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!

Consumer Affairs Victoria is a business unit of the Department of Justice and Regulation, in the Victorian state government. Its purpose is to help Victorian businesses and consumers be responsible and informed.

In May, I had the privilege of visiting GDS for two days.

Having worked in government digital for more than ten years, I’d followed the GDS story more or less from the get go. Their commitment to users first, iterating content and services rapidly and continuously, and sharing everything openly, has resonated with me.

I’ve devoured their many blogs, applying countless ideas they've contained, and shared them widely. It’s an honour to now contribute my own post about my two days at GDS, my first hand observations, and some of Consumer Affairs Victoria’s digital initiatives.

Day 1: user research

After a brief tour of each GDS team area, I spent a few hours in the user research lab. Having followed Kate Towsey and her colleagues’ work in establishing this world class facility, it was great to see it in action. I should note that the lab blog posts and Kate’s one-on-one advice was a great help to my departmental colleagues when they were establishing our (much less sophisticated) lab.

I observed and notated sessions that tested a prototype for recruiting participants to a new user research panel. The prototype’s design challenge was to encourage users to join the panel, without getting in the way of the task they came to GOV.UK to complete.

Initially, the ‘box’ promoting the panel was positioned beneath the page title of an existing service. When users were asked what they thought they could do on the page, they read aloud the sub headings and right hand menu links. Despite its prominence, the text within the box was the last thing users fixated on or read out, if at all. Classic banner blindness.

GDS’s interaction designer, Ed Horsford, was on hand to rapidly iterate the prototype between interviews.

The second issue they uncovered was the wording used in the box. The text asked users to help improve GOV.UK by signing up to the user research panel. Once participants were prompted to do this, they found the process straightforward; perhaps a result of GOV.UK’s robust design patterns. However, few knew exactly what they’d signed up for. One participant thought the ‘panel’ was an advisory board.

Clearly there was more to be done to improve the content design, and I look forward seeing what the team comes up with. Regardless, having Ed in the lab didn't just typify the ‘research is a team sport’ ethos, it reduced the feedback loop time drastically.

Rather than build prototypes in wireframing software, Ed and other GDS designers prototype in the browser. This allows them to re-use and iterate the existing GOV.UK design patterns, then quickly roll the tested design into the live service. Again, something I’d read about, but seeing it in action was a treat. I’ll definitely be recommending this approach to my team back in Australia.

Day 2: content design, show and tell, and more

I’d finished the previous day getting an introduction to the GOV.UK content design process. Today I was immersed in it. I observed 4 stand ups, was taken through the GOV.UK roadmap, and sat with the content team’s John Ploughman, Tom Hughes, and Keith Emmerson as they walked me through content fixes and design requests.

I learned that about 70% of the content design team’s time is consumed by new content requests, with the rest committed to improving existing content. GDS receives about 8,000 user feedback submissions per year via GOV.UK.

Show and tell

Living up to their ‘show the thing’ approach, GDS hosts regular show and tell sessions. Today it was the turn of the Home Office Digital team, and yours truly. I gave an overview of how we use website feedback to measure performance, and what we’re doing in content design to better meet needs of our biggest user group.

Afterwards, I had a great discussion with Performance Analyst, Vinith Pillai, about measuring content performance. Despite the value of our current approach, this is a topic of continued focus and learning for us. I was excited to learn that his team are looking at new ways to do this for GOV.UK. We will have much to share with each other over the coming months.

Final observations

The work of digital is never done. Regardless of GDS’s profile in the digital community over the past five years, they still encounter people in the UK Civil Service who are unaware of GDS or GOV.UK. Communicating who they are, what they do, and the benefits of the new ways of working, is ongoing.

The similarities with my own experiences were striking. Digital is now an established discipline that impacts the whole of government. It should no longer be the last piece of the puzzle. But, informing colleagues that they can no longer simply throw something over the wall to the web team to deliver is still a difficult conversation for many digital workers.

GDS knows they can do more to help internal users across government. Balancing the need to structure, prioritise, and measure content requests with the more collaborative, human aspects of content design is challenging.

Many of the issues government digital workers and their internal clients face are symptomatic of the current design of government. While policy continues to be siloed from delivery, friction will persist. Former Executive Director of GDS, Mike Bracken, long championed the need to bring policy and delivery together. Just last month his successor, Stephen Foreshew-Cain, described how this would look. My two days at GDS convinced me that they can continue to lead this transformation.

A quiet determination pervades the GDS offices; a mature organisation that acknowledges the importance of their work, and is resourced and empowered to get on with it. The experimentation and learning never stops, but it's rooted in a shared vision and solid design principles. Ultimately, this is what other governments should learn first from the GDS story.

