If you want to make big improvements to content, you have to understand how that content works as part of a service. After all, we know that services are made of both content and transactions and most of government is mostly service design most of the time.

Some ways to think about services when designing content

You can’t separate content design from service design. So we tried to think about both when creating the import and export alpha.

1. Understand what the process looks like from the user’s point of view

We weren’t starting from scratch. The service designers on the ‘one government at the border’ programme created a helpful map of the import and export processes - based on how users think about it rather than breaking it down by departmental responsibility.

We used this map to guide us when writing up the user needs for the project.

For example, it’s important to recognise that exporting isn’t a single, linear process. It’s more like a collection of related processes which typically involve different people, and can be spread over a period of years.

And if you’re a managing director deciding whether exporting is right for your business, your information needs are very different from - say - a logistics manager who’s making sure the paperwork is correct for a consignment of goods.

2. Start with user needs rather than government processes (not an original idea, but worth re-stating)

People want to know about government processes in a specific context – the thing they're trying to do – rather than in the abstract. Usually a verb, rather than a noun.

So, rather than starting with abstract explanations of government processes, we organised the content around tasks the user is trying to complete.

3. Turn publications into transactions

It’s useful to think about forms as transactions rather than publications. No one wants to read a form: it’s a way of providing information to the government so you can do something specific (eg apply, register, or pay for something).

With importing and exporting, a lot of the complexity comes from working out whether you need to complete a form - and if you do, which one.

So we brought together forms that relate to the same or similar tasks. That way we can explain which form to use in which circumstances. And we’re creating one thing per user need, rather than one thing per variant of a government process.

And transactional things belong inside transactions. I might need very detailed guidance to help me give the right information when I’m completing a transaction - but I probably don’t need the same level of detail outside the context of that transaction.

4. Turn schemes into services

Having too much detail about government schemes for traders can be counterproductive: it delays the point at which the user knows what action to take (and may stop them taking any action at all).

So we brought together information on government schemes that are designed to solve the same problem in different ways, and thought about what decision the user needed to make at this stage in their journey.

With schemes for exporters, the first step is often to talk to an adviser about what scheme is right for you. This meant we could strip away much of the complexity, providing a clear call to action with just enough information to let the user make an informed decision about whether to pick up the phone.

Think about content as part of a service

The vision for GOV.UK is to provide coherent services by bringing content, transactions, and support together. We can only achieve that by working with service designers to design content within a whole service.

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Over the last few years across government, we have collectively learnt a huge amount about how to create products and services that truly meet user needs.

We’ve taken best practises from outside government, adapting them where we’ve needed to, and we’ve created our own principles and techniques. Wherever possible, we share this knowledge in the form of talks, blog posts like this one and the Government Service Design Manual.

There is also a whole heap of knowledge still hidden away in the heads of product managers, service managers, and others performing similar roles.

This is the kind of experience that a healthy community of practice can unlock and share.

Helping the community to establish itself

I’ve recently joined GDS with the somewhat grand title of ‘Product and Service Management Community Lead’. I think it’s a bit of a misnomer, though.

For a start, there are plenty of product-minded people across government, but not all of them have the job titles of product manager or service manager. Our community needs to be a broad church, not an exclusive club with a strict door policy.

I also don’t believe that leading is what the community really needs me to do. Rather, the things a community lead should provide are support, encouragement, and facilitation. The ‘leading’ bit will emerge later from the community as a whole as it matures.

My main task right now is to help the community to establish itself, not just in GDS, but across government.

That might seem a little odd, particularly to the hundreds of people already managing products and services. The thing is, just because there are lots of people performing a role, it doesn’t mean they’re collaborating as an established community yet.

A community of practice

Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Treyner define communities of practice as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”.

At the moment in government, we certainly do have a large group of people who share the concern of managing products and services. I’m sure that most of those people have a passion for what they’re doing.

I’d also guess that a proportion of those people are learning how to manage products and services better in some way. Perhaps they’re learning through formal study or from their peers in government and beyond.

There are also a few people who are going out of their way to share their knowledge and experience with their colleagues.

A healthy community of practice needs a mixture of all of these people. Right now, what I particularly want to encourage is more sharing of knowledge and experience.

Where to start

So how do we establish a healthy community of practice? To begin with, it can be as simple as finding all these people working in product and service management and helping them to contact each other.

I’ve already discovered that even relatively small organisations find it difficult to discover all the people performing these roles. One of my motives for writing this blog post is for it to act as a beacon: if you manage products or services in government, join our #prodmgmt channel on Slack.

Once everyone in the community knows of each other’s existence and can communicate more easily, the next step is to encourage more interaction: to get people talking and sharing. Some of that will be online in our cross-government Slack channel and email list, some will be in the form of face-to-face meetups.

Meeting face-to-face

In the last few weeks, members of the product and service management community have been meeting up with their colleagues from across government.

Service managers from across government met up recently for the first time at the Land Registry. The host and organiser Eddie Davies has already published his write-up of the day.

Another was an evening cross-government show and tell followed by some healthy socialising in a local pub. Product people from the Department of Work and Pensions (@DigitalDWP), Ministry of Justice (@Justice_Digital) and CESG (@CESG_HMG) showcased their products and services to participants from many other departments and organisations.

The third was ProductCamp London. This was a free, all-day ‘unconference’ in which the agenda starts empty and the attendees themselves volunteer to speak, facilitate discussions or ask for people’s help. Sounds chaotic, but the speaking tracks filled up quickly.

Watching product and service managers from different government departments sharing with and learning from their colleagues in the private and third sectors was tremendous. It was like watching arcs of electricity leaping from person to person.

This is how I envisage our community of practice will be: passionate and knowledgeable people inspiring each other. Let’s make it happen.

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Data science techniques at the heart of government transformation

Data literacy has a vital role to play in developing government policy and in delivering services that meet the needs of people across the UK.

GDS’s Data Group has a team of data scientists, part of a growing cross-government community, using these new techniques to bring new insights to address complex challenges and improve delivery.

However, if we are to get data science to become part of the everyday toolkit of government we need to ensure that the opportunities of using these techniques are understood and taken up by those outside of the data scientist community.

Therefore, we’re also undertaking work to help those who aren’t data scientists in government make the most of the opportunities that these new techniques have for the delivery of their services and the development of policy.

What we’re doing

As ever we’re starting with a discovery phase to understand the breadth of potential users, what they need to know about data science, and how they want to receive this information. This will help us to make sure that any products we develop are based on real user needs of people in government.

At the same time we’ll pull together potential content based on the work of data science specialists both here and across government. We want to identify the areas they believe will be most helpful to colleagues from different working backgrounds. By hearing from them and understanding how they use data science, we can start to plan our approach beyond specialist groups and into wider government.

Building on existing content and communities

The data science community globally already produces a huge range of blogs, online courses, and other resources where they share their knowledge and help each other improve their skills.

However, many of these are targeted at specialist users or people looking to become data scientists. We want to also include people who work with data scientists, or who have a high-level understanding of the opportunities presented by these new technologies.

We want to build much broader understanding of data science. We want to do this by using an open and community-based approach - providing ways of accessing knowledge and resources that have been created elsewhere. We also want to encourage those who aren’t so familiar with data science to incorporate the techniques into their work.

At the moment we’re open about the form of the final product, and the user research will help us get closer to understanding what might work best - it could be a digital service, in person training or something else.

We will blog more about our findings from this discovery stage in the next couple of months. In the meantime, if you have any examples of good practice, products or resources please do flag them to us: we’d be very keen to hear from you.

A few weeks ago we hosted the first meeting of the new GDS Advisory Board. There was a terrific energy in the room, a real sense of purpose. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the Board members for their time and for their input.

I'd also like to thank our Minister, Matt Hancock, for coming along to lend his support.

The Board members are:

• Richard Allan – Director of Policy, Europe at Facebook
• Dr Sue Black OBE – Honorary Professor at UCL and Founder and CEO at Savvify
• Joanne Hannaford – Global Co-Head of Enterprise Platforms, Goldman Sachs
• Hermann Hauser KBE – Co-Founder of Amadeus Capital Partners
• Brent Hoberman – Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at Founders Factory Ltd
• Saul Klein – CEO and Founder of LoveFilm
• Baroness Lane-Fox – Co-Founder of lastminute.com
• Brian McBride – Chairman of ASOS and former UK Managing Director of Amazon.co.uk
• Herman Narula – CEO and Co-Founder at Improbable
• Sir Nigel Shadbolt – Chairman and Founder of The Open Data Institute (ODI)
• Monique Shivanandan – Group CIO at Aviva
• Wendy Tan White – General Partner at Entrepreneur First
• Vanessa Vallely – Managing Director and Founder at WeAreTheCity.com
• Laura Wade-Gery - Executive Director Multi-Channel, Marks and Spencer

Getting stuck in

We used this first session to get to know each other. All the Board members made plain their willingness to get stuck in. It was great to see their brains at work, to see ideas sparking more ideas, and to hear them saying things like "What are the most difficult problems you're facing? How can we help you solve them?"

That’s exactly the sort of help we need from them.

We spent a little time towards the end of the meeting thinking out loud in small break-out groups. The topics under discussion were:

• transforming the way government works
• capability
• using data to measure and improve performance

Those conversations were brief, but what came out of them was very interesting.

Transformation, capability, and data

We talked about the nature of transformation and how it is as much an exercise in change management as anything else. We need to listen to the concerns and motivations of colleagues and managers in departments, do a better job of explaining to them what works and why. Most importantly, we need to tackle the big issues (things like recruitment and retention) sooner rather than later.

In the group that looked at capability in more detail, we talked about how we get people into government. Can we remove the barriers and make government a more enticing career offer? Can we encourage more young people (new graduates and apprentices) to come in and learn? Government could benefit a great deal from their digital knowledge and enthusiasm.

We also discussed data, we agreed that good data is at the heart of delivering effective services that meet user needs. We talked about how we can make data more accessible to the people who can put it to use in government services.

