanism for getting things done. It exists to turn ideas into action.

So, GDS staff: if you've got ideas, we want to hear them.

We’re writing this public blog post about the Board, because making things open makes things better.

What the Board can do

Members were nominated by their colleagues, and will be expected to represent their views back to senior management. (Membership isn't fixed, either: at regular intervals, some older members will leave the Board and new members replace them.)

Crucially, the senior management at GDS have already said that they will say "yes" to the Board's recommendations, unless there's a very good reason to say "no".

So that gives the Board a mandate to change things. It has, as they say, some clout.

And in turn, that means that if you work at GDS and you're reading this post and there's something about how the organisation works that bothers you, the Board can help.

If lots of staff tell us that they're troubled about Issue X, we can discuss it with the people who understand it best, and make some suggestions to fix it. We can say to the senior management team: "This is what we think you should do to fix Issue X." And most of the time, we an expect them to say "Yes."

What we don't know yet

We've only had one meeting so far, so there are more unknowns than knowns at the moment.

We know that we need to devise simple ways for people to contact us with ideas, suggestions, and problems; and for those problems to be prioritised and managed through their life cycle. That needs to be managed sensitively - we're all in favour of working as openly as possible, but there will be some things that people want to discuss privately, with someone they trust. So we need to figure out how to make that happen.

We know that we want to understand how people feel about working at GDS. We also know that lots of people hate filling out lots of surveys, so we think (remember - only one meeting so far) that the best way to find this out is to do some good old fashioned user research. To sit down with people and actually ask them.

That process needs to be structured, though, so one of the first things on our to-do list is to work with a user researcher or two and assemble some kind of structure for those conversations, so that the things that come out of them are more useful.

We know that we need to communicate what we're doing with the rest of GDS (this post is a first step towards that) but we don't know exactly how that's going to happen in the long run.

There are many more things on our to-do list. (We'll probably publish our to-do list, but - again - we're not sure how or where yet. Trello board? Maybe.)

Anyway, that's it, and that's us, so far. Questions? Comments? For now, send an email to hello-people-board@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk. As soon as we've worked out a better way for you to get questions and comments to us, we'll let you know what it is.

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GDS conducts Service Standard Assessments for public-facing services with more than 100,000 transactions per year. All smaller services are assessed internally by departments.

As the expertise within departments has grown, we’ve started asking designers and user researchers from departments to sit on the GDS panels as well. The trial has been very successful, with the departmental assessors bringing new points of view to the process.

Katy Arnold, Head of User Research and Design at Home Office talks about her experience for us.

Recently I joined a GDS service assessment panel for the first time. I’ve been through a couple as a user researcher, and sat on numerous panels for our internal assessments with Home Office Digital, but this was the first time I took a seat on the other side of the fence at a GDS assessment proper.

Learning from experienced hands

It was the first time that anyone outside of GDS had been part of an assessment panel - and I was a little nervous. But the experienced hands - Ed Horsford and Martyn Inglis guided us through it. It’s hard to apply rigour and not become all schoolmasterly but they really nailed it. The assessment is important and they took it incredibly seriously but they kept the atmosphere as open and frank as possible. I often veered into empathy and had to restrain my desire to make the team being assessed feel okay but in the end it was an extremely professional affair and I learnt a lot.

At Home Office Digital we are immensely grateful to the assessment process - and the service standard - it's probably the single most important thing to have happened to digital delivery here. And it’s hard, really hard.

Unless you approach it the right way.

Fail fast, fail often

I was chatting online to Bernard Tyers recently, he’s one of our researchers who is currently observing users in Kuwait use our Beta Electronic Visa Waiver service for real. We’re putting small numbers of people through the service in a private beta before we open it out to higher volumes. It means we can sense-check how everything is working whilst keeping the impact of any potential problems to a minimum. It’s a fantastic way of seeing how we’ve done so far and finding the things we’ve missed. The team back in London are already filling their backlog with new stories to work on in the coming weeks.

Maintaining standards and always putting users first

I talked with Bernard about how, when his service came to assessment, he didn’t have to spend days or weeks preparing. All he had to do was talk about the great work he’s been doing. Your work should stand for itself. Get those things right and the assessment should be a formality. It’s still extremely tough - you need to be able to explain and defend your work. That’s always a challenge to do in front of an audience. But if you’ve been doing the right things, it should be relatively straightforward and you should not need to prep.

The rigour of an assessment drives us all to a high standard. It’s the reason any of us are even here and it’s why government is applying user centred design to service delivery. And when it needs to be, it’s been a clear focus for all of us on the most important thing in all of this. It's our users, citizens of the UK, who deserve our attention.

Thanks to the service assessment we are starting to open doors, change minds, and build better things. Things which make more sense for those who use them. There are huge challenges in assessing government services but I’m right behind it.

