GDS has used pair programming since its inception. It plays an important role in building our services. I recently gave a talk titled ‘How to be a good pair’ and the warm reception of the talk inspired me to share my observations in a blog post. This guide will be useful to people who have experience with pair programming or mob programming and to people totally new to it.

The benefits of pair programming

Before I go through my tips for successful pair programming, it’s useful to understand why this way of working is important. In the Digital Marketplace team, we use pair programming to write higher-quality code, but also to share knowledge and help with team building.

Communicating with and understanding the needs of your pair partner is just as important as the code you work on. These sentiments are echoed in a blog post by Taros Aires, a senior consultant developer at ThoughtWorks.

Below I take a look at 6 steps to keep in mind for more pleasant and effective pair programming sessions.

1. Prepare

To prepare for the session, take the following steps:

• set aside time to do it – the amount of time you set aside will vary depending on your schedules (for example, the number of meetings you both attend), but I find that anything shorter than 2 hours feels constricted. Some of my favourite sessions have taken half a day, or even a (nearly) whole day (but please remember to take breaks!)
• check in with your partner – ask them how they feel; are they still in the headspace to go ahead with the session? Maybe they need to go slower today or could use some emotional support? It is very helpful to know these things before you start
• make a plan – before you start coding, talk about what you want to achieve during the session. Writing down objectives on post-it notes is a good way to plan your session
• get comfortable – choose a space comfortable for both of you, preferably not too loud. Check if both of you can comfortably read the screen contents and that the code is up to date and working on both machines (if you use two computers)

2. Work closely together

When you’re pair programming, the usual set-up is for one of you to be the driver and the other to be the navigator.

The driver writes code, the navigator looks out for mistakes, ensures you’re both on track and calls a halt if necessary to rethink where you are, where you want to get to and how to get there.

It’s important to work together as a unit to make sure you get the best out of the session.

As the driver, it’s your job to talk your partner through each step when you code and make sure that your partner remains engaged. If you’re unsure, ask them to paraphrase what is happening to ensure they do understand.

As a navigator, make sure you stay engaged and actively participate in the session. Keep up the discussion with your pair partner and make sure that you are both:

• following the plan
• writing the code test-first as per Test Driven Development (TDD) principles, if relevant
• cross-referencing with the story ticket when necessary

Your ways of working may change depending on who your partner is and that's ok.

3. Learn and facilitate learning

Things to pay attention to if you’re more experienced than your pair

If you’re pairing with a programmer who is junior to you or knows less about the particular problem you're working on, be mindful that this is an opportunity for you to help them develop their skills.

Let your pair navigate you towards the solution and encourage them to ask questions. Be patient. If you work too quickly, your junior partner may miss out on learning opportunities. If you feel that your pair partner needs some encouragement, you can provide it by asking open questions like: ‘What shall we do next?’ or ‘How would you solve this?’

Remember that you can also learn something. Junior programmers often come with fresh ideas as they are not set in specific ways of thinking.

Things to pay attention to if you’re less experienced than your pair

If you are pairing with a more experienced programmer, ask questions whenever you don’t understand something. Pair programming is a great way to learn on the job and get to grips with concepts that are new or difficult.

Be patient with yourself. You are here to work, but you’re also here to learn. Pay attention to how your pair partner approaches the problem, note the new tricks and elegant patterns/solutions to problems to remember them better.

Whatever your seniority is, remember that some of our needs remain the same regardless of our relative experience, as per the slide below, taken from a presentation by a software developer, Irina Tsyganok:

4. Establish a rhythm

Change driver/navigator seats a lot, preferably every 15-30 minutes to maintain optimum levels of energy and concentration. Committing changes frequently will help you maintain this rhythm and also ensure that you stay on track: writing a commit message helps you to verbalise what you just did and to reflect if this was a step in the right direction. If you want, you can always squash the excessive commits later on.

Test Driven Development (TDD) and pairing work well together. If one person solves the problem described by a failing test and writes the following test, and then there is a role change, you can maintain a pleasant rhythm.

Celebrate each small success (this can be as small as finishing one small task), whether with a high five, a tea break (resting your eyes and stretching is important!), whatever works for you. You just made something work, yay!

Again, don’t forget to take breaks. Take one whenever you need it: after a completed task is fine, but if you feel worked up or stressed, do not wait until task completion.

At the end of the session, go through your commits together and discuss what has been done and what should be done next. This may involve using the story ticket as a reference point.

You may find it useful to jot down a few notes about the session. This makes handovers easier and may be useful when you’re summarising last day’s work during a stand-up.

5. Communicate effectively

Let your pair know if you feel you don’t understand something or you feel disengaged, pressured or pushed prematurely into a solution.

Use gentle language. You might want to talk it through at the beginning, so it feels less like a criticism and more like feedback you're both prepared to receive.

This can be awkward but it’s definitely worth doing. You could, for example, say:

If, at any time, you feel left out or lost, or you need me to do anything differently, please let me know. I value your experience, and if you don’t mind, I will do the same.

This is also important in mob programming, where you drive for a smaller part of overall time than in pair programming.

When pointing out a typo or a mistake, wait until your partner finishes writing a line. No one likes to be interrupted.

At the same time, remember that effective communication is also about observing and listening to your pair partner. Read your pair’s body language to see if they're comfortable. This becomes easier once you’ve worked with somebody for a while. If you think your pair is uncomfortable, propose a walk to the water cooler together, and ask if they need a break or would rather do something differently.

Make space for them to converse, to share with you, to give you feedback. And remember you are both humans, and thrive when presented with empathy and kindness. So be empathetic, be kind.

6. Embrace challenges

We may know all about pair programming, and it can still get out of hand. Human relationships are complex, code is sometimes complicated and there are times when it doesn’t lend itself to pairing quite as smoothly as we wish it would. And that’s fine. Things don’t need to be perfect all the time. Actually, it is often when they're not that we learn the most.

Treat those trying moments as an opportunity to do a small retro. What went wrong? What went right? Are there any actions you can take to avoid it in the future?

Summary

I hope these handy tips and tools will enhance your pair programming experience. If the amount of information seems like a lot to take in, you may want to choose one point you find most helpful and concentrate on it during your next pair programming session.

Let us know how it goes in the comments below. Most importantly, enjoy yourself and the exciting adventure of creativity and problem solving you embark on with your pair partner.

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A year ago we published the Government Transformation Strategy. This strategy outlines how we – GDS and everyone across all departments – are working to transform government together.

Over the past year we’ve made great progress. We’ve built a lot, delivered a lot and collaborated a lot. We have a great platform to build on. I want to talk about some of the highlights so far and to outline my priorities for the next 12 months.

Helping government work better for everyone

GDS is continuing to deliver the tools, resources and standards that help government work more effectively and deliver user-focused services.

There are now more than 175 services across government that use one of the common components we operate. For example the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency uses GOV.UK Notify to remind people when they need to have an MOT test for their vehicle. This service now has more than 500,000 users.

The Department for International Trade’s services on great.gov.uk, such as 'Exporting is great', 'Find a buyer' and 'Find a supplier', and 'Selling online overseas', were designed, developed and delivered very quickly, thanks to the department’s use of components such as GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Platform as a Service.

And local authorities are also taking advantage of these components. For example Bath and North East Somerset Council uses Notify to let residents know about bin collection days, while both GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Verify are also available for local authorities.

So far more than 22.3 million notifications have been sent through GOV.UK Notify and more than £39.3 million in payments has passed through GOV.UK Pay.

We’re also delivering things that help civil servants do their jobs better. Including GovWifi – a single wifi login for all of government, which was made available last year and has already seen more than 3.5 million transactions. GovWifi is now available in more than 340 locations across the country, including 100 courtrooms, local councils schools and hospitals, as well as the UK Border Force’s fleet of boats.

We’re helping improve government procurement through the Digital Marketplace. A total of £3.2 billion has been spent through Digital Marketplace in just under 6 years. Of that total, 48% is spent with Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) - that’s £1.43 of every £3.

We’re helping government make better use of data - to use data as an enabler of public services. We’re also helping government publish data through data.gov.uk and registers. There are now 26 registers in use, including registers of countries, local authorities and government services. Thanks to initiatives like this, the UK is the world’s leading publisher of open data according to the Open Data Barometer.

And we’re tackling the challenge of identity assurance through GOV.UK Verify. GOV.UK Verify is being used in a range of services across government. For example, HMRC is using it to help people check their income tax online and HM Land Registry will use it to support the launch of a new digital mortgages service.

Supporting transformation across government

As well as giving government the tools and resources to transform the way they operate and build better services, we’re also working with departments to create the right structure and support for transformation.

We’ve rewritten the Technology Code of Practice so that it provides the best and most relevant guidance to government and we’re updating the Digital Service Standard to support whole, end-to-end services as users understand them.

We’re setting up service communities, which will bring together everyone across government working on the same user-focused service, such as starting a business. And we’re building service journeys into GOV.UK – piloting this approach with the ‘Learn to drive a car: step by step’ page. These service journeys take all the content and transactions on GOV.UK and put them into a coherent service journey that users and government understand.

My priorities for the next 12 months

Our work so far is already having a demonstrable effect in helping government work better. Here’s what we’ll be focusing on in the next 12 months to build on this progress.

Being innovators for government

GDS is working with departments to support existing and upcoming programmes, including using biometrics and artificial intelligence on services. And we’re working to make sure the things we build and run – including GOV.UK – can use innovative technologies like machine learning and voice control.

We are also responsible for the GovTech Catalyst programme, a £20 million fund to help tech firms deliver innovative fixes to public sector challenges.

Our team will help government departments and public bodies identify challenges they face that could be solved by new digital technologies. We will then act as a ‘front door’ to tech firms, giving them a clear access point where they can put forward their innovative ideas. Once a finalised product is created, the public sector body can then choose to buy it from the tech company.