This is just the beginning

That’s just a snapshot, and we’ve really only just begun. This is the start of a much longer and more involved relationship. Next time the Board meets, I’m looking forward to a more detailed exploration of what’s possible. Thanks to their collective experience and willingness to get involved, the list of what’s possible is only going to grow longer.

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Just before he left GDS to go freelance, our friend Matt Sheret wrote a blog post about giving clear presentations. In it, he explained why our slides are so simple.

In the comments beneath that post, someone asked about sharing the message of a talk with colleagues after the event.

I posted a reply, saying that in my opinion, the best way to share a talk after the event is to re-write it as a blog post.

In the last few weeks I’ve found myself coming back to that thought over and over again - so rather than leave it as a comment where it’s easily missed, I thought I’d write it up in more detail here.

Slides are for presenting, not for reading

The point Matt made in his post was that our slides are simple for a good reason: we want to encourage the audience to pay attention to the speaker, to listen to what they're saying out loud.

Slides are designed to be presented. They’re great for showing on a screen in front of an audience, but they're a poor tool for sharing long chunks of text in any other circumstances.

The best way to share text that you want people to read is to share it in a format that’s easy to read. A digital document is fine if you're just sending it to a few people, but if you want to send it to lots of people or publish it, the best way is to write a blog post.

That’s the best way to share slides after the event.

People who already do this well

There are many people who are very good at this, and I'm going to pick out 3 of them.

The first is Matt Webb (formerly of this parish), who writes up his talks with incredible grace and style. Here's just a few (he's done many more): Sci fi I like, Scope and Iterative Architecture.

Click through them and you can almost feel Matt's personality and gorgeous grin leaping out of your computer screen at you. If you've met him in person, you can hear his voice seeping from the pixels. Matt's written up those talks on the internet, but he's written them as if he's talking.

Another example: Maciej Cegłowski, proprietor of the wonderful bookmarking service, Pinboard.

Maciej's talks are always funny and entertaining, but look at the way he writes them up. The most recent, The Website Obesity Crisis, is typical. At the very top of the page, he makes clear what the page is: "This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2015," he writes. After that, he tells you a story. The same story that he told on stage that day. He shows you the pictures that he showed then, and writes up what he said (not verbatim, you can check that by watching the video version, but near enough to make no difference). It’s text, but reading it feels like watching Maciej speak.

A third example: London-based designer and maker Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, who posts her talks online with an embedded slideshow and a transcript. Have a look at New Creatives and The End of Ignorance to see what I mean. Because they’re part of her blog, they feel like part of the ongoing narrative that her blog represents. Because of the way they’re presented, they read like little essays.

The point is they are very readable, in a way that simply sharing slides on their own, or slides with speaker notes as bullet points, would never be. Once again: it’s like Alex is in the room with you, talking you through her thoughts.

We should write up our talks like that

So if you want to share your talk after the event, don't put your slides online by themselves. Don't email your slides to people. Don't copy what you said out loud on to more slides, and send those.

Instead, do what Matt and Maciej and Alexandra do: write up your talk as an illustrated blog post. Write it like you're still talking. Then put it on the internet, so that everyone can hear you.

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Earlier this week, I was asked to speak on this subject at TechUK’s Public Sector 2030 event. I don’t claim any special ability to see the future, and I think predicting specific technological advances is probably a fool’s errand - but I was happy to offer my best guess for the broader themes.

Here’s what I said.

Good morning everyone, and thanks for having me here.

The year 2030 is less than 15 years away. It doesn’t sound like that long, but in terms of technology, it will be a whole new world.

After all, just look 15 years back - 15 years ago, the web was brand new, and government didn't really know what to do with it.

Broadband connections were few and far between, wifi was unheard of. Smartphones hadn't been invented, and nor had social media. Cloud computing and virtualised infrastructure were in their infancy, and services we have today that let us collaborate with colleagues or connect with customers in real-time didn’t exist.

Back then, you still bought your music on CDs. Even the most visionary scoffed at the idea we might one day rent our music. And in just 15 years we've gone from CDs to ripping, downloading, now streaming. The music industry isn’t about owning music any more, it's about experiencing it.

Knowing which innovations will be the ones to stick with and change how we live our lives, from the perspective of today, is mostly unknowable.

There will be new technologies for sure, and they will bring new cultural norms, new ways of communicating and sharing, and new ways of experiencing government. So when I think about government in 2030, I don’t think about what it will passively become, but what we will actively make it.

From government of the industrial age to government of the digital age

By 2030, we could (and should) be seeing the biggest change to the Civil Service since the Northcote-Trevelyan report. 
The last major revolution to the Civil Service was actually its creation in the middle of the 19th century. 
Trevelyn’s report was the culmination of various efforts to reform government to reflect a changed world. He wanted to create a Civil Service fit for the age (the industrial age of the mid 1850s).

The report called for revision of:

The public establishments as to place them on the footing best calculated for the efficient discharge of their important functions, according to the actual circumstances of the present time.

The changes called for were important, necessary, far-reaching and fundamental.

But that was 160 years ago. And the civil service we know today has not fundamentally changed since then. 
It is no longer fit, in Trevelyan’s words, for the circumstances of the present time, let alone for 15 years hence. 
And that’s largely because it hasn’t needed, for most of the past 160 years, to adapt quickly to an ever increasing pace of change.

Not government that’s changed, but government that can change

The 1st of January 2030 is just under 5000 days away (from 10 May, when I gave this talk). That’s only 2 more planned General Elections - one in 2020, another in 2025.

The biggest problem we in government face between now and then isn’t the change itself - it’s that everything will change, all the time. We know the change will happen, we know it will be inevitable and unavoidable, we know it will happen faster. It will happen whether government wants it to or not.

It doesn’t matter what government looks like in 2030; what matters is how dynamic and responsive it is.

Not the what we do, but how we do it.

So, the biggest problem we face is re-shaping ourselves so that we’re better placed to change as rapidly as the world around us.

Getting to this position isn’t about simply replacing the technology. We have to think deeper. New versions of the solutions to today’s problems are not the answer.

Government of the internet

We started the process of change 5 years ago, but we started 5 years (at least) behind everyone else. We’re catching up as fast as we can.

And that’s the work currently underway in GDS, and in departments and agencies right the way across government. They’re building the foundation for a government of the internet. I spelled it out in this blog post, just a few weeks ago.

The strategy remains delivery:

• we’re setting and defining standards for whole services and good service design
• we’re building, or helping departments to build, new common components that make services easier to assemble - a shared digital infrastructure
• we’re making sure the civil service has the people and skills it needs to make all this happen

That’s the strategy. We’re delivering it now.

The formal strategy document will be published in due course. But a strategy document doesn’t matter as much as running code - such as the notifications platform which will be going into public beta shortly. We’re trying to get a lot of this done in the next 5 years. I’d like to see a lot of it ready by 2020.

Bold predictions

So, enough scene-setting. I’m going to be bold and share with you the things I think and hope we’re going to see by 2030:

We will have fixed the basics

By 2030 - before that, long before that in fact - we will have fixed the basics. 
You know what I mean: the stuff we’re talking about for a while now. 
We won’t have to be constantly encouraging people to put users first, or to work in an agile way, to iterate - all these things will be the default, the new normal. They will be the new standard behaviour, to the point where we won’t have to think about them any more.

“Digital” won’t be a thing any more

This is probably the most fundamental of those basics. By 2030, we won’t talk about digital this or digital that, because everything will be digital. 
I’m not claiming that we’ll have reached the magical, mythical paperless society. I don’t think that will ever happen, to be honest.

Government services will still rely on paper sometimes. We shall still be sending letters to people in the post, if they prefer to be contacted that way. People will still be filling out paper forms, some of the time.

But the vast majority of services will simply be digital. They will have been designed that way, because digital by default, like “users first”, will be the accepted way of doing things.

Government will have a more diverse, digitally skilled workforce

We’ll have to be employing people who understand the internet and understand users – right across the Civil Service, not just in teams of technologists.

The best way to do that is to make sure that the diversity of the civil service reflects the diversity of the people we are here to serve.

In the words of DWP’s Kit Collingwood-Richardson:

Diversity is the lifeblood of a Civil Service which represents wider humanity.

Between now and 2030, we will have to get better at hiring the right people, and encouraging them to stay. And we’ll have to get better at training the people we’ve got, so that they can put their years of experience in services and on the frontline to good use.

Policy making will be service design

Policy making will be service design, and service design will be making policy. Ideas and implementation will be much closer together. In fact, there won’t be any new ideas without some sort of implementation. Thinking in code. Iterating in public.

By 2030 policy making will be minimally designed and built as a framework which allows flexibility and feedback, not as a fait accompli.

The way that the law is made will have changed. Today we are often blocked by the stuff written on the faces of bills about which we have limited understanding of feasibility, but by 2030 we will have legislation that supports service delivery, not blocks it.

White papers & green papers would be replaced by public prototypes of new or iterated services.

Public consultation will be massively changed: at the moment you have to be an engaged citizen to wade through consultation docs - we don't engage those whose views matter most, like vulnerable people. That means we're not consulting with integrity. We‘ll have smaller, rapid, frequent consultation.

We will be working not in a sequence, but a cycle. The old-style, top-down, predictive policy making model that identifies the “big idea” and doesn’t consider service delivery as the best source of evidence on what works and what doesn’t, just isn’t going to cut it.

If we get all this right, public services will be so easy to build, they could become almost disposable.

Imagine being able to create a new service in hours, not months. Imagine being able to create two slightly different versions of a service, and see which one works best. And then, having done the research and iterated and improved the better one, simply killing off the one that didn’t make the cut.

Imagine being able to do that at negligible cost.

Platform thinking will be everywhere

Of course, everything will be made using interconnected digital components, built to appropriate standards.

There will be software platforms, data registers, standards, patterns, services, and skills that service teams in all departments can simply plug into their new services quickly and easily, whenever they need to.

