In the coming weeks, you will notice that it’s much quieter than usual on this blog and all the other blogs run by GDS. It’s because between midnight on Friday, 21 April and the general election on 8 June is the pre-election period.

This means that we only communicate essential information, in line with the general election guidance for civil servants. This applies to @GOVUK on Twitter, this blog, and any other GDS blogs and social media channels.

While we’re on the subject of elections, don’t forget to register to vote. You can do it online and the deadline is 22 May. It takes about 5 minutes to register.

The work of GDS to address the digital diversity problem is ongoing. Part of this effort is making sure that it champions difference. Last year, we decided that “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”.

To support this pledge, it's important that we're encouraging and enabling women across the organisation to feel confident speaking publicly. In this blog post, we’d like to tell you about a new peer-led initiative we’ve been developing to usher more women towards the podium – Break into Public Speaking.

Break into Public Speaking

I’m a creative writer at GDS and I led the initiative jointly with GDS developer Rosa Fox and Open Source Lead Anna Shipman, who are both experienced public speakers. Together, we have a solid grounding in what it takes to craft and deliver an interesting, accessible talk. And, how to get accepted to deliver it at an event. With Break into Public Speaking, we wanted to pass on this knowledge, and encourage a new group of women from GDS to go out and represent our organisation.

Our first job was to look at the issues holding women back from applying to speak that could be tackled in sessions. To do this, we circulated a survey to all potential course participants, asking them about what would discourage them from public speaking. 

Some of the concerns they expressed were:

• not knowing what to talk about, or feeling like they didn’t have anything to say
• not knowing how to tackle conference submissions
• difficulty structuring talks
• general anxiety around public speaking

Based on these responses, we drafted a 6-week plan that would allow us to cover these areas over the course of hour-long lunchtime sessions. Our objective was that over 5 weeks, members would be supported in developing, structuring and rehearsing a 5-minute talk, then delivering it in week 6. Staff from across GDS would be invited to come and act as the audience and the talks would be filmed.

Six weeks to becoming a polished presenter

We organised Break into Public Speaking as follows:

Week 1: Thinking about ideas for talks, and identifying interesting areas for people to present on.

Week 2: Researching subject matter and making the first drafts of talk structure.

Week 3: Drafting rough talks and arriving on a final structure.

Week 4: Writing talk abstracts which could be used as part of a submission for an event. As well as written abstracts, we arranged for members to be filmed as they delivered their pitch.

Week 5: Final practice of talks, with feedback given by organisers.

Week 6: Delivering and filming the 5-minute talks in front of a wider GDS audience.

Evaluating the course

After the presentations in week 6, we sent a follow-up survey to the participants to help us plan potential future sessions.

One aspect of the workshops that participants found very useful was having the opportunity to get feedback from experienced presenters, in a forum that felt “safe” and encouraging. All participants said that their confidence in presenting had improved as a result of the workshops.

There were also a couple of ideas for how we might improve in future sessions. One participant mentioned that they would have enjoyed hearing from experts outside of GDS, and also asked for more practical exercises to help them to develop as a speaker. Another would have liked to have had the chance to look at outstanding examples of talks led by female speakers for inspiration.

Overall, we found the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, but one of our favourite comments was this one:

“It was the first time I've felt I might one day be comfortable speaking publicly, and maybe even enjoy it! Thank you.”

Looking ahead

We would like to run this course again in the future, rolling it out to a wider range of future speakers. We’d like to  help members of the GDS LGBT+ and BAME groups get their voices heard. And, we’d love to get more experienced presenters to come and support the sessions, from both inside and outside of GDS. If we’re serious about being the change we want to see, this has to be a collaborative effort.

As for the members of the inaugural Break into Public Speaking, several have told us that they hope to do their first bit of public speaking in the next few months. Three have already been accepted to go out and represent GDS at external events this summer. We hope they’ll be back to Break into Public Speaking in the future too, helping us coach a new diverse crop of speakers.  

There was a bit of a buzz at GDS on Tuesday as we welcomed our new minister Caroline Nokes to the new home of GDS in Whitechapel.

This was an early chance for the minister to get a deeper understanding of how GDS is supporting the delivery of digital transformation in government and to take a look around our new offices.

The minister was keen to make the most of the opportunity to talk to staff and learn more about some of the projects that the GDS teams are working on.

Guided by GDS Director General Kevin Cunnington, the minister was introduced to members of staff and spoke with them about the programmes that they are involved in.

Holly Ellis, Director of Capability for the Digital, Data and Technology Profession spoke to the minister about GDS’s work helping to building digital, data and technology capability across government, including the GDS Academy flagship nationwide skills programme.

The minister also met the Service and Design Assurance team, headed by Nic Harrison. Louise Downe, Deputy Director for Service Design and Standards, spoke about the work that GDS is doing to make sure that services are accessible to everyone.

Milan Bogunovic, Service Owner for the Digital Marketplace, introduced the minister to the ways in which Digital Marketplace is reducing the barriers for small businesses to sell to government. And the work being done on model contracts in partnership with Crown Commercial Service to increase transparency and stamp out corruption.

Next on the agenda was an introduction to the  Better Use of Data team. Sue Bateman explained how GDS is supporting government colleagues to make better decisions by giving them the skills they need to commission and interpret data science and performance analytics.

After meeting with the GDS senior management team, the minister met with GDS Head of User Research John Waterworth. He spoke with her about user research practices across government, and the importance of building and supporting the growing community of user researchers in departments and agencies.

The minister certainly seemed to enjoy her visit and expressed her excitement at the prospect of working with GDS:

"The UK government is one of the most digitally advanced in the world, and I am excited to be playing a part in driving forward development in this area.

"It is vital that government continues to encourage more people to go online, so they can access the guidance and services they need – as well as reducing the cost of delivering public services. The Government Digital Service plays a leading role in making that happen."  

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We’ve been working on a project we’ve called Finding Things, which we’re now calling Group and Transform Content. Its aim is to make it easier for GOV.UK users to find the content they need on the site. The results are now starting to become visible to users.

The work we’ve carried out is not just about taxonomy, navigation or search. It’s about working across all these things. It’s about letting users interact with the site better. It’s about breaking down the siloed content. And it’s about letting users easily move around the site in a way they couldn't do before.

As it says in the Government Transformation Strategy we need to ‘transform the relationship between citizens and the state – putting more power in the hands of citizens and being more responsive to their needs’. Our work on GOV.UK will do just this – it will put more power in the hands of our users and it will be responsive to their needs.

The silos had been there since the start

GOV.UK launched in 2012. Which means we’re GDS’s most mature digital product.

But it’s easy to forget how quickly we launched. And how much work we’ve had to do since then. We transitioned 300+ websites onto one platform in 15 months. That meant we didn’t have the time or the opportunity to look properly at how that content fitted together.

And because each organisation’s website moved on to GOV.UK separately, that content came onto the site siloed and has remained siloed. And there are now more than 300,000 individual items on GOV.UK.

A number of interconnecting challenges

This siloed content structure has led to several challenges for users. It means that it is harder than it should be for them to navigate through GOV.UK. It can be challenging for users to find the content they need. And it isn’t always easy for them to work out where they are on the site.

There were three main reasons for this:

• our navigation can be hard to understand
• users aren’t always given a clear indication of where they are on the site
• the tagging system for content – the taxonomy – is too broad for users and not well understood by publishers

These are all important issues. But they couldn’t each be tackled in isolation. Each one relates to each other. We have to make sure the taxonomy supports the navigation, which supports the user journey, which then has to make sense for the taxonomy.