Building capability across government

So far more than 7,500 civil servants have gained digital skills and capability by taking courses at the GDS Academy. We run the GDS Academy across the country – in Leeds, London, Manchester and Newcastle – and we’re looking to expand it. We’re also developing new training at the GDS Academy. We’re looking at subjects including artificial intelligence, geospatial and distributed ledgers. We’ll make these available to all departments.

And to give us an overview of digital capability across government, we’ve launched the first national framework of Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) job roles. This has created a structure of 37 common job roles across government.

We’re also developing the workforce plan for the DDaT Profession, which will give us full data and a full picture of what the profession looks like across government. It will give us information on things like different roles, pay, gender and diversity. It will mean we can spot, for example, where we need more emerging talent, if there are diversity issues or if there are gender pay disparities.

And we’re building and expanding data science and analytical capability through initiatives like the Data Science Accelerator training programme. The programme is currently recruiting its ninth cohort - entries are open until 19 February.

Supporting EU exit

EU Exit is the biggest challenge government faces at the moment and GDS is supporting all departments to meet this challenge.

The use of shared platforms will enable new systems to be delivered efficiently and quickly to meet common needs across EU Exit work.

And because of our work to develop the DDaT jobs framework across government, we are able to understand what resource is needed and to make sure departments have it. We are supporting government to hire and redeploy talent. We are also upskilling the Civil Service through the GDS Academy. We are working to make sure we have the right skills and capability in all departments.

Transforming government together

People are working extraordinarily hard across the Civil Service to prepare for EU Exit and to transform government. Our work at GDS supports both these things.

We are building momentum and we are delivering at pace. We are working with our colleagues across government to transform government together.

The Future Policy Network is a cross-government group of teams that focus on innovative approaches to delivery and policy making.

To celebrate the one year anniversary of the network and recognise outstanding work in these areas, an awards ceremony was held in January.

The GDS Better Use Of Data team was delighted to receive an award for the Data Science Accelerator programme which we run in conjunction with the Government Data Science Partnership.

The award recognised the impact of the programme across the UK public sector, helping to increase data capabilities through the delivery of mentored projects.

The Data Science Accelerator programme shows that public servants take responsibility for their own development and that they seek out new opportunities to learn the skills which are essential for responding to the needs of government and society.

The 10th cohort recently graduated from the Data Science Accelerator, which means that since 2015, 90 aspiring data scientists from across the public sector have completed the programme.

Applications are currently being accepted to be part of the next Data Science Accelerator programme.

Public sector staff with an interest in this type of work should join the Data Science Community of Interest which holds regular events and meetups.

About the Future Policy Network

The Future Policy Network is convened and co-ordinated by the Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat (EDS) Projects team, and includes the Better Use Of Data team, Behavioural Insights team, Policy Lab, Government Office for Science, Commercial Models, What Works, and the Inclusive Economy Unit.

The network has begun scoping new areas to address over the next 12 months, to continue demonstrating the value of a multi-disciplinary approach.

Teams within the Future Policy Network have already collaborated on a number of big policy and service design problems, bringing fresh approaches, such as running trials to reduce mental health service drop-out, using commercial insight to increase the efficiency of the childcare market, and using government complaints data to spot live issues and trends.

Find out more about the work of the Better Use of Data team, the Future Policy Network and the Data Science Community of Interest.

When I joined GDS as the head of editorial in March last year, we had 15 different blogs. It was a real mix – the main GDS blog, some community-focused blogs and some programme blogs.

The blogs had a lot of engagement overall. But there were some issues too.

Too many blog channels

The main issue was that our audiences were confused. We were getting a lot of feedback from users saying that:

• they wanted to subscribe to our content, to read about the things relevant to them but they weren’t sure which blog to subscribe to
• our identity as an organisation was fragmented and confusing (imagine having 15 different Twitter accounts)
• GDS staff who wanted to blog weren’t sure which blog to publish on to get the most out of their posts

Everything we do at GDS follows the government design principles, including the first one – start with user needs. Our blogs are no different.

We set up our blogs to address our need to talk about and share our work. This is still true but we need to make sure we consider the needs of our audiences too – our internal and external users, our readers and our authors. You're only working in the open if people can understand what you're saying.

The feedback we were getting from our users made it clear that we needed to make some changes.

The changes so far

In the last 12 months, we’ve reduced the number of our blog channels from 15 to 11.

We archived the ‘Assisted digital’ blog because we weren’t regularly publishing on it and the content overlapped with the main GDS blog. When there are new stories about assisted digital, they will be published on the main GDS blog.

Our readers and colleagues working with data told us they weren’t sure why we ran two data-focused blogs. So we worked with the data community at GDS to merge the two channels and create one cross-government community blog for data scientists and performance analysts. It’s called ’Data in government’.  

We archived our ‘Government technology’ blog because we can publish our technology stories with more impact on the main GDS blog or the ’GDS technology blog’. Some of the most engaging technology stories were published on these 2 blogs in the last 12 months, including a post about how to code in the open securely, which got 33 times more unique page views than an average post.

We archived the ‘GDS Digital engagement’ blog due to a big overlap with the remit of the main GDS blog.

So we now have 11 blogs – that’s still a lot, but it’s a work in progress.

There’s no target we’re trying to reach. There is also no right answer to the question of how many blogs an organisation should run. What matters is the users – the communities that want to share their work and the readers who want to learn about it – and how well their needs are met. It may well be that we will create new blogs in the future. If this happens, the decision to do so will be based on evidence and user feedback.

We publish less but with more impact

If you look at the posts we’ve published recently on the main GDS blog, you will notice that they’re not as frequent as they were pre-2017. This is not an entirely deliberate shift – for example, we didn’t publish anything during the pre-election period last year. But it’s a shift that has resulted in higher engagement.

Quantity doesn’t equal quality – however clichéd that may sound, it’s true in this case.

We haven’t stopped ideas. We’ve sometimes combined them together and published them in longer blog posts. Or we’ve tied them in with important events GDS has celebrated, as part of multi-channel campaigns – like the ones to mark the first anniversary of the Government Transformation Strategy and GOV.UK’s 5th birthday.

Our blog posts now frequently get 2 or even 3 times more engagement per post than they did when we used to publish several times a week. Even though we’re publishing less frequently. This is great news for the authors whose stories reach a bigger audience. And it proves that you really can get 80% of results from the 20% most impactful things you focus on.

We still work in the open

Reducing the number of blog sites we run and blogging less frequently doesn’t mean we’re no longer interested in working in the open. Far from it.

We’re keen to continue to talk openly about the work we’re doing on the channels that remain. It’s true that some of our blogs might be more active than others, but that’s a work in progress too so do keep an eye on them.

Blogging is only one part of a bigger picture

Communicating our work well is all about delivering the right message, to the right people at the right time. Sometimes, blogs aren’t the most suitable channel. Sometimes, they are stand-alone pieces, sharing ideas or updates about the work we’re doing. And sometimes, they’re only one part of a bigger, multi-channel campaign – one that can include posts on other government and non-government sites.

Like the one we ran to mark the first anniversary of the Government Transformation Strategy. We published blog posts by our Director General and our Minister, we hosted the Chief Executive of the Civil Service John Manzoni at GDS, and we supported all this with social media activity.

Or the one we ran to celebrate GOV.UK’s 5th birthday. We published a blog post on the GDS blog, we got John Manzoni to blog about it on the Civil Service blog, we had a week of social media activity, including sharing fun facts about what you can use GOV.UK for, and much more.

We worked as a team across GDS and contributed different things to the final product – blog posts were just one part of it. We’re now using a wider range of ways to talk about what we do at GDS, making sure that what we’re saying reaches the people it’s aimed at, through the most appropriate channel.

Having said that, the majority of our posts are still individual stories sharing best practice, like this one about how to pair program effectively, this one about using design crits to improve collaboration, and this one about how we upgraded the GOV.UK search engine. These stories add a lot of value to the communities they’re aimed at, they help us learn from each other and start useful conversations. So we want to continue to share them.

A retro to make our blogging better

When we started blogging, GDS was a much, much smaller organisation, and it was focused on GOV.UK. We’ve now grown significantly and the work we do spans a number of different areas. Managing the publishing workflow in an organisation of more than 800 people can be tricky.

So, in December, we ran a retro to gather our thoughts on what’s working, what’s not working and what we should do to make the blog publishing process at GDS more straightforward.

Our colleagues told us they value blogging, they like to talk openly about the work they’re doing and they like reading about what others are up to.

But there were some challenges too:

• ideas for blog posts were floating about for a long time before being drafted and published
• the sign-off process wasn’t always clear
• authors weren’t always sure what stage of the publishing process their posts were at

We’re now working on some new guidelines to help authors understand how they can publish their stories quickly and achieve the impact they want. We also want to encourage more people to blog, even if they’ve never done it before.

Once we’ve launched the new guidelines for our authors, we’ll be blogging about them too.

We’ll keep iterating  

In the last 12 months, things have evolved, the context has changed and so have user needs. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is that blogging is hugely important to us.

As with everything else that we do at GDS, we will continue to iterate our publishing process and the way we use our blogs to make sure they meet our users’ needs.

Make sure you’re subscribed to this blog if you’d like to follow our journey. You can also follow Agnieszka on Twitter.

On 10 May GDS will be hosting Sprint 18. This will be an event to celebrate all the great work that has been done so far to transform government – and to look at what we’ll be doing next.

We’re holding the event at London’s Southbank Centre and we’ll be welcoming ministers, colleagues from across government, international visitors, digital and tech suppliers, tech media and national tech correspondents.

Looking back and looking forward

GDS has held a number of Sprint events. The aim of all of them has been to look back on the work we’ve been doing to transform government and to look forward at what we need to do now. Sprint 18 will be no different.

We’ve come a long way since GDS was founded 6 years ago. We are now the number one e-government in the world, according to the United Nations, and the number one publisher of open data, according to the Open Data Barometer.