Needless to say: the cost savings are likely to be significant.

Data-driven government

In 15 years from now, the work we’ve already begun in the government data programme will be having far-reaching effects.

Better use of government data will change the world for business, for government itself, and for citizens:

• 
businesses will be able to depend on better data infrastructure, which will make the UK a better place to do business
• government will be in a position to innovate like never before
• we shall be able to offer users services that are tailored to them and their needs ...

The UK will be a smartphone state

… services that will be available to them, where they are.

Our minister’s vision of a “smartphone state” will be reality.

By 2030, most of the time, most users will be able to find services that meet most of their needs - on their smartphone, or on whatever equivalent device exists by then.

And by that last point, I mean: government will be so different in 15 years, that it won’t matter if something has replaced the smartphone as the consumer gadget of choice.

We will have learned enough by then to be able to adapt.

Services will shape government, not the other way round

In order to achieve all of that, government will have to be simpler, smaller, faster and more agile.

It will have to be a more flexible, adaptable organisation. One that doesn’t fear new technological change, but embraces it.

The result will be services that shape government, not the other way round.

I believe that by 2030, the organisational structure of government departments and agencies will be much simpler, and radically different. Parts of Whitehall will no longer exist, at least not in the same way that we see them today. The departmental silos we’re all accustomed to now will have faded away. 
There will be a smaller administrative centres, and a new culture based on evidence-based decision making and trust between teams.


Government will be smaller, faster, more flexible

And the result of that effort?

We will have transformed the relationship between citizen and state

We’ll have reached the goal, as described by our Minister, Matt Hancock.

When you need to do something that requires you to deal with government, you heart won’t sink. You will know that whatever you need to do it will be simple, it will be clear, and it will be fast. 
We will have transformed the relationship between citizen and state.

Even then, we won’t be “done”

And even then, we won’t be “done”.

Even in this transformed future, we won’t be able to sit back at the end of 2030 and declare ourselves finished.

Why not? You know why not. Because of this:

Because of the fifth of our design principles, the rules that keep us on the right path:
Iterate. Then iterate again.

In 2030, and in the years that follow, we shall still be iterating. We shall still be doing the user research, doing the hard work to make things simple.

There’s no definition of done. We’re never done - it’s about the journey, not the destination. And on the 1 January 2030, 4986 days from today, we will be working out how we can make things even better in 2031.

Start now

Everything I’ve just described will be the new normal by 2030. It will be very different, but it will be very much better for us, for our work, and for the users we’re here for.

The scale of the challenge ahead is so enormous that we can’t afford to wait.

As I’ve said before, this isn’t about simply replacing the technology. We have to think deeper, we have to be more radical. We have to be bolder. New versions of the solutions to today’s problems are not the answer to tomorrow’s challenges.

It’s the role of GDS and our digital leaders to design and deliver the government of the future. We need our technology leaders to deliver technology which helps us do that.

As my predecessor said, and I have oft quoted, technology is a fourth order question:

• user need
• minister need
• operational need
• technology need

Let’s keep it that way. And whatever our ambitions for 2030, let’s start now.

Thanks for listening.

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I’m Kit, I work for Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and I recently became a lead assessor for GDS service standard assessments. Until a few months ago I was a service manager and have represented teams in around a dozen service standard assessments; this post is about what I’ve learned from sitting on the other side of the table.

I jumped at the chance to become an assessor for two reasons:

Firstly, I’m part of a cross-government digital community. I feel that I, and others in departments with experience of launching digital services, have a responsibility to put that experience to good use in that community.

Secondly (and this isn't about me specifically), it lends even more strength to the GDS assessment process that they now trust departmental digital leads to assess services.I want to celebrate and be part of that. It’s testament to how far digital has come across government that this now happens.

What I learned

Being an assessor needs preparation too

Preparing for a service standard assessment is a real undertaking for a service team. The time leading up to an assessment is like a multi-week retrospective - you look back and scrutinise every aspect of what you’ve done, finding potential gaps and making sure your service is everything it can be to your users at a particular stage. As an assessor you’ve got 4 hours to do justice and respect to that preparation, and get the best out of the team in front of you.

I understand now that preparation is as important for the assessment panel as for the service team, particularly around any perceived gaps and specific question points, to make sure that happens.

Show, don’t tell

Although 4 hours (often more) is a long time on paper, it really flies, and it’s the lead assessor’s job to make sure that time is productive. For me, the way to do that is to focus at least half the time on the service demo, and trust yourself and the panel to bring out the salient points from it without formal questions.

I then use the post-demo break to go through the standard points and then ask fewer, more specific questions from it to fill in the gaps in the panel’s knowledge.

Team environment says a lot

When assessing GOV.UK Notify recently, we as a panel went to see where the team sat, and looked at their working environment and wall space. How a team works is as important as what they work on, and seeing this for real made the answers come alive.

When assessing services in departments, a lead assessor can easily arrange a pre-meet or even ask for pictures of where the team sits. It’s all part of the bigger picture.

It’s as much about how you ask a question as what you ask

When representing teams at assessments, I hadn’t given much thought to how the questions were phrased. When I became an assessor I realised that the quality of the output was proportionate to the quality of the questioning, and I gave lots of time to make sure I was phrasing questions in a way to elicit clear and direct responses.

There’s training available through GDS which can help with this, that I recently attended, and found really useful.

Take care of each other

Finally, it seems a minor point but a service standard assessment is a big deal for everyone involved.To get the best output it’s important to keep energy levels up. There needs to be plenty of water and caffeine around as well as some food. It’s good to build in a couple of breaks to allow people to refocus, and keep the tone light and friendly. This quells nerves and allows people to perform at their best. It’s not an interrogation; it’s a collaborative effort.

In short, it’s been eye-opener and I look forward to assessing lots more services in the future. You can contact me @kitterati on Twitter with any comments – I’d love to hear from you.

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I’m Alistair Duggin, Head of Accessibility here at Government Digital Service. I’ve been here for just over 7 months now. My job is to make sure that GOV.UK is as accessible as possible. This means that we are not excluding people on the basis of a disability, as I explained in my recent post - What we mean when we talk about accessibility.

My background is as a developer. I’ve worked on lots of large projects including the BBC London Olympics 2012, BBC Weather App, The Money Advice Service and Pension Wise. I’ve experienced first-hand how hard it can be to make products and services accessible and the many challenges that teams face.

My goal

My ultimate goal is to make GOV.UK accessible to everyone. To do this we need to raise awareness of accessibility and make it easier for people to make things accessible.

The accessibility of GOV.UK is good compared to many websites. But there is much more to do. I want to make it an exemplar for accessibility that others can learn from and help improve accessibility of the web in general. A big ambition, but I believe there is nowhere better to do this than at GDS.

The challenge

One of the biggest challenges is the sheer size of GOV.UK, the number of people contributing to it, and the fact that people work on it all around the country. GOV.UK is not a single website. It is made up of many parts.

There is the publishing platform used by all government departments and agencies to publish over 300,000 pages of content by over 3000 people.

There are over 800 digital services that allow people to register to vote, claim a benefit, renew a licence and calculate taxes etc.

There are the platforms that enable these services to verify people’s identity, collect payments and send out notifications.

There are the public facing parts of GOV.UK as well as the internal systems that people use.

Furthermore, government services are not just online. They have non-digital aspects like letters, call centres, face to face. These must all not exclude people on the basis of a disability such as a visual, hearing, cognitive, or motor impairment.

The common approach to accessibility

The way accessibility is usually approached is to set a policy that is based on meeting a technical standard, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 to level AA.

Designer and developers are told to adhere to an accessibility checklist and once the website is built it is evaluated for accessibility by a specialist. Occasionally usability testing with people with disabilities is also performed at this time. A report listing all the accessibility issues is provided. The designers and developers are told to fix them, often with no support and little background knowledge.

As a result, accessibility can be seen as a burden and a constraint to creativity and innovation. Fixing bugs late in the development cycles is always much more difficult than doing it early so accessibility is also seen as expensive.

Due to people having a low awareness of the issues that people with disabilities can face when using a service and due to people being overwhelmed by how complicated accessibility can be, it is often ignored or not given the priority it requires.

Accessibility is not just about meeting a standard

The goal of accessibility is not to meet a standard, it is to make sure the people with disabilities can use your service as easily as people without a disability. It is unlikely that someone will complain that a service doesn’t meet a standard. They will complain that they are unable to do what they need to.

Following a technical standard is an important aspect of making something accessible, but it does not ensure that what you have made is accessible. A standard is a tool that helps you get there more efficiently. But you also need to understand how people with disabilities will use your service and include them in the design and testing of it. This is all too rarely done.

A better approach to accessibility

A better approach is to help people understand that making a service easy to use for people with disabilities makes it easier to use for everyone. Accessible design is good design. Designing for disability leads to innovation. When you get feedback from people with disabilities early in the design and build of a website or service problems become easier to fix, and you come up with solutions that benefit everyone.

When you provide support for how to approach accessibility and how to solve issues, accessibility becomes easy. It is under these conditions that people are much more likely to embrace accessibility with open arms.

This means raising people’s awareness of accessibility and growing a community where people with little or no accessibility experience can get support from those with more experience. It also means providing guidance and solutions for common accessibility issues.

We want a culture of designing with accessibility in mind, where services are made accessible by default.

We need more than an accessibility team to do this. We need an army of people across government that care about accessibility, who reap the rewards of building accessible services and sharing solutions.

One of the GDS design principles is 'do the hard work to make it simple'. This is how we need to approach accessibility. We need to build a team that can help make it simple rather than building a team that just tells people they are doing it wrong.

We need to reduce the duplication of effort that is happening and instead utilise this effort to establish best practice and reusable patterns and solutions so accessibility becomes easy and efficient.

This is what we are starting to do at GDS.

The story so far

So what have I been up to for the last 7 months?