Thank you

My two days at GDS were an inspiring and affirming experience, and I have much to share with the Victorian Government digital community upon my return. I’d like to thank everyone at GDS who gave up their precious time to let me into their working life. I'd especially like to thank Trisha Doyle, Head of Content Design, who did the hard work to make my visit happen (and simple!).

Dan works as Digital Services Advisor at Consumer Affairs Victoria in Australia.

We spoke recently at a roundtable in Parliament, organised by the All Parliamentary Group for Design and Innovation (APDIG). At the session, ‘Designing the next generation of government services’, we talked about why GDS is making service design a priority.

We also outlined how we’re supporting government to design great services. We said that we can’t do this alone and we need to work with the whole of government to improve services.

Ashley gave a brief history of digital transformation, starting with GOV.UK, and explained how the Government as a Platform supports good service design across government. Louise talked about the guidance and support GDS offers. And Nick de Leon, founder of the Service Design Programme at the Royal College of Art, talked about the kinds of skills needed to make this happen.

Here’s what we said.

Verbs and nouns

Users don’t care about the structure of government. They don’t care which department or agency does what. We’ve talked a lot about designing services for the user, not just for those in government.

To a user, a service is something that helps them to do something – like learn to drive, buy a house, or become a childminder. Notice these are all verbs.

But at the moment, when users interact with government they often come up against things that might not make sense to them. Things like 'Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995 (RIDDOR)' or 'Statutory Off Road Vehicle Notification (SORN)'. These are all nouns.

As Louise says: “good services are verbs, bad services are nouns”.

We want to help government make good services. To do this we want to help anyone in government involved in designing, running and maintaining services. Service teams are our main users. We want to help them help their users.

Whole services, whole government

In order to create great services in the first place, government has to stop thinking in silos. It needs to create services that cross departmental boundaries.

In his talk ‘What GDS is for’, Stephen Foreshew-Cain spoke about this at the Public Sector Show a few weeks ago. He said: “We have to think about ourselves as a single entity, as one whole government.”

At our session, we showed the journey that has brought GDS to a position where we can think about whole services. We also talked about how we can work with the rest of government to create great services.

Creating time and space to think about services

Ashley ran through the history of GDS. He talked about the initial work on GOV.UK in 2010. He then looked at the Transformation Programme and the learnings that led to Government as a Platform.

The aim of Government as a Platform, as Ashley said, is to provide a series of common components. Things that can be used across government in different services, to make them easier and cheaper to run. Components that can be built once and used again and again.

Components like GOV.UK Pay, a common payments platform for government. Or GOV.UK Notify, which allows government teams to send emails, text messages and letters to the people that use their services.

And, as Ashley said: “By creating these common components we’ve done two things. We’ve helped to make the time and the space to let us think about the design of services as a whole. And we’ve developed a set of tools that can be used to create these services.”

This has brought GDS to the stage where we can think about the design and creation of end-to-end government services.

What GDS is doing

Louise then outlined 3 of the main areas of support that we’re giving to government to help design great services. These are: tools, guidance and skills.

Tools

Ashley talked about common components. GDS is also developing a series of toolkits to help developers rapidly develop prototypes or quickly build services in the GOV.UK style.

And we’re also developing service patterns. These are sets of practical guidelines for building a services (or bits of services) that are repeated across government. This could be something like getting a licence or exchanging the ownership of something.

Guidance

The guidance GDS offers around services comes in several forms. Our Service Manual is there to help people across government design and manage services well. It’s there to help pass the service assessment – the necessary step to getting an online service. It’s continually being updated by experts across government and from around the world.

And on our Performance Platform we collate information about the performance of similar government services. This is to give departments all the data they need to make better decisions about services.

Skills

This is possibly the most important point. All the tools and guidance in the world are useless unless we have skilled people working across government who can create good services.

Nick pointed out the skills that a service designer can bring to creating user-focused services. He said: “Service design puts big data and little data together – the big data and the nuances of people’s behaviour.”

GDS is bringing together a skilled community of designers from across government. There are now more than 300 designers and 10 heads of design across government. GDS is training 35 designers every six weeks.

We’re working to support a network across government that will create great services.

We can’t do this alone

As Louise said during the session, service design in government shouldn’t be complicated. As we’ve already seen, to a user, a service is simple. It’s something that helps them to do something – like learn to drive, buy a house, or become a childminder.

It’s not complicated, but it is hard to build these services. It’s hard because it cuts across government departmental boundaries. It’s hard because it involves thinking from the user’s perspective, and it’s hard because it has never been done before at this scale.

At GDS we’ve started this hard work. We’ve created components, developed tools and guidance and brought together communities. But to scale this work we need to involve the whole of government. We need to get to a stage where services built around user needs shape government, not the other way around.