So it’s fair to say this has been a pretty major project, with lots of moving parts.

Starting with the taxonomy

In 2015 we set up the multidisciplinary Finding Things team to look after this work. It was the biggest single team on GOV.UK. The end goal of this team was to make GOV.UK joined up and really easy for users to understand.

We started by working to create a single-subject taxonomy. So that all content on GOV.UK could be tagged based on the type of subject it covered, rather than the department it came from. We trialled this approach with the ‘education’ topic.

We worked closely with the Department for Education (DfE) and its agencies to create the subject topic and to make sure the navigation would work with this.

We did things like hold a tagathon day, where education publishers tagged more than 3,000 things in one day and fed back on the new taxonomy. And we worked with the DfE and its agencies to audit and improve the content it was publishing. They removed or improved more than 1,000 pieces of content as a result.

This close collaboration was vital because the success of this project will largely be down to the quality of the content – and this content will be provided by departments. So we needed to work with them to make sure the taxonomy and the content were as good as possible.

Redesigning the navigation

At the same time we looked at how we could improve the navigation to make it easier for users to find the content they needed – and to help users understand where they were on the site.

We user-tested several new navigation elements, including:

• introducing a consistent breadcrumb trail with a link showing the user which page they are currently on
• organising topics in a grid so it is easy to see the breadth of content
• iterating an accordion design that had been developed by the Service Manual team

Rolling out the changes and improving the user journey

We’ve now launched the new taxonomy in beta. We have a branch the covers the government’s education offering, with all relevant content tagged to it.

The new GOV.UK education topic

We’ve also put the new navigation into A/B testing on the ‘education’ topic. We’ve carried out extensive user research on it, but there are things we can only learn by looking at how the navigation is used. We have set up a performance framework and we’ll be monitoring the results closely and iterating based on our findings.

If this new taxonomy and navigation performs well, we’ll look to roll them out across GOV.UK and bring in more topics and themes. This means we’ll be working closely with government publishers – as we did with the DfE – to ensure that this new approach works for them and to help them improve their content.

And it means users will have a GOV.UK site that takes all of government’s content and makes that content clear, easy to find and easy to navigate around.

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It’s LGBT+ Pride until 9 July and people from GDS will be joining the Pride in London march to mark the event.

Pride is important because it’s an annual celebration of openness and inclusion. But at GDS, building an open and inclusive culture is something we work on continually.

We do this through talking regularly and publicly about diversity – as well as having policies on the issue. We do this through initiatives like encouraging more women to feel confident in public speaking. And we even use our physical environment to send out a message of inclusivity.

All this work is important, because it helps create an environment where people can feel confident to be themselves at work. Where they can bring their whole selves to work.

For this blog post – and to mark this year’s Pride – we asked LGBT+ people and allies working at GDS to tell us why it’s so important to build an open and inclusive culture and what it means to them.

Lou Downe, Deputy Director of Service Design and Standards

I feel immensely privileged to work in and contribute to such an open and inclusive environment here at GDS. There's no way to do your best for such an important cause when you're not yourself.

As a gay and gender non-binary person in a leadership role, I've never felt pressured to conform to a dominant culture – our dominant culture is one of fairness and inclusivity.

It's important to be visible and open – even when you're not certain about your own identity - so that others can feel as free as you do to be themselves. We can only have fairness if everyone takes part.

Laurence Berry, Interaction Designer

I joined GDS around the time everyone was getting ready for Pride 2016 and the window vinyls, rainbow bunting, laptop stickers and posters have been around ever since. Several new joiners have told me how positive the environment makes them feel.

GDS is a place where I’ve never hesitated to be completely open, honest and happy, and I’m really proud to be part of an organisation that not only values diversity but wears those values on its sleeve (or walls, ceilings, windows and laptops, to be more specific).

I feel confident enough now to do more to help everyone – not just people like me – feel included and supported in the same way.

Laura Martin, Senior Web Operations Engineer

It is essential that I have trust with the people I work with, and trust works both ways. If I didn't bring my full self to work, we could never have that degree of trust.

Working in an open environment where I am able to fully express myself means not only feeling comfortable at work, but also being able to fully achieve my potential.

Alan Maddrell, Senior Content Designer

I want the people I work with to be comfortable. In a modern society, we shouldn’t have to concentrate on concealing who we are – it’s distracting, it’s tiring and it makes us unhappy.

Having an environment that’s consciously inclusive is a big part of helping people to feel comfortable at work but it’s something we have to actively work at all the time. Visibility is really important and I’ve seen GDS is getting better at this.

Rory Smith, Product Manager

Bringing my whole self to work is something I risk taking for granted now. But there was a time when I wasted energy policing the persona I presented to the world, to keep parts of the real me bottled up inside. I felt that the real me wasn't a person other people wanted.

And all that wasted energy was a distraction from doing a better job, having a bigger impact and being the best that I could be. And that's why an open and inclusive environment matters: being my whole self means I do better, at everything.

Hannah Roe, Fast Stream User Researcher

When I joined GDS the rainbow bunting everywhere really struck me. It was an indication that the culture is really welcoming. Things like the bunting are put up by the teams themselves – so they’re more meaningful than generic HR posters.

This open culture inspired me to apply to attend a Lesbians Who Tech conference. I had to get management approval to do this, but I felt very supported through this process and I also felt that everyone understood the value of it. I’m hoping to use the connections I made at the conference to set up future GDS LGBT+ events.

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Jamie Edwards is a user researcher within the Customer Insight team at Intellectual Property Office (IPO).

Apply to register a design on GOV.UK

We have recently passed a ‘live’ service assessment for our new digital application service for registered designs. Whilst IPO already has a number of core transactional online services, the ‘Apply to register a design’ service is the latest digital service developed to meet user needs.

What is it for?

The ‘Apply to register a design’ service went to public beta in September 2015, replacing the previous paper application process.

You can register the look of a product you’ve designed to stop people copying or stealing it. The look of your design includes the appearance, physical shape, configuration and decoration.

Registering your design protects any aspect of it and gives you the right to prevent others from using it for up to 25 years.

User research, testing and feedback

A wide variety of user research has been conducted on the service, before and after it went live.

We’ve conducted focus groups, external testing with private applicants and attorneys, and conducted assisted digital and accessibility testing.

Users valued the ability to apply to register a design online. Those who tested the service found it easy to use and navigate.

However, one thing that was missing was the option to save a draft of their application so that they could return to complete it later. This has now been implemented within the live service.

Testing for accessibility

As we tested the service for accessibility, we discovered that some of the headings used on the ‘Apply to register a design’ pages were not as logically structured as they could have been.

For example, inconsistent formats were used where an h1 heading was followed by an h4 heading. This caused some difficulty and confusion as users progressed through the site, and it was picked up by all screen reader testers regardless of the software type they were using.  

Sarah Combstock, a fellow user researcher at IPO, wrote a blog post discussing this accessibility testing in more detail on the IPO blog.

Rapid take-up

What was previously a cumbersome and error prone paper-based process, is now a much more efficient, user-friendly system that our customers were quick to embrace – 69% of applications were filed using this service in March 2016 and this has grown rapidly to 98% in April 2017.

Despite the increase in the volume of applications, we are examining and registering new designs more quickly than ever. This is because the avoidable customer errors have largely been eliminated.

As a result of this, in October 2016 we were able to pass on our cost savings to our customers in the form of reduced application fees.