I’ve been doing a lot of traveling around the country. Going to departments and meeting teams that are building new digital services. Doing lots of presentations to raise awareness of accessibility and trying to inspire people to take up the challenge of making their services accessible. Talking to people to find out who has already been doing this. Seeing how teams are approaching accessibility. Identifying the challenges that teams are facing. Thinking about how we can make it easier.

We’ve been recruiting for people to join the GDS Accessibility Team. Ensuring that we have the right skills and experience to deliver accessibility support efficiently and effectively across government.

We’ve been building an army. A couple of weeks ago we started a cross-government accessibility community. An email list where people can ask questions, share information and provide support to others.

We started by inviting the people I had met in government that are already doing great accessibility work. Those that are enthusiastic and have experience and knowledge to share. We then opened it up to everyone in government. We already have over 200 people, from a range of departments, with people working in content, design, development, user research and quality assurance.

We also have a number of people with access needs who are keen to share first-hand experiences. We have our first accessibility meetup on May 19th. All 65 places went within 18 hours. We’ve been blown away by the response.

Twelve(ish) things for the next 12(ish) months ... in no particular order

One of my priorities is to continue to raise awareness, inspire people and get them to join and participate in the community. If people don’t care and don’t get support, then they will only do the bare minimum of what is required to make something ‘accessible’.

Improving how teams approach accessibility is another priority. They need to understand access needs early in a project. Get feedback from people with disabilities as part of regular user research sessions. Run automatic tools to identify and prevent common accessibility issues.

We need to utilise the community to establish best practice and provide helpful information in the content design guidance, service manual and provide training courses and materials.

By providing accessible versions of all of the common building blocks that teams use to provide online services we can remove many of the problems that teams face.

By providing guidance on how to test services we can help teams to do this early and often rather than relying on external specialists at the end of the build.

We need to know what technologies people are using to overcome their disabilities so we can ensure our services work with them. We’ve launched an assistive technology survey to help us do this.

We also need to make it easier for teams to set up and use assistive technologies.

We’re planning to research access needs that are common to all services. Do people who struggle to see or process text need to be able to change the colours and typography on GOV.UK or have the content read out to them? What is the best way to support deaf people whose first language is British Sign Languag and find English hard to read and write?

Can we make it difficult to publish content that has accessibility issues? Things like missing alternative text, headings that do not follow a hierarchical structure, videos that are missing captions and transcripts and PDFs that are not tagged or only contain an image.

How do we make it easy for teams to find people with disabilities to take part in usability testing and provide input and feedback on the design and implementation of services?

We need to make service assessments more rigorous to reduce that chance of people being excluded from being able to successfully use a service.

We need to work out the best way to monitor services that are live, so the accessibility of them is prevented from declining as new features are added.

And one for luck ...

We need to make sure that when services are procured that high accessibility standards are maintained. Both the provider and the buyer must be aware of their responsibility.

There is a lot to do. But, by working together, by making accessibility easier and by making it part of the culture, we can do it. We can transform government and influence the rest of the world.

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Hi, I’m Sally and I’m a civil servant. Over the past few months, since I’ve joined the Cabinet Office, I’ve heard a lot about GDS. Glance down the Cabinet Office or Civil Service Twitter feeds and I guarantee it won’t be long until you see a tweet highlighting their work.

But what is it like to work there? And how do you run a tech organisation that’s part of government?

I spent two weeks in GDS Operations finding out.

Show the thing

GDS aims to be transparent – but their windows aren’t always. That’s because of the sticky notes and posters displayed everywhere around their offices. Far from just decoration (although you can do some nifty things with sticky notes) these visually show the story of what is being worked on in that particular corner of GDS HQ.

And not just the tech stuff, it's the people stuff too. How many people are being recruited this month. The biggest operational issues this week. It's all there somewhere.

Useful tools for the teams. Useful tools for visitors and colleagues to see what GDS is doing.

Iterate to accumulate

Iterate is a term frequently heard at GDS. In fact, if I had a pound for every time someone used the word, I’d have supplemented my salary nicely by now. However, it does go to the heart of what they’re about. If at first you don’t succeed … well, why would you think you’d succeed at the first attempt?

Early versions of team objectives are posted up for comment – and criticism. Whiteboards near the lifts ask staff to give feedback on what is bothering them, or what they want to talk about.

There’s a People Board to help make changes from the ground up. GDS Chief Operating Officer Alex Holmes has blogged about applying a digital way of thinking to how GDS is run and this is very much ‘GDS – beta version – user feedback welcome’.

Stop – collaborate and listen

Digital tools can do a lot to make collaboration easier. But we need to work together as people too. I saw a good example of this when I helped work on a paper destined for GDS’s Executive Management Committee.

This is how it works:

The team sits down and think about what they need to achieve. What problem are they trying to solve? What are the needs of their audience? They post these thoughts up on the wall. Everyone then has an equal chance to pitch their ideas. They think about the ideas, and ask questions. Only then do they pull out their laptops and start contributing to a shared document. Later, they bring the document up on a big screen and brought in other colleagues to check their thinking.

It made me wonder if previously I’d been guilty of thinking of shared working technology as the solution, rather than tools we have to actively think about how we should be using in the context of real conversations.

My take-aways

Spending time in GDS helped me to see operations in a new light. I suppose, going in, I’d thought that a digital way of thinking would be about using the newest shiniest tech at every opportunity. Instead, in GDS it’s about approaching running an organisation as you would approach the development of a new digital service. Find out what your users need and share things early to improve them.

Perhaps one day all operations staff will be known as user researchers ...

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We're hiring quite a lot of new people at GDS, and that's brilliant because there are so many new brains and new skills and new faces to get to know.

It's also difficult. It's difficult for those newcomers to know what to expect, and what's expected of them.

Of course they get told all the official stuff - how they get paid, how to use the printer, who their line manager is.

But it’s harder to communicate the unofficial stuff. The stuff that's good to know, but that it’s no-one's job to tell you. The stuff you'll probably find out during your first few months, but most likely by accident, because someone casually mentions something in passing and you say "Wait, what? Is that a thing?"

Stuff that’s good to know on day 1

The team I work with has been hiring too. We welcomed one newcomer two weeks ago, and two more just this week.

And it occurred to me: maybe it would be helpful to spell out this unofficial stuff up front, on day 1. Maybe we just need to say what’s ok. To be explicit about the things that those of us who have been here a few years take for granted.

So our team wrote a list of things it's ok to do at GDS.

It's ok to:

• say "I don't know"
• ask for more clarity
• stay at home when you feel ill
• say you don't understand
• ask what acronyms stand for
• ask why, and why not
• forget things
• introduce yourself
• depend on the team
• ask for help
• not know everything
• have quiet days
• have loud days, to talk, joke and laugh
• put your headphones on
• say "No" when you're too busy
• make mistakes
• sing
• sigh
• not check your email out of hours
• not check your email constantly during hours
• just Slack it
• walk over and ask someone face-to-face
• go somewhere else to concentrate
• offer feedback on other people's work
• challenge things you're not comfortable with
• say yes when anyone does a coffee run
• prefer tea
• snack
• have a messy desk
• have a tidy desk
• work how you like to work
• ask the management to fix it
• have off-days
• have days off

Having written the list and shared it with a few other people, we turned it into a poster and stuck a few copies on the walls. We took pictures and posted them on Twitter and Instagram. It seemed to go down quite well.

Growing a team is hard

I'm no expert, but I think that maintaining a good organisational culture is hard work, especially when your organisation is growing. None of your newly arrived colleagues can be expected to know all that cultural knowledge, and few of the old hands have time to sit down with them and explain it all.

So too often, newcomers are left to stumble on it by themselves. Eventually, they figure out the unwritten rules on their own, but that might take months, even years.

This poster isn't exhaustive. It doesn’t say everything that needs to be said. It's not an induction either, but perhaps it might become part of one. (We're working on a new induction process, something we've needed to do for ages. More on that another time.)

But: it's a start, and we hope it gives newcomers at GDS a hint about how we work, and how they'll be working too. Some of those old hands I mentioned have said they found it useful too.

It's ok to print your own copy

Quite a lot of people asked if they could get a copy to put up in their office too. Great idea. If you'd like one, you can download a print-your-own version.

Did I mention that we’re hiring? Oh yes, I did. Righto then.

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A few years ago, when I was organising finance and procurement for the GDS user research lab, I invited the Financial Business Manager for the Cabinet Office to come and see the space, an invitation he accepted. I gave him a tour of the space and showed him the plans. I shared the vision, and involved him in the creative process. I did the same with the Estate Manager, building security, and postal room staff.

It wasn’t a consciously strategic move, I was just gung-ho and eager to get everyone who had anything to do with the project involved and enthusiastic too. It proved a very good move.

Collaboration was so important

Finance went smoothly, deliveries arrived without hassle, parking arrangements and supplier passes were no problem, and the Estate Manager went the extra mile in helping make the lab just right.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but to a very large extent, the success of the project was a result of this very human and simple effort - show everyone involved in the project the thing. And I mean everyone.

It’s about understanding that people in extended-team positions are often overlooked for their importance in bringing a creative vision to life. Especially in the case of finance and procurement, their buy-in is essential to a project’s success. When you’re used to running numbers, paperwork, and contracts all day - with little vision of what you’re actually creating the contract for - it’s refreshing and enthusing to be included in the creative vision.

A prototype, a gnarly sketch. A here’s-what-we’re-doing

We’ve just completed procurement on another project. No matter how clear we thought we were being, procurement just didn’t seem to get it. It wasn’t their fault, we hadn’t actually communicated what we were trying to build, and why. We’d left them in the dark and expected them to accept and understand all the details.

We could have shown them a prototype. We should have done.

Keep it short and sweet

It’s not about overloading extended team members with more information than they need. You might show them a prototype, a gnarly sketch, or an empty room along with drawings and explanations, as was the case with the GDS lab. The point is to show the thing, show it early, and give everyone a creative ‘in’.

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We’ve been running a Women’s group at GDS for a year now. I wanted to share why we do that, what the group has done so far, and what we plan to do next.