We have delivered GOV.UK, which has had nearly 17 billion page views in 5 years of live service. We are building common components like GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Notify which are used by more than 175 services across government.

We’re tackling the challenge of identity assurance through GOV.UK Verify, which is being used in a range of services across government. For example, HMRC is using it to help people check their income tax online and HM Land Registry will use it to support the launch of a new digital mortgages service.

And there are now around 17,000 people working in the digital profession across government, delivering transformation.

Earlier this month we marked 1 year since we published the Government Transformation Strategy. The work that we have delivered across government to support the strategy has given us a great platform to build on. We have been helping government work more effectively and deliver user-focused services. And we have been growing skills and capability across departments. So far, more than 7,500 civil servants have gained digital skills and capability by taking courses at the GDS Academy.

So there’s a lot to celebrate. But there’s also a lot to look forward to.

Transformation, innovation, collaboration

We want to look at how we can continue to transform government, by giving people the tools, structures and capabilities they need.

We want to look at how we can bring innovation into government, through projects like the GovTech Catalyst fund, which will see GDS help tech firms deliver innovative responses to public sector challenges.

And we want to look at how we can continue to collaborate across government – how we learn from each other’s skills and experiences, how we can work together to make better user-focused services and how we can transform government together.

I hope to see you at Sprint 18.

If you would like to attend, please register your interest by emailing us.

Earlier this month I visited GDS staff in the White Chapel Building with my senior management team. I was last there in the summer – and it was great to see everyone now fully settled in. The office felt like home.

We celebrated  the first anniversary of the Government Transformation Strategy. A year ago, we set out our vision for transforming the relationship between citizens and the state – from the smallest transaction right up to major reform: producing 21st-century solutions that make a real difference to the lives of the people we serve.

This is even more important given the EU Exit implementation challenges that we now face. To do this well, we will need to adapt how we operate, right across the government. And with most of the 150 priority EU Exit projects requiring technical expertise or tools, GDS is at the very heart of efforts across government to accelerate and assure this delivery.

But it is also transforming government as it goes.

It is building skills – with over 7,500 civil servants having gone through the GDS Academy so far, and the career framework for digital, data and technology specialists across government. This will help us to recruit and retain the best people, and give them interesting and stretching careers.

GDS is building shared platforms for digital services, helping to make processes such as online notifications and payments easier and quicker.

It is equipping us all with the right tools for delivery, including supporting more flexible, collaborative and productive working through the provision of wifi in new hubs in many of the major cities across the UK.

GDS has taken forward legislation to help make it easier to share data sets within government, as well as driving a series of pilot data analytics projects with departments to prove what is possible.

As always, there is more to do – and I know the teams are also working hard to get nearly 100 services online by 2020 and to launch a new and exciting set of programmes and activities for the GovTech fund. And much, much more!

To deliver EU Exit, GDS has risen to the challenge. What I saw was an organisation buzzing with ideas, not afraid to break the mould, and working hard to deliver a real difference to the way government works.

We will pick this up again at the Sprint 18 event in May – I look forward to seeing many of you there!

We’re currently updating the Digital Service Standard. The standard exists to help government build and run effective, user-focused digital services, and came into force in April 2014.

We’re updating the standard partly because users’ expectations change as technology changes. And partly because we want to move from looking at isolated transactions to whole, end-to-end services. Services as users understand them. This reflects a commitment in the Government Transformation Strategy to design and deliver joined-up services.

We need to make sure that the new standard supports everyone in government who is involved in designing and delivering services – no matter which role or organisation they’re in.

So we’ve been working with colleagues across government to work out what challenges the new Service Standard should address. Here’s what we found out.

Workshops and wider discussions

We worked with teams across government to understand their experiences of using the current standard, and to get insight into the challenges government would want a new version of the standard to meet. We ran 4 workshops across the UK: in London, Sheffield, Newport and Newcastle. Around 150 people came from a diverse range of roles – including digital, policy and front-line operations. And for people who couldn’t come to the workshop, we set up a Google group.

From these workshops, a number of themes emerged that we’ll consider in the next version of the standard.

1. Support end-to-end services without impeding delivery

There is a huge ambition to transform services from end to end. Digitising existing processes isn’t the goal.

So it’s important that the standard supports progress towards end-to-end services, from the point where the user starts trying to achieve a goal to the point when they’re finished. This includes website content, the transactional part of the service, the phone, post and face-to-face channels, as well as the digital elements. And it includes the internal processes that government needs to deliver an outcome.

But it’s also important that it doesn’t stop services being built quickly and incrementally. Progress – even if it’s not perfect – is better than stasis. We also need to find ways to encourage and support the retirement of services when they are no longer meeting user needs or serving a purpose for government.

2. Solve whole problems for users

The new standard should help to align services to things that users are trying to achieve. Such as learning to drive, or starting a business. We need a way to build a shared understanding of what those user needs are and a way to decide on a collective approach to meeting them.

This is partly about openness. The more we can do to encourage service teams to be open about what they’re doing, the easier it is to spot opportunities for collaboration and avoid duplication. For example, by publicly sharing roadmaps, business cases, experience maps and prototypes.

But openness alone won’t be enough. We need a standard that makes it possible to assess whether the right problems are being solved in the right way, by the right people working together. And we need to be able to identify who owns the whole problem and the whole service that cuts across team and organisational boundaries.

And we need to make it easier for teams across government to share knowledge, research and analytics. People thought this could include supporting new approaches to data infrastructure. Others suggested a central list of APIs.

3. Promote working across organisational boundaries

Solving whole problems for users often means working across organisational boundaries.

That’s hard. There’s a perception that it increases risk, because it’s not certain that two organisations will treat the problem with the same degree of priority. Plus government funding and governance processes have traditionally been designed on a departmental basis.

But the Service Standard can and should help to encourage this way of working. One participant put it really well:

Outcomes are the glue that holds departments together.

4. Revisit the discovery, alpha, beta and live phases

Some people felt there was a need to revisit what each of the phases of service development – discovery, alpha, beta and live – are for. In particular, there’s sometimes a tendency to arrive at discovery or alpha with a solution already partly defined, rather than using the discovery and alpha phases to learn about the problem and experiment with different solutions.

Other people felt that a new, post-discovery check point would help make sure that service teams have sufficiently explored the problem space before they start experimenting with solutions during alpha.

5. Broader approach to accessibility and inclusion

Government services should be accessible across all channels. If the accessibility of non-digital channels is neglected, that’s a problem because some transactions can’t be completed in one channel.

There’s a need for more patterns showing how to use offline channels effectively and how to make service-specific decisions about channel priority.

6. Don’t break things

People liked the idea of a standard that supports end-to-end services. But they identified some risks.

Digital teams use the current standard to make the case to stakeholders for investing in user-centred services. Some people wondered whether expanding the standard would make that more difficult.

It’s important that the assessment process retains authority, and that online services which don’t meet the standard don’t go live. It’s also important to get broad buy-in to the approach, since we’re asking people to consider how the user’s experience of the service is affected by a wider range of things.

We definitely want to avoid unintended consequences that make it harder for government to deliver services that meet user needs – and to deliver quickly. So we’ll make sure the new standard reflects that. And we’ll keep consulting and testing our assumptions.

7. Wider context: culture and governance

It’s not easy to build end-to-end services that meet user needs. That’s partly because it means people from different professions tend to have different working practices.

For example, the digital, operations and policy professions can have very different expectations about how far outcomes should be specified early on in the process. And we tend to work in very different cycles.

A new standard could raise the visibility of those challenges and help the professions work together to build the best service for users.

Other things that might help include developing more examples of service design and policy working together – such as the work of Policy Lab. And giving people ways to get an insight into how the other professions work – for example, service design training for policy makers.

What’s next

This has been a truly collaborative process from the start – thanks to help from colleagues across government, we’ve got a good idea of the main challenges the new standard needs to meet.

We’ll share more on our current thinking soon, so we can get further feedback from teams across government and hone our approach.

Once we’ve gathered this feedback, we will run a pilot with a small number of services so we can make sure we’re providing the right support to service teams going through the assessment process and to our-cross government service assessors. As part of that work, we’ll work out the best way to to phase the introduction of the standard so that service teams have plenty of opportunity to prepare before it’s implemented.

To mark International Women’s Day, we’ve asked our colleagues in technical roles to share what it’s like to work in government and how we can encourage more women to join the digital, data and technology profession.

Here’s what they said.

Sunitha Chacko, Head of Technical Architecture Community

I joined GDS as the Head of Technical Architecture Community. I collaborate with other GDS leaders to build technical architecture capability that can deliver the GDS mission as well as support capability building across government. I have oversight of the work of community members on projects and programmes.

As a technical architect in government, you have the ability to influence meaningful change across government and society. You work with business and technology stakeholders to translate business problems into technical designs.

I encourage women to join the profession as GDS is strongly committed to empowering change to tackle diversity issues. You get to be part of an excellent community of technologists where everyone is encouraged to ‘do the right thing’. You will be offered extensive learning and development opportunities to help support your career progression.

Louise Ryan, Technical Architect

I’m a Technical Architect. My role is multifaceted but in a nutshell, it is to direct the technical strategy within a service and to work closely with the team to bring it to life.

Being a technical architect in government is great! Government has some amazingly interesting problems to solve. By solving these problems you’re going to be helping save taxpayers’ money and, far more excitingly, create high-quality services for potentially millions of people to use.

The percentage of women in leadership positions in technology is still low. It’s deeply unfair that for whatever reason, women are missing out on these opportunities. So we need more strong role models. We should encourage women to join the profession because a career in technology can be extremely rewarding.

Holly Ellis, Director of Capability, GDS and Digital, Data and Technology Profession

I feel privileged to work for an organisation that is paying such great attention to gender inclusiveness, and to be tasked with delivering strategic interventions to tackle gender diversity across digital, data and technology in government.

