In the second GDS podcast, senior writer Sarah Stewart talks to Terence Eden, Open Standards Lead at the Government Digital Service.
Terence explains the open standards mission, the challenges and triumphs of the team and how the UK is doing on the global stage.
The pair discuss innovation in government, how to ensure a sensible approach to emerging technology and the need to consider the ethical implications.
In future episodes of the GDS podcast we’ll talk to people both inside and outside GDS and discuss digital transformation, innovation and collaboration.
You can subscribe to the GDS podcast on Apple Music and all other major podcast platforms.
Content design is one of the User-Centred Design (UCD) professions in government, alongside service design, graphic design and user research. There are more than 2000 content designers in government working on GOV.UK, digital services and products.
At the Government Digital Service (GDS) we use a community model of learning and support. We create opportunities for UCD practitioners across government to build and share knowledge together as peers. For example, our large scale learning festival ConCon, regular cross-government design critiques, mentoring networks or online conversation spaces like Slack.
Educational academics Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger describe a community of practice as “a living curriculum”.
Supporting a growing profession
We're a small team, supporting a large and growing profession, in a complex environment. So we have to design learning experiences that can scale up and adapt quickly as learning needs evolve.
One of the programmes we run is the required learning to get a publishing account on GOV.UK. This covers how to write user-centred content and how to use the GOV.UK publishing system.
Last year around 500 people attended, and numbers are set to increase this year as government departments prepare for the many content changes anticipated because of the UK's exit from the EU.
The required learning for publishers was delivered as a 2 day, face-to-face classroom based training course. It had positive feedback from attendees on the content of the course. But it was causing an issue because:
it was taking a disproportionate amount of time to deliver for so many people, taking capacity away from the support of ongoing learner journeys for content designers as the profession matures
it was impossible to scale up and we could not have run more sessions
it was no longer meeting learner needs as learners were asking for more use of digital tools, opportunities to learn closer to where they were based and more practical activities
Redesigning the required learning for GOV.UK
We created an application and triage process to analyse and manage demand for places, instead of first-come, first-served booking. This means we can prioritise places for teams with urgent publishing needs.
‘Writing for GOV.UK’ is now an online module. New GOV.UK publishers can complete it at their own pace, in their own location. It contains a mix of materials including videos, links to articles, practical tasks, quizzes and an end of module assessment.
Learners have said:
“This new course offers the chance to focus more and think about the task independently.”
“The e-learning gave me time to really immerse myself and absorb the information.”
‘How to Publish on GOV.UK’ is now a half day classroom session, focused largely on hands-on opportunities to practice using the publishing tool with real world scenarios. It’s now being offered in GDS Academy locations around the UK.
How the training and assessment day has evolved
We’re also building an associate trainer network by partnering with skilled content professionals in departments across government to deliver this classroom session. So far we’ve worked with the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), Department for International Trade (DIT), Department for Exiting the European Union and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Theresa Fleming, IPO’s content lead, described the associate trainer opportunity as “a welcome evolution in our offering”, being able to build capability within their communications team and organisation.
Kay Southall and Mark Hazelby, joint head of content at DIT also welcomed the opportunity to run training sessions to meet demand, saying it was great to be “part of a cross government community of practice that will help to quickly build capacity and capability in DIT”.
When someone completes the course and receives their GOV.UK publishing account, they are welcomed to the cross-government content community and offered ongoing opportunities to contribute and learn.
We can now:
support 4 times as many people to start publishing on GOV.UK with no additional trainer time
see upcoming demand and schedule classes closer to where learners are based
spend more time helping content designers learn across their whole career, not just at the start
How the trainer network as expanded
What we're doing to continue building the profession
We are refocusing the team away from delivering training and towards a broader learning design approach. This is so we do not make the assumption a new classroom training course is the answer to all the learning needs for the profession. And to allow us to collaborate more closely with the vibrant community of practice.
Feedback on the newly designed GOV.UK publishing course shows learners are marking it 4 out of 5 on average. But 30% of learners are finding it too long or too text based. So we will be iterating it from the next quarter based on user feedback and in collaboration with members of the content community.
As the new simpler, data-informed publishing system is rolled out, we’ll be able to access data to tell us what the learning needs are across the publishing network, so we can design more focused learning interventions.