It’s not just for women

The Women’s group is for everyone, irrespective of gender, who cares about having an equal and diverse workplace – but that’s not a snappy and concise name for a group. So we're calling it the Women's group.

Having an active and supported Women’s group can help make GDS a better place for everyone to work. Issues that affect women don’t just belong to men or women. And, whilst the group may have been set up originally to provide a safe space for women to discuss their experiences, our actions haven’t been limited just to the women in the organisation.

GDS is still only a few years old, and has seen a lot of changes during that time. We faced some of the same problems that many tech start-ups face - including working so hard to get the job done that we didn’t always focus on promoting an inclusive culture.

People who were naturally more confident and more assertive thrived, but people who prefer to take time and collaborate could be left out. The Women’s group was formed as a direct response to this, and its aim from the start was to make GDS a more inclusive place to work. We’ve been empowered by our senior team and by whole organisation to make recommendations for change, and we’ve always been listened to and strongly supported.

Things have changed since our early days. GDS's role in government has developed, and with that we’ve had to find more sustainable ways of working. We’ve found ways that encourage whispers as well as shouts, and ways that encourage people to collaborate as well as lead.

The Women’s group works closely with the management team and our operations group to improve our culture and make GDS a more diverse and equal workplace.

What we’ve achieved

We started last year with 5 objectives:

• raise awareness and be a voice for women
• solve problems
• provide support
• provide training
• socialise and network

So far, with help from colleagues across GDS, we have started as we mean to go on.

We've rolled out unconscious bias training to all line managers at GDS

We all have unconscious biases that impact our choices and decisions. Most of the time they’re harmless, but understanding your own helps you to spot when you’re making a decision based on logic, or if you’re being lead by bias.

We’ve set up a reverse mentoring scheme for all senior civil servants

Members of the senior team are mentored by a junior member of the Women’s group. This helps managers find out what people outside of their usual sphere think about working at GDS and opens up lines of communication.

We run monthly talks by inspirational women

We've already welcomed speakers from tech and digital industries, government, and the House of Lords. We've also secured funding to host six CodeBar events in 2016.

We published our parity pledge on International Women’s Day

We committed to send more women to speak at events, and not to send speakers to events where the organisers aren’t working hard to improve the speaker diversity of their event.

We’ve started work on presentation and public speaking training ...

... for everyone at GDS no matter their seniority, skill, or experience.

We’ve ensured all GDS interview panels are mixed

And we've increased the pool of women who feel confident conducting and chairing interviews by running training sessions. Teams can contact the group if their panel doesn’t have a woman on it and get a volunteer, who in turn learns about a different area or role in GDS and gains confidence.

The GDS executive board have published their objectives, and each included one on diversity

We’ve pushed for hiring of more permanent civil servants instead of Fixed Term Appointment (FTA) contracts, which can put women off applying and impacts maternity leave.

We linked up with the GDS LGBTQ+ group

We want to support them with their events and communications.

Not bad for year 1.

What’s next

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve. We hold open workshops every six months to work out the next set of objectives.

Here’s our current plan:

We’re expanding unconscious bias training to all staff

We’re training up members of the group to facilitate these sessions.

We’re working with our recruitment team to increase the number of women hired into technical roles

Improving how people find out about working here, looking again at what events we should be speaking at, and how we write job descriptions that don’t put women off applying.

We’re setting up more training sessions

This includes interview, presentation and public speaking training, and finding more opportunities for women to speak and develop their skills. We take our pledge very seriously, so we want to build a network of women to talk at events, and encourage senior men to step aside and promote other people to speak on their behalf.

We’re setting up a work experience programme with Stemettes and Next Tech Girls

This is so that girls can get experience of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) jobs at GDS and learn from the women who work here. We’d like to roll this out across government too.

It doesn't take long to make a change

When we held our first workshop 14 months ago, concern about culture was the number one issue that people wanted to tackle. We’ve worked hard to find ways that we could improve things for everyone. In April we held our third workshop and saw only one sticky note on the wall that talked about a problem with culture.

So things are improving. And they’re improving fast.

We'd like to hear your views, about GDS or about your own experiences - feel free to comment below, or join the conversation on Twitter. Don't forget to sign up for email alerts too.

I’m Amy, a creative writer at GDS. My job is to explain to people inside and outside government what we do here at GDS and, specifically, what we’re doing on the Digital Marketplace team.

One of the main ways we tell our story is through the Digital Marketplace blog. On it, we explain what the team is working on, what it’s working towards and how users are using the service. We also tell people when we’ve changed our minds about something and why. Being open and transparent is a really integral part of what we do at GDS, and blogging helps us do this.

What ‘good’ looks like

The other week, blog owners from around GOV.UK got together at the first #GovBlogCamp. We shared our ideas on writing for our readers and building readership. Someone asked me what makes a ‘good’ blog. I said that the best blogs:

• share a little piece of your team’s story, regularly
• tell the story in the most effective way (it could be through a guest author, video or case study)
• use language that everyone will understand

Perhaps most important of all, a good blog has to be made up of posts that are as engaging as they are accurate. And to write posts like that, the writer and the team’s subject matter experts have to work together.

The storyteller and the team

Being a creative writer at GDS isn’t about helping the team write things. It’s actually quite the opposite: it’s about the team helping you to tell a story. For this to work well, it’s good to be clear about each other’s areas of expertise.

It’s the storyteller’s job to know who the reader is; identify a good story and work out the best way to tell it (sometimes a presentation or video will work better than a blog post). But the storyteller isn’t responsible for knowing what’s technically accurate and legally correct. That’s down to a subject matter expert.

Being clear and correct

If the blog post is about something complex, it’s often better if the writer knows very little about the subject. Forms and surveys specialist, Caroline Jarrett recently tweeted that: ‘If you know enough to say it's correct, you know too much to say it's clear.’ And it’s true. GDS creative writers and content designers work with this idea in mind.

If you understand the thing you’re writing about, it’s easier to assume your reader has the same level of knowledge you do. If you’re working on a post about something you’re not particularly clued up on, you’re more likely to challenge the expert and anything that isn’t clear. Caroline added that: ‘No one can judge both clear and correct.’

Hard work. Totally worth it.

The fourth GDS design principle, ‘do the hard work to make it simple’, applies to storytelling too. It would be much quicker to go ahead and publish posts without input from the experts in the thing you’re writing about. It would be equally easy to give those experts the password to a blog and let them bash out accurate but badly-worded posts.

But giving the experts complete freedom, often means that jargon starts to creep in. Worse still, there’s a bigger risk of the user need not being identified before the post is started, which can mean that the most important points never get made.

Doing more, and harder, work to make things simple means we give people the information they need, when they need it. It’s the right thing to do for our readers. When teams work together, we inform, prepare, reassure our reader through accurate and engaging storytelling.

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What is a farm girl from California doing at GDS? Well, apparently, quite a lot. At the end of my first month on the job as a product manager, I wanted to share a few observations from a newcomer’s perspective.

Teamwork

On my team, we’re working to bring peace of mind to citizens with GOV.UK Notify. This platform helps service teams across government to send text messages, emails or letters to their users, making it much easier to keep people up to date.

This is the first time I've had the privilege of working so closely with a team of talented developers, designers, and user researchers. In contrast to my previous experience working with teams based off-site, or even overseas, I feel having face-to-face conversations with colleagues improves the level of communication tenfold.

When I first came to Aviation House for my GDS interview, I immediately felt like this would be great place to work. One tangible benefit is the warm, open work environment encouraged at GDS. This is something I was seeking when I began my job search. So far, I certainly feel ‘at home’.

It’s ok

The bright yellow posters that recently appeared around the building might also help explain why I already feel so comfortable at GDS. These are designed to let new recruits like myself know what is ‘ok’ in GDS culture - from singing at work, to not checking email out of hours. To me, they represent 'non-judgemental advocacy’; giving employees the freedom to be themselves.

These guidelines are also useful when you’re confronted with situations that could be a little daunting for a new recruit. For me, it was my team standups, when our developers share the details of their daily tasks. As a product manager who's still learning about the tech side of things, 'it’s ok' means I’m free to ask as many questions as I need to, without fear of judgement.

A new way of working

At first, the pace of life at GDS felt a little slower than what I was used to in the private sector. But, on further reflection, it struck me that the pace at GDS was just that - paced out. My previous experience in a commercial setting and before that, as a freelancer, meant that my schedule was often rushed or erratic. This steady flow of work allows me time to think and respond to issues properly. Before, I'd often find myself just reacting to them. And, I’m already seeing a difference in the quality of my work.

Reflecting on all these positive aspects of GDS, I wonder, have I arrived in a role that offers real work-life balance? Can I really just go home and think about what I'm going to whip up for dinner, or even a weekend sailing trip, instead of worrying about my work all evening?

The road to GDS

My journey to GDS really began about a year ago, when a friend and fellow General Assembly veteran said to me, “Oh, you’d do well to land a job at GDS. It’s the perfect place to learn, mature, and really see what product management is about”. His words have echoed ever since, and when, after several applications, I was finally offered a role at GDS, I accepted right away.

Throughout my career, I’ve constantly found myself chasing goals. But sometimes, I wonder if I’ve forgotten something important: to enjoy myself along the way. Ironically, this realisation has come to me only after I’ve reached another milestone - the goal of landing a role at GDS. And, as I take time to reflect on how hard I worked to arrive here, I’ll make sure to savour this new journey.

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And if you’d like to join us, we’re recruiting. We’re always on the lookout for talented people to join the team so take a look at our videos describing how we work, our vacancies page, or drop us a line.

A week or so ago, I was invited to speak at the ND16 Digital Leaders event, on the subject "Culture, behaviour and transformation". Here's what I said on the day.

I’m pretty sure many of you have seen me speak at events like this before, and you’ll know that most of the time, I’m talking about digital transformation.

Today, I want to talk about how transformation relates to the culture and behaviour we see, and expect to see, in our workspaces. That relationship begins with what we mean when we say “digital”. It’s important to be clear about it up front, because to start with: “digital” isn’t about computers.

