I’m Sue. As a content designer at GDS, it’s my job to write content for everyone. This means I write in the simplest way to help our users do things that are often complex. To make sure the words we use are both clear and accurate, we often need input from experts in a particular area like law, policy or product. We’ve found that working together to ‘pair write’ is a good way to do this.

I’ve run quite a few pair writing sessions and I’m constantly tweaking them depending on where in the country the 2 people are, and how quickly the content needs to be written. However, in all cases so far, I’ve found that this 4-step process works well and makes sure your content meets user needs.

1. Make sure you’re starting on the same page

The best way to kick off is, like always, to start with user needs. There’s a chance that the subject expert might not be familiar with a user-needs-centred approach, so it’s worth spending time focusing on what user needs are. This will help you both work with the same thing in mind.

Then work out the ‘user acceptance criteria’ for the piece of content you’re going to write. These are the things that the piece of content will need to include to be useful to the user. To do this, I usually ask the pair writers to think about the main questions users will have about the thing they’re trying to do.

And finally, before you start writing, the subject expert should flag if there’s any information you have to include for legal reasons. I’d recommend writing down anything you have for each of the categories and keep them in mind throughout the process.

2. Agree on a sensible structure

Put yourself in the user’s position and think about the questions they’re likely to have, and the order they’re likely to have them in. This will give you a starting point and an idea of a sensible order for the content.

3. Write words. Get rid of jargon.

You can both sit at one screen or use Google Docs on separate screens. The subject expert should be in control of the keyboard in the beginning to give them the opportunity to get their specialist knowledge down. The content designer’s role is to challenge jargon. Sometimes, you can’t get rid of tricky words or phrases for legal reasons but you should always explain what they mean in plain English. As they watch the subject expert write, content designers ask questions like:

• is there another way of saying that?
• what do you mean by...?
• should this part come further up?

Usually, I’ve found it works well if the pair swaps who types every now and then.

You’ll know you’ve finished when you’ve addressed all the user needs you wrote at the start of the session.

4. Ask for input (but put a time limit on feedback)

Most of the time, the thing you produce on the day won’t be a super shiny ‘finished’ thing - you’ll need to polish and tweak afterwards. Sometimes, you’ll need experts in other areas to fill in a couple of gaps here and there.

It’s really good to get input from relevant and knowledgeable people but it’s always worth giving very strict deadlines for feedback and amends. If you don’t, the polishing process can be never-ending and you risk delaying getting the content to your users.

Near, far, wherever you are

Pair writing sessions are great in person but they work equally well if you have access to collaborative software. Google Hangouts allows both people to speak on a video call and see each other’s screens. Trello lets you group and order cards in online lists, which is really useful at the start of the pair writing process when you work out user needs and acceptance criteria. When you start writing, do it in Google Docs and share the document between you. You can see each other typing in real time.

Pair written guides in practice

Earlier in 2016, I worked on the Digital Marketplace. We launched a new way for the public sector to find what it needs to buy for its digital projects. When we launched the minimum viable product (MVP), users needed to complete some steps outside the Digital Marketplace. This meant we needed to write a collection of 17 guides, in less than 3 months, to make sure buyers knew how to do the right things at the right time. Content lead Roz Strachan explained more about how we wrote content as a team.

Pair with us

We’re running training sessions on how to pair write. To find out more, email
gov.uk-training@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

Follow Sue on Twitter, and don't forget to sign up for email alerts.

A good induction should feel like checking into a beautifully designed 5-star hotel. You should be greeted on arrival and someone should be there to pre-empt any questions. They should relay essential information (like where breakfast is served) in a direct but not-too-pushy tone. They should probably give you champagne.

The GDS induction came up at a line manager and community leads workshop held in April.

The workshop attendees split into groups. Each group identified a problem they had experienced during the hiring or line-management process. There were quite a few things that we needed to fix with the induction process, so one group decided to look at inductions in more detail.

Why the GDS induction process wasn’t 5-star

A combination of rapid hiring and too few induction sessions to meet such a high level of demand had led to a backlog. This meant that the induction happened too long after a person started.

The content wasn’t relevant to all new starters.

Signposting to online employee content needed improving too. We should do the hard work to make it easy for new starters to get to grips with their new workplace.

The quality of an induction also depended on the team you were in and how much effort they put into it.

What a good induction looks like

During the workshop, one group came up with ideas for what an ideal induction should look like.

The guiding themes were frequency, consistency and clarity.

Approximately 45 new employees join each month. To avoid a backlog, induction sessions should happen every week. As many people as possible should be able to give the presentation and welcome new staff.

Inductions should be consistent in content, regardless of the team a person works in. They should be clear and concise.

The ideas from the workshop informed the new induction process.

Making things better

The subject of the GDS induction had been raised separately with the People Board quite a few times.

The People Board is an elected body that exists to make GDS a better place to work. With support from the People Board, the Creative team offered to work with the People team (which deals with recruitment, training and development) on a revamped induction.

Those 2 teams ran an informal workshop, and wrote down all the things that new starters should know about - one per sticky note. Then they sorted those stickies into 2 piles: the stuff you have to know, and the stuff it’s nice to know.

The new induction treats each of those in a different way.

The stuff that it’s nice to know has become a presentation, which we’re iterating and improving every time we give it. Soon it will be happening every week, and the goal is that we never have a backlog of un-inducted people. The presentation includes what GDS does and how it does it, when payday is and the culture of the organisation.  

The stuff you have to know has become a Trello board. Newcomers receive a link to it and are asked to make their own copy. Then they work through the cards on that board during their first week or so, learning as they go. Trello is a digital to-do list, with each task listed on an individual card. Each card gives a few lines of explanation or links to the source of appropriate information. Trello was already used by a number of teams, including GOV.UK.

The new induction, like any GDS product should be iterated and improved. Now we're trying to welcome contractors like we do full-time members of staff. If you’re a new starter and you’ve been through the new induction recently, we want to hear what you think: email the People Team.

This week is National Inclusion Week, and Cabinet Office is publishing its first ever Gender Identity and Gender Reassignment Policy. I feel like this is a good opportunity to write about my experience of being transgender and transitioning to my identified gender while working as a civil servant.

At the beginning of 2016, at the age of 31, I decided that I wanted to transition full time to live my life as a woman rather than as a man. During 2015 I had come out as transgender to everyone outside of work, and at this point I was already living much of my time in this role.

Making the switch at the office felt like the final hurdle, and I could finally formally change my name and title to reflect how I wanted the world to see me. I spend most of my life at work, so in practical terms this really was the “big push”. I also have to regularly forge relationships and work alongside people who do not know anything about me personally. This means that having a supportive work environment was integral for me to have the confidence not just to make these changes at work, but to finally establish my entire life the way I had always dreamt about. It also meant that I needed to ensure that it did not impact my career or professional life, either.

Fortunately, I work with lots of great people. I’ve been working at GDS for over 2 years, and one of the things that really struck me when I first joined was the open conversations about identity politics compared to my previous places of work. Knowing that people, particularly my immediate team, were aware and informed about transgender issues was an enormous confidence boost. It was a huge reason why I felt I could make that big jump. It made something that was unspeakably terrifying to myself into something that was a plausible option.

Knowing that your colleagues have an understanding of what you might be going through is incredibly reassuring. And this is why something like National Inclusion Week and an official policy for trans* folk is so important.

When I spoke to our People Team about announcing my transition to my colleagues, I was told that there was no policy and they asked me how I would like to approach it. I did not want to make a big deal about it, but I wanted it to be communicated en masse. I didn’t want to have to endlessly explain to individuals that I was changing my name and repeatedly ask people to refer to me as “her”.

I picked a date and, as requested, it was communicated simply as a footnote at the end of a weekly all-staff email. The next day came around, and that was it. Colleagues used the right name and pronouns, and I have had an entirely positive experience.