Earlier this month we welcomed a group of GCSE and A-Level computing students into GDS from north London comprehensive school Fortismere. This was part of the Tech Partnership’s Tech Week 2016 – a UK-wide event to inspire young people to make a career in digital.

The students spent a whole day with us, getting involved in activities and meeting people from across the organisation. We made a film to show what they did and what they thought about it.

Showing the reality

The idea of inviting these pupils to GDS came from Cordia Lewis, Engagement Lead on the Platform as a Service team. Rather than going into the school to talk about GDS, Cordia thought it would be much more interesting for the students to come here so we could give them a taste of what it’s really like.

We wanted to show them why government is such an exciting place to work if you’re interested in digital. And to prove that any preconceptions they might have about the Civil Service being boring or out-of-touch are wrong.

As one of the students told us: “Before today it would never cross my mind to work in government, but after seeing what they do, I’d enjoy working in a team, on projects that I know are going to help other people.”

Showing the fun

It was important that the students were able to meet people from across GDS doing very different jobs. They met designers, developers, product managers and user researchers, to name just a few. The students had the opportunity to talk to people from all of these areas and find out how they built their careers.

But, we wanted to make sure that our visitors had fun too. So we built Arduino robots and worked with the students to program them. Lots of people from GDS helped. Thanks to them all.

Showing the opportunity

We wanted to show the students that there’s an opportunity for everyone in the Civil Service. This is really important for us. As Stephen Foreshew-Cain says in his post What government might look like in 2030: “The best way [to build better government services] is to make sure that the diversity of the civil service reflects the diversity of the people we are here to serve.”

This is reflected in the Civil Service Talent Action Plan, which says: “Our aspiration for the Civil Service is an ambitious one – to be the UK’s most inclusive employer, representative of modern Britain and the public that we serve.”

We aim to meet this aspiration through schemes including apprenticeships and work experience, and also by showing as many people as possible what it’s really like to work in government. We hope this will be the first of many days to support our drive to attract more young people into government and to build a more diverse workforce.

To find out more about our work experience, apprenticeships or graduate programmes email the GDS Early Talent Team. You can also find more information at:

• Civil Service Fast Track
• Civil Service Fast Stream: government social research service

Video transcript:

Stephen Foreshew-Cain, Executive Director, GDS

We have quite a large skills gap not just in government but in the wider public sector. We see declining numbers in girls, for example, taking on stem subjects at school. So I think it’s really important to give young people the opportunity to experience the amazing work that government is doing.

Cordia Lewis, Engagement Lead, Platform as a Service

We need to attract more young people and one of the ways of doing that is to work with schools to let them know about the careers that are available. For Tech Week we brought 20 A Level students into GDS so they got a an idea of the breadth of roles across GDS.

Francisco Garcia De Paredes, student

Before today it would never cross my mind to work in government, but after seeing what they do, I’d enjoy working in a team on projects that I know are going to help other people.

Robbie Buxton, student

I like programming and I think it could be very interesting to work in that department.

Emmanuel Bugyei, student

Definitely I wasn’t expecting it to be like this. It’s just really cool here, it really opened my eyes. I’d love to work here.

Lydia Foteinopoulou, student

It’s actually inspired us to see different jobs and see other options that we haven’t seen before.

This blog post was originally published on the Civil Service blog.

Today we’re sad to say goodbye and thank you to Stephen Foreshew-Cain, Executive Director of GDS. Stephen is leaving GDS after 2 years, first as Chief Operating Officer and then as Executive Director.

As Chief Operating Officer, Stephen oversaw the establishment of GDS as a mature operational organisation, following the early start-up years. He established a more disciplined, rigorous approach to the way GDS manages its money, people and programmes.

As Executive Director, Stephen has led and overseen a period of outstanding delivery and achievement. Stephen built a new leadership team at GDS and continued to provide supportive, environment for the team to excel at what it does. Under his leadership, GDS has (among many other things):

• secured 4 years’ funding in a very challenging spend review
• continued to operate and improve GOV.UK
• built and deployed two new common services (GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Notify) that will save millions and make it easier for people across government to build services
• taken GOV.UK Verify from beta to live – a world first
• put in place a newly collaborative approach to working with departments, improving the spend controls and service standard assessment processes

And all the time keeping true to the mission to make government work better for users.

From the start, Stephen has led by example and been an inspiration to colleagues across government. As Cabinet Office LGBT champion, he provided visible leadership and championed diversity as the lifeblood of the organisation. It’s leaders like Stephen who make the Civil Service the diverse, vibrant organisation it needs to be, through their own actions and also by inspiring and freeing others to bring their whole selves to work.

I want to thank Stephen for his dedication, commitment and resilience, and for his contribution to making government work better for users. I am really proud to have worked with Stephen, and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavours.