Of course technology is part of it, but that’s not how we define digital. Digital goes broader and deeper. I think the best summary I’ve seen so far is this tweet by GDS alumnus Tom Loosemore:

“Digital means applying the culture, practices, processes and technologies of the internet era to respond to people’s raised expectations.”

That’s brilliant. That’s it, in a nutshell.

It’s not about computers. It’s about people.

Transformation means understanding what your people are capable of, the skills they have, and how to best put them to good use. It’s about trust, and giving your team a mandate to do what they think is right.

If you foster the right environment of creativity, of trust, of empowerment, you get better results from your team. And the team, as we’ve been saying for years now, is the unit of delivery. We believe multidisciplinary teams are essential for good agile working. If the team’s not right, the thing it’s working on won’t be right either.

To do digital transformation well, you need to focus on building and maintaining the team, bringing people together and giving them space to thrive.

That’s why culture and behaviour matter so much.

Not a new idea

Of course, none of this is a new idea. Thinking like this is commonplace in the private sector, especially in the technology industry.

But it’s not always the norm in government. We’re a few years behind the rest of the world, we’re still catching up. But we know we can, and we know we will. Bringing about that kind of change is a big step. It means change, and you have to handle change with care.

At GDS, we’re fortunate because we’re a relatively new organisation. We were able to build our own culture from scratch.

Much of what GDS has become began in its very early days, when a small team of people were building the GOV.UK alpha. But since then it has iterated, evolved, and changed, just like the products and services we make.

The goal has been to encourage and foster a work environment for humans. To build a place that recognizes people’s humanity just as much as their employability or productivity. So now I’m going to show you some examples of what a humane, people-focused workplace looks like. Or at least, what ours looks like.

Principles for working

The best known chunk of GDS culture is our list of design principles. They started as a bunch of sticky notes stuck on a wall during the GOV.UK alpha phase.

Don’t let the name mislead you - they’re not just about design. They’re built on collective wisdom. They’re a guidebook, a staff handbook, a learning tool and a motivational tool.

We know that if we’re doing what the Principles tell us to do, we’re doing the right thing. If GDS culture began anywhere, it began with these.

Words on walls

Should you ever come and visit us, you’ll see the culture all around you. Our office is colourful, decorated with bunting. Our walls are used for thinking out loud and for sharing work with colleagues. The environment produces the atmosphere, and the atmosphere produces the work.

Internal communication is very important, and too often overlooked. We don’t always get it right, but one thing we’ve found that does work is communicating via the walls.

We make posters to remind ourselves about stuff that matters - for example, we made posters that explain why user research is important, and why everyone should take part.

We trust GDS staff to behave like grown-ups, to foster a good environment for all.

If anyone behaves badly, they’re abusing that trust. That gets spotted and dealt with pretty quickly when it crops up, which is rarely.

Power to the People Board

Last year, we set up a body called the People Board. It’s a group of about 12 people, nominated and elected by their peers. They meet regularly to discuss ideas and suggestions for making GDS a better place to work.

The management empowered the People Board to decide things (again, there’s the theme of trust and empowerment). If the Board think something is a good idea, it should get done.

They set up whiteboards on the walls around GDS, where people could comment anonymously about the things that bug them. So far, the Board has helped fix some small things, like tea and coffee supplies in the office -- and some big things, like making performance management better.

It’s management done by the team, rather than by managers.

Good culture spreads

Culture needs to be free. It needs to be able to reshape itself. Out of the blue, one of our management team, Janet Hughes, wrote a blog post about boldness in government. We turned it into posters and stickers, so they’re a constant reminder. And they work, because every now and then people refer to them - “Well, we can be bold,” they say. “Let’s do the bold thing.”

Good culture spreads when the organisation shows its support.

Another example of that: some of the team spontaneously wrote a list of the unwritten rules, and turned that into a poster too.

It was a list of things that it’s useful to know when you start working at GDS, but that it’s no-one’s job to tell you.

It says things like, it’s ok to:

• say you don’t understand
• to ask why, and why not

And my personal favourite:

• sing

It was a huge hit. We tweeted it, and now it’s up in other departments too. It’s gone all over the world.

Good culture evolves spontaneously, and spreads all by itself.

Good culture fixes problems

Sometimes, though, things happen that are not ok. About a year and a half ago, GDS was struggling to be its better self when it came to the treatment of women.

So when something like that happens, the team self-organises to do something about it. Some of them set up a Women’s Group. It’s a group for everyone, irrespective of gender, who cares about having an equal and diverse workplace at GDS. That group has been up and running for over a year now, and has been hugely influential and successful.

Among its many achievements are:

• increasing the share of women in tech roles with Codebar and Makers Academy, getting more junior developers into the industry and into GDS
• the GDS parity pledge for diversity at conferences and events; as a result, we have new rules: no-one from GDS will take part in a panel discussion of two or more people unless there is at least one woman on the panel, not including the chair. And: no-one from GDS will speak at an event unless the event's organisers are clearly working hard to address gender diversity on stage.

We’ve had to have the courage of our convictions to see that through. It’s not about absenting ourselves from those conversations, it’s about making those conversations better.

None of that would have happened without the Women’s Group.

That’s a whistle-stop tour of GDS culture, but I hope it gives you an idea of how we do things.

Not top down, but bottom up

None of those things I just showed you - the posters, the People Board, the Women’s Group, the being bold, the saying what’s ok and what’s not - none of that came from me. That would never work.

You can’t impose culture upon your team. You can’t tell them how to act.

Your job as a leader is to provide the right environment in which culture can emerge and evolve all by itself. That means trusting your people, and ensuring they feel safe; safe to ask questions, safe to make mistakes, safe to do what they think is right.

Change doesn’t happen overnight, and the GDS culture is still changing day by day.

I see it as a cycle of improvement.

Better culture (through trust, safety and empowerment) means more diversity. More diversity means better results. Better results build a better culture - and so it goes on.

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We’ve been talking a lot about diversity at GDS in recent months. I recently announced our commitment to only taking part in conferences that are gender diverse and we’ve written about the work of our Women’s Group.

Now we’re taking part in LGBT+ Pride.

What we’re doing

You might have noticed that our building looks a bit different this week. It’s traditional to fly the rainbow flag during Pride, but Aviation House doesn’t have a flag pole. But, that hasn’t stopped us coming out in support of Pride.

We’ve decided to wear our hearts on our sleeves and our rainbows on our windows.

That’s not all we’re doing. Our LGBT+ group at GDS - part of the Cabinet Office LGBT+ Network - organised a guest speaker from Stonewall, the LGBT+ equality organisation, to talk to staff earlier this week about their work improving diversity in the technology sector, and LGBT+ staff from GDS will be joining the Civil Service as we march in the Pride in London parade tomorrow too.

Why this matters

I’ve talked before about how the job of transforming government together would be impossible without diversity. Recent Civil Service People Surveys have shown that LGBT+ people make up around 5% of the Civil Service; but of those staff who identified as working in our profession, only 1% said they were LGBT+. Having too few LGBT+ employees in our profession - or worse, not knowing how many you have at all - is a problem.

If we look at the broader technology sector, there’s very little data on LGBT+ diversity at all. Most companies in our industry report the amount of women, Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME), and disabled employees they have, but not on their LGBT+ workforce.

Being LGBT+ isn’t like some other diversity characteristics; more often than not it’s invisible. When our workplaces aren’t diverse, when we can’t see that diversity and when our culture doesn’t make LGBT+ people comfortable being ‘out’ at work, we all suffer. If someone’s hiding who they are, as an organisation we won’t be getting the best out of them and we won’t be able to invest in them the way that we should. This is not ok.

Of course, this isn’t just true of LGBT+ people. It applies to every kind of diversity we want to see in the Civil Service; whether it’s sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, race, social background - we need to create an environment where people can be themselves and give their all. We won’t transform government without it.

Digital and technology is shaping everything we see and do on a daily basis. Software is our society now. Much like how the Civil Service is pushing to reflect the diversity of the wider public it serves, so too should those shaping the digital world reflect the diversity of their users.

I’m proud that our organisation challenges itself to do better on diversity and that we recognise our role in shaping the industry we’re a part of. When it comes to LGBT+ representation in digital, data, and technology; there’s still work to be done.

It’s why we feel we have a responsibility to speak up. That’s why we’re taking part in Pride.

We know that the best digital services are created not just by multidisciplinary teams, but by diverse ones. And we know our industry isn’t as LGBT+ inclusive or diverse as it should be. We’re putting rainbows on our windows to acknowledge we have a responsibility to change that.

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Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Public Sector Show. It re-visits some of the things I spoke about recently, but ties them together with some new thoughts about the future of GDS and the role we play within government. Here’s what I said.

Today I’m going to spell out what GDS is for.

The role of GDS is transformation, but we believe very strongly that transforming government services means transforming government itself. And that, as all of us across government have been learning over the last few years, goes much deeper than upgrading our technology and redesigning our websites.

During that time, GDS has been thinking very hard about services and how they work. We’ve been trying to understand services as users see them - as whole services, from one end to another.

Users don’t care about the structure of government. They don’t care which department does this or agency does that. They don’t care about your process. They just want to do what they need to do, get stuff done, and get on with their lives. Users have needs - our job in government is to build services that meet those needs.

So government has to think of itself in a different way.

We have to think about ourselves as a single entity, as one whole government.

I’ve said before; the question we should be asking ourselves isn’t “What does my department do?”, but rather: “What services can my department contribute to?”

We need to have a cross-government perspective on everything we do. GDS exists to help tie all that together.

GDS doesn’t claim to know every department’s users or their user needs, but we do claim to be experts in one thing: digital. Our job is to help everyone in government do the right things, in the right ways, to the right standards.

Lots of the government services we have today evolved over a very long time. The service itself - the thing that the user experiences - cuts across organisational boundaries. Boundaries that users don’t care about, and shouldn’t be expected to understand.