GDS assessment

We were therefore delighted when we passed our GDS live assessment on 26 April 2017. The panel was particularly impressed that all recommendations from the beta assessment had been adopted. They also noted the passion of the multidisciplinary team who will continue to iterate and improve the service in live, led by the designs service manager.

GDS design and style guides have been followed throughout the service and the assessment panel described the ‘migration from a largely paper-based, error-prone process to an exemplary digital service’.

What’s next?

The work doesn’t stop here. There is a backlog of work aimed at improving the service.

The team have been looking into digital registration certificates. This would result in certificates being emailed to the applicant, replacing the current process of being issued by post. As designs are being examined and registered within 3 days, emailing design registration certificates would again increase the efficiency of the service we provide for our users.

We will continue to iterate this service for our users so we would welcome your further feedback to help us with this service going forward.

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I joined the Government Digital Service (GDS) as Director of Capability, for the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) profession in April.

My job is to lead the cross-government strategy to help departments recruit, develop and retain the right people and skills needed to transform public services.

I’ve worked in the digital industry, in both the private and public sector for 18 years. Before joining GDS, I was interim Chief Operating Officer for DDaT at the Home Office. Prior to that, I was the Deputy Director for Digital Delivery.

What is the digital, data and technology profession

Our profession currently represents about 17,000 digital, data and technology specialists across government.

From developers to designers, analysts, data scientists and many more, these are the people whose talent and skills make government transformation a reality. They’re the people working on some of the world’s largest and most complex technical projects.

The challenge of our profession nationwide is to scale up in line with our ambitions as a digital government.

Building capability within departments

When I joined the Civil Service in January 2016, I was very interested in the challenges impacting DDaT delivery. A significant one being the people and the skills – what we call ‘capability’ – and everything that sits around it: career progression, pay, learning and development, attraction, culture and the diversity of the DDaT workforce.

At the Home Office, my team worked on tactical solutions to address some of the immediate issues we faced in building our capability.

For example, we improved our workforce planning and recruitment processes. We tested job descriptions for gender parity, and we made use of the GDS Academy. We also developed an internship programme, enabled school girls to participate in work experience, and much more. Some of this work was exemplary and it made a difference, though in small volumes.

Wholesale change

Individually, department by department, there are many exemplary changes being made to address the workforce challenges, and we learn a lot from one another. My fear, however, is that we will only make a small dent in what is a significant challenge to government as a whole if we continue in this way.

We need a high volume of DDaT professionals to deliver digital transformation. We need meaningful and long-lasting intervention and wholesale change, to make more than just a dent in the challenge.

Strategically addressing the capability challenge and building common solutions for common challenges is an enormous enabler for government. Departments should be able to focus on delivery rather than the resources needed to support it – and this is my motivation for taking on my new  role. I want to enable this wholesale change.

We’ve laid the foundations

The DDaT Profession team’s role is to lead the change, and to represent all DDaT professionals across government. Its role is also to support departments to solve the problem once, and on a scale that has not been attempted before.  

I’m fortunate that a lot of work to enable this change has been carried out in the lead-up to me taking on this role. Our work, which includes the development of a common DDaT Capability Framework for government, is the foundation for implementing change.  

Adopting the Capability Framework across government enables us to be far more strategic than we could previously have been. We can recruit once for government, we can identify common skills gaps and design specific activities to address them. We can track our progress, measure success and iterate our solutions.

What’s next

Our priorities are now to:

• embed the foundations that have been designed with the Capability Framework across departments
• build out the learning and development offer through the GDS Academy
• build a cross-government view of DDaT capability across government, identifying those hot spots for capability
• grow our approach to emerging talent
• trial recruitment ‘once for government’ for DDaT roles

The potential is enormous, the outcomes should change the landscape of the profession, and I’m really excited to take on the challenge.

Share with us concepts that have been successful that could be rolled out across the profession.

You can also visit our Capability Framework on GOV.UK and send us your feedback to help us make this better.

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Earlier on in my career as a content designer someone once said to me that no one reads government websites for fun. When you work on GOV.UK every day, it can be easy to forget what it’s like for someone who isn’t as familiar, someone who needs something urgently, or someone who needs to do a thing with government before they can get on with the rest of their ‘to do’ list.

Even though I haven’t set up a business myself, I know that browsing more than 50 pages to do so is the opposite of fun.

In a recent project to improve guidance for new businesses, we reduced that number of 50 down to 16 pages. As a result of our changes, we observed:

• a 25% increase in clicks to services that people need to use when setting up businesses – showing that more people were finding what they needed
• a 5% decrease in average numbers of pages per session to get to those services – showing that users were getting there more quickly

Of course, we didn’t set out to get rid of a specific number of pages. We started with user needs and talked to people from the very beginning and throughout the project.

Start with needs

We started with fresh pieces of paper, post-its and minds. For example, we had a feeling that ‘Avoid and report anti-competitive activity’, whilst important, wasn’t the first thing that sprung to people’s minds when starting a business.

We reviewed existing user research that helped give us an understanding of how people think, and go about starting a new business. Their actions, emotions and pain points were recorded on experience maps. One of the main findings was that their interactions with government were limited to compliance-driven needs. These were seen as peripheral to users’ mental model of starting a new business.

We combined these findings with data on what users are searching for and looking at now and drafted a list of user needs. We then talked to more people in the process of setting up their business. This helped us refine the list of user needs and confirm what the priorities were for our users:

I’d never go to government for help and advice, no… When it comes to tax, and limited company, then I’d go to government.

Users don’t care who does what, so we need to work together

When I say ‘we’, I don’t just mean Government Digital Service (GDS). GOV.UK content for the general public and small businesses is called ‘mainstream’. This is published and maintained by GDS, who work with government departments and agencies to ensure the facts are right.

But people don’t care about internal processes – they just want to ‘do the thing’ (for example, set up their limited company, or register for self-assessment).

We’ve always worked together to:

• validate user needs
• identify further pain points with existing content with ‘cognitive walkthroughs’
• develop content plans
• review, redesign and rewrite content
• check the facts
• plan for major changes (unpublishing, redirecting)
• establish evaluation frameworks

‘We’ included content designers, user researchers and subject experts from Companies House, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, HMRC and GDS.

Be bold and unpublish

It can be nerve-wracking removing content that’s been there from the very early days of a website. It might be well-established in search engine results, have lots of referrals from other sites, have thousands of unique page views a day. However, if the findings from user research and analytics suggest that it’s not working, then you have two options:

1. Do nothing, learn nothing.
2. Be bold, do something and learn from it.

This is easier said than done. We found that real quotes and videos from user research helped show that change was needed. We also visited and talked to business support helpline advisers to share new content with them and listen to their feedback.

It’s also useful to make it clear:

• how users will be redirected from any pages you’re removing
• that you plan to measure the impact of the change
• that your solution isn’t etched in stone and you’re open to trying something else if the new approach doesn’t work

Talk to users, then talk to them again

We talked to people setting up businesses throughout this project, not just once. Not only was I inspired by those starting a new venture, I learnt something new every time and was motivated to make improvements after every session.

A screenshot of the 'Set up a business' page on GOV.UK

The last round of user research showed that the guidance provided on setting up business types is clear and, despite some minor issues, users were clearer about what to do for each business structure. We met people who hadn’t fully decided, and in most cases they felt that the content made them more confident about the best structure for their business:

It’s clear and easy to use. I could have written that myself.

Unlimited partnership

One of the most positive experiences on this project was the way in which we were able to draw on evidence from both data and user research to make the case for change. And this doesn’t stop when we hit the ‘publish’ button (or the ‘unpublish’ button).