I knew that some people might have questions: I think that’s natural, and I always try to encourage people to be open rather than feel awkward around me. The main thing is that I am treated with respect, and I have never had a problem with that at GDS. The culture is one of the big draws, and while this has been my only position in the Civil Service, I would like to think that people have a similar positive experience to mine elsewhere. Having other inclusive networks available, such as the LGBT+ or Women at GDS groups, is also key to ensure that people know they have a space to freely and openly discuss issues that may be affecting them.

For me, National Inclusion Week is about drawing on these experiences and hoping people understand that language and actions within a workplace are incredibly important.

I was fortunate enough that my colleagues empowered me to finally get on with something I should have done a long time ago. But there will be times when language and actions have a serious negative effect and make one of your colleagues feel excluded. This can have direct consequences on not just their work, and subsequently the team as a whole, but the rest of their life. Having that awareness and respect for others can make a huge change in someone's life, and it’s important we all understand the difference we can make.  

You can find further information on the Civil Service Transgender Network, Agender.

Laura is a Web Operations Engineer at GDS.

Follow GDS on Twitter, and don't forget to sign up for email alerts.

When we created the People Board, we said it had been set up to "make GDS a better place to work".

By way of a quick recap, the Board is a small group of people who are:

• elected by everyone in GDS
• empowered to decide things
• empowered to delegate tasks to other people and teams in GDS

One of the things we realised from the start was that we didn't know enough about the things that people were bothered about. So we did some research, and ran a series of workshops with people from all over GDS to understand what their priorities were.

Internal comms matter

Another thing we realised pretty quickly was that we needed simple ways for people to get in touch with us with ideas, suggestions and (occasionally) complaints. We set up an email account and a Slack channel, but found that whiteboards on the walls were by far the most popular way to raise issues.

The whiteboards can be a bit unruly at times, and hilarious at others. They are inspiring places for collaborative communication - on more than one occasion, someone has asked a question on the whiteboard and someone else has scribbled the answer underneath. People add "+1" to things they support. The People Board boards (as we've started calling them) are a good way for people to share ideas, raise issues in an informal way, and sometimes vent frustration about things that aren't working well.

Members of the People Board take turns to do a bit of whiteboard maintenance in between our monthly meetings. That means taking photos of the boards, wiping them clean, and making sure that all the actionable things people have written on them are turned into new cards on our Trello board. (Yes. Another lowercase board. Sorry.)

We use Trello to manage our workflow. Each card represents an idea, suggestion or problem that the Board has been asked to deal with or think about. We move cards into an "agenda" column and use that as the basis for our next meeting.  

Deciding things

Importantly - and it took us a while to work this out ourselves - the People Board isn't really a doing things team. It's a deciding things team.

All the members of the Board are elected by their colleagues in GDS, and they all have plenty enough work to do already. At the meetings, their job is to consider the ideas and suggestions that have come in, and decide: “will this make GDS a better place to work?” If we reach a consensus on "yes", we then think about who in the organisation is best placed to make that thing happen.

As a result, we've formed good connections with the Estates Team who look after the building we work in, and the People Team who handle all the the HR stuff.

More specifically, we've:

• helped make performance management better, by asking the People Team to simplify the language
• helped make induction better, by asking the Creative Team and the People Team to collaborate on a new process
• encouraged management to think about diversity in the organisation
• done lots of little things

Some of those little things are quite sensitive. Some of the issues people raise with us are very specific to those individuals. In those circumstances, a member of the Board usually volunteers to have a private conversation with the person concerned, and makes sure they get the help they need from the right people.

Not everything gets done quickly. Tackling diversity and raising awareness about it is something we've been looking at since our very first meeting, but none of us would claim that we've "done" that task. Nonetheless, it remains on our Trello board because making GDS more diverse is one of the things that makes it a better place to work, so the People Board continues to support it.

How to set up your own People Board

The most important thing that needs to happen isn't announcing that you'll have a Board, or running the elections to find members for it. Rather, it's giving that Board a mandate to change things.

We have a mandate to ask the senior management team to fix things that are broken. We have a mandate to ask other teams in GDS to help with specific projects. We have a mandate to decide, on behalf of the people to elected us, what things will make GDS a better place to work.

So if you want to create a People Board in your organisation, that's the vital first step: give the Board a mandate. Let it decide how it runs itself. Let it make decisions, and trust those decisions. Refresh it with new members now and again (since we set up our Board, about a third of the original members have stepped down to make way for new ones).

Another useful thing to do is make sure that there’s a member of senior management who’s on the People Board too. In our case, it’s GDS Chief Operating Officer Alex Holmes, who chairs the People Board meetings and acts as a useful conduit between the People Board and management team.

What it all means

Having a People Board is not a way for management to avoid day-to-day problems, because some of the things that the People Board encounters are bumped up to them to deal with anyway.

It's not a way for individuals to wield power either, because the Board discusses everything as a group and aims to reach consensus.

It's something else. Our former boss summed it up like this: "It's management by the team, not the managers."

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

We’ve all been in group situations where the discussion is dominated by the most confident or the loudest people in the room.

The less dominant or newer members of the group hesitate to voice their opinion. Others get distracted waiting for the right moment to jump in, only to find that when there is a chance to speak, the conversation has already moved on.

We’ve all interrupted or been interrupted.

In my experience, people don’t dominate a conversation or interrupt others because they are unkind or power-hungry. It usually happens because they’re passionate. And when a large group of passionate people come together, whatever the organisation, there’s a risk that meetings can become a bit chaotic, unfocused and frustrating.

Stephen Hawking said: “Quiet people have the loudest minds”. We must do our best to ensure we create an environment in which everybody’s opinions are heard. The team needs the input of quiet people just as much as the louder ones; we are a poorer team if they don't feel able to participate.

Ushering in a new way of communicating

The use of hand signals in the Platform as a Service team came out of a discussion we had at a retrospective. Our stand-ups and larger team meetings were getting longer and communication was becoming harder. One of our team members suggested hand signals as a way to help with this, and we all agreed.

Our team uses 6 hand signals. They convey:

• agreement
• disagreement
• wanting to talk
• a direct response
• clarification
• point of order, which is used when the conversation has strayed

Hand gesture to agree

Hand gesture to disagree

Hand gesture when you want to talk

Hand gesture to respond to someone directly

Hand gesture to ask someone to clarify their point

Hand gesture to make a point of order

In the first week that we used them, people felt very self-conscious. It does look a bit strange to outsiders. But, as Will Myddelton put it: “It sounds weird, but when you see it in action it is strangely beautiful.”

Getting hands on

One team member said that when they joined the team, they were bemused to see the hand signals in operation, but the value quickly became obvious.

For some, learning the signals can take time but using them soon becomes second nature. It takes discipline to make hand-signalling their default response and they have to remember which hand signals to use.

We now use hand signals on a daily basis in discussions involving more than 3 people. They are used in stand-ups, planning meetings, retrospectives and impromptu discussions. We don’t use them when we have visitors from outside the team because it would be a bit like having a discussion in a different language in front of people who can’t speak it.

Giving hand signals a thumbs up

There are so many benefits. Using hand signals really does level the playing field and can be a useful way to build up confidence.

The flow of conversation is improved. Agreement or disagreement can be demonstrated without speaking. Whoever is talking is free to finish without interruption, and gain feedback as they talk.

We spend the same amount of time in meetings but we have more focused discussions and certainly get through more content. People can have a voice without worrying about when to jump in.

While I don’t find myself slipping into using hand signals in my personal life, in big group settings such as conferences or seminars I do miss them.

Using hand signals is just one way of communicating in groups which we’ve found to be effective. If you’re team adopts any other approaches, please share in the comments.