Hello, I'm delighted to be the new head of GDS. This post is mainly just to introduce myself and say how excited I am about joining the team.

Only this week, it was announced that the UK is now ranked at the top of the United Nations' latest e-government index. That’s a great testament to the work being done by GDS and digital teams across government.

Our role in GDS is to work with departments to improve public services for citizens. I believe very strongly that doing that means transforming government itself. We’re here to make that easier.

I want to strengthen and accelerate the pace of change. I’ve read many times about the end of GDS, but it has always come back stronger than before. I want to tackle one thing head on: GDS will not be broken up. We remain part of the Cabinet Office with a clear mandate to lead digital, technology and data across government.

I say this with the support and backing of John Manzoni, Chief Executive of the Civil Service and Permanent Secretary for Cabinet Office. By bringing me in as Director General for GDS, John is making it clear that this organisation matters, and is here to stay.

My first few weeks

Everyone at GDS is carrying on with the work they've been doing.

Just recently, GOV.UK Verify went live, GOV.UK Notify sent its first messages, and GOV.UK Pay secured compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard.

My first priority is to get to know the team and listen to what they have to say. I want to properly understand their plans, concerns and ideas. That’s going to take a few weeks. After that, I’ll write another post here with some more thoughts.

Thanks Stephen

In the last few days, I've seen first-hand how well respected and admired Stephen was by the team here.

On behalf of everyone, I want to say: thank you Stephen. You achieved a great deal during your time in charge. You secured funding for GDS for the rest of this parliament. You put new emphasis on people and relationships.

You’ve left us in a great position. I want to continue the new ways of working you introduced. Thank you.

I’m Katy. I’m currently working in the Digital Public Services and Business Transformation Division as part of the Scottish government’s Graduate Development Programme.

Over the past 4 months, I’ve been developing the service assessment process for the Scottish government’s service standard, Digital First.

The standard applies to all online services on our mygov.scot platform and has been around for a while. Over the last few months however, myself and my colleagues in the transformation team have been working out how we should assess new services against the Digital First standard.

To help us do this, we visited our English counterparts at the Government Digital Service (GDS) to see what we could learn from them.

Learning by example

At GDS, the Standards Assurance team is responsible for running the service assessments. We went to watch one, which turned out to be a good example of how a service team should present their service to the assessors. I’ve themed the main things we learnt below.

Spotting bad things earlier

We’re in the lucky position where we can implement measures early on to try and avoid some of the issues GDS has faced. For example, we now understand long assessments can be challenging for service teams, as assessors sometimes don’t get a full picture of a service. To try and avoid this, we’re thinking about encouraging assessors to attend team show and tells in the lead up to a service assessment so they have more background information.

Asking the right questions

We heard the kinds of questions GDS assessors ask and what kind of issues they’re interested in. They place lots of importance on having a process where service teams learn from users and use this to iterate and improve their product. This will be helpful when we run our first training session for our assessors, with GDS, as our assessors will get to hear first-hand the experiences of some GDS assessors.

Assessments can be time-consuming

We wanted to know where GDS gets its assessors from and how much of their time assessments take. We were also interested in how GDS ensures consistency across its assessments. At GDS, service assessors take time out of their regular work to help with assessments, which can be pretty time-consuming. To try and avoid too much disruption to everyday work, we’ll try to make sure assessors aren’t called on too often. We also think it’d be beneficial to have assessors from other departments and public bodies, so there is a wider understanding of what Digital First means across the public sector.  

Examples from far and wide

But we’re not just learning from GDS. It’s been interesting to watch the Australian Digital Transformation Office’s approach to service assessments, which focuses more on regular ‘check-ins’ than traditional assessments. The check-ins encourage collaboration between teams and assessors, working together to create a better service, which, after all, is what assessments are all about.

Using what we’ve learnt to design Scottish service assessments

We’re still developing a model that will work best for our public services. However, we already know that:

• the Digital First assessment process shouldn’t be a burden for organisations
• there’s a need for us to help service teams access advice, help and resources early on before they even begin a discovery, so they can check they’re on track to meet the Digital First service standard
• our service teams need clarity over whether they’re meeting Digital First, and access to resources when they’re not

Next steps for Digital First’s service assessments

We recently hosted a workshop with some users from the types of organisations that will be using our assessment service to ask them how they think the process should work. We’ll be talking more about the outcomes from the day, and how we think the whole process will work, over on our Digital Blog soon. We’ve also recruited our first group of assessors and, with help from GDS, we’ll be training them this week.

Over the next few months we’ll continue to design and test our process to ensure it’s as effective and as helpful as it can be. The process we design will reflect the things we’ve learnt from the service assessments elsewhere while acknowledging the unique nature of digital in Scotland.

If you have any questions or comments, please email our team. You can also follow our progress via our own Digital blog.