We will look for ways to share the online ‘Writing for GOV.UK’ course more widely to help more people understand the value of content design. We know there is a demand from other government professions and public sector organisations.
We will also be looking at the content designer end to end learner journey across their career and designing a variety of ways for them to learn what they need to know, when they need to know it.
New regulations have come into force which means from next year, every public sector website and app will need to meet certain accessibility standards.
The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No.2) Accessibility Regulations 2018, to give its full title, came into force on 23 September. It aims to ensure public sector websites and mobile apps are accessible to all users, especially those with disabilities.
Now we want to focus on one particular thing the regulations require - publishing a website accessibility statement.
The regulations and the statement
All new public sector websites will need to meet accessibility standards and publish an accessibility statement.
This will make clear the level of accessibility across the site or app. Where there are barriers, the statement will inform users of alternative routes to access. The statement will also enable users to contact the website owner if they identify issues.
Any websites published since September this year will need a statement by September 2019, while older websites have until 2020 to comply.
Writing the statement
Many public sector bodies already publish accessibility information on their website. The new regulations mean this information will have to be presented in a consistent way and based on a model statement.
The accessibility statement should:
list any inaccessible parts of the website or app
show how people with access needs can get alternatives to content that’s not accessible
provide details on who to contact to report accessibility issues
provide information on the enforcement procedure if people are not happy with the response
be published in a fully accessible form
follow a consistent format
The statement will also need to be updated annually.
How GDS is helping
GDS is currently working on the model statement that website owners must use.
We are currently finalising the template and will publish it on GOV.UK in the new year.
What you need to do right now
In order to have the information required to complete an accessibility statement it is important that public sector bodies review and test their websites for user accessibility now.
You should include users with access needs and those using assistive technologies in this activity and schedule this on a regular basis.
When fixing issues with your online services and published content make sure they meet the key acceptance criteria of the European or international standards (respectively, EN 301 549 and WCAG 2.1 AA).
This will ensure you are prepared to meet the new regulations and will have all the information needed for your statement.
We want our teams to reflect the society we serve. An inclusive and diverse workplace will help the UK government work better for everyone.
The Civil Service has committed to increasing ethnic minority representation at Senior Civil Servant (SCS) level - the highest grades made up of deputy directors and above.
We are determined to change this and we wanted to give civil servants the opportunity to tell us what will help them. So, we held our first Breaking Down Barriers event last month in London, specifically aimed at improving SCS representation in the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Profession.
John Manzoni, chief executive of the Civil Service, spoke passionately about his dedication to increase ethnic minority representation in SCS. We also heard career stories from public and private sector employees.
— Digital, data and tech careers in UK government (@DigiCareersGov) October 23, 2018
The audience was asked: “In one word, what is the greatest barrier to SCS progression for ethnic minority DDaT professionals?” The answers, as seen in the word cloud above, included 'culture', 'support' and 'confidence'.
The audience shared their experiences and we had conversations about what the Civil Service is doing - and can do - to help overcome obstacles to career progression.
We aim to continue this work across the Civil Service in 2019 and produce materials that will support line manager capability training across the DDaT Profession.
Get involved
Whatever your background you can be an ally. Allies help to raise awareness and encourage the change we all wish to see.
You can also join a network. For instance, GDS has the GDS BAME Network.
Or come along to the next Breaking Down Barriers event. It will be held in Spring 2019, and if you want to hear about the next event and what else we’re doing, please sign up to the Let’s Talk about Race mailing list.
In the podcast, Liz and Rosa talk about how and why the network was set up and its work so far. They also discuss wider issues of equality and inclusiveness in the workplace.
You can subscribe to the GDS podcast on Apple Music and all other major podcast platforms.
You can read transcripts of all our podcast episodes on Podbean.
Journey mapping is an essential part of building step by step navigation on GOV.UK. It’s a process that can also be used elsewhere so we shared how we map service journeys.
GOV.UK is built and run using agile methodology and as part of this, we adapt our ways of working based on what we have learned. So we put in place 4 new principles to help overcome challenges with GOV.UK delivery:
Oliver Dowden, Minister for Implementation and GDS’s minister, came to visit us at our offices in Whitechapel, London. He met staff, including the GOV.UK team, and heard about their work.