Follow GDS on Twitter, and don't forget to sign up for email alerts.

We’ve talked before about our plans to create a set of patterns and tools that people building government services can use. The idea was that creating these templates would free up teams so they could spend more time designing user-centric services rather than starting from scratch every time. This way, services become easier to create as well as cheaper to run.

The templates are available for anyone to use. We knew that government departments would use them but we’re finding that other organisations are using them too. Sexual Health: 24 (SH:24) is one of them. Chris Howroyd, service development director at the organisation, recently came to GDS to tell us about the SH:24 service, the benefits of using the GOV.UK design pattern and how the service follows GDS Design Principles.

Doing things differently

SH:24 is a free online sexual health testing service that provides confidential home-testing for chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis and HIV. Last year, Public Health England reported STI rates of 2,943 per 100,000 people in Lambeth - the highest rate in London. SH:24 was set up to tackle sexual ill-health in the area.

Traditionally, residents would visit a clinic for sexual health checks. However, many clinics were facing the challenge of delivering their services with less resources. There were also significant barriers to use, including stigma and embarrassment around visiting clinics and waiting for results. The team at SH:24 has designed a service that better meets the needs of the residents, helps the local authority to cut STI rates and saves money.

Now residents can order a free STI testing kit online and receive it in the post the next day. When they’ve collected blood or urine samples at home, they can return them by Freepost. Results are issued over text message within 72 hours of their samples being received and 98% of users received their results within 24 hours. If someone is diagnosed with an infection and requires treatment, they’re fast-tracked into their local NHS service.

Using design patterns to speed things up

In his presentation at GDS, Chris explained that the service shares a lot of the same thinking and patterns we use. The team used GOV.UK patterns to design the website prototypes. This freed up more time to focus on problems more specific to the service, such as users taking their own blood samples.

The service is also a fantastic example of the eighth GDS Design Principle: ‘build digital services, not websites’. In other words, the team has done excellent service design from end to end and front to back.

The development

SH:24 started with a multidisciplinary team including designers, developers and public health consultants.

Before building anything, they talked to a range of people including receptionists at clinics and residents (some of whom get tested, as well as some who don’t). SH:24 was turned from user research into a working alpha in just 5 weeks.  

The team tested the service on more than 400 users during the early development. And, as the fifth Design Principle recommends, they iterated and then iterated again. The team developed a series of 17 prototypes and tested them with service users, clinicians, commissioners and safeguarding boards.

The service was released as a minimum viable product and the team plans to add additional functionality as it develops.

Designing the end-to-end service

The service is made up of both online and offline parts and the same team has designed each bit with user needs in mind. They considered interactions including:

• how to tell people what the service is and how to encourage them to use it
• how to make things discreet by sending the kits out in plain packaging
• users’ (literal) pain points – they have redesigned the lancet (sharp surgical instrument) to make it easier for users to take their own blood samples
• that users might be uncomfortable taking their own blood sample so they made clear instruction videos explaining this
• how to use and hack the resources that already exist, for example, the instructions to use the kit
• sensitivities around highly sensitive data when posting samples to labs by putting barcodes on packaging instead of names
• how to make sure the service works with existing (often old) software in clinics
• how best to tell people their results because communicating positive HIV results over text message would obviously be insensitive and inappropriate

So far, so good

In the first 8 weeks, residents ordered 1,300 test kits. 76% of these were returned. This is a comparative success if we look at the return rates for the National HIV Self-Sampling service, which are 51% (Luis Guerra, PHE, June 2016). The SH:24 service received NHS Information Governance approval after 12 weeks.

Local authority commissioners in Southwark and Lambeth have commented that SH:24 “improves access to sexual health services and mitigates the impact of financial pressures”.

The service is now operating in 5 other local authorities: Herefordshire, Telford and Wrekin, Shropshire, Essex and Medway.

The service is of the internet, not just on the internet. The team has used the internet to rethink how the service of sexual health testing is delivered to users. By focusing on user needs and working in small, agile teams, you can transform a public service.

You can follow Harry and SH:24 on Twitter, and don't forget to sign up for email alerts.

When designing services or creating content, we always start by thinking about user needs. It’s our first design principle.

The principle states that we should focus on ‘user needs, not government needs’. But with registers, just like all other Government as a Platform (GaaP) products, we’re building something for users within government as well as outside it.

Of course, this shouldn’t make a difference because users are users, whether they work in government or not. This has already been observed by the GOV.UK Notify team, whose main users are government service teams.

Registers are reliable lists of information that can be used to build better digital services. Using a register will mean a service team is only ever working with one accurate and up-to-date list of information, leaving much less room for error.

As well as service teams, we’ve been thinking a lot about who the other users of registers are. We’ve identified 2 other potential groups of users. They are:

• people who collect, store or manage data for their organisation and think they should be using a register
• people who are responsible for keeping registers up to date

Both users are actually the same person – the custodian of a register – only at different stages in the register creation process.

We decided to concentrate on meeting their needs first. Making sure it’s as easy as possible to request, create and maintain a register is crucial if we want more people to use them.

Taking the service design approach

We approached designing the register creation process in the same way we would anyservice. We looked at the process end-to-end and back to front. This means we thought about the entire user journey (including online and offline steps) and concentrated on what might be needed behind the scenes to make the service work.

This isn’t easy, and requires an understanding of the user’s circumstances, as well as the task they need to complete and what can stop them from doing it. Fortunately, having worked closely with a custodian to create the country register, we already had a lot of this knowledge within the team.

Visualising how registers are created

We created a timeline, similar to a user journey map, to help visualise the process of creating a register. This helped us see exactly what support the custodian needs from the registers team at GDS and at what point in the process they’d need it.

We were also able to identify when we could point the custodian in the direction of guidance rather than give them support in person. As we’re not yet at the stage where we can offer custodians around-the-clock support, we didn’t want to create a service in which we became a bottleneck. It’s important that custodians are always able to get the help they need, so we decided to publish registers guidance on GOV.UK.

A few months ago, we published an introduction to registers. One of the reasons we did this was to give potential custodians enough information about what registers are and what they can do. Having this knowledge will make it easy for them to decide if a register is the right way of managing their data.

To make sure potential custodians are even more aware of what it takes to make a register, we’ve also published guidance on creating a register and becoming a custodian.

In addition to these, we’ve recently published history pages for every register we have in alpha or beta. These record the steps that the custodian has already completed and what they’ll need to do next in order to put the register live.

Refining this process will not only help custodians, but service teams, too. Knowing that the custodian has provided useful, contextual information about the register and is committed to keeping it up to date will let service teams know the data is good enough to build services with.

What’s next

We’re testing our GOV.UK guidance with both existing and potential custodians. Once we have enough feedback, we’ll look at what we can do to improve it.

We’ll also look at how we can improve the way registers are maintained once they’re published. This will require us to build some new tools for the custodians, and we’re starting to think about what they might look like. We’ll have much more to say about that soon.

After we’ve done this, we’ll go through this whole process again to look at the needs of our third user group – service teams.

You can follow Martin and follow Tom on Twitter, and don't forget to sign up for email alerts.

This week, there has been a series of events running across the country to celebrate National Get Online Week. This is part of the government’s plans to make training in basic digital skills free for adults who need extra help.

GDS already helps government to create digital services so good that people prefer to use them, and the Service Standard supports this.

Helping people get online

With that in mind, a cross-departmental group from GDS, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and the Cabinet Office, including Civil Service Workplace Adjustments and Civil Service Learning, ran a set of lunchtime market stall sessions this week.

The first session was to help people get online and use the internet. Tinder Foundation demonstrated a free online learning resource called Learn My Way. Civil Service Workplace Adjustments helped them understand the tools available to support their teams. Civil Service Learning showcased its basic digital skills product, demonstrating how to use it while obtaining user feedback.