Members of the cross-government service manager community recently got together in Bristol to compare notes and swap stories. We wanted a chance to get to know each other better, to learn from each other's mistakes, and to talk about some of the issues and problems we're facing in our different departments and teams.

What it means to be a 'service manager'

We talked about the role of service manager in different government departments.
It turns out the role varies from place to place. Part of the problem is that the definition of what 'service' means varies too. Does it mean something that's only public-facing? What about tools, platforms and software that we all share? Is a digital service different from a technology service?

We felt that service managers everywhere are facing similar tensions, particularly when it comes to balancing demands for development, enhancements and running an operational service. Not all service managers have the influence to make radical, organisation-wide changes (even when research suggests changes like that are necessary to build the services properly, in order to meet user needs).

Getting better at sharing

We all agreed that we need to get better at sharing information and experience between teams. Sharing is quite informal at the moment – some communities meet up frequently, others don't. It's too easy for teams or groups to work in an isolated way, or for sharing to be trapped in little pockets. Technology is sometimes a help and sometimes a hindrance – for example, some tools are accessible by all, but others (such as chat application Slack) are blocked by some organisations.

Sharing needs to be both physical and virtual. If we're going to build mutual support across the community, we need to make time for both kinds.

What GDS can do

We think GDS can help service managers across government by:

• encouraging and enabling more support from senior leadership
• creating powerful case studies to help explain what service management is
• running masterclasses for service managers and service teams
• continuing to promote openness and transparency

GDS has been making collaboration a top priority for a while now, so we'd like to see that continue. The more we collaborate to resolve big common issues and remove common blockers, the better.

At GDS, we believe that local and central government and the wider public sector will provide better digital services for the taxpayer if they have access to a diverse group of suppliers. By diverse, we mean suppliers that are:

• a range of sizes, from small and medium enterprises (SMEs) through to large technology companies
• available to work in a range of places

A large part of delivering a successful digital project is also having the opportunity to choose a supplier that fits with your team’s work culture.

A big chunk of my job is to make sure that all of the above happen.

Making changes to meet the user need

I’m Gemma. I head up engagement on the Digital Marketplace. This is a service that helps government and the wider public sector find suppliers with the right technology and people at the right price.

The buying process works in cycles, or iterations of ‘frameworks’. Each framework is replaced every 6 to 9 months. When services on the Digital Services 2 (DS2) framework became available in August 2015, government buyers had access to 169 suppliers. We knew this didn’t meet the user need as well as it could, partly because government buyers didn’t have a very diverse pool of suppliers to choose from. Most of the suppliers were based in London, too.

To make things better we made lots of changes. In fact, we designed an entirely new framework. When the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework replaced DS2 in April 2016, the supplier statistics showed there were 1,261 suppliers, and 52% of them were new to the Digital Marketplace. They are also spread more widely around the UK.

The image compares the spread of DS2 suppliers with the spread of Digital Outcomes and Specialists suppliers.

The importance of engagement

On the Digital Marketplace blog we talked a lot about how we were encouraging suppliers to apply to sell their services to government, by making things simpler and faster for suppliers. For example, we’re simplifying the way suppliers apply to a framework and we’ve reduced the volume of legal documents by half.

However, having a strong engagement plan was also really important to increase the number of suppliers and their diversity.      

Reaching the right suppliers

For Digital Outcomes and Specialists, suppliers can provide services in 4 different categories. We started by working out which communication channels we could use to reach suppliers that sell services in these categories. We plotted it onto a matrix.

A little help from our friends

We worked with business and technology communities around the UK to hijack their communication channels, like Twitter, email newsletters and blogs. We teamed up with specialist and local communities such as SW Innovation, CodeClan and ScotlandIS, as well as larger communities including techUK, EuroCloud and The Federation of Small Businesses, which have widespread members around the UK.

Through them, we reached suppliers that were eligible to be on the framework, kept their members up to date with our progress and let them know they could apply to supply their services to government. Looking at the analytics, we identified notable spikes in traffic to the Digital Marketplace service in line with our engagement activity.

It’s good to talk

We ran 2 events to talk about the progress on the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework. We publicised the event widely through the tech community, which lead to more than 300 suppliers attending from across the UK. The events were useful in 2 ways. Firstly, we used the feedback we gathered to help design the framework. Also, by holding the events, we told lots of people that we’re working on something that they could and should be using soon.

Blogging often

We also encouraged suppliers to apply to supply their services by blogging. We blogged regularly and used the Digital Marketplace blog in several ways, to:

• give updates on the product
• be open and transparent about our thinking behind our decisions
• link to the Digital Marketplace GOV.UK guidance that users were telling us they needed
• communicate important dates
• link to Google forms where we gathered feedback

In the end, suppliers created over 3,000 accounts on the Digital Marketplace so they were ready to apply to supply their services to government when applications opened.