For example: think about how benefits are divided between DWP and HMRC. Or how offenders and other people dealing with the criminal justice system have to be in touch with the police and the courts, prisons and probation staff. Or how complicated it is to start a business, because you have to get in touch with BIS, HMRC and Companies House, at least. Some other agencies too, depending on the nature of your business.

All these are examples of some of the great challenges facing government right now. Not just challenges, though: opportunities.

Transforming the relationship between citizen and state.

This is what the Minister for the Cabinet Office said earlier this year. He was talking about the ultimate goal: making it really easy to deal with government, safely and securely.

What does that look like?

To be blunt, it means widespread, substantial change across government. The most fundamental thing that needs to change is us, is the way we work. How we assemble services to meet user needs. How we put user needs first, not government needs.

In practice, that means moving from government inherited from the industrial age, towards government intentionally designed for the digital age.

I spoke about this at an event last month, where I described my vision for what government would look like in the year 2030.

In 15 years or so, by the time we get to 2030, I expect government to look, behave and feel very different.

By then we will have fixed the basics. “Digital” won’t be a thing any more, because everything will be digital; by default. The work we’ve started in the last year to establish the digital profession in government will have matured, and we’ll have a diverse, digitally skilled workforce which reflects the diversity of the people it exists to serve.

In the words of Kit Collingwood-Richardson from DWP: “Diversity is the lifeblood of a civil service which represents a wider humanity.”

More changes: By 2030, policy making will be service design. Ideas and implementation will be so closely tied, you won’t be able to have one without the other. Thinking in code, iterating in public - these will be the norm.

Policy making will be minimally designed and built as a framework which allows flexibility and feedback, not as a conclusion.

The way that the law is made will have changed, and so our approach to public consultation will be massively changed: it will be faster, smaller, conducted more frequently. We will be working in a cycle, not a sequence. The old-style, top-down, predictive policy making model that identifies the “big idea” and doesn’t consider service delivery as the best source of evidence on what works and what doesn’t, just isn’t going to cut it.

Platform thinking will be everywhere. Every time a government team makes something that should be shared, it will be shared. And shared in the right way, so that it’s easy to use - again, thanks to standards we’re setting now.

In 10 or 15 years from now, we’ll be reaping the benefits of the work we’ve begun to make better use of data in government.

Data will be easier to find, access and use, which means we’ll have clearer insight into what works and what doesn’t. We’ll reach that insight faster than ever before, because the data won’t all be locked away.

Where sharing can be done securely and appropriately, sharing will be easier, so that government can work more efficiently.

The upshot will be services that shape government, not the other way round. Because we’re putting users first, and because we’re working in an agile way, and because we’re making data easier to use, government itself will have to change.

There will be more small, multidisciplinary teams working in short sprints, moving products and projects from discovery to alpha to beta to live. There will be more flexibility and agility, and less risk.

Sometimes things won’t work out - not everything does. We’re human, just like everyone else. But when that happens, we’ll learn and iterate and adapt. So we’re not here just to fix the websites.

It’s not about making existing things just a little bit better: it’s about completely rethinking what we do, and how we do it. From top-to-bottom, from end-to-end.

From the moment the user has a need, to the moment that need has been met.

And the “we” I’m talking about here is all of us in government. It’s a collaborative joint effort, because no single department or team has the knowledge and experience and expertise to do it alone.

In GDS, we’ve come to that understanding thanks to about five years of intense effort and learning. Our thinking has changed over that time, just as our role and our approach have changed.

This diagram is my attempt to explain that a bit.

Think about the things that services are made from, and how visible they are to the public. The vertical axis represents visibility. The higher up something is, the more visible it is.

GOV.UK is very visible. It’s up the top there. It’s the digital embodiment of government on the web, so of course it’s very visible. GOV.UK Verify is slightly less so, but still near the top.

And something like Government PaaS, our hosting platform, is at the bottom. Still an essential component, but pretty much invisible to the public.

Over time, our work expanded to cover more things. (For example, data - I’m not showing here how central it is, how it flows in and out of services, how they depend upon it.) We could show 100 more boxes on this diagram, but let’s keep it simple. These boxes represent all sorts of things - making technology governance simpler, or making procurement easier, or making data easier to find and access and use.

When GDS began, our work was mostly focussed at the top, at public-facing transactional services.

Part of that was about making the point that transformation was possible. That putting users first meant better services; that being agile was something that could work in government. And that government departments needed to hire people, or train people, with digital skills. And making those points through real, demonstrable change.

And things have changed now. Departments are putting users first, they are being agile, they are hiring and training people in digital skills. And our focus has become more collaborative. We want to work with those empowered people. We want to help them.

We’ve started looking at the entire picture, not just bits of it in isolation.

So today, it looks more like this. We’re thinking about what connects all these separate things together. Those connections are just as important as the things themselves.

Our role, in GDS, is guiding, advising, demonstrating, consulting. We’re here to help government work like this, so that it can transform itself, and so that it can transform its relationship with citizens.

And how do we do it?

Not by doing digital, but by being digital. No-one has defined that better than GDS alumnus Tom Loosemore, who said recently:

“Digital means applying the culture, practices, processes and technologies of the internet era to respond to people’s raised expectations.”

Brilliant, isn’t it? And so, so true.

Of course technology is part of it, but that’s not how we define digital. This is how we define digital. Thank you Tom.

The world around us is digital, whether we like it or not. Government must learn how to be digital too. GDS exists to make it easy for government to do that.

To apply the culture, practices, processes and technologies of digital era. To understand what they are, how they work, and how to put them to use to meet user needs. Because only by meeting those user needs will we be able to respond to people’s raised expectations and change how they feel about government.

Delivering, enabling, guiding, directing

What that means in practice is a mixture of things - sometimes it’s about GDS delivering products, platforms and services. Sometimes it means us working with other teams to help them do the delivery.

And sometimes we’re directing, saying what’s right, what should happen and what shouldn’t. (We only do that because we’re digital experts. But it’s something that has to be done.)

A few very quick examples:

• Delivering: Among many other things, we’ve delivered GOV.UK Notify, an easy way for service teams to keep their users up-to-date. Something that used to be complicated, difficult, time consuming and costly is now quick, easy, simple and cheap. And because Notify has been built in a particular way, it’s open to everyone in government. No need for every department to re-imagine it, or re-build it, or re-procure it.
• Enabling and guiding: We worked closely with a team at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office when they built the first data register for government, the Country Register. There used to be dozens of different sources of information about countries on GOV.UK, none of them aligned with any of the others. Now there’s just one. It’s a digital service that lives entirely on the internet. It’s data that’s easy to find, access and use. There will be more registers to come.
• Directing: And sometimes we have to say how things should be done, and put a stop to things that are being done in the wrong way. Standards are there for a reason: to maintain quality. Sometimes that means we have to make unpopular decisions. Sometimes, the controls process puts a stop to things, even when people have done a lot of work to get them started. In 2014/15, government saved £391 million, as a direct result of spend controls. That’s why it matters.

“No more big IT”

Some of you might remember my predecessor using this phrase in some of his talks: “No more big IT.”

It’s still true! We still mean it. Big IT is a bad idea for government, for the public sector. There are better ways.

When I say “Big IT”, I'm referring to a culture of technology outsourcing that took strategy and control with it. Of solutions that didn't focus on user needs, but often on government needs and (sometimes) supplier needs ahead of the needs of users. Of arrangements that didn't always result in the best partnerships for government, and that made responding to change much harder than it needed to be.

Now of course, large IT companies can and must still be suppliers - we won’t solve some of our most daunting challenges without them - but it must be on the same level playing field as their smaller, more agile peers and always focussed on meeting user needs.

There’s no going back on this. No backsliding. We’re not going to allow the old style big IT culture to slide its way back in, nor are we going to allow new big IT ideas to creep in, pretending to be agile and user centered when they’re not.

And I say that stridently because I have a mandate and a responsibility to say that. From the beginning, GDS has had a mandate to uphold standards for digital services, and we shall continue to do that.

We are allowed to direct things. We are allowed to say that some things should be stopped when they’re not being done the right way. That’s part of why we’re here. It’s part of my job, and my team’s job.

Transforming government together

“But wait a minute Steve,” I hear you say.

“What happened to the fluffy cuddly GDS that was talking about “transforming government together”? Where’s the GDS that says 'We've got your back'? Where’s that gone?”

It hasn’t gone anywhere. Transforming government together is still at the heart of our work. One of the biggest changes we’ve seen over the last 5 years is empowering people to do the right thing.

Five years ago, digital wasn’t a thing in government. There were people all over government who had the right skills and the right expertise, but they didn’t have the mandate. They didn’t have us to back them up.

Right now, there are teams all over government trying to work digitally, and our job is to help support, connect and guide them. We’ve got their backs because they look to us for that support. They need us to do the right thing, not the easy thing, when it comes to standards and controls. Because that empowers them to do the right thing.

They need us to help convene, coordinate, guide. To reflect back to the community what good looks like, so that everyone can recognise it when they see it.

So, our support takes many forms.

What we offer to the rest of government are the following things:

• A cross-government perspective - because we’re at the centre, we have a unique cross-government perspective. That’s essential for making sure all the digital work across departments is properly lined up.
• A digital profession - we’ve established the digital, data and technology profession, to make it easier for government to understand the skills it needs to hire in, and the in-house skills it needs to develop and grow.
• Breadth and depth of expertise - we have an award-winning team of digital experts, who came here because they want to work on stuff that matters.
• A thriving digital culture - we’ve made room for culture to grow by itself, and culture is a vital part of transformation too. It’s just as much about how people work, and the environment they work within, as it is about the actual work itself.
• Funding and capability to deliver shared components and services - we now have the people, the skills and the budget to deliver shared components and services and products that can be put to use across government. Things like GOV.UK Verify, and GOV.UK Pay, and many many more that will follow in the years ahead. That doesn’t mean we will make them all, of course. Other teams, in other departments, will make shared components too.
• A mandate to set and enforce standards - everything will be built to the same high standards, set and enforced by GDS. Without standards, digital transformation would be a mess of conflicting ideas and approaches. Without standards, it would all fall apart.