The second session was for those building digital services. It explained how to use the Digital Marketplace to find products and people to build the services. It was also an excellent opportunity to get user feedback to iterate and improve these services.

The sessions showed how GDS and other organisations can help users to build the best services and, more importantly, help civil servants use them, irrespective of profession.

A change of charity

In the theme of helping people use technology, we decided to use National Get Online Week to announce the GDS charity of the year.

Although we aren’t the biggest fundraisers in the world, we do have a lot of talent and expertise. The GDS charity team wanted staff to be regularly involved in this year’s charity's work, so they chose one that’s local and works at a grass-roots level.

Our chosen charity

We contacted Comic Relief for some guidance. They pointed to Tech for Good to suggest potential charity candidates.

We found Dragon Hall. It’s small, local – it works with young people, residents and business and community groups in Holborn and Covent Garden – and works with tech, so our expertise can make a real difference.

Dragon Hall wants to give children the chance to explore and play with new technology, while addressing the inequalities that exist in access to these innovations. It offers some great resources and activities from 3D printers, virtual reality headsets, coding, augmented reality programming and app design.

We’ve started fundraising already and are looking for ways to get our staff involved with the work that Dragon Hall does, perhaps by using one of their 3 volunteer days.

Follow GDS on Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for email alerts.

Last week, I attended the fourth Transforming Together event. Colleagues from across government came together to talk about some of the big issues facing us. The main thing we learnt was that we need to share our ideas early, explore them, build on them and adopt them together. We need to make a commitment to collaboration, because what we need to achieve cannot be done without it.

During the day, I took the opportunity to set out my initial views on what GDS is here to do and how we’re going to do it. Here’s what I said:

GDS mission

Over the past 6 weeks, I’ve split my time between GDS HQ in London and various government departments across the country. I wanted to listen to the views of as many people as possible. One of the main things they asked is for us to be absolutely clear about what the GDS mission is.

We’ve come a long way since Martha Lane-Fox’s ‘Revolution not evolution’. We’ve achieved a huge amount. GOV.UK is now part of the national infrastructure. GOV.UK Verify is a live service, and growing fast. We’ve hired and trained more people to deliver digital services right across government. I’m proud to be leading an organisation that has achieved so much, and that has so much more to offer in the future.

This week we marked the fourth anniversary of GOV.UK, and we’re approaching the fifth birthday of GDS. Our mission has moved on. So what is it now?

I think it’s this: GDS is here to help departments transform the relationship between the citizen and the state. And to do this, we will support, enable and assure departments as they deliver their digital transformations. We’re here to listen to them, to help them do the right work, and be confident that it’s being done in the most efficient and effective way.

Scale and scope

There’s a lot of transformation work already underway, right across government. These are the things we as a government need to do in order to bring about the transformation of the relationship between citizen and state.

But the scale and scope of all these projects varies enormously: some are primarily focused on user-facing services (such as getting a divorce online). Others are more focused on how departments operate internally to provide the services that users expect (such as government office hubs, which aim to bring more civil servants from more departments together in fewer offices).

Some of our biggest and most complex transformations – such as Universal Credit, Making Tax Digital, HM Courts and Tribunals Service Reform and GOV.UK Verify – have significant elements of both. They focus on users and on transforming internal operations.

So what exactly do we mean when we say “support, enable and assure”?

Support

Support means we need to:

• publish our new strategy (which will be ready before Christmas)
• provide expert advice where it’s needed around government, expanding the work we’ve already been doing in recent years
• expand the Digital Academies – our goal is 3,000 people trained every year on more than 300 courses, giving government the capability to push ahead with citizen-facing services
• create a national footprint for GDS – we need to get out of London and go national, so that we’re geographically closer to the teams who need our help
• innovate with new ideas, and help departments to innovate. Things like biometric residence permits, which a team at the Home Office has been working on

Enable

Enable means making sure that we’re giving government the right tools to get work done.

It means continuing to develop and ramp up projects like GOV.UK, GOV.UK Verify, Government as a Platform, the Digital Marketplace and the work the Common Technology Services team is doing to fix technology for civil servants.

It means sorting our digital job families and pay across departments so we can attract and retain the best talent.

And it means doing more about data, an essential component for the joined-up transformed government of the future. It means pressing on with our work on registers, data legislation and improving our data science capability in government. But we also need to do more to support the effective management and use of data. Data is essential for the efficient running of government, and more and more services need to join up across departmental boundaries.

It still means doing the hard work to make things simple for the rest of government.

GOV.UK Verify is a big part of this work and we’re making it one of our top priorities. We’re looking at how to take Verify forward so we can make the most of its benefits to users, across central and local government.

Assure

Government needs to know that public money is being spent on the right things at the right time to continue to transform the relationship between citizen and state.

Assure means providing the right controls and standards so that, across government, we have the confidence we are doing this.

It means streamlining the controls process to reflect increased capability in departments, so our controls ensure we’re doing the right thing but don’t get in the way.

It means strengthening standards.

When the Civil Service Board asks for assurance that digital transformation programmes across government will be successful, we need to be able to give it. That means better measures of how we’re making a difference for citizens, as well as how we’re driving up efficiency and building flexibility into the system.

Next steps

Transforming Together is an important part of our ongoing conversation as we continue to transform government.

I’m looking forward to the next Transforming Together event, which will be hosted by HMRC in the new year.

Follow GDS on Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for email alerts.

Front page of the prototype

The Performance Platform measures how government services are performing. The team that runs it made the decision to carry out a rediscovery of its work and we blogged about it in June.  We are exploring what data we should provide and how we should provide it to enable better decisions about government services.

We’ve been through a rediscovery and we’re now looking for user research participants and alpha partners to help us develop our prototype and improve the data we’re giving.

Here’s what we’ve done so far and what we plan to do in alpha.

Running the rediscovery

One of the roles of GDS is to help the rest of government to make great services. We wanted to know what part we could play in this.

We wanted to know what problems people were trying to solve with data. We wanted to know if we were continuing to meet users’ needs and, if not, we wanted to know what we should do about it.

So we ran a rediscovery. We ran this in parallel with our work to maintain the Performance Platform. We haven’t changed anything or switched anything off. The work we’re doing is to outline our future direction.

You can read more about our user research, and more about some of the outputs.

What we learned

When we were looking at user needs, we focused on people in strategic roles. These might be people who are responsible for a number of services, or people who have a strategic decision-making role in departments.

We found some high-level needs for these users. They need to:

• know what’s happening with services across government so that they can prioritise where to intervene
• be able to share best practice so that they can help government better meet user needs
• be able to demonstrate the benefits of their strategies so that they can show their value

Our research also confirmed that the data that we give to people needs to be reliable and standardised. And people need to be able to understand the data we provide so that they can use it properly.

Metrics

Through our initial research, we identified 3 main useful metrics: the breakdown of transactions per channel, the number of unique users for a service, and the reason a user contacts a service or has to repeat or amend something.

At the moment the Performance Platform has ‘user satisfaction’ to indicate service quality. This is measured by surveying users as they complete transactions. There are several issues with this. A very small number of people respond to it and it only collects responses from successful online services. It can be hard to know if someone is happy with the service itself, or just happy about their personal outcome from it.

We’re looking at the reasons why users contact a service as a possible alternative. We worked to see if we could categorise different types of user contact. We worked to see whether we could differentiate the kind of contact services expect from a user – for example to get support to use a service – from when a user is getting in contact because of a problem with the service. We found that making these groupings was very complex and subjective.

Instead we found that we could group reasons for phone calls and reasons for people having to repeat and amend things without assigning value judgements to them. This means users of the data can make their own judgement calls on the success of a service.