Supporting local government and the wider public sector

The supplier base is increasing and diversifying with each new framework on the Digital Marketplace, but there’s still more work to be done. We want to engage and educate buyers in both central government and the wider public sector – at the moment, local government and the wider public sector only contribute around 23% of the spend that goes through the Digital Marketplace.

Councils and wider public sector organisations work hard to deliver a better deal for taxpayers but there’s potential for even greater value for money if they use the Digital Marketplace. It’s important that we offer support and education so the benefits of using the Digital Marketplace are felt as widely as possible over the public sector.

The GDS International Team is now 4 months old and we thought it was about time to introduce ourselves.

International collaboration plays a large part in what GDS does, from influencing global standard-setting bodies to knowledge-sharing with other governments. Our team acts as a bridge between GDS projects and the teams that have the expertise. We’re here to co-ordinate international collaboration and set the international strategic direction.

GDS was doing international work before April, but our role is to act as the umbrella team that knows about all this work. In these first 4 months, we’ve spent time researching how the team can help GDS to succeed. Our backgrounds in policy teams have given us the skills to fully engage GDS in cross-governmental international work. And we’ve been developing our own objectives and responsibilities, though these may change.

While a policy and engagement team like ours might not seem that likely to share the GDS style, we work in an agile way, and we use iterative approaches, collaborative technology and visualisation tools.

International collaboration

We co-ordinate GDS’s participation in lots of international fora. One of our more informal projects is the International Working Group on Digital, set up by the Ontario regional government in Canada. Lots of digital services are just starting out, whereas GDS is one of the most advanced organisations, and it uses the Working Group to share expertise.

For example, in June, members of the GDS recruitment team spoke on the topic of hiring and retaining staff.

But we also benefit from hearing from our international counterparts. In July, our Services team were the ones listening, via teleconference, as New Zealand officials and other participants answered their questions.

Visits to GDS

We welcome guests to Aviation House – from foreign officials to digital experts – because there are some things you can’t communicate over the phone. Our team arranges a personalised programme for each group to make sure their needs are met. We get requests from all over the world.

By June 2016, GDS had welcomed visitors from 52 countries.

The majority of our requests come from:

• leaders looking to start digital transformation in their government
• established digital services
• communications, industry or procurement ministries
• people who want to learn from our mistakes
• experts who want to make a reusable component similar to GOV.UK Verify or Pay
• officials who want our advice on a challenge relating to governance or controls

What we're doing next

Now we are set up within the organisation, and have managed GDS’s existing international work – improving it where necessary – we are looking to the future. We’ll continue to set priorities for international engagement and work with teams throughout GDS to do so. We’ve hosted 21 visits so far this year, and we continue to receive requests. And we’re always open to suggestions for collaborative projects and knowledge-sharing, so get in touch.

A lot of the time here at GDS, we think the best way to solve something tricky is to share the problem. Often, it’s not a case of ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’, it’s a chance for us to get as many brains as possible thinking about the same thing. So actually, it’s like ‘a problem shared is a problem…’ well, it’s a smaller challenge for each person.

My name’s Paul and I’m a developer on the Digital Marketplace. Recently, our team of developers has been trying to solve a problem using mob programming. The development team on Verify has been experimenting with mob programming for a while, but this was something new for us. The idea is that “the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, at the same computer,” says Woody Zuill, the self-proclaimed father of mob programming.

Testing shouldn’t be testing

As with all GDS services, on the Digital Marketplace we constantly test different scenarios a user might find themselves in. We do it so we can be confident that everything works as we’d expect it to, so we can avoid broken user journeys like dead ends or user data not saving properly. There’s nothing more infuriating than completing an online form, clicking through to the next part and having everything you’ve filled in disappear.

In April, we were working towards putting Digital Outcomes and Specialists live (a piece of work we’d been developing for months). During this period of heavy testing, we realised that the code we’d written to test whether things were working as they should be, had become unwieldy and frustrating for our developers to maintain.

Because we’d already spent months writing the code to build the application, it was tempting to write the test code super quickly, and I think that’s what we’d been doing here. One of us would write some code to test a part of the user journey, and then when the next person came to write more, they weren’t always sure what the last person had done or what the next person would need to do. So, individual developers were making small changes without agreeing on common ways of doing things, and the code got more confusing as it grew.

Ready, steady, mob

As Woody suggests, we each took on different roles: one person typed and another led the session. While this was happening, the rest of the mob gave their input as and when it was needed. The main point of a session is that “for an idea to go from someone’s head into the computer, it must go through someone else’s hands,” says programming expert Llewellyn Falco.