It is timely that this month we launch our first cross-government gender diversity working group, which will allow to share best practice and develop single plans for long-lasting change across the board.

GDS has partnered with a number of departments to recruit Technical Architects into government in several locations. Find out more about the jobs, departments and locations.

Tonea Charlery, Associate Delivery Manager

I’m currently working with a team of content designers. My role involves ensuring the team members have all they need to do their jobs. I facilitate team ceremonies, such as stand-ups, retros and the occasional workshop. I help remove blockers from the team and help my colleagues come up with solutions to many problems.  

Being a delivery manager brings out a lot of skills and you develop a new level of thinking. As a delivery manager, you can accomplish a lot of things working on a project. You bring people together, help them communicate with each other (and the wider team) and solve problems as a collective.   

No one day is the same when you’re a delivery manager. It’s a multi-faceted job with lots of things happening at pace. You can learn many things that add value to your role, such as coaching and various agile methodologies. If you want to continuously learn new things as well as lead a team in delivery, then you should go to agile meet-ups, and network, shadow delivery managers in various places and even try and introduce elements of agile in your current job.

Pea Tyczynska, Junior Technologist – Digital Marketplace

In my role as Junior Technologist I am working as a member of a multidisciplinary team to deliver new features and improvements to Digital Marketplace, which is a digital procurement service. I take part in all stages of delivery, including research, prioritisation and the design process. Still, my main responsibility is to write and maintain the code for the service together with my developer colleagues.

I massively enjoy working for GDS. I love how we work in agile methodology. It means we divide our work into small chunks which are easy to test and improve upon. It also means we check often if the feature we are building is still what our users need and we can change our course easily if it’s not.

I also appreciate the open culture at GDS: I feel I can talk about any issues I see, and I can be proactive and give talks and get involved in other activities. But most importantly I’m happy that I can work on projects that will – directly or indirectly – benefit our society. It gives me extra motivation to do my best.

I would encourage all women to try coding. It is very empowering to know a language that enables you to create working things – it feels almost like learning magic. And nowadays it’s so easy to give it a go. There are plenty of free online courses that require neither prior coding knowledge nor maths skills. This is actually how I started my adventure with web development less than 2 years ago, and it was one of the best, most life-changing choices I’ve ever made.

Irene Lau, Tech Lead – GOV.UK Verify

I have recently taken on a Tech Lead role in one of the teams on the GOV.UK Verify programme. My daily job involves: working closely with our product and delivery managers to identify, prioritise and break down technical tasks into sensible chunks of work, organising developer pairs to deliver the work and ensure their personal growth, but most importantly ensuring that we produce good-quality software that solves the needs of our users.

Having been in the private sector most of my career, GDS is a very different place to work. On the technical side, we aim to implement the right thing with our best effort. When pain points become too apparent they are turned into a mission so that they can be tackled in a planned fashion, rather than as ad-hoc work.

People at GDS are always approachable and we work together well with non-technical colleagues as multi-disciplinary teams. I particularly enjoy the autonomy and flatter management structure across the programmes where decisions are made collectively, and where all voices – not just the loudest – are heard.

Gender diversity in any profession promotes a diversity of views, which ultimately improves the quality of the work and output. Female developers have always been rare and there’s a misconception that it’s a ‘nerdy’ career. We should continue to reach out to GCSE and A-Level students to create interest in this field and to show what it’s really like to work as a developer.

Silvia Mandala, Software Engineer – GOV.UK Pay

Making things that help people is a real honour. I work as a Software Engineer at GDS, and basically spend my days as a puzzle-solver. I’m part of the team building GOV.UK Pay, the government’s online payment platform.

We surface issues people are facing, try to come up with solutions, test them, iterate. Every day we try to make a tiny little thing better than the day before – over time, this process compounds. It’s a great mindset to absorb in life too.

I want to share that I still feel like an imposter from time to time. I think it’s never going to go away, and I’m ok with that. As women, we often tend to focus on all the things we have to learn, and we forget to take pride in our work. If I had to give a piece of advice to anybody wanting to work in any creative industry, I’d simply say: care about your craft, always strive to get better, but most of all, accept and cherish that your work is imperfect. And that’s perfectly ok. Do it anyway, share it, make a difference, no matter what.

GDS has partnered with a number of departments to recruit Technical Architects into government in several locations. Find out more about the jobs, departments and locations.

We're also doing some new user research on gender diversity in tech. If you're interested in participating, please email us.

The Digital Marketplace is transforming the way government buys technology and digital services by opening the market up to small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) suppliers. A total of £3.2 billion has been spent through the Digital Marketplace in just under 6 years. Of that total, 48% is spent with SMEs – that’s £1.43 of every £3.

The Digital Marketplace has changed the UK procurement landscape. Now we’re ready to go global – and we need your help.

Global Digital Marketplace

We’re working on a project called Global Digital Marketplace. As the name suggests, it’s an expansion of the Digital Marketplace that will be open to international governments. And it means UK suppliers will have access to the global market.

Global Digital Marketplace is a partnership between GDS and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It aims to help international governments make their procurement more transparent, in order to prevent corruption and to boost their digital, data and technology sectors.

We announced the project at an event last September, where we looked at how Global Digital Marketplace could support emerging economies to deliver better public services and reform their digital and technology procurement.

We’re holding another event next month to further refine how Global Digital Marketplace can work.

Join us to help shape Global Digital Marketplace

The ‘GDS: Global Digital Marketplace’ event will be held in London on 12 April in collaboration with The Whitehall & Industry Group, a charity that specialises in bringing business, government and not-for-profit organisations together to build constructive dialogue and learn from each other.

The event is open to government and industry, but particularly digital, data and technology (DDaT) suppliers. We want to hear from both large enterprises and SMEs who are interested in exporting their services globally.

At the event, we want to discuss the challenges and opportunities of exporting DDaT services to support global government transformation.

In particular, we want to talk about how GDS:

• plans to work collaboratively with UK DDaT supplier partners
• plans to support Smart City initiatives around the world
• can work with government organisations and suppliers to support international governments to deliver transformation

We also want you to help us refine the ‘ICT Commissioning Playbook’, which we’ve co-designed with the Governments of Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Chile. This will influence how the Global Digital Marketplace works.

We crowdsourced contributions for the playbook at our September event and we’ll be sharing the first draft for consultation at the event on 12 April.

Apply for your place

The event will run from 9am to 12.30pm and will be divided into a mixture of interactive sessions, panel discussions and case study presentations. Speakers will include:

• Robyn Scott, Co-Founder and CEO of Apolitical
• Dylan Thomas, Director, Technology and Smart Cities, Department for International Trade
• Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi, Head of Digital Government and Open Data Team, OECD
• Tom Gray, Group CTO, Kainos

You can apply for a place at the event on The Whitehall & Industry Group website. We hope to see you there.

Today the GDS Academy celebrates the 1,000th graduate from its digital and agile foundation course. This 10-day course - an introduction to agile and digital in government - has been running since the Academy began.

The GDS Academy launched as the DWP Digital Academy in February 2014. Back then the Academy was training people at the Department for Work and Pensions. Classes were held in a room above the Fulham Jobcentre.

A lot has changed since those early days. The Digital Academy became the GDS Academy last year. It now runs at sites across Leeds, London, Manchester and Newcastle and has trained more than 7,800 civil servants, helping to build digital skills and capability across government.

GDS Director General Kevin Cunnington set up the Academy when he was Director General of Business Transformation at DWP. He says: “We wanted teach people how to embrace digital ways of working, in order to help teams build their own capability and give them the digital skills they need to transform public services.”

In this blog post, we speak to 4 graduates of the foundation course, to find out how the academy has helped them take their digital careers to the next level. And we hear from GDS Academy Business Manager Lara Stevenson about how the Academy has grown.

Dr Carla Groom, Head of Behavioural Science, DWP

“Before I went on the foundation course, agile was just a vaguely useful set of concepts. After attending the course I became a full-on agile amateur. I realised that there were so many people out there thinking about basically the same kinds of organisational problems.

I joined Twitter within a week of graduating and have spent the 2 years since then wringing out every last drop of expertise from people all over the world. I’ve attended agile events and met incredible people from all kinds of sectors. And I’ve read books on design, engineering and computing that have changed the way I think about my own practice, Behavioural Science.

The modern digital community is like a sweet-shop of ideas and tools for solving the problems I work on, and the Academy has been the most wonderful shop-window.

As I have become more familiar with the digital world, it has become increasingly clear that the Academy does something that most private-sector digital consultancies don’t. It enables people to thoroughly explore some radical and useful ideas, but discourages them from getting too attached to them. There are no ‘commandments’, only suggestions. So it doesn’t just teach you things. It helps you learn to learn them.”

Baljit Rakhra, Digital, Data and Technology Fast Streamer, currently on placement with High Speed 2

“Doing the course gave me the foundation to build my career in the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) profession. It has helped me to think in an agile way.

One thing I found really interesting and useful was that the course involved working on a project. This meant that we got a chance to use all the techniques that we were learning.

Being able to do the course at an early stage of my Fast Stream has really increased my confidence. For example, I recently delivered a workshop on user research to the Business Analyst Community at HS2. I wanted to spread the knowledge that I’d gained during the course to my colleagues.”

The first ever digital and agile foundation course, in Fulham in February 2014

Doug Bell, Learning Facilitator, GDS Academy

“I was a student on the very first digital and agile foundation course in February 2014.

I had led several teams on traditional projects and as an Implementation Lead I had first-hand experience of the problems associated with the delivery of large IT projects as front-line operations. The Academy taught me how services should be built around user needs and how ongoing testing of prototypes could reduce service risk.