Prototyping. And prototyping again

People weren’t really using the graphs of the data we provided. This is because they liked to take the data and combine it with other information to create a complete picture.

So our first prototype focused on data without much visualisation. We tested a prototype of a spreadsheet to find out if the metrics and other information we had developed were the right ones. This helped us to eliminate some metrics. It also showed us that users who initially didn’t use graphs did need some visualisation. A spreadsheet wasn’t enough.

For our second prototype, we focused on how we should group the data, so that it was most useful for our users. Our research found that users are interested in how ‘transactions’ are grouped into end-to-end services.

So as well as the usual department and agency groupings, we also tried out ‘themes and topics’ groupings around things like driving and pensions. We found that while people were interested in these groupings, we need to refine them further, so that they are as useful as possible.

Looking for alpha partners

The research results have helped us prioritise user contact across channels for our minimum viable product. We’re building a prototype so that we can test this.

We’re looking for partners for the alpha prototyping. These partners will help us to shape the way we collect and report on government service data. Initially, we want to partner with one service, helping them to provide the data and build our knowledge to support our future technical decisions.

If you’re interested in being an alpha partner for this, or in taking part in our user research sessions, get in touch by emailing performance-platform@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

Follow GDS on Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for email alerts.

In my last post, I wrote about how GDS needs to make a commitment to collaborate with all government departments. We need to work together if we want to transform the relationship between citizen and state.

This week I’m happy to announce 2 new senior appointments to GDS. Both will play a vital part in making that collaboration happen.

Arif Harbott, formerly Chief Digital and Information Officer at the Ministry of Justice, has moved over to GDS to advise on Digital, Data and Technology. He has joined GDS on a short-term contract.

Arif joined GDS on Monday 31 October. He takes up the position from Susana Berlevy, who is moving to take on a great role at Lloyds of London. We’d like to thank Susana for the great work she did to develop new digital career paths in the Civil Service.

Arif is in a strong position to take up the reins as he has extensive experience in digital and technology both inside and out of government. He will also begin work on the other parts of capability-building at GDS: workforce planning, attraction and recruitment, learning and development and employer branding.

He will take the lead on our Digital Academy. As I said in my previous post, our goal is expansion: to train 3,000 people every year on more than 300 courses, giving government the capability to push ahead with citizen-facing services.

I’m also delighted to welcome Emily Ackroyd to the organisation. Emily will be Director of Policy and Engagement at GDS. Emily previously worked at Number 10 as Senior Policy Adviser for Welfare, Employment and Pensions.

Emily will be responsible for strengthening the organisation’s role in policy. As we start to work more with departments to deliver transformation, we need to bridge the gap between policy and delivery. In addition, Emily will lead on how we engage with and better understand the priorities of other parts of Whitehall.

Beyond Whitehall, Emily will work to maintain the UK government’s reputation internationally as a leader in digital government.

Emily’s first day at GDS will be 7 November. She will work full-time until the new year, when the position will become a job share. We will be advertising for someone to share the role shortly.

Both Arif and Emily are here to ensure that GDS can work effectively with other departments to transform government together.

Our priority is to transform the relationship between citizen and the state. Our success depends on getting the right people in the team. We want to hire the best people, wherever they’re from, who can support, enable and assure departments as we undertake digital transformation.

Webchat is a channel for support that allows users to talk to advisers through real-time online text chat. The Government as a Platform team recently carried out a discovery into how services around government currently provide webchat to help support their users.

We observed there was an opportunity to create service patterns to help teams buying and operating webchat support. We ran an alpha to learn from departments that have been running webchat and to learn what works for users.

What we did

We ran 4 rounds of research with users for the alpha. We wanted to understand what they expect from webchat, and what makes a webchat usable. We spoke to advisers working in support or contact centres who use webchat, their managers, the teams implementing webchat platforms, and service teams supported by webchat.

To get an idea of potential design and usability patterns that might arise, we tried some commercial webchat services. We used their standard designs and then customised them to look and feel more like GOV.UK. Research was split between desktop and mobile applications.

In addition, we created our own webchat prototype to experiment with different design ideas.

The user’s view

Some people told us they use webchat as a primary support channel. But most of the participants told us they’d prefer to make a phone call.

Expectations about webchat depend on previous experience. If people have had a positive outcome, they’re more likely to try it again - even if it was with a different company.

‘Webchat’ as a term isn’t that well understood. A common expectation was that it would have the same sense of immediacy as a phone call. But, in reality, advisers are often handling several webchats at once. This can result in a lag between replies, which can put some users off.

Some users found it hard to believe it was a human and not a software program replying to them over webchat. Users said if it was a robot replying, they didn’t trust that the response would be accurate or resolve their problem.

We looked at ways to convince users they were talking to a human. This could be through including the adviser’s name, showing that the adviser is typing a reply, or changing the language advisers use to respond to users.

As part of this discovery, we asked users to input some personal or financial information into webchat. Many users were comfortable with this but others weren’t. They didn’t trust the webchat in the same way they would an adviser on the phone, or a traditional form on a website.

The adviser’s view

Advisers who are good at typing told us that they like to use webchat. It gives them more time to consider the correct response, and removes some of the emotional stress of telephone or face-to-face support.

Advisers said they find the functionality in modern contact centre software helpful. In particular, they appreciate features that allow them to handle several webchats at once, such as:

• a search engine that works well
• having quick and easy access to information about the user’s interaction with the service before they asked a webchat adviser for help
• having pre-written responses for common problems

However, there are issues that limit webchat advisers in government from making the most of it. Many existing government IT systems only allow advisers to look up one user’s record at a time - stopping advisers from helping more than one user at the same time.

The manager’s view

Contact centre managers have to plan how many advisers are answering webchats through the week. They do this by monitoring demand and measuring the efficiency of teams of advisers. However, metrics used to monitor phone support aren’t as effective with webchat. For example, the length of a phone call versus the length of a text chat isn’t a fair comparison.

Managers are taking advantage of the move to webchat to introduce new ways of working, such as working from home for advisers. This could allow contact centre managers to extend the hours that support is available.

The service team’s view

It’s important that the teams who build and support services pay close attention to the problems users are having. It’s easier for a service team to run through the transcripts of webchat sessions than to listen to hours of audio calls. It means service teams can look at the data themselves and do not have to wait for weekly or monthly management reporting. It can be quicker to understand service problems with webchat (as the page and previous user interactions are stored) than looking at issues dealt with by telephone.

Front-to-back service design

User support is a vital part of providing digital services. We need to look in more depth at how best to improve services based on their users’ needs for support. The biggest user benefits stem from making the service better, rather than just focusing on improving support.

Find out more

If you’re working on a government service using webchat, or thinking of implementing it, get in touch to find out more.

We’ll also be blogging more on the Government as a Platform blog about our webchat alpha over the next few weeks.

Follow Chris on Twitter and don’t forget to sign up for email alerts.

The US government runs an International Visitors Leadership Program, which brings together future leaders from around the world. It’s had over 350 current and former heads of state attend, as well as 45 Nobel laureates.

The attendees of the International Visitors Leadership Program

Each visit is themed, and the most recent one was for future digital and technology leaders. As one of the organisations playing a leading role in digital government around the world, GDS was invited to take part. So 2 of us joined a group of 21 people from 13 countries on a tour across the US. We visited Washington, DC; Detroit, Michigan; Columbus, Ohio; and San Francisco, California.

We wanted to share what we learnt while we were there.

1. GDS is making a difference

What we’ve delivered and published at GDS has had a big impact. People, including the State Chief Information Officer of Ohio, told us that their organisations have changed as a result of the blog posts and guidance we’ve published.

The Digital Service Standard is credited as inspiring the US approach to digital, as set out in the US Digital Playbook. GOV.UK design patterns are obvious across federal, state and county websites, and the guidance on native mobile apps seems to have been one of the most appreciated things we’ve done.