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Following the ‘discovering how people work’ blog post we received questions about the content of the profiles we created. Working with the Home Office we wanted to investigate what their staff need from technology; and see if they could be grouped into profiles that could be re-useable for other departments. This work could then benefit other departments through the ability to streamline their technology transition projects. Here’s how our research and analysis developed into seven profiles.

What we did

Our discovery period lasted several months and included nearly 400 interviews. We focused on the differences in how people work, the context of that work, and which aspects influenced their working environment.

We wanted to express the complexity of the department and stop describing people by their grade or with terms such as a “mobile worker” or a “customer facing worker”. How a job is done, or the technology required to do it, is rarely confined by these descriptions. The profiles enable us to describe tasks and requirements regardless of grade or job title.

What we discovered

We started discovering the common threads between different jobs, job descriptions, and teams. We focussed on how staff did their job and what they needed to do it well. Do they need to talk to someone? Do they need to create something? Do they need to use anything specific to do that?

By asking these questions we concluded that there are six dimensions which could be applied when describing how Home Office staff work.

1. Mobility: how mobile do they need to be at work to get their job done? Does it involve one location or many?
2. Interactions: who do they need to talk to to get their job done? How many people are engaged in the interactions and how broadly these go?
3. Time criticality: how quickly do they need to respond to queries and last minute changes/questions?
4. Standard applications use: what kind of tools do they need to use?
5. Departmental applications use: what kind of departmental tools do they rely on?
6. Security classification: what level is needed?

We knew from the beginning that defining a specific profile would take a combination of dimensions to indicate staff’s technology needs. Someone who is very mobile may also need constant access to departmental tools, which is different from someone who is very mobile but needs non-standard tools and permanent contact with the public. These were the kind of intricacies we wanted to discover.

The profiles

We’ve summarised the profiles identified for the Home Office below.

Behind the scenes:

These staff perform clearly defined (often complicated) procedures that have to be followed precisely.

They usually work in one place (a fixed desk or hot-desk). They spend most of their time inputting and manipulating information within specific line of business applications rather than off the shelf software. Working from home or remotely is not typically possible, and they rarely work outside of office hours.

Office everywhere:

These staff are office-based but often move around, predominantly for meetings with colleagues or external stakeholders. They regularly work from home and other remote locations.

They are heavy users of standard productivity tools. They interact with their team, the wider department and sometimes externally, though rarely with the public. They require their tools to be reliable and convey a professional image of their department, especially when presenting their work outside of government.

Out and about:

These staff are often on the move without regular access to office facilities or mobile technology. They frequently conduct field work in all manner of environments and locations, and keep in touch with their team by telephone. They often have to access and capture information instantly.

They collaborate with a wide variety of people both internal and external to the Home Office as part of investigations or in fieldwork activities. They are heavy users of standard productivity tools and often require specialist programs.

Speedy checkers:

These staff move often, carrying their technology between locations. They interact with the public daily and often make snap decisions based on information available to them at that moment.

'Speedy checkers' may conduct checks of goods/places/people and simultaneously consult live systems. They often require full access to line of business systems even when outside HO locations. When these are not available they rely on calling the office to request checks. A lack of remote network access means many roles rely on printing before any operational work is started.

Front of house:

These staff are based in one location gathering information (e.g. from visa applicants) and process it for further evaluation by other teams. The use of interview rooms and booths for public engagement requires widespread hot-desking. Some work is shift based, rotating staff 24/7, and there is little opportunity to work at home.

Staff spend much of their time in line of business applications and are reliant on these functioning well. The roles are often customer facing, and the real time gathering and processing of data is critical. Some staff need to communicate widely outside their immediate team.

Technologist:

These staff develop and manage digital services or perform in-depth data analysis. They are sophisticated IT users, accustomed to managing the configuration of their own devices. They often need access to coding environments and visualisation and modelling software. For this they require large or multiple screens.

They’re mainly at fixed desks but are sometimes mobile to engage with contractors and Civil Servants outside of the Home Office. They either work with high specification devices or struggle with the main IT system.

Always on:

These staff are highly responsive to all information they receive through multiple channels. Quick data evaluation to pass to the relevant person/team is required. They are advanced email users and need constant access to specific applications for processing and storing information.

'Always on' staff split their time between fixed desks and being highly mobile. They work outside standard office hours, and always have to be reachable and respond to any requests.

What happens next

This is just the start of our research. We want to understand whether the information contained in the profiles is accurate and useful. Could we use it to apply common profiles across government departments? Will we be able to provide departmental profiles of what staff require, making the right kit cheaper and more flexible to obtain? If we can, we will meet user needs more effectively than assuming one type of kit or set of applications is good for all.

You’ll be able to follow our work on this blog, the Government Technology blog and the Home Office Digital blog. If there are any departments and agencies looking to start or expand on their own user research in technology you can contact us via contact.cts@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.