After I graduated from the course I worked as a Business Analyst on a cross-departmental DWP/HMRC team, working on transforming a service where customers could find out what their State Pension would be at their State Pension Age. This enabled me to consolidate all the things I had learned on the course and the team went on to win a number of awards - including the 2016 Civil Service Digital Award.

I want others to embrace the Academy learnings and to share the same sense of achievement I have experienced. To this end I have recently joined the Academy as a learning facilitator, where hopefully I can support learning across Government with real examples of successful delivery.”

Sylvia Romero-Reyes, Product Manager, Department for International Trade

“Taking the foundation course gave me not just the tools to do a better job but also got me in the right state of mind to work better as a part of a team, and to focus on delivering valuable outcomes for our users.

It made me realise in a very practical way how important it is to focus on user needs from the beginning. And the course made me think of the wider picture: there were lots of things I wasn’t even aware I didn’t know!”

Lara Stevenson, Business Manager, GDS Academy

“I’ve been in the Academy since it was first created and it’s been such an exciting journey - never in our wildest imagination did we think that we’d be offering our services nationally and across government. It was such a proud moment when we hit 100 students, so 1,000 is incredible.

It’s a real testament to the team who work tirelessly behind the scenes keeping the Academy going, and it’s in no small part thanks to them, that we’ve had the privilege of seeing so many fantastic people pass through our doors. Roll on 2,000!”

Are you one of the 1,000 graduates of the course? Share your memory and tag your classmates as part of the celebrations on Twitter @GDSacademy using the hashtag #GDSacademy.

Visit GDS Academy for a list of courses.

We’re currently iterating the Service Standard. As it says in the Government Transformation Strategy, we need to transform whole citizen-facing services, to continue to make things better for users and for government.

To a user, the definition of a service is simple. It’s something that helps them to do something, such as learn to drive, buy a house, or become a childminder. For those of us who work in government, though, understanding what a service is can be more complex. There can be a number of different definitions.

Is a service a single transaction or is it everything a user needs to achieve a goal? Is it just public-facing or does it include all the government-facing processes as well? And what about different channels (online, face-to-face, phone, paper)?

Before updating the Service Standard we need to be able to answer these questions. We need to settle on a cross-government definition of an end-to-end service. So we carried out research to do this.

Testing different definitions

We ran consultations with 150 people across government – mainly in the digital, data and technology profession – as part of the Service Standard update workshops.

For the in-depth research, we started by showing people 3 visual definitions of a service and asking them to either choose one, amend one or to create an entirely new definition that would fit their mental model.

The 3 definitions we put forward were:

• the service as one or a set of public-facing transactions, whether online, face-to-face, over the phone or on paper
• the service as an end-to-end service, including all the online and offline steps a user needs to go through to do a specific thing
• a whole service: this is everything the user needs to do to achieve a goal, including non-transactional things, such as research and choosing how to achieve their goal; a whole service is also everything government needs to do to achieve an outcome, including delivering and supporting the service

We then did an exercise on identifying the elements people included or excluded in their service definition. For example, do internal systems, calculators, call centres as well the transactional service make up a service?

Finally, we asked participants to look at their definition of a service through the lens of assessments – does it remain the same or does their definition change?

The next step was to take the 3 service definitions to the consultation workshops we ran to get cross-government feedback on updating the Service Standard. The 4 workshops took place across the country and involved 150 multidisciplinary people delivering and assuring digital services and leading digital transformation across government.

Arriving at a definition – the whole service

We got people to vote on their definition of a service, the elements that make up a service, and to share feedback where their mental model diverged and where they felt we had got something wrong or missed something.

The research showed that our third option – the whole service definition – is how the majority of digital people think about government services now. This working definition will be used to support the work being done to pilot the implementation of the Service Standard. We will also work to understand how colleagues in Policy, Operation and Delivery define services, and colleagues who make funding decisions, to work towards a truly cross-government, cross-discipline definition of a service.

What does a whole service look like?

A whole service is everything the user and government needs to do to achieve an outcome, as initially described in Lou Downe’s blog post from 2016.

A whole service is:

• end-to-end: from when the user starts trying to achieve a goal to when they finish
• front to back: it involves the citizen-facing service, internal systems and processes, supporting policy or legislation, and organisational, financial and governance structures of the service
• across every channel: including online, phone, paper and face-to-face

A whole service that solves a whole problem and can be made up of multiple end-to-end user journeys.

A user journey is all the interactions a user has that relate to a government service. Interactions include transactions, seeing campaign messages, asking questions or advice. These interactions could take place over any medium or device – online, over the phone, in person, on paper.

A whole service is everything required to make that journey work – content, materials, people, technology, policy, tools, processes.

Visualising a whole service from both the citizen and government’s perspective looks something like this:

Things that are part of a service – and things that aren’t

As part of the research, we also asked people what specific elements make a service. The consensus was that services are made up of the following things:

The service and supporting content is:

• the transaction itself (across all relevant channels)
• service-related materials and content (across all relevant channels)

Things that support or constrain the delivery of the service are:

• people providing and supporting a service
• internal services and processes
• tools (for example, APIs and calculators)
• legacy issues

Things that nudge people to do a thing are:

• informational websites and microsites
• campaign content (across channels)

The purpose and effect of the service is:

• outcomes
• policy intent

Infrastructure, such as buildings, equipment and training, are also factors that influence whether a service is a success or not. However, most people didn’t consider these to be part of the service, as decisions about these are made at the departmental level and not the service level.

Using this definition

For government to run better services, teams working on designing, building, supporting and delivering them will need to work more closely together – sometimes across departmental lines.

We will continue to iterate this definition. A definition of a service will become part of the updated Service Standard and Service Manual, based on our collective knowledge and understanding of what a service is now. We will, for example, further investigate what we mean by legacy and what part internal services and tools play.

We are piloting the implementation of the updated Service Standard, and using this definition will be part of this pilot. Implementing the Service Standard will help support building and delivering end-to-end services across government.

Thanks to Dave House for the service visualization.

We have revised the Open Standards Principles to make it easier for departments to adopt open standards.

We iterated the existing Open Standards Principles as part of the Government Transformation Strategy and the UK Digital Strategy. The updated version of the principles uses clearer language and clarifies several important points.

The Cabinet Office mandates the use of the Open Standards principles, which say that all documents and data we create need to be available in open formats. It is vitally important to ensure that the Civil Service adheres to these principles.

Open standards underpin so much of the work we do in the Civil Service. We can help to reduce costs, prevent vendor lock-in and fulfil our commitments to the Open Government Partnership by promoting the adoption of open standards across government.

We thank everyone who sent us comments and helped us improve this document. It was a pleasure working with so many people from across government, with external organisations, and with individuals.

Read the Open Standards Principles and don't forget to subscribe to this blog to receive email updates when new posts are published.

In November, Sarah Foster and Jasper Pandza from the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) got in touch with GDS to find out about the work it does with Codebar, a non-profit organisation that runs coding workshops for under-represented people in tech.

We met to have a chat. DCMS wanted to run something similar – informal meet-ups for colleagues who were interested in learning to code.

As you would expect from the lead government department for digital policy, there was strong interest in learning to code at DCMS, especially among leaders and policy officials.

It soon became clear that there was an opportunity for the GDS technology community to provide support to DCMS colleagues to help them develop their coding skills.

A weekly lunchtime coding club was suggested. DCMS colleagues would attend and GDS developers would provide support and guidance.

Bringing the Coding Club to life

DCMS colleagues wanted to learn Python as well as HTML and CSS. I asked the GDS technology community for volunteers to go to DCMS one lunchtime a week for a 4-week trial to help out at the coding club. 9 developers came forward.

We decided to offer 2 coding club sessions a week: one on HTML and CSS and the other on Python.

Coding Club session at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport

An informal class

We decided to keep the coding club sessions fairly informal so that we could cater to a range of skill levels. People who had never written a line of code before were just as welcome as those familiar with programming languages.

We knew that not everyone would be able to attend every session and we didn’t want anyone to feel left behind if they couldn’t come one week.

Therefore, rather than delivering lectures which may not be suitable for everyone, we invited attendees to either bring along a project they wanted to work on or follow one of the many free tutorials available online, such as 'Automate the boring stuff with Python'. With this approach, attendees could work at their own pace, carry on in their spare time if they wanted to and pick up where they left off if they missed a week.  

GDS developers were on hand to answer questions, clarify programming concepts and offer guidance on personal projects.  

Future coding club sessions

After the 4-week trial concluded, we held a retrospective for DCMS coding club attendees and GDS volunteers to evaluate the sessions.

Both attendees and volunteers enjoyed the sessions. Attendees were grateful that they could work at their own pace and liked meeting colleagues from another department. They also said they had already made progress and were keen to continue learning.

We agreed that we needed to find a way to better match the number of volunteers to attendees so that everyone got the help they needed. We also noted that the number of attendees fluctuated from week to week and needed to find out the reasons behind this.

In the future, we’d like to explore grouping attendees by experience level so that we can better tailor sessions to different needs. This approach would also enable attendees to collaborate in groups and help each other out, so that the coding club can be more self-sufficient. It also became clear that attendees valued the idea of building something rather than just following tutorials, so GDS will help to compile a list of beginner-level projects to get started with.

Do you run something similar in your department? Comment below.

Emma Beynon is a GOV.UK developer.

We’re hiring! Come and chat to us at Silicon Milkroundabout on 19 and 20 May and follow @DigiCareersGov.

Check out what type of software developer roles exist in government.

GOV.UK is relied on by millions of people every day to access vital services and information. Material published on GOV.UK can move financial markets. GOV.UK is a vital part of our national infrastructure.

But GOV.UK differs from most other pieces of national infrastructure in one respect: we built it and we run it using agile. GOV.UK has been live for more than 5 years and we’re constantly iterating and improving it based on feedback. GOV.UK has always been – and will continue to be – agile at scale.

But being agile doesn’t mean simply installing a methodology and then religiously sticking to that methodology. It means adapting what we do based on what we’ve learned. And this includes adapting our ways of working.