2. Three’s company!

The US government system is federal and decentralised. We were introduced to the 3 main arms of federal digital capability and their respective areas of expertise or, as they’re known at 18F, their ‘superpowers’. There was a consensus that this ‘division of powers’ approach was well-suited to the US context and its benefits outweigh any downsides of potential duplication of effort.

The Presidential Innovation Fellows are the catalysers: working alone in agencies and departments for a year, identifying digital opportunities and prototyping.

18F is an in-house digital delivery agency funded by departments to work on specific projects. It often builds on the ideas introduced by the Innovation Fellows, and builds digital capability across government. It has the feel of the UK’s Transformation Programme.

The US Digital Service is the policy arm of digital delivery. It’s focused on ensuring that there isn’t another Healthcare.gov-style technology disaster that undermines political priorities. And they have a direct phone line to the President.

3. The US public service is attracting diverse talent

The US public service has done an excellent job of attracting top talent into government. Of the people we met, a huge number are incredibly talented women. These include the US Chief Technology Officer and her deputy, the 18F Deputy Executive Director and the Code for America Director.

At the main Code for America summit session, there were 23 speakers on the main stage. Of these, 17 were women. We asked Maryann Kongovi, the Code for America Chief Operating Officer, how they’d done that. She said they were the best people.

4. We need to learn from each other

We need to keep ourselves open to learning from other countries. If you’re trying to solve a problem, it’s likely someone else has already done it.

The UK is currently number 1 in the UN e-government index. We need to be at the leading edge of change to stay there. For example, we should learn from the Kenyan model of innovation in the money transfer and financial services market. They skipped the step of requiring bank accounts and moved directly to mobile payments. We should learn from the Estonian model of e-Residency, which addresses the needs of an increasingly mobile business market.

Our US hosts acknowledged the inspiration they’ve drawn from GDS. But it’s important that we’re just as committed to learning lessons from other countries that can help us serve our users better.

Specific examples where this kind of learning is already happening include cloud.gov and Government Platform as a Service (PaaS). The GDS PaaS team decided to use the cloud.gov documents as the basis for its own technical documents, building on the work the US had already done. We need to find ways to do more of this, not just between the UK and the US, but with other countries that are leading the way on different aspects of digital transformation in government.

5. We should look for new ways to solve government problems

We heard about the potential of bringing startup innovation to solve government problems. We should be on the lookout for new ways to solve government problems to serve our users better.

We met Jerry Paffendorf, founder of Loveland Technologies. He’s been working with the Detroit city government to map plots of land, helping to target blight demolition initiatives more effectively, and supporting people at risk of foreclosure as a result of tax arrears.

From New Zealand we heard about the R9 Accelerator, an initiative to involve aspiring entrepreneurs in a 3-month long discovery and alpha-like exercise alongside existing civil servants. In a twist on traditional procurement, the programme lists ‘Opportunities’ for innovators to work on.

These are just a couple of examples of how other countries are experimenting with using new thinking to solve problems.

An office at the US Digital Service

6. Accessibility needs to be of the people, by the people, for the people

One of the many inspiring talks at the Code for America summit was by Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Microsoft’s Chief Accessibility Officer. She said that to get accessibility right, we need to be committed to hiring people with disabilities. They need to be involved in building software that will meet the needs of people like them. She showed a video demonstrating Microsoft’s commitment to this principle.

Jenny’s advice is a variation on a theme that we often return to. As government, we are building services that need to work for everyone, so it’s especially important that we have a diverse workforce. People delivering public services don’t just need to understand diverse needs in an abstract sense, they need to live those needs in a very personal way. A specific demonstration of this general principle is putting users of accessible software at the heart of building accessible software.

7. Good processes and services should be shared, so others can use them

We heard about central federal government teams working on software that individual states or local areas can use to deliver local government services. One example is the Presidential Innovation Fellows’ work to develop a way for parents to apply for free school meals. Another example is a prototype service developed by the US Digital Service. It shows how local governments’ separate benefits application processes can be unified with users at their heart. You can watch the Code for America presentation on that initiative.

This takes the way we’ve been thinking about Government as a Platform one step further, to think not just about components, but to include whole services, which require minimal customisation. It’s not an area that we’re currently exploring, but it certainly offers food for thought.

Thank you to the people who helped make this trip happen, and everyone who was so generous with their time. We especially want to thank the US State Department and the International Visitors Leadership Program, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the US Digital Service. And, of course, all of our fellow attendees!

You can follow Rory and follow Olivia on Twitter, and don’t forget to subscribe to the blog for email updates.

We’ve blogged before on how the Standards Assurance team at GDS is working in collaboration with people from across government to improve the way we assure things.

One of the ways we assure new digital services is via the Digital Service Standard. We presented on this at the Digital Leaders meeting on 16 November 2016. I’m delighted to be able to share what we are are doing with service teams to make this process better.

The Digital Service Standard is integral to how we build good digital services in government. Since its introduction in 2014, our team has assessed over 270 services, not to mention the hundreds of internal assessments we’ve helped departments to run themselves.

We’ve seen a lot of best practice across government.

Our discovery

Earlier this year, we interviewed lots of people involved in the assessment process in our discovery. The overwhelming conclusion was that, while the Digital Service Standard has been fundamental to changing the way we deliver digital services, the process needs a revamp.

We’re not alone

Our findings are not unique.

In my old home of Australia, the Digital Transformation Agency is facing similar issues: how to get greater consistency across assessments, how to avoid teams spending a long time preparing for an assessment, and how to make meetings more open and constructive.

And it’s no surprise that our proposals reflect the approach that the Ministry of Justice has just started trialling. The models for GDS assessments (we assess all services with over 100,000 transactions) and internal department run assessments (for services with fewer than 100,000 transactions) are very similar.

The new approach

Our proposed new assurance model, which we’re testing now, is designed to meet the needs we identified during the discovery. This told us that teams need:

• advice and support from GDS from the start
• assessors to have a deeper understanding of the service they’re assessing
• greater consistency in the advice and recommendations they receive

Under the new model, assessors will visit teams regularly at their location throughout the development of their service. A lead assessor will be assigned to each service and help the team to identify risks and any areas they need to focus on.

The lead assessor will bring along expert assessors – for example, on user research or service design. This will allow all assessors to gain a better understanding of the service and give immediate, less formal recommendations about progress towards meeting the Standard.

Assessors will have the option to observe team meetings, to see their physical boards and ask questions. They will have access to the whole team (not limited to the 5 members currently allowed to come to an assessment), see the team environment and the interactions with suppliers. Questions like, “Give me an example of how your team works in an agile way” will become redundant.

We’re exploring ways to record the outcomes of visits that will allow service teams to track how they are progressing towards meeting each of the Service Standard points.

While the engagement will be continuous, there will still be assurance that a service meets the Standard before it’s made public. When the service approaches the end of a stage and is ready to progress, for example, from alpha to private beta, the lead assessor will bring along a ‘buddy’ to peer-review the service team. This will ensure objectivity and consistency.

Challenges

We think there are 2 big challenges facing us. They are:

• making this model sustainable – service teams are located throughout the UK and we currently have a limited number of trained assessors.
• resolving differences of opinion – the new model requires an alternative approach to how we overcome difficult conversations and sticking points

We hope to get some ideas on how to address these from the trial.

What’s to come?

We’re in our alpha phase and are road-testing the new model with a handful of departments over the next couple of months. We still have a long way to go. We’re approaching the service assessment transformation as we would a digital service transformation. User needs will continue to be identified and validated, and we will continue testing and iterating our proposed assurance model.

This is probably a good time to say thank you to all our assessor panelists that have come along on the journey with us so far, not to mention all the service teams.