The whole thing felt super collaborative because everyone was engaged in solving the same problem. Every 5-8 minutes, we swapped roles, being careful not to shove someone into a role they weren’t keen to take on.

We weren’t planning to mob forever, but by starting to rewrite the test code as a group, individual developers returning to the project later would be aware of its history and understand its design.

Could we fix it? Yes, we could

Rewriting the code seemed like a really slow process at the beginning. However, when we became more familiar with the process and settled on a direction, we gained momentum as we went. Together, we built up a collection of code that we all understood and agreed with.

Mobbing: another form of collaboration

We’re a collaborative bunch at GDS. Whenever developers work on things individually, someone else reviews our code. We also do a lot of pair programming (2 developers working side by side to fix a problem together), and we do group ‘story kickoffs’ where various team members talk about the approach to a piece of work before an individual developer works on it. Now the Digital Marketplace development team have also used mob programming successfully.

Each of these types of collaboration are suited to different kinds of problems. Since our particular problem stemmed from the team not having a shared understanding of the project when it began, using a collaborative method that involved the entire team from the start turned out to be a great approach.

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At GDS, we hold quarterly all-staff meetings to share what we’ve achieved and talk about what we’ll be doing next.

Each all-staff typically has 6 to 8 sessions across 2 hours, including a look at how we are doing overall. We hold them in a lecture theatre, which allows us to get multiple messages across, but interaction isn’t easy.

In July, we held a feedback session, inviting staff to tell us what they want to get from these internal events. Lots of people said they’d like to try an ‘unconference’ so that everyone could get more actively involved.

What an unconference is

The traditional unconference takes place all in one day, with people standing up and pitching an idea they’d like to talk about. Then everyone votes and sessions run if they’re popular.

But we were a bit short on space, with limited conference rooms available. We also wanted to encourage everyone to pitch, not just people who are happy to stand up in front of a large crowd and sell their idea in just a few moments.

So we set a skeleton timetable in advance and asked people to pitch their talk ideas on big boards around the office.

We didn’t put restrictions on the format of sessions – they could be presentations, interactive workshops or an informal chat, which encouraged a variety of people to pitch ideas.

The best thing about an unconference is that topics are pitched by your peers and you can choose which sessions to attend. It also gives those who wouldn’t want to speak in front of absolutely everyone the chance to present something that’s interesting to them, in a way that suits them.

A list of the ideas for sessions was shared, and everyone voted for their favourites. The votes were counted, and the full agenda was decided.

We ended up with a mix of different-sized sessions. The most popular ones were scheduled in bigger rooms or across multiple session times, so more people could attend.

On the day

With both excitement and a bit of fear, we scheduled 3 different session times of 30 minutes each, which meant we were running up to 13 sessions at once. Everyone was free to attend whichever sessions they wanted and could drop in and out whenever they wanted to.

The 19 session topics were:

• stop writing user needs as user stories!
• user needs for internal services – balancing needs of citizens and admin staff
• replace consultations with ongoing digital conversations
• what is Whitehall?
• how to get started with PaaS for posting prototypes
• does digital service just mean online service?
• deaf awareness
• GDS as a listening organisation
• thinking about a performance framework
• cross-gov role-based community meetups
• what is a service?
• continuous discovery – why we needed it, but never got to do it
• aphantasia – the inability to imagine images
• what the People Board is up to
• service programme research playback: how services get made across government
• mental health
• what we mean when we talk about transformation
• how to make GDS a great place for introverts
• why we have a creative team

We’re hoping to write blog posts about some of the sessions covered on the day. Let us know in the comments if you’d like to hear about a particular one.

Let us know what you think

It’s good to experiment with the way we do all-staff meetings, though there will always be times when big announcements and information are best shared with everyone at the same time in a lecture theatre.

Our first-ever unconference of sorts was a great learning experience for us all. We’ve sent out a feedback form to find out what we did well and how we can improve next time. Let us know if you’ve enjoyed other large event formats so we can consider these too.

Thank you to everyone who bravely came forward to host sessions, and those who volunteered their time to make the day run so smoothly.

It’s been a few months since we last posted here about the Service Manual, the best place to find guidance and tools for government service teams. Our biggest news since then is that the Service Manual passed its beta assessment in June. Thanks to the team for all of their hard work.

Here’s an an overview of what we’ve been up to since our last update.

We’ve:

• launched a publishing app with a new interface to allow us to update the Manual more easily
• published nearly 100 new or improved guides across 9 topics
• iterated and improved on GOV.UK’s design patterns based on our user research
• continued to do research with our users across government
• built a performance framework to check the success of the changes we’re making

Read on for a bit more detail.

Publishing app and front end

The main goal for the technology team was to build an accessible, easy-to-navigate front end, based on the GOV.UK platform.