Join the conversation on Twitter, and don't forget to sign up for email alerts.

One of the targets for GOV.UK Verify is to hit 90% demographic coverage by April. That means 90% of people who are expected to use GOV.UK Verify at that time are able to do so.

We’ve made a tool that shows what proportion of the public will be able to use GOV.UK Verify over the coming months. It’s helping us - that’s the GOV.UK Verify team here in GDS and the services connected to GOV.UK Verify - understand more about our users, as well as showing our certified companies the room they have to innovate.

Reaching the country

Reaching the 90% target means understanding who has the combination of evidence and/or technology to allow us to verify their identity using GOV.UK Verify.

This might mean passports, driving licences, smartphones, tablets or other documentation or equipment. The tool we built helps us understand which people have access to what and where the gaps might be when it comes to reaching that target.

By interviewing people – 2,000 to date – on what evidence and/or technology they have and comparing that to the verification methods used by our certified companies, we’re able to say whether or not people would be able to get verified.

To make this analysis transparent, we're releasing a web tool to let people explore the data as well as underlying data to let people run their own analysis.

We’re also going to release as much of the underlying data as we can under an open government licence with the Office for National Statistics (ONS), while protecting the anonymity of survey respondents.

For more explanation on how we created the tool please see our accompanying blog with the technical detail.

Using the tool

The demographic coverage web tool allows us to explore different groups’ ability to be verified up until GOV.UK Verify goes live in April and then beyond, to summer 2016.

The tool covers data sourced in August and October 2015 by the ONS through this survey. For the broad demographic groups we’re looking at right now, that’s a representative sample.

The tool and the data have already provided us with a number of insights on our users. For example, there may be a greater chance of GOV.UK Verify being able to verify the identity of a user who lives in a rural area compared to one who lives in an urban area. This is because - generally - people who live in the countryside are much more likely to have a driving licence, or use the kind of financial products that create a credit history that our certified companies currently use to verify people online.

With the tool providing clear insights like this, we can further explore how to improve and expand GOV.UK Verify ensuring that, in future, it can cover groups who have less evidence and/or technology.

For instance, users aged 16-24 are less likely to have an established identity footprint. However, many have accounts for charity services like JustGiving, which means that - as a charitable donor - their details have already been verified. We’ve been working with industry through the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) to explore how using these databases might help our younger users.

Finally, the tool is another way our certified companies can see where the gaps in the market might be. Providing more granular information about which groups need to be reached informs the market about where the gaps are. This will help identity providers plan their work on new data and methods to expand demographic coverage. This is just another way GOV.UK Verify is stimulating a market around identity assurance services.

A tool we’ll improve

This is our first iteration. We want to add more demographics, more data, and more ways to analyse the information. At the moment we have nine categories to explore, but we're looking to increase that.

The next round of data should be coming soon, and we're working with data visualisation experts such as Kyran Dale, who built the tool with us, to see how we can analyse that more effectively. In the meantime, please feel free to explore the tool.

Join the conversation on Twitter and don't forget to sign up for email alerts. 

In two weeks time, on 11 February, we’ll welcome over 450 people to Sprint 16 at the British Film Institute in London.

Sprint is about showing the progress we’ve made across government in the past year. It’s about showing how teams and departments are using digital, data, and technology as transformational tools: what’s already been done, and what we plan to do in the future. It’s about sharing our plans on how we move beyond focussing on transactions, to whole service transformation.

It’s also an opportunity for colleagues from across government, together with some important figures in digital, data, and technology from outside government, to meet up and share what’s next for government transformation. We're also welcoming international visitors, suppliers, and the press to share our progress.

Transforming government has never been the job of one team, and this year’s event will reflect that. Over the next four years, the UK government will be scaling up the transformation of government. More than ever, that means everyone across government working together.

GDS will be supporting departments by making it easier and faster to build services that are simpler and clearer for users. At Sprint 16, we’ll be sharing thoughts about the components of wholesale service transformation: platforms, technology, design patterns, and data.

The true success of building Government as a Platform depends on collaboration across departments and professions; moving away from outdated siloed thinking to deliver services that meet user needs, not government needs.

Over the course of the day there'll be demos and inspirational speakers on stage. You will be able to see first-hand the cross-government platforms already being built, how we are improving government technology, and some of the great innovation in digital services being led by departments.

I look forward to seeing you there.

To give you a taste of the format, here's a film we made of Sprint 15:

And here are short films showing what happened at Sprint 13 and Sprint 14.

If you can’t make it, don’t worry: we’ll be updating a live blog and Twitter throughout the day. There’ll be lots of content: videos, updates, pictures, and interviews. Join the conversation either on @gdsteam or by searching for #Sprint16, and of course here on the GDS blog.

Sprint 16, 11 February 12.20pm, BFI Southbank, London