We’ll keep blogging about the process and if you would like to be involved in any future trials please email the Standards and Assurance Community.

December 2015 was the wettest month ever recorded in the UK. More than 17,000 homes were flooded in England alone.

Photo by Allan Harris, used under Creative Commons Licence

Around Christmas we were contacted by colleagues at the Environment Agency (EA). They were concerned that users weren’t able to navigate mainstream flooding content on GOV.UK.

At the time, the mainstream guide ‘Prepare for a flood and get help during and after’ addressed several user needs. It seemed that users were struggling to find the content they needed when they needed it. For example, searching for ‘get help after a flood’ returned a guide called ‘Prepare for a flood’. We decided that we needed to consider splitting the content into separate guides.

But it was Christmas Eve and heavy rain was forecast. We didn’t have time to do a complete revision of the content before imminent flooding. So we made a few quick fixes and planned to return to the content in the spring for a proper improvement project.

Linking up with EA’s flooding services

EA had plans to improve all its flooding services throughout 2016, so we timed the work to coincide with the launch in the spring. That meant that from the beginning we were very engaged with what EA was doing on its services and we could structure the mainstream content as part of an end-to-end user journey.

EA was doing user research into its improved Flood Information Service, so we did some research on mainstream content at the same time. Some of the feedback from users supported our belief that content that isn’t clearly defined for a specific user leads to a bad experience for everyone.  For example, one user said ‘Prepare - that’s what we should have done last week’. We also found that users are very keen on information that’s tailored to their location and need very clear signposting to current flood warnings.

Revisiting user needs

We also held a user needs workshop at GDS, which was attended by members of the EA content team, content designers working on EA services and a content designer from the Department for Communities and Local Government. We drafted new user needs together in the workshop and used them to come up with a content plan.

The new content

In July 2016 we spent 3 days in Bristol working on the mainstream content with EA’s content team.

We split the ‘Prepare for a flood and get help during and after’ guide into 3 new pieces of content:

• Prepare for flooding
• Get help during a flood
• What to do after a flood

We consolidated the content about checking flood risk into a single answer – Find out if you’re at risk of flooding – and made it clear whether we were describing immediate risk or long-term risk of flooding. Based on our understanding of users’ need to report a flood (or rather lack of it), we improved the structure of the ‘Report a flood or a cause of flooding’ page.

We published the revised content at the beginning of September 2016.

User research follow-up and further iterations

When we tested the new content, we found that breaking up the guide made it easier for users to get to the information they needed. Users found EA’s redesigned services helpful. One user said ‘It’s brilliant!’, referring to the 5-day forecast service.

However, we also found a couple of areas where we need to make further improvements. User journeys between GOV.UK and local council content aren’t working very well. We’ve identified ways to make the journeys smoother and will be sharing these with local councils.    

Users also didn’t understand what ‘long-term flood risk’ means. Often users thought it referred to long-term weather forecasts, but the service actually identifies areas that are prone to flooding. We need to look again at the way the long-term service is referred to and make sure we use terminology users understand.

Follow GDS on Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for email alerts.

GDS turns 5 this week (officially on Thursday 8 December), and we’re celebrating all week.

There will be cake (inevitably), but also a few other things: we’re going to spend some time on this blog looking back at the story so far: how GDS was created and grew, and how GDS has influenced Australia's Digital Transformation Agency.

We’ll also look forward to the future, and towards at the end of the week we’ll put the focus on what it’s like to work here. Because, as always, we’re hiring.

A history in the making

Today, we start by looking back. We've just published A GDS story. Nothing in it is new – those of you who have been reading our blog posts since the beginning will have heard it all before. But this is the first time it's been summarised and pulled together in one place, with plenty of pictures, videos and links.

It's an easy way to tell our story to people who want to hear it. (No, really, there's a need being met here: many visitors to GDS, from other government departments, from foreign governments and from the private and not-for-profit sectors ask us to tell them our story from the beginning.)

Note the title: it's A GDS story, not THE GDS story. We've published one version of it, but we're certain that people reading it will notice errors and omissions. That's fine, we can iterate. That’s what we do. You can send comments, corrections and suggestions to gds-story@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk and we'll incorporate them.

Later this week

We’re going to be celebrating all week with some interesting stuff on our Twitter feed (@gdsteam). We’ll also be posting on Instagram, Flickr and LinkedIn.

Later in the week, we’ll be looking to the future. Kevin Cunnington will post here about the imminent publication of the strategy and his plans for 2017 and beyond.

Anyway. Time for some cake.

Last year, the Australian government set up a team tasked with transforming government to make services easier to use. It was called the Digital Transformation Office – recently renamed the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA). Paul Shetler, formerly of GDS and the Ministry of Justice Digital team, was appointed to set it up.

Paul asked a few of us at GDS to move out to Australia to help get things up and running. Since then, we have been hard at work helping the Australian government transform its services so that they are easy for people to use. Paul left the DTA last week, but I’d like to talk about the approach we’ve taken over the past 15 months.

Like GDS, our strategy has been delivery. We've focused on proving to government that an agile, user-centred approach to service delivery means that users get better services, delivered more quickly.

We started with a recruitment drive, seeking the best developers, designers and user researchers in Australia to come and help us out.

So far, we have released:

• a beta of a performance dashboard for government services
• the Digital Marketplace, to make it easier for government to buy digital and technology services
• an alpha prototype of a single government website

We also invited Australian federal and state governments to move teams into our Sydney and Canberra offices, so they could work alongside us and learn how to deliver digital services.

By working with government agencies, we've helped to make it easier for users to do things including:

• enrolling newborn children into Medicare
• booking appointments for immunisation and health checks
• booking Australian citizenship tests

Over the past year, we have been very fortunate to stand on the shoulders of the work done by our colleagues at GDS.

For example, our Digital Service Standard and Design Principles started by forking the original version from the UK. We figured out which parts of them worked well in Australia, and made a few changes. We have reduced the Australian Digital Service Standard to 13 criteria. We have also changed how we assess services, moving to weekly 'in-flight' assessments so that we can give more regular feedback to teams.

Likewise, by making use of the UK Digital Marketplace code, we were able to release our beta version in just 5 weeks – months ahead of schedule. In July, GDS’s Caroline and Alexey flew out to Sydney to help our team get up to speed. We're now collaborating around a shared backlog so that both countries can benefit from future development effort.

In our other teams, GDS has welcomed our executives to Aviation House, made time for us to ask questions of the product teams, and arranged field visits to see initiatives like the Digital Academy.

I think GDS’s biggest impact has been on our culture and values. I'm proud that our teams put users' needs first, work in the open, and iterate quickly so we can learn from mistakes. And, of course, we have the 2 staples of digital government: bunting and cake.

It's fantastic to be part of an international community of governments who are all on the digital transformation journey. The collective approach to learning, sharing and reuse is helping us all to move faster.

We recently received a big vote of confidence in our approach: the Australian government is expanding our remit. We are now being asked to look at the digital and technology policy for the whole of government, along with the technology procurement rules. We will also be setting up a programme management office to oversee technology projects happening across government.

Without the support of GDS, we wouldn't have been able to do half as much as we have done. We're very grateful of the time you've been able to provide, and are delighted to be able to contribute back.

Happy 5th birthday, GDS!

It’s half a decade since GDS was founded. When it started, it was just 14 people. In those days, it had more of a startup culture, with a very small staff working to build the early prototypes of GOV.UK. Today, GDS has grown to over 700 people, working on projects like GOV.UK Verify, opening up data and end-to-end services. And we’re recruiting at a rate of 45 additional people a month. In startup terms, that’s a major success. In terms of digital government, it is hugely important.  

GDS remains committed to its original principles: building and supporting services that put the user first. Making things open. Making things better for the citizen.