That’s what we’re for. That’s why we’re here. It’s not about doing what’s easy, it’s about doing what’s right.

We want to make it easy for colleagues across government to do what’s right.

Although we’ve been around for quite some time, chances are you haven’t heard of the Delivery Operations (Del Ops) team at GDS. And if you have, you probably don’t have a clear idea of what we do.

We thought it was time for an introduction.

In Delivery Operations, we work behind the scenes at GDS to make sure it can explain what it’s doing with the resources it has been given. We help GDS make decisions about how to use its resources for the greatest impact. And, we check why GDS is doing things, how well it’s doing them, and how much it’s spending.

GDS needs to show that it’s making the most of any money it receives. The Delivery Operations team are the people who make sure it stays accountable, and make it as easy as possible for teams in GDS to do good work.

Helping to make GDS transparent

Individual teams inside GDS do a terrific job sharing what they’re doing and showing their own roadmaps. But, we also need to have an overview of everything happening at GDS. Delivery Operations helps teams to explain their goals, to tell us what they need to reach those goals, and what they think might get in their way. We provide tools to make it easy to tell us what people and other things will be needed, when, and for how long.

Sometimes we need to know when things will be ready for other departments to use. At other times, GDS may need to answer a question from someone outside of government. Or, within government, it may need to ask for money, or explain something to other departments. That’s where Delivery Operations steps in. We take data about finance, people, and goals within GDS and turn it into information which can be used by everyone in the organisation.

“...plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

It’s impossible to know everything that will happen when you start a project. But it’s important to try to predict as much as you can, and make sure you are able to respond quickly as things change. We need to have the most up to date information we can to be sure we are making the best possible decisions.

Change happens all the time at GDS, with everything from priorities and resources, to the things that people want and need. Delivery Operations works to minimise the impact of these changes as much as possible. We let people know about the impact of any changes as early as we can, and if any decisions need to be made.

One example of this is our work on the Single Departmental Plan, which states what Cabinet Office will do between 2015 and 2020. We produce monthly reports on how well we're doing at meeting the goals on this plan, and any issues that may have come up.

Sometimes, it makes sense to stop working on something that started out as a priority project. We help teams to identify if a project is no longer the best use of resources. We tell them how to explain the reasoning behind their decisions, and the impact any changes they make will have.

Breaking with tradition

Traditional models of management may have worked well in the pre-internet age. But, they can’t keep up with the pace of change in our digital world. For this reason, GDS has long championed agile ways of working. We move projects along in small continuous steps, and make changes along the way. It’s a slow and steady process, and it’s easy for us to go back and fix things if we find any problems.

Delivery Operations has introduced agile thinking to help manage every aspect of our business. We use it for everything from planning our work, to reporting on what we’ve done.

And, we frequently check how much GDS has spent on projects. We ask ourselves questions like; are we dealing well with risks and issues as they come up? Are our tools as flexible as they need to be? We want to make sure we invest as much of our resources as we can into actually "making the thing".

We also regularly check with the people we support at GDS to make sure we're doing the best job we can. We carry out frequent tests to get to know our own internal users and their needs. The things we learn help us to develop better ways of managing information and resources.

Agility and Delivery Operations

We’ve made several changes to make sure the Delivery Operations team is working in a truly agile way.

To start with, we’ve stopped using large systems that were hard to adapt to our requirements. In their place, we’re using lightweight cloud-based tools (some that we’ve built ourselves) that can change as our needs do. These tools make it simpler and faster for  teams to tell us about their needs, and when they need them met by. They also allow them to tell us how they’re doing, and when and where they need our help.

We like to do small things more often. Rather than holding long yearly planning meetings, we now meet for just a few minutes every week and slightly longer each month. We’ve also introduced quarterly goal-setting (using Objectives and Key Results). Every three months we set new goals for the next quarter, and review how well we’ve met our goals for the current period. Our goals must be easy to measure, so that we can easily see how we’re doing and decide if we need to do different things to reach our longer-term targets.

We've made it easier for teams to see how they’re doing and to catch problems sooner, before they get big. It used to take months for teams to find out if their plans for when, where, and how they would spend money were correct. Now, they can update us and find out in a few hours, and they can do it every month. We did this by looking carefully at how teams were making their estimates. Using this information, we were able to try out new methods, and build new tools to help them.

Recruitment is another area Delivery Operations has been working to improve. We’ve linked our business planning tools with our recruitment plan. And, we’ve built simple dashboards for different communities within GDS. These help us understand how demand will change based on our latest business forecasts. They also make it easier to see if it would be beneficial to move people between teams; both to help us meet our goals, and to further people’s careers at GDS.

What we’re doing next

In the next few weeks we’ll be sharing more about what we’ll be doing in the 2016/17 financial year. It won’t be a traditional “annual business plan”. We'll look at some of the important things that people have asked GDS to do. We’ll be discussing the things that we think are most important to do now and, finally, estimating how much we plan to spend.

We’d like to hear from you too. How do you keep track of where money is being spent, and on what, in your organisation? What do you do to make it as simple as possible to share what’s happening, highlight issues, and make decisions about what to do next? What else would you like to learn about Delivery Operations?

In future posts we’ll go into more detail on how we operate. Things like the specifics of our tools, how we set goals, and the challenges we’re facing. But for now, please join the conversation below!

We're hiring quite a lot of new people at GDS, and that's brilliant because there are so many new brains and new skills and new faces to get to know.

It's also difficult. It's difficult for those newcomers to know what to expect, and what's expected of them.

Of course they get told all the official stuff - how they get paid, how to use the printer, who their line manager is.

But it’s harder to communicate the unofficial stuff. The stuff that's good to know, but that it’s no-one's job to tell you. The stuff you'll probably find out during your first few months, but most likely by accident, because someone casually mentions something in passing and you say "Wait, what? Is that a thing?"

Stuff that’s good to know on day 1

The team I work with has been hiring too. We welcomed one newcomer two weeks ago, and two more just this week.

And it occurred to me: maybe it would be helpful to spell out this unofficial stuff up front, on day 1. Maybe we just need to say what’s ok. To be explicit about the things that those of us who have been here a few years take for granted.

So our team wrote a list of things it's ok to do at GDS.

It's ok to:

• say "I don't know"
• ask for more clarity
• stay at home when you feel ill
• say you don't understand
• ask what acronyms stand for
• ask why, and why not
• forget things
• introduce yourself
• depend on the team
• ask for help
• not know everything
• have quiet days
• have loud days, to talk, joke and laugh
• put your headphones on
• say "No" when you're too busy
• make mistakes
• sing
• sigh
• not check your email out of hours
• not check your email constantly during hours
• just Slack it
• walk over and ask someone face-to-face
• go somewhere else to concentrate
• offer feedback on other people's work
• challenge things you're not comfortable with
• say yes when anyone does a coffee run
• prefer tea
• snack
• have a messy desk
• have a tidy desk
• work how you like to work
• ask the management to fix it
• have off-days
• have days off

Having written the list and shared it with a few other people, we turned it into a poster and stuck a few copies on the walls. We took pictures and posted them on Twitter and Instagram. It seemed to go down quite well.

Growing a team is hard

I'm no expert, but I think that maintaining a good organisational culture is hard work, especially when your organisation is growing. None of your newly arrived colleagues can be expected to know all that cultural knowledge, and few of the old hands have time to sit down with them and explain it all.

So too often, newcomers are left to stumble on it by themselves. Eventually, they figure out the unwritten rules on their own, but that might take months, even years.

This poster isn't exhaustive. It doesn’t say everything that needs to be said. It's not an induction either, but perhaps it might become part of one. (We're working on a new induction process, something we've needed to do for ages. More on that another time.)

But: it's a start, and we hope it gives newcomers at GDS a hint about how we work, and how they'll be working too. Some of those old hands I mentioned have said they found it useful too.

It's ok to print your own copy

Quite a lot of people asked if they could get a copy to put up in their office too. Great idea. If you'd like one, you can download a print-your-own version.

Did I mention that we’re hiring? Oh yes, I did. Righto then.

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A few years ago, when I was organising finance and procurement for the GDS user research lab, I invited the Financial Business Manager for the Cabinet Office to come and see the space, an invitation he accepted. I gave him a tour of the space and showed him the plans. I shared the vision, and involved him in the creative process. I did the same with the Estate Manager, building security, and postal room staff.

It wasn’t a consciously strategic move, I was just gung-ho and eager to get everyone who had anything to do with the project involved and enthusiastic too. It proved a very good move.

Collaboration was so important

Finance went smoothly, deliveries arrived without hassle, parking arrangements and supplier passes were no problem, and the Estate Manager went the extra mile in helping make the lab just right.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but to a very large extent, the success of the project was a result of this very human and simple effort - show everyone involved in the project the thing. And I mean everyone.

It’s about understanding that people in extended-team positions are often overlooked for their importance in bringing a creative vision to life. Especially in the case of finance and procurement, their buy-in is essential to a project’s success. When you’re used to running numbers, paperwork, and contracts all day - with little vision of what you’re actually creating the contract for - it’s refreshing and enthusing to be included in the creative vision.

A prototype, a gnarly sketch. A here’s-what-we’re-doing

We’ve just completed procurement on another project. No matter how clear we thought we were being, procurement just didn’t seem to get it. It wasn’t their fault, we hadn’t actually communicated what we were trying to build, and why. We’d left them in the dark and expected them to accept and understand all the details.

We could have shown them a prototype. We should have done.

Keep it short and sweet

It’s not about overloading extended team members with more information than they need. You might show them a prototype, a gnarly sketch, or an empty room along with drawings and explanations, as was the case with the GDS lab. The point is to show the thing, show it early, and give everyone a creative ‘in’.

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