A little while ago we learned that we had a few challenges with GOV.UK delivery. So we had to adapt our approach. Here’s what we did and what we learned.

Moving fast and accruing debt

We built GOV.UK very quickly. It launched in 2012 and just over a year later it was hosting all the content for 24 ministerial departments and 330 organisations. By 2015, it had replaced the sites of 1,882 government organisations.

But doing all this had come at a cost. We had accrued a lot of technical debt by building things quickly that might cause challenges later down the line. And the number of people working on the programme had fluctuated, meaning that there wasn’t much stability.

As the programme matured, it was time to step back and review our ways of working. By the beginning of last year, we noticed 4 problems that were affecting delivery:

• as deadlines could be flexible, sometimes work wasn’t stopping
• greater clarity was required on the most important problems
• research effort wasn’t always reflected in delivery
• we had too many potential single points of failure

So we put in place a new way of working to deal with these.

A new way of delivering

We put in place 4 new principles to help improve delivery on GOV.UK:

1. Spend only 3 months per mission

We wouldn’t commit to any mission – or piece of work – that lasted longer than 3 months. That was because every 3 months we wanted a genuine re-evaluation point where we could say: “Do we definitely want or need this work to continue? What is the compelling proposition for another 3 months on it?”.

We kept the time period short because we wanted to build in the flexibility so that we could change direction, if we needed to. Time was fixed and scope could be trimmed.

2. Measure stuff with numbers

We would use metrics to see how we’re doing. But proper metrics, not fluffy key results.

Teams were tasked with defining how they would undeniably be able to show that their 3 months of time had been a good investment.

3. Have firebreaks

Between each 3-month mission we would have a 1-week firebreak. This would be a chance for teams to work on anything they wanted.

Doing this would remove any possible build-up of pressure, make more space for learning, foster creativity and allow time for team reconfiguring.

4. Prioritise sustainable building

Sustainable building would be a must – we need to have less problematic technical debt.

You can read more in this blog post about our 2017-2018 roadmap.

Putting this into practice

This new way of working would be quite a big change for the people working on GOV.UK. It would mean that they could be moving across missions and teams every 3 months. So we took a number of steps to introduce it carefully.

Firstly, we mapped our planned missions against the headcount, to make sure we had the right number of people and the right skills.

Then we sent out a survey to all staff asking them what teams they would be interested in working on or had any relevant experience in.  

Before we announced the teams, we also ran drop-in sessions for people to come and find our more about the new model. And we met lots of people individually to talk about their preferences and development opportunities.

We’ve been running this model on GOV.UK for just over a year now. And it’s also being used by other parts of GDS.

What we’ve learned

This model can be successful

When we first started working in this way, most teams faced challenges with incremental delivery, delivery at pace, sustainable building, doing things with data and responsiveness to change. Now we are starting to excel in these areas.

We achieved this through extensive training for teams, strong messaging and support from programme leadership, moving seniors into broader roles where they can oversee the work of several teams, and lots of sharing of best practice between teams.

Large programmes can be made more manageable

With 168 people across 24 teams, GOV.UK was a relatively large programme.  As a management team, we found it difficult to effectively manage at this scale.

To counteract this, we’ve split our work into a handful of objectives, with each objective containing 3-5 related missions and about 40 people. Most people are assigned to teams, but some people are assigned to specific objectives so that they can help out on each mission as needed.  

This move towards working in smaller groups rather than one big group helped teams to become better at self-organising and more adaptable to change. Having senior team members leading objectives gave them the space and context to help out with long-term thinking and coach best practice to more teams.

Stopping things is hard (but it gets easier)

We are all very passionate about our work, and it's hard to stop doing something when it looks like there is more to do. But it’s best to do less and do it well rather than to be too ambitious and have no slack for the unexpected.

When we did decide to pause work on missions, there was an initial and negative emotional reaction from team members. However, in the longer term, the reduction in work in progress was a relief as it allowed us to do what we did to a higher level of quality.

We need to provide clear direction to teams

It took us some time to get the balance right between giving teams clear direction and the autonomy to solve problems.

Over the year, we’ve learnt that good missions need 3 things:

• a clearly defined problem for the team to solve
• clearly articulated measures of success and definitions of 'done'
• a steer on the expected scope/direction (if leadership have a view on this)

The team should be free to challenge any of the above, but it is critical to have a shared understanding of the purpose of the mission from the very beginning.

Varying mission lengths can avoid dysfunction

Initially, we decided missions should be 3 months long. But some pieces of work need a guarantee of longer than 3 months – otherwise it could create dysfunction in the way the team members prioritise work.

Now we are experimenting with missions of variable lengths.  Smaller missions or exploratory work could be 6 weeks in length, and more clearly defined work could be 12, 18 or 24 weeks in length.

The model needs to work for part-time team members

In a perfect world, team members are dedicated 100% to their team. However, this is not always realistic and some roles have to be shared.  

We have found a number of ways to help part-time team members:

• reduce the need for people to be split across multiple teams by reducing the number of teams
• group part-time team members by objectives and allow them to work with the senior delivery manager on their objective to decide how they should allocate their time between the missions
• give part-time team members a primary team, and allow them to consult with other teams as required

It’s important to measure from the start

Our measures of programme performance became much better as we progressed through the year. We also started running a regular survey at the end of the first quarter to give us quantitative data on people’s satisfaction and productivity.

However, if we could do this again, we would invest heavily in establishing and baselining programme performance measures right at the beginning, and implement the change once effective measurements were in place.

Staying agile

This new way of working on GOV.UK affirms our commitment to agile. It means we can move quickly and respond to learnings or changing circumstances, and reduce the cost of any changes.

We're making better use of taxpayers' money by more frequently delivering improvements that will make GOV.UK better and improve users' lives.

Follow GDS on Twitter and don't forget to subscribe to this blog.

The G-Cloud 10 framework is now open for applications, meaning that new and existing suppliers can offer their cloud technology and support to organisations across the public sector.

G-Cloud 10 is run as a collaboration between the Government Digital Service and the Crown Commercial Service and is operated through the Digital Marketplace. It is the 10th iteration of the G-Cloud framework, which launched in 2012.

So far, nearly £3 billion has been spent through the G-Cloud framework, with 48% of that spend going to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Moving fast to respond to the market

We’ve launched G-Cloud 10 in response to supplier needs to refresh services and open the market up to new suppliers.

Because we are able to meet these needs without overhauling or radically changing G-Cloud 9, we took a minimum viable product (MVP) approach. This meant we could launch quickly and give the market what it needed.

G-Cloud 10 is an iteration of G-Cloud 9, which means existing suppliers should be familiar with it. But we’ve also been able to make a few important improvements and extensions.

Now including cyber security

As well as cloud services, suppliers can now apply to sell cyber security services on G-Cloud 10. This includes services that are assured under these National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) schemes:

• Cyber Security Consultancy
• Penetration Testing (CHECK)
• Cyber Incident Response (CIR)

Suppliers can store info centrally

To make things easier for suppliers, we’ve created a new supplier section on the Digital Marketplace. This lets suppliers store essential information such as company contact details and registration information centrally.

The supplier section runs across both the G-Cloud and Digital Outcomes and Specialists frameworks and means suppliers no longer have to fill out information for each individual application. They can just enter the information once and use it again and again, saving time on applications.

Existing suppliers can copy over their info

New suppliers should apply to G-Cloud 10 by creating a supplier account.

Existing suppliers on G-Cloud 9 will also need to apply, but to make things simpler for them, we’ve redesigned the process to allow them to simply copy over their G-Cloud 9 declaration and services into G-Cloud 10. This makes things quicker and easier for those who want to move over from G-Cloud 9 to G-Cloud 10.

Screenshot showing the copy process for existing suppliers

Applications to G-Cloud 10 for both new and existing suppliers close on 23 May.

Easier process = quicker applications

Having taken an MVP approach and simplified the application process for existing suppliers, we’re already seeing far more applications at an early stage to G-Cloud 10 than to G-Cloud 9.

When G-Cloud 9 had been open for 1 day, it had 15 completed services and 14 completed applications. After 1 day of G-Cloud 10 we had 95 completed services and 39 completed applications.

This is more than 6 times as many services and nearly 3 times as many applications.

Transforming government procurement

Alongside the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework, the G-Cloud framework is transforming government procurement.

These 2 frameworks mean government can buy the right technology and services from the right suppliers at the right price.

And by making procurement clear and simple, they are opening up the marketplace to suppliers of all sizes and from all parts of the country. They are creating a level playing field that means that all private sector enterprises can be involved in helping government work better for everyone.

New suppliers can apply to join G-Cloud 10 by setting up a supplier account. Existing suppliers apply by simply logging in and copying their G-Cloud 9 declaration and services across.

A poster showing advice for designing for screen reader users. The posters are available to download.

This year the UK is implementing the EU Directive on the accessibility of public sector websites and mobile apps ("the Directive"). To gather your views, we’ve launched a consultation to help plan how we implement the Directive.

What is the Directive about?

The Directive requires public sector bodies to make their websites and mobile apps more accessible by making them "perceivable, operable, understandable and robust", to the extent that doing so would not impose a disproportionate burden. This means following a set of principles and techniques when building, designing, maintaining and updating websites and apps to ensure people can use them, especially people with disabilities.

Public sector bodies will need to evaluate the accessibility of their websites and mobile applications. They will then be expected to fix any issues and provide detail of this in an accessibility statement hosted on their website. If there are areas of inaccessible content, the organisation responsible will have to explain the way in which the content is not accessible and the reason for it. They will also have to provide accessible alternatives where appropriate.

There are some exceptions to this. For example, public service broadcasters and some types of published content are exempt, such as online maps and pre-recorded videos published before September 2020.The full list is in the consultation document.