We’ll keep evaluating how well GOV.UK is meeting the needs of people starting a business in the UK, and collaborating with our colleagues across government to make it better. We’ve also shared feedback on GOV.UK search with the teams working to improve how people find things.

We’d welcome your feedback on the ‘Set up a business’ pages on GOV.UK.

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Across government, departments are beginning to realise not only the value of the data they hold, but also how they can use data science to make more effective, data-informed decisions.

The Government Data Science Partnership is a collaboration between the Government Digital Service (GDS), Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Government Office for Science. It was formed to help government realise the potential of data science. And to support the development of skills and tools to kickstart greater take-up across departments and agencies.

How are we supporting the community?

In the past year, we’ve been focused on building data science capability, working with departments to develop projects, delivering training to build new skills and facilitating a thriving community of interest.

Expansion of the Data Science Accelerator programme

We’ve expanded the Data Science Accelerator. It’s a capability building programme which gives analysts from across the public sector the opportunity to develop their data science skills. They do this by working on real business challenges with the support of experienced mentors.

This year, we’ve scaled our Data Science Accelerator hubs across the UK from three to five. Our hubs are in London, Newport, Bristol, Sheffield and Newcastle, and to date over 60 civil servants have graduated from the Accelerator programme.

The first Government Data Science Conference

In April 2017, the partnership hosted the first Government Data Science Conference. We brought together over 250 data scientists, analysts and policymakers from across government to share knowledge and best practice, and to learn from each other. The conference featured over 30 talks.

Our colleagues from the Department for Transport spoke about how they’re trialling using a mixture of natural language processing and topic modelling to automate some of the otherwise time-consuming manual work needed to collate and analyse policy consultation responses.

Greg Haigh from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy talked about a challenge his department faced to reach the almost 2.5 million households living in fuel poverty who are eligible for support. His team developed a machine learning algorithm using data from the English Housing Survey, National Energy Efficiency Data Framework and Ordnance Survey to identify the areas that would require support.

We also heard from other government organisations on how they’re working to create a data-informed culture. David Dorrell from the Ministry of Justice talked about the three-year journey HM Prisons and Probations Service has taken to set up data science and analytics capability.

Our colleagues from Defence Science and Technology Laboratory spoke about how they’re embracing open source and collaboration by launching an open data science challenge, which they’ll be working on with Kaggle.

At a regional level, Plymouth Council told us how they’re taking an open and community-focused approach to data and digital innovation in town planning, on a limited budget.

The Royal Statistical Society’s Data Science Section led a discussion featuring experts from academia and industry. It was about how we can build multidisciplinary teams of adaptive data scientists and analysts alongside decision makers who understand the value of data and can effectively commission projects.

Collaboration on the data science career path in government

In March, the Digital, Data and Technology profession published a capability framework for 38 DDaT roles, creating a common set of roles, skills and career paths that every government department can use. The Government Data Science Partnership collaborated to establish the career path for data scientists in government as part of this work. We hope this will help recruit and develop data scientists in a consistent way by starting with a common understanding of the role.

Supporting the cross-government data science community

In addition to our annual conference, we’ve been growing the cross-government data science community of interest by holding regular show-and-tell events. These events bring together data scientists, analysts and policymakers interested in better use of data.

We host the cross-government data science Slack channel where people share ideas, problems and recommendations with over 600 members. And we send out a monthly data science newsletter.

How can we support you?

Our focus this year is to build data science capability across government and improve data literacy among non-analysts.

Building data science capability across government  

We’re connecting data scientists across government to enable peer support and peer learning. This year we’re continuing to run regular data science community meet-ups and ONS Data Science Campus seminars in England and Wales. The Government Data Science Partnership will also host a second Government Data Science Conference in 2018.

To equip analysts and data scientists with the skills they need, GDS is continuing to run three cohorts of the Data Science Accelerator per year across the five UK regional hubs. The Government Statistical Service Learning Academy and the ONS Data Science Campus are leading the development of formal training and data science modules. They have created a new MSc in Data Analytics for Government open to all civil servants, and launched a pilot apprenticeship programme for data analysts.

The Government Data Science Partnership is also supporting data scientists across government to deliver best practice work by developing and disseminating data science standards, guidance and frameworks.

ONS are ensuring that learnings from academia and the private sector are brought into government through a series of collaborations with universities across the UK and the Alan Turing Institute. The Government Data Science Partnership is also supporting the third Data for Policy Conference, which is centred on the potential for algorithms and data science to transform government.

Data literacy for non-analysts

We’re planning to enable a range of audiences to understand the data science opportunity to tackle policy problems and to support services.  

For the policy profession, we’re working with Civil Service Learning to deliver a knowledge series on data and better decision making in September.  

We’ll also be scaling existing training, in particular the ‘Art of the Possible’ – a course aimed at senior civil servants, which explains what new tools and techniques are covered by data science and the opportunities they present, so that leaders can provide a clear vision for their staff.

To help operational and service delivery teams to understand how data science can help improve their services, we’ll be adding new data modules to the GDS Academy courses.

Get involved

Sign up to the cross-government data science community of interest here to learn more about events, projects and training we’ll be offering. The data science community of interest is open to UK civil servants only, so please register with a gov.uk email address.

How we started

The GDS Academy was previously known as the Digital Academy, which started at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in 2014. We built the project from the ground up to help people working in digital understand how government was working in new ways to build services for its users.

There was a real appetite for training and we grew rapidly. We developed a catalogue of courses to help our colleagues thrive in the world of agile and user-centred design.

Other departments and local authorities got in touch. Our alumni became a thriving community, working across departments and boundaries, continually improving their skills and putting user needs at the heart of everything that they did. We trained 5,000 civil servants in 3 years.

The new Academy

In late 2016, the minister announced that our Academy should expand to support the development of digital skills and awareness across the Civil Service. As a result, the Academy transferred to Government Digital Service (GDS) on 1 May 2017.

Annette Sweeney, Head of GDS Academy

This is a really exciting time for us. We’re now an integral part of the Digital, Data and Technology Profession, which represents around 17,000 professionals across government. We’re expanding nationwide, further increasing GDS's national presence, we’re reviewing our curriculum, and we aim to train more than 3,000 people per year.

Why enrol

Whether you’re a specialist or non-specialist civil servant, the GDS Academy will help improve your digital awareness by giving you a better understanding of the user-centred methodologies which are at the heart of government transformation.

We now offer 10 courses focused on digital and agile delivery, a subset of practitioner courses, a 10-day foundation, and a course in agile for more senior leaders.

You can train at our centres in Leeds, Stockport, London and Newcastle. If you’re in Scotland, you can train at our Scottish Government 'pop-up' in Edinburgh in September.  We also run pop-up academies for departments in different locations.

Shaping our offer for the future

The remit of the GDS Academy is quite different to that of the Digital Academy.

Our aspirations are to better support:

• career transition – by helping civil servants develop the skills they need to take on digital, data and technology roles
• career progression for digital, data and technology professionals – by helping you increase your skills and progress your career within government

To achieve this, we plan to:

• expand our curriculum to further cover the breadth of specialisms across digital, as well as data and technology
• have more locations and offer more pop-ups, as we broaden our offer
• develop deeper learning and development opportunities

Obviously we can’t do this alone so we’ve embarked on a discovery phase to involve specialist communities, government departments, agencies, academia and expert providers. We want to make sure user needs are met and we want to prioritise the skills we need to develop within the Civil Service as we shape the future curriculum.