Separating the Service Manual front-end application from the standard GOV.UK front end lets us develop new features quicker - useful for rapid prototyping and testing.  These include an accordion (an expandable list) on the topic pages and the page history on guides.

Another goal was to launch a publishing app so that content designers could publish Service Manual guides using a secure and logical workflow. The minimum viable product (MVP) version of the app is now live and we’re already working on the next version. We’re also exploring how we can offer what we’ve built to other government publishers on GOV.UK.

New content we’ve published

We’ve been working with experts across government to update and reorganise the information in the Service Manual. This is so it reflects current best practice and so that we can learn from the expansion in digital skills and experience of people working on services across government.

So far, we’ve published fresh guides in these topic areas:

• agile delivery
• the team
• measuring success
• user research
• technology
• service assessments
• Digital Service Standard
• helping people to use your service
• communities

We’ve already started iterating and improving newly published content based on user feedback. We will continue to do this.

Design patterns and our design

As well as remaining consistent with existing GOV.UK design patterns, we’ve also designed new patterns. These include the accordions, page contents and page metadata mentioned above. They’re based on research with Service Manual users. They’ve been designed and built so they can be reused across the rest of GOV.UK where appropriate.

We’ve also designed an MVP interface and flow for the back-end publishing app. We’ll continue to improve this based on user research with content designers.

User research

We’ve focused on 3 broad themes in our user research:

• exploring the relationship between the Manual, the Digital Service Standard and assessments
• defining what the Manual should cover
• validating our approach to content, which we do routinely, and especially before launching a new topic

Earlier this year we experimented with publishing the Digital Service Standard as a stand-alone publication on GOV.UK – we tried separating it from the guidance and service assessments information in the Service Manual. But when we tested this in the lab, we found it didn’t make sense to our users. So for now the Digital Service Standard remains a part of the Service Manual.

We continuously test how our approach to guidance works for users through content evaluations to ensure that it meets the needs we identified in our discovery.

We focus on:

• whether users understand what’s mandatory and what’s optional
• whether users find the Manual persuasive and useful

We’ve started exploring if the Service Manual’s scope should change. We’re considering how the Manual relates to all the GOV.UK resources (products, tools, patterns and components) that help teams design and build a service, and how service teams use these.

Based on earlier research, we’re looking at what the Service Manual should include and what it should link to. We’ll start testing with users soon.

Analytics

We’ve built a performance framework to measure the effect of the changes we’re making.

The Manual is non-transactional. As it has no defined start points or end goals, it can be hard to measure how well it’s doing.

We’ve addressed this issue by choosing measures and key performance indicators that are based around user behaviour. For example, we’re using Google Analytics to check if users are:

• leaving the site on navigation pages
• finding what they need in search

We’ve also redesigned our online user survey, which sits at the top of every page. We designed this to work in conjunction with the analytics we gather and to improve the quality of information we get from users.

We’re using this combination of analytics and user feedback to inform changes in a number of areas, from how we display videos on the site to improving the user journey for on-page links.

Talk to us

We passed our beta assessment, but we’re not done yet.

In the next few months we plan to publish more content in technology, user research and design – including service, content and interaction design. We’ll keep improving the content we’ve already published. We’ll also keep exploring both the relationships between the Service Manual and any other tools our users need.

We’ll update you soon on what else we’ll be doing next. In the meantime, let us know about your experience using the Service Manual.

Get in touch with us through the cross-government or GDS Slack channels, or leave a comment below.

We were delighted to welcome our new minister, Ben Gummer, to the GDS office in Holborn yesterday, when he made a few important announcements:

• GDS is taking over the Digital Academy programme, and will be expanding it to support all departments across the whole country
• GDS will soon be moving from Holborn to new larger custom-designed offices in Aldgate
• GOV.UK Pay took its first real payment from a real credit card earlier this week

We took him on a quick tour of the office to meet some teams and find out more about some of what we do, including:

• the user research lab, where he met some researchers
• meeting the teams working on GOV.UK Pay, GOV.UK Verify and GOV.UK Notify
• introductory discussions about the Digital Marketplace, Common Technology Services, and Data Registers

In a quick Q&A with GDS staff, the minister reiterated the importance of rebuilding the relationship between citizen and state.

He made his support for GDS and its work very clear, saying: "You have been thinking about the digital interactions that happen. That work has to grow so that you are thinking about not just individual transactions, but the entirety of what we do.

"That means you're going to be doing a lot more. More of what you've done before, but also some new things. It's about deep, deep transformation – making digital not about what exists around individual transactions, but a thread that winds its way through all that we do."

He added: "I am absolutely determined that this is the place that will define digital standards across government."

We'd like to thank the minister for coming and giving us his support. We still have a great deal of work to do – and with our minister's backing, we're going to get on with it.