The obligation to make websites and mobile apps more accessible will apply to websites and mobile applications in different stages, over the next 3 years. But by 2021, all public sector websites and mobile apps will need to comply with the Directive.

What is the consultation?

The consultation concerns the UK government’s plan to implement the Directive including draft regulations. It includes what guidance and what training the government will provide to public sector bodies to help meet the accessibility criteria.

We would also like to hear from public sector bodies on how they will comply with the Directive and their thoughts on GDS’s proposed monitoring plan for the Directive’s implementation.

Who is the consultation for?

Everyone! We would welcome responses from the charity sector, the private sector and public authorities, professional bodies, interest groups and the wider public, especially people with disabilities.

Why are we implementing this Directive?

You might wonder why we are implementing the Directive as we are preparing to exit the European Union (EU) next year. The reason is simple: until the UK leaves the EU, all the rights and obligations of EU membership remain in force. The Directive is also in line with the government’s current policy on accessibility.

In the transition period, the government will continue to implement and apply EU legislation. In line with this policy, the government will implement the Directive in accordance with our EU law obligations.

Next steps

The consultation will run for 4 weeks from 30 April to 28 May.

If you would like to respond, please follow this link to the consultation page.

If you prefer to submit your response via email, you can send it to:
consultation-responses@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

Alternatively, you can send your response by post to:

Accessibility team
7th Floor, The White Chapel Building
10 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 8QS

Please indicate in your response whether you’re happy for it to be published, and whether or not you want it to be attributed to you or the organisation you represent.

We look forward to reading your responses!

Over the past 5 years, the Government Digital Service (GDS) has helped save over £1 billion by working with departments to identify better and cheaper ways to deliver IT and digital products and services.

As part of this process, GDS works collaboratively with departments, before they even start to create digital services. One of the ways we’ve done this is through the spend controls process. Jointly, we make sure that they’re getting the best value from anything they’re building or buying.

The spend controls process was introduced in 2010. But time and technology moves on. We want to make sure that it continues to be as effective as possible and that it gives departments the support they need.

We’ve previously written about all the work and research we’ve done to improve the spend controls process. We’ve looked at providing earlier engagement and greater collaboration with departments as well as giving support where it is needed and when it is needed.

Based on this research, we’ve developed a new approach, which we’ve piloted with 4 departments.

Now we’re ready to roll out the new spend controls process more widely. Here’s what we’re doing:

Putting a pipeline in place

When we carried out research with departments, they told us they wanted more autonomy to assure their own projects and programmes, where appropriate. They also said they wanted to make it easier to jointly determine where and how help is provided.

To enable this, we’re introducing a new system that we call a pipeline approach. This means that rather than looking at individual services or technology projects, we’re going to work with departments to develop a 15 to 18-month forward-look at all their commercial, digital and technology spend. We will look at all digital and technology activity, rather than just looking at spend above a certain threshold.

Work in the pipeline will be assured against government standards, such as the recently updated Technology Code of Practice. This will show us where and how GDS and departments need to work together to improve things.

This is a more agile, iterative model which will rely on and strengthen departments’ existing governance processes.

The benefits this will bring

We’ve been piloting this new process for some time and we have seen it bring lots of new benefits. These include:

• enabling earlier engagement between departments and GDS, ensuring approval is a smoother process for everyone
• allowing better planning and decision-making, and better outcomes
• ensuring consistent application of standards, including the Digital Service Standard and the Technology Code of Practice
• increasing collaboration between experts, such as technologists or commercial professionals, regardless of departmental boundaries
• bringing in a more iterative, holistic approach, while keeping the backstop of a hard control when standards are not being met

Rolling out this new approach

Following our pilot with 4 departments, we’re now ready to roll out the new process to a small number of additional departments.

We’re pleased to announce that the new spend controls guidance for IT and digital was published on Monday, collaboratively penned by 5 departments working with a technical writer to ensure clarity.

The process is not something that has been dictated by the centre of government – it has been built with and for users in departments.

We’re going to work with departments that have a pipeline ready and have their own design authorities, as laid out in the Government Transformation Strategy.

We want to hear from you

We’ve been thinking about how we understand spend across government. We’ve done some excellent research work with dxw (read more here) talking to standards and assurance teams across government. What we’ve found has helped us understand a set of user needs that are not only good for the civil servants who need better data, but for the public at large in starting to create a transparent, auditable pipeline of digital spend.

Are you working on how to manage the process, governance and data around digital spend portfolios? We’re working on procuring a tool and would like to talk to people who we could share it with. We are particularly interested in local and devolved governments (we’re already building for the user needs of central). We've already started conversations with a few organisations about whether we can share, but we'd like to talk to more.

We will be sharing further information with the Standards and Assurance community on the rollout and how it may affect them and their individual departments. If you work in government, you can join the GDS Advice and Assurance community.

It's now only 1 week until #Sprint18!

Sprint 18 is coming up on 10 May. As I wrote in my previous blog post to announce the event, Sprint 18 will be an opportunity to celebrate all the great work everyone across digital government has done so far. And to look at what we’ll be doing next.

Registration for Sprint 18 is now closed. However, you can follow the event on the day (10 May) – we’ll be doing a live blog and tweeting about it using the hashtag #Sprint18.

Transformation, collaboration, innovation

Sprint 18 will focus on 3 themes:

• Transformation: what the transformation of public services really means – both for government and for users
• Collaboration: how all of government, including GDS, is working together to deliver this change
• Innovation: how government can use cutting-edge technology to solve real problems for users

Sprint 18 will show how these themes drive our work and our purpose – to help government work better for everyone.

The speakers

At Sprint 18 we’ll hear from a wide range of speakers from GDS, government and across the digital and tech sectors. We’ll hear from people driving policy and from people delivering services. We’ll hear about the tangible effects transformation is having.

I’m particularly looking forward to hearing from departments about their service transformation. For example, we’ll hear from Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Department of International Trade about how they’re using common components. And we’ll hear from the UK Hydrographic Office about how they’re using innovative technologies to detect previously unknown shipping hazards.

We’ll hear from Oliver Dowden, Minister for Implementation, about building a government that works for everyone; we’ll hear from John Manzoni, Chief Executive of the Civil Service, about government’s digital transformation; and we’ll hear from Apolitical Chief Executive Robyn Scott about what the UK can learn from other governments to remain a global leader in digital.

And of course we’ll be talking about the work of GDS. We’ll be talking about the future of GOV.UK and end-to-end service transformation. We’ll be showing how we’re building government’s Digital, Data and Technology capability through the GDS Academy and we’ll be showcasing our work to help set up the Global Digital Marketplace.

A world-leading digital government

We hope that Sprint 2018 will be an illuminating, informative and inspirational day. It will be a chance to look at all the reasons that the UK continues to be a leading digital government and to look at how we can maintain and build on that position.

I hope to see you there.

16:20

Thank you for joining us on the live blog today and contributing to the discussions on Twitter (#Sprint18)! We’re hoping the conversations continue beyond today.

Did you find the content of this live blog useful? Let us know in the comments below!

16:05

Robyn Scott, Co-founder and CEO of Apolitical is on stage now talking about what the UK can learn from other governments to remain a global leader in digital.

15:59

Here are some highlights from this afternoon:

The Digital Marketplace workshop at Sprint 18.

The innovation showcase at Sprint 18.

15:40

How can the UK help other governments improve transparency by opening up procurement and contracting, and at the same time create global opportunities for UK suppliers?

It’s time for a panel debate featuring colleagues from GDS, the British High Commission in Pretoria, South Africa, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce, and the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management.

You can find out more about Global Digital Marketplace from our blog post about it.

15:37

More machine learning on show at #Sprint18!

15:25

We’re now hearing from Neil Williams, Head of GOV.UK, and Nicky Zachariou, Data Scientist at GDS, about the future of GOV.UK. They’re talking about how GOV.UK is using supervised deep learning to ensure its content can be understood by machines as well as humans.

They’re also revealing new ways to interact with GOV.UK. If you’d like to find out more, make sure you’re subscribed to the Inside GOV.UK blog.

15:14

Our colleagues from the UK Hydrographic Office are now on stage talking about automatically detecting previously unknown shipping hazards.

14:53

The innovation showcase is about to begin!

First, we’re going to hear from Graham Walker, Deputy Director for Innovation at GDS, and Holly Ellis, Director of Capability at GDS.

They’ll be talking about the first round of GovTech challenges and show practical uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Our delegates will see how digital continues to disrupt and revolutionise service delivery, and how government is harnessing the potential of emerging technology.

14:42

Kevin Cunnington, Director General at GDS, and Lara Sampson, Product Director at the Department for Work and Pensions, are on stage now.

Kevin is taking questions about GDS’s recent work and its upcoming priorities.

14:30

Here’s what people have been saying on Twitter about #Sprint18:

14:05

13:57

Registers are accurate and consistent live sets of data.

In this workshop session, participants are hearing about practical tips and examples of how to find and build with data. They’re also learning about how to make sure their data is good enough to support their service as it grows and adapts to meet changing needs and applications.

You can read more about our work on registers in this blog post update from Government as a Platform Programme Director at GDS, Ashley Stephens.

13:48

Our people and skills workshop participants are now learning about how we’re delivering the government’s ambition to have one of the most digitally skilled population of civil servants in the world.

This workshop is led by colleagues from GDS, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and the WPP Government and Public Sector Practice.

Digital skills are something Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has blogged about on the DCMS blog.

You can also read more about the work we’re doing across government to build capability in the Digital, Data and Technology profession on the Digital People blog.

13:33

The Digital Marketplace is helping the public sector buy what it needs to deliver great digital services.

Those attending our Digital Marketplace workshop are now learning from Crown Commercial Service and GDS, who run the service, about how they’re supporting buyers to procure services that transform government.

We recently blogged about a project we’re working on called Global Digital Marketplace. As the name suggests, it’s an expansion of the Digital Marketplace that will be open to international governments. And it means UK suppliers will have access to the global market.