I’m proud of all that we’ve achieved and can’t wait to see the GDS Academy break new grounds to support government in building the skills it needs to deliver its ambitious transformation.

For now, we’ll  keep you updated via Twitter and our GOV.UK page, where you can also book our courses.

You can also follow the head of the GDS Academy, Annette Sweeney @DigiSweeney.

Hard times

In 2007 I’d been in a dead-end job for 5 years. I kept applying for other work, but was rejected repeatedly. My mental health was declining and the promise of my 20s was fading away.

I’d never been keen on the idea of volunteering. I’d thought that I should probably make some money before I started giving my time away for free.

A friend of mine was a volunteer at  Westminster Youth Offending Team (YOT). They pressured me into going. At around the same time, a regular customer where I worked had been talking about restorative justice. The YOT showed me a video about a man who had escaped a life of violent crime by being confronted with the effects of his actions. I was convinced that restorative justice made a difference and signed up to volunteer.

An upstanding member of my community (panel)

My first role at Westminster YOT was that of a community panel member. I represented the local community in meetings between young people who had pleaded guilty to crimes in court and been given a referral order.  For 2 months, I attended training every weekend. We covered topics such as tackling prejudice, active listening and understanding how the youth justice system worked.

My role was to ensure that young offenders took responsibility for their crimes. I worked with them to agree how and for how long they should recompense society or their victims. Sometimes I participated in mediating between the two parties.

All of this resonated with me. I’m lucky to have grown up in an environment which was relatively privileged. I didn’t face the barriers and problems other people my age did. I had opportunity and support. I know that my life could’ve turned out very differently and I felt I owed these young people something.

Volunteering got me free skills and a job!

As soon as I updated my CV, I had a job offer from a well-known national children’s charity. I accepted the job and worked there for a year. Then the economy collapsed. My mental health slumped along with it. I couldn’t find work again. I scraped along. Some days my volunteering was the only thing that got me out of bed.

Jacob Bonwitt

Volunteering gave me a reason to get up. I was constantly building skills, including mediation, active listening, working with young people and a host of others. I started mentoring a young person at risk of becoming a young offender and found myself taking responsibility for an 8-year-old boy for two days a month, which was pretty challenging!

Skills for a career, volunteering for fun and making a difference

My career (and I) had several other peaks and troughs, and gradually I stopped working with the YOT. But the skills I gained there were still serving me well in everyday life, and in a variety of jobs. I ended up at GDS, where I worked my way up to become a user researcher. My active listening skills are a premium asset in this role.

I still volunteer outside of GDS. In 2015, I started cooking at the Food Chain and hosting people with HIV/AIDS. This keeps me happy as I love cooking and pleases the people I'm cooking for, giving them the chance to eat good healthy food in a friendly environment. I also volunteer in my local community, doing chores for people who have various difficulties. You don't need to join an organisation to make a difference. There are people that need help near you.

Volunteering at GDS

Since becoming gainfully employed by GDS, I’ve done a lot of work with our charity group. Using my contacts with another major charity, Comic Relief, we picked Dragon Hall as GDS’s charity as it is aligned with our own ambitions.

I recently delivered a session there, teaching young people design and agile skills for solving problems, which in turn is further enhancing my CV and improving the profile of my employers.

One of the good things about working in the Civil Service is that it encourages volunteering. You are given 3 volunteer days every year, with an extra 2 at the discretion of your line manager. That and the fact that if you have the skills, you can get an interesting job in a stimulating environment.

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

This post is based on a talk I gave earlier in the year about how we are using roadmaps in government.

Many civil servants are familiar with project plans. A project plan is a great tool for planning time, scope and cost when you have a high degree of certainty in your users, their problems, and your solution.

However, the development of services often requires us to operate in areas of uncertainty and work with agility. Roadmaps can be used at the team level, service level, and organisational level. They are great tools for making strategic decisions in spaces with low certainty. We can use them to maximise the value of public service for our users. We can set goals for our teams, reprioritise quickly, and work with senior leadership teams.

Here are 3 tips for getting the most out of roadmaps for your service from MOJ Digital and Technology.

1. Focus on value

A core principle of agile and lean theory is that products should seek to maximise value. Products should not be judged solely on their adherence to cost and delivery schedules, but also on their delivery of value. Product managers are responsible for maximising the value of products. They think about value at three levels:

• vision: what’s the big improvement in life for your users in the future?
• strategy: what are the incremental steps towards the vision?
• tactics: what are the actions that need to be  taken to complete each of the steps?

Roadmaps help us to work on the strategy for maximising the value of our products, breaking the vision down into incremental steps.

Your roadmap needs to take into account value for your users and value for your organisation. The user research community leads the work to define value for users, and the business analysis community leads the work to define value for your organisation. If you define the value of your service then you can prioritise the development that is most valuable.

2. Roadmap services (not solutions)

Focusing on value requires us to start being passionate about problems, not solutions.

Our organisation, portfolio and delivery teams all need to be thinking in terms of services, rather than solutions. But what does that actually mean?

Louise Downe, Deputy Director of Service Design and Standards at GDS, suggests that calling something ‘Statutory Off Road Vehicle Notification (SORN)’ leads to a focus on transactions that serve the needs of government, not users. 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 an activity that needs to be done. ‘Learn to drive’ describes a service. ‘Statutory Off Road Vehicle Notification (SORN)' describes a transaction. Why is this important?

Roadmaps are new for lots of people, who may be used to project plans that focus on solutions, milestones and costs. If you name your service after a solution then you’ll tend to frame the conversation in terms of a solution. If you name your service to describe its value then you’ll tend to frame the conversation in terms of a user and their needs, and focus on value. This sets the conditions for a roadmap to be truly useful.

3. Use your roadmap to set goals, not tell a team what to do

There are a lot of blog posts out there on roadmaps, with the GOV.UK team being particularly great at sharing their insights within government. Posts vary a lot in terms of things like roadmap format, or whether or not to include dates, or whether or not to include budget.

The important thing to remember is that there’s no right answer; do what’s best for the users of your service, your team, and your stakeholders.  One thing everyone tends to agree on is that roadmaps should focus on goals, benefits and objectives.  And, they should be used to challenge teams, rather than telling them what to do.

Objectives and key results are used in large organisations, and can be set to apply at every level. This makes them well-suited to building public services within government.

Jock Busuttil, my predecessor as Head of Product for Ministry of Justice, recently shared a good post about roadmaps in which he also talks about setting goals. He suggests that the goal of every step of a roadmap is to test a hypothesis that doing something will improve the value of a service.

Share your roadmap

There’s a full set of roadmap principles coming soon from the cross-government product community. One of these is likely to be that we should share our roadmaps publicly. So, why not start now? Please share your own roadmaps, and roadmapping tips, in the comments. We can use these to learn from each other how to get better at setting goals for our teams, and help improve public services for all of our users.

You can follow Scott on Twitter. Don't forget to sign up for our email alerts.

GOV.UK Notify – the government's digital communications platform – is fast becoming established in central government. 70 service teams (from 34 different organisations) have used it to send more than 12 million emails, text messages, and letters to their users.

We’re now ready to start offering Notify to local government.

Many of our 900 trial accounts are from local government service teams keen to start using Notify.

So we’re going to invite 20 service teams in local government to start sending messages. This means we can make sure everything works for these teams before we open it up for the rest of local government in a few months.

Local government needs for sending notifications are very similar to those of central government. During the invite-only period we’ll learn what’s different for local government in terms of branding and paying to use Notify.