Some of the changes we make in people’s daily lives are incremental, but they all add up to a big shift in the relationship between citizen and state. GDS is helping to put government at the service of the citizen.

All of us here owe a great debt to the people who laid the foundations for the organisation we are today. One that is agile and iterative, in a position to both lead and support. To build and test, and to challenge. We are a mature organisation now, and a recognised centre of digital excellence for government, not just in the UK, but around the world.

Here are some of the things I am looking forward to us working on in the next year.

Fixing data

To make things that are truly better for citizens, we know that we need to fix how data is stored and used in government. Current structures prevent departments from giving each other access to information. The creation of joined up services across government is inhibited by legacy structures. GDS will work to lower these barriers, and help to establish secure, ethical ways for working with data for the benefit of the citizen. As part of this work, we will be publishing a roadmap of open APIs (application programming interfaces) for data.

Joining up departments

As digital transformation penetrates every layer of government, working across departments will increasingly become the norm. GDS has invested more into policy and engagement, and is looking at ways for this important work to happen smoothly and efficiently. In modern government, we will need to go beyond siloed services to do the work we need to do.

Pushing GOV.UK Verify forward

Identity is another priority. We’re investing in GOV.UK Verify, working hard to make it fit for use across government. We want as many people signed up as we can, and we’ll continue to push this actively in the next year.

Transforming our workforce

We know that digital transformation has no end point. And it’s just as much about people and practices as it is about technologies and tools. GDS aims to establish 8 regional digital academies, providing training for 3,000 people across government every year.

Along with upskilling the current workforce, GDS is working to create a more diverse workplace. Earlier this year, my predecessor Stephen Foreshew-Cain wrote about the importance of GDS taking part in events like LGBT+ Pride, and making people from minority groups feel comfortable to be themselves in the workplace. With the support of the GDS Women’s Group, we’ve made a formal commitment to only take part in conferences that are gender diverse. The Women’s Group has also been instrumental in rolling out compulsory unconscious bias training for all line managers. We now have a group of about 25 people from the Women’s and the recently launched Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups who are being trained up as unconscious bias facilitators to run the sessions in house. This means everyone who works at GDS can have consistent face-to-face training. All of these things are helping to make GDS a better place to work. One that is better equipped to meet the needs of all its users.

Looking ahead with optimism

Although there is no ‘finish line’ for digital transformation, we can set targets. There are fewer than 1,000 working days until 2020, and we want to see as many of these objectives realised as we can. That means there is a lot of work for us to do. And, there is a lot to be excited about. It won’t be easy, and we may not see instant results, but we know that what we’re doing is important. A brilliant foundation has been laid. And we’re more than ready to take the next steps as we look towards GDS year 6, and beyond.

Follow GDS on Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for email alerts.

It is said that users don’t care about the structure of government. They don’t care which department does this or which agency does that.

In the Standards Assurance team we have the same approach. We don’t see technology projects in isolation from the rest of the department, or government. We look at them and ask: how can we make this better? We have a mandate to help and we will.

We are incredibly passionate about saving money by supporting great technology projects. About using our cross-government perspective to uphold the standards that will enable government to transform.

This year, by working collaboratively across government, we have demonstrated our value.

What we achieved

We help departments through digital service assessments and spending controls.

For controls, last year’s published savings figures set a precedent. This year, our team of 9 people, working with all central government departments, is proud to state confirmed savings of £339 million for the 2015 to 2016 financial year.

This figure works out as roughly equal to 5 hospitals, 19 new schools or 10,889 police officers.

What this means for departments

These are not just savings delivered by the Standards Assurance team. These are savings for government departments.

More importantly they are a testament to departments using government's standards: the Technology Code of Practice and the Digital Service Standard. They ensure departments and their service teams have flexibility in their technology choices, meeting their needs without being locked into long and costly contracts.

We’re not finished yet

It’s not about making existing things a little bit better: it’s about completely rethinking what we do and helping government to do it.

The next question naturally is: how? It’s about supporting government teams to build better services for less. To disaggregate contracts, to make use of Digital Marketplace appropriately for buying technology, to build prototypes instead of writing long procurement documentation, and aligning with the Technology Code of Practice.

We’ll be talking more in upcoming blog posts. If we can make savings in the heart of government, the lessons learnt can be applied and borrowed to help elsewhere. Whether that may be healthcare or local councils or other areas entirely.

Our next steps

We’ve been listening to departments to look at better ways to assess money and assure digital services. For instance, since 2010, we’ve been working with departments using a controls framework that was pivotal. We can now improve that process, to help us engage earlier and spend time where it’s needed most.

We’ll be making use of government’s improved and matured capability to understand how and where we can speed things up. We have outlined how we are already doing this through our communities work to change the cogs of government.

We understand the layers of internal governance that departments currently go through. We want to ensure that GDS doesn’t add another layer, while making sure we add value by sharing our knowledge of the controls and assessment process.

Earlier this year we conducted a discovery into our digital service assessment process. We blogged about the discovery in June, and recently posted about its alpha. The transformation of this process, like spending controls, is going to take a while. It’s important we get it right by redeveloping it with departments.

When we get these mechanisms built, and built right, we’ll continue to assess and assure technology and digital services. We can then help to release similar, if not better, levels of savings.

Our aim is that the process will become simpler, clearer and much faster.

We are making these changes through our cross-government standards and advice community. If you are in a government department you can sign up now to join.

Follow GDS on Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for email alerts.

A recent product manager career path workshop

I recently rejoined GDS after 3 years away – at the University of Bath and the Scottish government.

Back then I was an associate product manager. I’m now the full-time Head of the Product and Service Manager Community.

I’m excited to be back at GDS to serve a community of product and service managers in the UK, both in GDS and around government. It’s vital that these experts are connected with one another, their skills are shared and they stay excited about their work.

After 3 years away from GDS, things are certainly different. In this post, I’d like to share the changes I’ve noticed, explain the importance of communities of practice and invite you to get involved.

What’s new

Three years ago there were just a handful of product managers in government, and most of them worked at GDS. I was one of them. We were mostly referred to as product managers but a few of us were associate product managers. Some of our products were in beta, but most were alphas or in early discovery.

Today, product and service managers are found in government departments across the UK and at all levels. Some are in their first post-university roles. Others have experience stretching decades outside of government.

There are many live products and they have gone through several iterations since first moving into a ‘business as usual’ phase. The pace of improvement is so fast that some of yesterday’s promising new products are now being retired.

These days, product and service management is an accepted and sought-after specialism. The role is given as much weighting as designers, developers and user researchers.

Communities of practice

Other job families – technical architects, performance analysts and delivery managers – established communities of practitioners long before product and service managers.

Communities of practice help to hire people, move them to the right projects at the right time, and assist with professional development and performance management. They also meet up to share insights and practice so that product and service managers keep getting better at their jobs by learning from one another.

This is particularly important when we consider that product and service managers lead teams and are ultimately responsible for the success of their products and teams.

The product and service manager community is relatively new, so it’s taking shape, but luckily we have friends in the other communities who can help us. We can also learn from one another by spending more time talking and working together beyond our product, programme and organisational boundaries.

Let’s get together

There are lots of opportunities to get together as a cross-government community. The simplest ways to do so are our product and service manager mailing lists and Slack channels. Leave a comment if you want to be involved.

There are also regular meet-ups, such as the monthly Product People event on Monday 23 January. It’s open to people across government, so get in touch if you want to come attend or speak at another upcoming event.

While this is a good start, we can do more.

To see the way forward, we sometimes have to look sideways. I’ve been spending time with product and service managers in other communities, departments and agencies. I’ve been able to experience their approaches firsthand and talk about how we can work as a happy and productive cross-government community. But I’d love to see more.

On that note, can I buy you coffee?