13:16

Making things accessible means removing barriers. It means thinking about the range of human capability and designing for everyone.

Those attending the accessibility workshop, hosted by the Home Office and GDS, are learning about how making things accessible makes them better for all of us and how simple approaches can improve accessibility.

We recently published a great round-up of articles about accessibility so make sure you take a look.

Our blog post about the dos and don’ts on designing for accessibility is one of our most popular ever.

And, our colleagues from the Home Office have also blogged about how they work together to achieve accessibility.

13:11

Here’s what’s happened at #Sprint18 so far:

12:17

GDS has achieved a lot since we were set up. Read our story to see the highlights of our work from each year from 2010 to 2017, including highlights from 2017.

We're looking forward to more #Sprint18 action after lunch!

12:06

Finally, effective services don’t just reply on common components – they need to share common designs and standards. We are enabling government to move beyond digitisation, to transform end-to-end services at scale. Lou Downe, Head of Service Design and Standards at GDS, is on stage now.

You can read more about end-to-end service design and things we’re doing in 2018 to transform services on the GDS blog.

11: 56

The transformation showcase continues. Colleagues from the Department of Work and Pensions are talking about their ongoing work to ‘go digital’ with the state pension and make it easier for citizens to find out information on their current and likely future entitlement.

11:39

Shaun Ewings from HM Land Registry is on stage now speaking about their digital mortgage service – explaining how you will be able to sign mortgage deeds online as the service moves closer to public beta.

You can read about the digital mortgage service on HM Land Registry’s blog, including about how it makes use of GOV.UK Verify.

11:29

It’s transformation showcase time!

11:24

Chief Executive of the Civil Service John Manzoni is now speaking about how the Government Transformation Strategy and Government as a Platform (GaaP) have made it easier to transform services. As a result, digitised public services now support people at the most important points in their lives.

11:10

Oliver Dowden is announcing the first challenges to benefit from the GovTech Catalyst fund. Here are some reactions:

11:00

Oliver Dowden CBE MP, Parliamentary Secretary and Minister for Implementation, is on stage now.

10:51

Trisha Doyle, Head of Content Design at GDS, has just welcomed everyone to #Sprint18.

10:31

The Women in Tech stall at Sprint!

10:23

While you’re waiting for us to start live blogging the event, why don’t you read our recent blog posts about the work we’re doing at GDS to help government work better for everyone?

• We’re improving the digital and IT spend controls process
• Consultation launch: accessibility of public sector websites and apps
• How we’ve made things simpler for suppliers on G-Cloud 10
• Refreshing the Open Standards Principles

10:10

Here’s what we’re looking forward to today:

09:56

The main event is due to start at 10:40 with a keynote speech from Oliver Dowden CBE MP, Parliamentary Secretary and Minister for Implementation.

Then, we’ve got colleagues from Foreign and Commonwealth Office, HM Land Registry, the Department for Work and Pensions, and GDS talking about their progress to transform services by putting citizens at the heart of them. We’re also going to hear from Chief Executive of the Civil Service John Manzoni.

Make sure you bookmark this page and keep checking back for highlights, quotes, photos, videos and links to interesting content related to the topics we discuss at today’s event.

09:50

Our attendees are arriving and getting excited about the day. Here’s what they’ve been tweeting. Make sure you join the conversation as well (#Sprint18) and say hi – we’re tweeting at @gdsteam.

09:30

#Sprint18 is about to begin – welcome to our live blog! 

But what is Sprint? It’s our flagship event to celebrate all the great work that has been done so far to transform government – and to look at what we’ll be doing next.

Our Director General, Kevin Cunnington, blogged about it a few weeks ago. And so did the Head of the Civil Service, Sir Jeremy Heywood. We also have a highlights video from 2016 if you want to know more about Sprint:

We’ll be live blogging throughout the day, sharing quotes and pictures from the event, and links you may find useful. Make sure you bookmark this page and check back regularly for updates.

We’re also tweeting using the hashtag #Sprint18 so please do join in the conversation! Feel free to leave comments below as well!

Did you find the content of this live blog useful? Let us know in the comments below!

A couple of months ago, I blogged about some changes we were making to our blog channels to make sure they meet user needs, and how we’re improving the internal blogging process at GDS.

As I said in my previous post, we ran some retro sessions at the end of last year to find out what was working well and what wasn’t working. In this post, I’m going to talk about what we’ve done so far to address the feedback to make it easier to blog at GDS, and what’s coming up next.

New step-by-step process for blog authors

When we ran the retros to get feedback on our old publishing workflow, we found that many people at GDS were confused about:

• what they needed to do if they wanted to publish a blog post
• who they should speak to if they wanted to kickstart the process
• what the different stages in the publishing process involved

Each of the blogs that GDS runs has an editor, who is in charge of what goes on each blog. The editors worked together to come up with a new step-by-step process for blog writers that would show how to take a blog post from idea to publication.

These guidelines are now published on our intranet, and we’ve already done some internal comms and workshops with teams to tell people about them as well.

The first step in the publishing process: talk before you write

In the last 12 months, we’ve found that blog posts that are discussed with blog editors at the idea stage – before they’re drafted – take less time to publish and tend to require less editing.

So, the first step in the new publishing process is not actually about doing something, but it’s about not doing something – not writing before the initial conversations with the blog editor have taken place.

We ask authors to do that so that:

• we can work out whether the proposed blog post can be tied in with a bigger campaign that we’re running or be linked to a specific event (like this post, which was published on International Mental Health Day, or this one, which was a write-up of a conference talk our colleagues gave a few days before the post was published)
• the blog editor can liaise with press office ahead of time so that colleagues are aware of what’s coming up on our blogs, and with our social media team so that we can plan for how we publicise it
• we can support the author to highlight as much of the amazing work they’re doing as possible

This way of working is similar to how other teams at GDS work. You could say that a blog post is like a piece of code. Code is not written in isolation but created within a context – in response to something that our users need and usually as part of a service that has a number of different components. Similarly, blog posts are part of a bigger picture made up of other communications activities we run – something I already discussed in my blog post about making sure our blogs meet user needs.

The idea behind the ‘talk before you write’ principle is also to get things right the first time round – avoid unnecessary editing further down the line or any other issues that may slow down a blog post’s publication.

Questions to consider before drafting a blog post

We now also ask blog authors to consider some questions before formulating their blog post ideas. This is meant to help them in their drafting process and to help the blog editor understand what the aim of the post is.

We also encourage authors to consider whether a blog post is the most appropriate way to communicate their message.

Here are some of the questions we ask:

• Is a blog post the most appropriate way to communicate your message? Could it be communicated in a different way (for example, through a show-and-tell or on social media)?
• What’s the aim of the blog post? What’s the user need?
• Who’s going to read your blog post and how will they benefit from it?
• Is it time-sensitive? When would be the best time to publish it?

So far, feedback suggests that authors find it useful to answer these questions as it helps them formulate a strong draft.

The next step: writing your post

Once the initial conversations have taken place, we ask the author to draft their post. Most blog posts at GDS are written by their authors but we do have creative writers and technical writers who can support them or even write on their behalf. We use Google Docs to work collaboratively on blog posts when suggesting edits or additions, and when asking for feedback.

Blog writing tips

Our new step-by-step process also includes some advice on writing clear and engaging blog posts, including advice on:

• structure
• tone and style
• titles
• using calls to action

We also encourage authors to consider talking about the problem they or their team were faced with, how they went about addressing it and what the outcome was. We’ve found that this type of structure tends to produce the most engaging posts.

You can read our blogging guidance on GOV.UK.

Sharing our blog posts with our audiences

Once published, we share our blog posts on our official social media accounts. We also encourage their authors to do the same. This works particularly well when the author is an active Twitter user with a good following made up of people interested in a specific area. Twitter is our primary source of traffic when it comes to social media, but LinkedIn works well too. We’ve also had some traffic coming from Reddit recently.

How we measure success

Obviously everyone who publishes a blog post wants it to be read by as many people as possible. But page views aren’t the only metric we use to measure the success of our posts. Some of the other things we look at include:

• what proportion of people who read the post clicked through to specific guidance on GOV.UK that we linked to
• how many people registered for an event we blogged about
• how many people got in touch to join a user research group as a result of a call to action we included
• how much and by who the post was shared on social media
• whether or not the post was picked up by the press and what the coverage was

Looking at things like this helps us understand what sort of things we should be blogging about in the future. It also demonstrates that blogging can be a valuable tool to, for example, talk about guidance or build communities.

Monthly highlights

When we ran our retro sessions to get feedback on the old blogging process, another thing that came up was that our colleagues were interested in how our blogs were performing. So, we decided to make the stats more public by sharing them monthly on the GDS intranet.

We publish a lot – approximately 20 blog posts across all of the GDS-run blog channels each month. So, the highlights we produce only include a selection of blog posts. However, we encourage authors to get in touch with the blog editors they worked on their posts with to find out how their posts have performed.

Blogging drop-in sessions

The majority of people who want to publish blog posts on our blogs have not blogged on any of our channels before. That’s why we know we need to support them with the process.

One of the things we’re trialling at the moment is blogging drop-in sessions where authors can discuss and get some feedback on their ideas.

We ran our first drop-in session in May, for those interested in writing for our tech community blog. It was facilitated by the editors of the blog and technical writers, and it went well.

We’re now hoping to roll out a similar approach for the rest of the GDS-run blogs.

What’s next

We’re continuing to speak to everyone in GDS about our new guidelines and monitoring their effectiveness. We’ll be running further retros in the coming months as well, to see what’s worked so far and what else we can improve.

Subscribe to this blog if you’d like to hear more about what we’re doing in the blogging space at GDS.

Agnieszka Murdoch is the Head of Editorial at GDS. You can follow her on Twitter.