Once we’ve made Notify available to all of local government, we’ll be looking to take a similar approach with the NHS.

If you’re in local government and you’re ready to start sending emails, text messages, or letters through GOV.UK Notify, then let us know now and we can invite you.

To improve our focus on delivery and the flexibility to sensibly reprioritise our work throughout the year, we’ve moved to a new way of working in the GOV.UK team.

We blogged about our old roadmap and explained how – despite the fact that we thoroughly reviewed progress and adjusted our roadmap every quarter – missions felt protracted and delivery was hard to show. We needed to improve that.

Our new approach is a better way to focus our energy. It also allows enough flexibility to change direction if needed.

As we’ve done since the beginning of GOV.UK, teams will continue to work in an agile way. However, work is now organised into quarter-long missions, each with a specific goal.

The scope of the mission is flexible but the length of the mission is fixed. No mission is longer than 11 weeks. It might be the case that a theme extends over the course of the year, but we want iterative and complete delivery every 11 weeks, in case we need to change direction or stop. This will also help us to continually deliver value.

We believe this length of time is sufficient to deliver the most value. We feel this structure allows us to build and develop products to a stable state, in a responsible way.

Product managers share what it’s like to manage and change scope to deliver in a fixed timeframe.

Luke Malcher, Product Manager, GOV.UK Benchmarking

When the mission started, I was quite new to the organisation. However, this new approach meant it felt like everyone was starting afresh.

It took some time to familiarise ourselves with the benchmarking mission, which is all about addressing challenges that users face with common user journeys on GOV.UK.

We were perhaps a little too cautious at the start when it came to agreeing what was valuable and achievable, but this will improve with experience.

We know that we'll get better at assessing this with every mission.

For example, we agreed to ship something small – an A/B test. We started to test our assumptions with real users. In benchmarking we realised we could get A/B tests shipped and completed quickly. This shaped the mission and made it easier to work out what we could do in time left.

I’m looking forward to taking our experiences and lessons learned into the next quarter.

Humin Miah, Associate Product Manager, GOV.UK Publishing Frontend

This was a completely new way of working for the team. We adapted by focusing on delivering the minimum viable product or improvement. We did this to maximise our learning opportunities throughout the mission.

We knew that the quickened pace might put pressure on the team. As a result, we implemented two methods to reduce this.

The first method is to use the 80/20 rule in our sprint backlog. 80% is mission-related work and 20% is non-mission work. The 20% includes upgrades or design changes we’ve been wanting to make for a while. This reduces scope and boosts team morale.

The second thing we do is we talk every month about our attitude to the mission. Discussions focus on specific categories, visualised with the team. These focused on the mission and the work we were doing.

It’s a great method to address concerns and adjust scope to keep the team strong, happy and committed to the work.

Mark McLeod, Product Manager, GOV.UK Search, Custom Formats

We spent the first 2 weeks of the mission trying to understand the challenges of measuring search performance. We then discussed and agreed what our goals should be for the mission.

By the third week, we developed a team roadmap of how we would achieve our goals in the remaining 8 weeks.

Our roadmap comprised a series of 2-week sprints. We accepted that this was only a best guess. We accepted the roadmap could change in size as we learnt more about the size and complexity of the work.

We learned at pace. For example, we wrote up stories with acceptance criteria for the first sprint. These were only high-level ideas of what we planned to work on in the final sprint.

We reviewed our roadmap, and adjusted our scope at the start of each sprint to better manage it throughout the mission.

Generally, this meant reducing the scope of what we had planned.

For example, we planned to measure both internal and external search. We soon realised that this was too ambitious and reduced the scope to focus on internal search.

We’ve learned that the scope must be flexible. We know we won’t get it right at the start of a mission and the scope will change. We will get better at refining this with every mission. Working in this agile way makes it easier to manage changing scope and deliver value to users early and often.

Does your organisation deliver in a fixed time frame? What have the challenges been for you? What’s worked well? Comment below.

The UK is part of the Working Party of Digital Government Officials, known as E-Leaders. It is a forum within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The forum enables governments to share experiences and seek solutions to common problems.

Since October last year, I’ve been leading one of the 'E-Leaders' thematic groups. The focus of the group was 'ICT procurement reform'.

My colleague Chad Bond, Deputy Director, Standards Assurance, supported me. Contributions also came from our counterparts in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Chile.

There are many practical challenges facing the public sector procurement and contracting. As it moves away from the traditional approach, we want to find solutions.

Why procurement?

We want to realise the vision for a digital government, a Brilliant Civil Service, and to create a vibrant, diverse economy of digital and technology suppliers.

In order for this to happen, we need a step change in public procurement and contracting.

We want to remove as much friction as we can from the procurement and contracting process.

This will attract the right suppliers. By 'right suppliers' I mean people who work in the right ways, with the right products, services and skills. It means we will deliver successful public sector programmes and projects together.

The procurement reform playbook

My thematic group is drafting a playbook for digital and technology procurement reform. It will help public sector organisations to reform their approach, and it will be open source.

We are interested in:

• opening up data throughout the procurement and contracting lifecycle
• encouraging more modular and agile approaches to contracting
• procurement transparency to help tackle corruption and improve value for money
• stimulating and accessing a more diverse digital and technology supply base
• encouraging more flexible, digital, agile and transparent interactions focused on joint delivery
• sharing and reusing platforms and components, and better practices for delivering successful programmes

Practical action: how you can take part

We are running an event in partnership with Crown Commercial Service (CCS), Digital Catapult. It will take place on 11 September.

The event will incorporate some short presentations, followed by hack-style sessions. There’s no pre-set agenda; attendees will shape the day.

Similar events are being organised by the other governments contributing to the thematic group. They will take place in their countries around the same date.

We’ll talk about our findings to develop the procurement reform playbook.

These types of events have been running in government for some time now. The One Team Government movement held a recent event.  One of its founders, Kit Collingwood-Richardson talks about it in this blog post:

Although talking is vital, we will be defined more by the things we do than the things we say. We will create change by taking small, measured steps every day...We will create chances for passionate reformers to get together, create ideas and take action.

Our event takes the same approach. We will bring together a broad cross-section of the Civil Service, and its digital and technology suppliers.

We want to have an open discussion about making  procurement and contracting more effective for a digital government. We want to talk to:

• digital, data and technology policy makers and delivery teams
• procurement and commercial policy makers and practitioners
• micro, small, medium and large providers of digital and technology services

We want to hear from you. We want to know what’s most important to you and the things that aren’t working so well. We want to identify how to remove friction from the end-to-end buying and selling process.

Sign up now to attend ‘Open procurement for a digital government’.

On 14 September 2017, applications will open for the digital, data and technology (DDaT) Fast Stream scheme 2018, aimed at graduates and existing civil servants. The scheme consists of 6 placements over 4 years. Fast streamers will work in up to 6 government departments, in various UK locations.

There’s no doubt that the DDaT Fast Stream is where we’ll see the leaders of the future emerge. As head of the DDaT profession, I’m hugely excited about this scheme.

Unique opportunities

Our colleagues across departments can be very proud of the steps they have taken to transform and build services that meet the needs of their users.

But we know there is a lot more to do, and to enable that we must continue to build a diverse, innovative workforce. With the challenges of Brexit, security, and improving how we use data, there’s never been a more exciting time to join the Civil Service. Nor more of a crucial time to ensure we recruit the best people possible. The DDaT Fast Stream has an important role to play in this.

With its unique learning and developmental package, as well as its career-enhancing potential, the Fast Stream scheme is very popular among new graduates. In 2016, The Times ranked the Fast Stream fourth out of its top 100 graduate employers.

Not just for graduates and tech experts

However, we’re not just interested in people fresh from university. We also welcome applications from people well established in their careers in the Civil Service.

Everyone has something unique to bring to the Fast Stream, and to get the kind of innovative, driven talent that we’re seeking, we look far and wide. For this reason, we don’t require you to have a technical background; you’ll learn everything you need on the job. And you’ll learn fast.

Building diversity into government  

It’s vital that we attract candidates that represent UK society as a whole. This means appealing to diverse candidates across all backgrounds. We’ve made progress in improving who we recruit in this respect, ranking number 12 out of 50 in the Social Mobility Employer Index, published in June 2017. The index recognises employers who have taken the most action to improve social mobility in the workplace. But we know there’s much more that can, and should, be done. And we’re doing our best to fix it.

What sort of work do DDaT Fast Streamers do?  

On the DDaT Fast Stream, participants gain a rich grounding in many different areas of digital. A typical placement might include innovative, large-scale and complex projects in fields like artificial intelligence, cyber security, data analytics and data science, or robotics. You might be involved in user research, or building web services and creating content for websites. You’ll also have the chance to train in agile methodologies at the GDS Academy. With the expertise you gain, you may even end up advising ministers on digital, data and technology policies.

Placements are available throughout the UK, giving Fast Streamers unique opportunities to learn quickly about, and adapt to, different kinds of challenges in government.

There are fixed roles for Fast Streamers working directly with me, and I have seen first-hand how varied their working days can be. I’ve also seen how quickly their expertise in digital, and confidence in their abilities, grows over the course of the placement. And I’ve seen many of them go on to rewarding roles in the Civil Service.

Skills that translate across the public and private sector

As technology develops at a rapid pace, employers both inside and outside the public sector are making digital talent a priority. The DDaT profession is the youngest in government, established in response to the growing need to hire and nurture the skills of the 21st century workplace in the Civil Service.  

The DDaT Fast Stream will help you to develop skills that employers will value, spanning a wide variety of specialisms. The skillset we aim to develop is one that will be useful to you throughout your whole working life. But more than that, it’ll put you in a position to do work that genuinely improves lives. And that's a tremendously important thing.

Although the Fast Stream is a 4-year commitment, we see it as the first chapter of an exciting long-term career in the modern Civil Service. Thanks to initiatives such as the GDS Academy, which allow you to continuously develop your knowledge and expertise as you progress, there will never be a point where your learning comes to a halt.

Register your interest

You can learn more about the scheme on the DDaT Fast Stream site. If you’d like to register your interest, please send us an email. This is an incredible opportunity for anyone looking to accelerate their career in digital. Whether you’re a graduate, or an experienced civil servant, I very much hope you’ll consider putting yourself forward.

The Digital Marketplace is transforming government procurement. We want to make it easy for suppliers to sell to government so that we can deliver great digital services.

We collaborate with Crown Commercial Service (CCS) to provide a service that connects cloud and digital suppliers with public sector buyers.

Recently we stopped publishing the spend data for the Digital Marketplace. We did this so we could move the data to its new home on GOV.UK.

This gave us the opportunity to look at how we use data and through looking at it, determine what’s important to our users.

Small businesses

Asked what government and tech leaders can do to help startups become scale-ups, Sherry Coutu CBE said in the Tech City's Tech Nation 2017 report:

First and foremost they can buy stuff from them!

As an indication that we’ve moved on from this, as of July 2017, total spend through the Digital Marketplace has exceeded £2.6 billion. Of this spend, 45% was through micro, small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The Digital Marketplace offers many SMEs their first chance to supply to government.

A contract with the government can help startups get funding, which helps them scale their business.

So far, £1.39 in every £3 spent through the Digital Marketplace has gone to SMEs.

Geographical locations of all suppliers on the Digital Marketplace, to August 2017

The European Union's definition of an SME is a point-in-time status based on its number of employees and its turnover or balance sheet. So as small businesses grow as a result of government’s spend with them, over time we’ll naturally see a change to that status.

As we push forward with CCS on public sector procurement reform, it's been fantastic to see the impact. More and more digital and technology suppliers are emerging as examples of economic growth.

This has created new job opportunities. It has encouraged the creation of new products and services using emerging technologies. It has also attracted inward finance from overseas companies and investors.

You can find a detailed breakdown of spend data for the G-Cloud, Digital Services, and Digital Outcomes and Specialists frameworks on the Digital Marketplace sales page on GOV.UK.

Making our data better

One of the key aspects of the Government Transformation Strategy relates to data. Specifically its ability to act "as the foundation upon which everything else rests".

As a result, we are looking at how we can improve and open up procurement and contract data.

As well as our work on the digital contracts alpha, we are looking at the implementation of the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS). It was recently approved by the Open Standards Board.

The OCDS enables the UK government to make data open. It makes it transparent and machine-readable throughout the process of planning, procuring, awarding and delivering public sector contracts. This includes spend data.

Spend data helps us to identify where we can better support digital and technology suppliers.

It shows the spread of supplier diversity across the UK, and where the UK taxpayer’s money is going. We use this data to design the Digital Marketplace in a way that meets our users’ needs.

For the time being, we’ll be publishing our spend data quarterly. We will determine how we can present it in a way that’s useful for suppliers, the rest of government, and citizens.

If you have any thoughts, comment below. You can follow the Digital Marketplace on Twitter. 

Alan Rider is a digital capability lead at the Department for Transport.

It can be tough to find the data you need to do a task. It’s not that it doesn’t exist or that someone is hiding it. It’s that it’s sometimes hard to find, and finding it takes a long time.

We suspected that was a problem for people working in the Department for Transport (DfT).

However, at that stage, it was an assumption. We carried out a discovery to check whether we were correct, and if we were, what we needed to do to fix it.  

Proving our case

We spoke to over 60 people across the department who confirmed this. It wasn’t just data sets they wanted to find, but they also wanted an expert to talk to.

In some cases they needed to talk to someone from the outset. They wanted to know what was available and how it should be used and interpreted.

When you’re not sure what you need or where to find it, you waste a lot of time and energy in pursuit of it. A simple way of seeing available data and tracking down an expert would free up time to focus on delivery.

Meet our personas

We created four personas. They represented users in policy, statistics, transport modelling and operational research. We set out their needs, mapped their user journeys and worked out where their pain points were.

Priya works in policy. To inform her work, she draws on the expertise of others in the department.

Simon works as a transport modeller. He constantly updates and improves his models, drawing on the best available data. His work is technically complex. He typically works on the same kinds of problems for a long time.

Charlene is a statistician. She takes raw data and processes it to produce statistical reports. She’s an expert on her data, and fields lots of incoming requests from the department and from the public.

Halil is an operational researcher. He provides analysis on a range of topics to decision makers and internal teams. He draws on a broad base of analytical disciplines.

Every picture tells a story(board)

Once we determined the user need, we worked with an external partner to help us as we moved into alpha.

We spoke to an extra 60 users in more depth. This enabled us to develop a set of storyboards  to explore their potential user journeys. This allowed us to understand how a data index could work in practice.

We developed paper prototypes and operational proofs of concept using the GDS frontend toolkit. These helped us test functionality and determine if the service was technically viable.

We developed an operating model to ensure the index was sustainable. We produced a delivery blueprint so that systems were in place to support it.

We built a pop-up agile workspace in a meeting area to promote the work and our agile approach. We used mock-ups, storyboards and a user research wall. We created a comfortable space to conduct  interviews that put people at their ease.

What did we find out?

We learned a number of things during the process.

Expertise was as important to users as access to the data assets

Sometimes it is necessary to restrict direct access to a data set and point users to a person to talk to about it first – usually the data owner. This protects both parties.

It’s important to understand what a user needs to decide if a data set is useful

People access the data set to see what’s in it, but what they’re really interested in is how suitable the form of information is to the current task. This could be a database, spreadsheet, document or visualisation. They also want to know what level of assurance it’s been through before they use it.

Once a user journey is understood, it’s important to get a working prototype, using real data, in front of users. The team integrated the GDS frontend prototype with cloud-based ‘search as a service’ technology.

This provided an operational proof of concept involving 600 real DfT data sets to support user research. It also demonstrated the value of the service and its technical feasibility.

It was important to develop an operating model in parallel

This helped us to build buy-in across the business. It also ensured that the information in the index is well maintained. Rather than invent new processes, we linked into existing processes and responsibilities.

It was hugely beneficial to have a dedicated agile space to work in

It helped us visualise the research findings, meet with users and run show-and-tells, which enhanced our work. Lots of visitors saw what a fully agile project looked like. This was still a bit of a novelty in the central department.

What’s next?

Having completed a successful alpha, we are now in the process of securing internal sponsorship and funding for the beta stage of the index. The benefits of demonstrating how an agile project like this can work are already paying dividends. We are now using the same approach as a model for other agile projects.

Other departments are asking us about our approach to developing the index and internal teams are learning from the process and looking to apply agile techniques to their projects.

If you want to know more, leave us a comment below. You can also follow the DfT on Twitter. 

For any service to be put in front of the public, it has to meet the Digital Service Standard, a set of 18 criteria.

One of the criteria is that all new source code is made open and published under an open source licence.

This goes hand in hand with our tenth design principle: make things open: it makes things better.

In this blog post, I explain why coding in the open makes things better.

It encourages good practice

When you know someone is watching, you tend to take greater care. You're more inclined to document your work clearly. You make sure your code is secure by keeping secrets separate from the code. You are polite and constructive in code reviews, and you follow good architectural principles.

In short: when other people can see your work, you tend to raise your game.

It makes collaboration easier

If code is open, it is easier to work on it with others. You don't need to give them special access or make complicated business arrangements. You don't even need to be in the same building.

For example, someone from 18F, the government agency that provides digital services to the government of the United States, was able to help a colleague from GDS with a code-writing problem.

It worked because both sides coded in the open. We also worked with the Australian Government to help them establish their own Digital Marketplace.

Closer to home, it makes it easier to work on the same code between departments.

External users can help make it better

Open code makes it possible for people who don’t work for you to make improvements to your code.

For example, members of the public made improvements to the Government Petitions Service. Someone added the scheduled date for debates. Someone else made a change to the signature counter to make it update in real time.

People can ‘scratch their own itches’. They can make the small improvements that aren't at the top of your list of priorities, and they can help make your code more robust.

Others can learn from your work

If your code is open, people can apply what you've learned from doing the work.

Skills Funding Agency used GOV.UK's Smart Answers code to build a tool for their apprenticeships service. It took less than a week.

Without the Smart Answers example to learn from, it would have taken at least two months.

It makes it easier to share standards

Open code makes it easy to follow other teams’ work. This promotes a common culture and way of working when you can see how other teams manage certain issues.

Anna Shipman (left)

Quite often, teams will make small improvements to other teams’ work. For example, a developer from GOV.UK made a correction to GOV.UK Verify.

GOV.UK publishes coding style guides. This makes it easy for everyone to find and stick to the same standards.

It improves transparency on government’s work

When code is developed in the open, you can see where public money goes.

It is a catalyst which encourages openness in other things. For example, the GOV.UK roadmap is open, and one of the teams on GOV.UK uses a public Trello board.

When there is an occasional outage on GOV.UK we investigate and publish a report. It’s important to show how we learn from mistakes.

It clarifies ownership

We want government to own and be able to make changes to its services, and lack of clarity on intellectual property (IP) can be a barrier to that.

Open coding from the beginning surfaces copyright and IP issues before work starts.

The Service Standard demands that code is published under an open source licence (at GDS we use MIT). Additionally, all the work we do as civil servants is Crown copyright.

In the past, government services have wanted to change a project but have been unclear about who owns the IP.

Clarifying the issue upfront is valuable. It means that departments can bring in a supplier to work on their alpha and then switch to another supplier for beta without losing their work.

They can even build up teams from many suppliers who can work on the code seamlessly.

It prevents supplier lock-in. Without clarification, the software created for you can be the thing that will prevent you from switching suppliers.

So resolving this can save a lot of money for government.

It helps make government technology seamless

People who move between departments can continue to work using the same tools as before. It saves time and money. They can share knowledge of projects they were working on, because it’s all open.

After someone moved from GDS to another department, they contributed to our single sign-on service.

Over time, it will make government technology seamless as people move towards the most useful tools.

It’s easier to code in the open than to open a closed repository

Coding in the open means you decide whether that code is suitable for publication as part of reviewing each small piece of work.

To open it later means having to go back through a body of work that has built up over time to make sure there is nothing that shouldn’t be made public, which can be significant extra work.

Make your own code open

Many people think that being able to reuse code is the biggest benefit of coding in the open. However, while reuse is a nice-to-have, I hope this blog post illustrates that there’s more to it than that.

Take a look at our open code and our guidance.

Join the conversation in person, in our #open-code channel on Slack or in the comments below. You can also follow Anna on Twitter.

GOV.UK Pay - the government’s secure online payment service - has now processed almost half a million payments, with a total value of over 20 million pounds, for central government service teams.

We offer end users a GOV.UK-branded payment experience designed to meet their needs, with payments routed to multiple Payment Service Providers (PSPs).

So far we’ve only made GOV.UK Pay available to central government bodies, but we’re now ready to start offering GOV.UK Pay to local government. Our product will help them:

• take online card payments and issue refunds
• ensure their payment experience meets the Digital Service Standard
• use payment processes that are fully Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant

If you’re in a central or local government service team, you can try GOV.UK Pay now. For more information visit our product page, or get in touch with the team.

Since our earliest blog posts about our work to make payments more convenient and efficient, we’ve heard from local government authorities keen to adopt GOV.UK Pay.

Our colleagues over at GOV.UK Notify recently announced their private beta with local government. We're now also ready to start a limited pilot with local government service teams. The pilot will help us understand how the needs of local government organisations differ from those of central government.

For example, we’ve introduced custom branding on our payment pages for organisations that are exempt from GOV.UK branding requirements. Teams will still benefit from payment pages designed to meet the needs of paying users – fully accessible with helpful inline error messages and a user experience optimised for mobile. But for those who need it, we now offer a payment experience that can be made consistent with the rest of your online service.

Anyone with a public sector email address can set up their own test account by visiting our new GOV.UK Pay product page and clicking on ‘See how to get started’. You can invite other members of your team to join your test service without any help from us.

For teams wanting to use GOV.UK Pay, technical integration takes just a couple of days. Once you've finished a test integration we can easily and quickly switch over to your live service. Our test and live accounts are both run on the same infrastructure.

Test accounts are free and unlimited, and you don’t need a contract with one of the underlying Payment Service Providers to try us out.

If you’re a local authority interested in taking online card payments using GOV.UK Pay, get in touch.

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