GDS also held its flagship event, Sprint 18. We celebrated the great work happening across digital government and launched the first GovTech Fund competition. The £20 million fund helps private sector innovators tackle public sector problems.
We blogged about the UK government’s accessibility empathy lab, which is based at GDS. It’s open to any public sector employee to raise awareness about accessibility and be an assistive technology testing space.
GDS needs to make sure GOV.UK can keep pace with whatever technology people are using to access it. This is why a huge amount of work has been done on the GOV.UK structure which will allow it to be read by newer technology, such as voice assistants.
GDS and the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government launched the Local Digital Declaration. This is a set of guiding principles to support local authorities to deliver digital services and platforms.
Our post on why GOV.UK content should be published in HTML and not PDF scored the accolade of being the most-read post in our blog’s history and received global attention, with people reading it from as far away as Japan.
Almost half of government digital spend through the Digital Marketplace went to small and medium-sized enterprises, according to the August spending figures.
The first Let’s Talk About Race event aimed at increasing diversity amongst senior civil servants in the Digital, Data and Technology Profession was held in London.
The GDS Academy shared its expertise overseas on a visit to Ottawa to meet members of the Canadian government. Following our return, they announced the creation of their own Digital Academy.
But digital skills alone are insufficient. Digital understanding is paramount to the success of government transformation. We believe that an understanding of technology - both present and emerging - should be core to the practice of the Civil Service.
So following a successful pilot in early 2018, the GDS Academy has launched the Emerging Technology Development Programme. It's now open for applications from across the Civil Service until 5pm on 11 January 2019.
What the first cohort will be doing
The programme will create a deployable team of specialists with the skills, knowledge and confidence to advise on the application of emerging technologies to solve government’s most difficult problems.
It will partner small groups of qualified civil servants with world leading specialists through a tailored 10-week curriculum of learning.
“Thanks to its versatility, AI and machine learning can be used everywhere to accomplish services and enhance the quality of their provision across sectors like health, energy, environment, transport, housing, manufacturing,” says Prof Hamid Bouchachia, Professor in Data Science and Intelligent Systems at Bournemouth University, as well as one of the academic tutors on the programme.
The programme is designed to significantly enhance government capability. It will help departments make the best use of emerging technology and build internal capability within GDS and wider government to stay ahead of the transformation curve.
Dr Wenjia Wang, a senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia’s School of Computing Science, and another programme tutor, said: “AI can help government improve its services to its citizens in a number of ways.
"For example, to have a better and evidence based understanding of the concerns or the problems the citizen has with the services government provides, by analysing the service data and finding the patterns.”
The new programme reflects the wider expansion of the GDS Academy’s curriculum to cover the breadth of new technologies impacting public services.
It’s been a year since we announced the GovTech Catalyst and in that time we’ve had a great response to our aim of finding innovative fixes for public sector problems.
So far, we’ve run 6 challenges and received more than 270 applications from private sector tech firms, with 90% from small and medium size enterprises.
We’ve learned a lot over the past year and we’re often asked by other government departments to share what we’ve found. So if you want to explore and investigate innovative solutions to problems at low cost before you procure a solution, here are our top 5 tips for setting up your own catalyst.
Set your goals
The first thing you have to be clear on is what problem are you trying to solve by setting up a catalyst. It’s important to have a problem-led approach rather than a technology one. For example, you should focus on the problem you’re trying to solve, rather than how can a specific technology can solve your problem.
The GovTech Catalyst model is for you if you want to partner with emerging technology or innovation focused companies to research and test solutions. It focuses on things actually getting delivered in an environment where it’s genuinely possible to fail fast.
On the other hand, if you want to challenge the culture of your organisation and foster intrapreneurship, a model like the DfT Lab would be useful.
The two models are quite different, but equally successful at delivering their intended outcomes. When you're clear on what you want to achieve it will be clear which model to pick.
Grow your team
Once you know your model, you need to think carefully about the size, shape and skill set of the team. This has been one of the most challenging aspects of running the GovTech Catalyst. We’re currently a small team of 7 people, but we initially underestimated the amount of administration work needed to run the challenge process and set up the competitions.
At its peak, we'll be running 15 projects at the same time - so having identified the increased workload, we expanded the team and changed our approach.
We now have more engagement leads and take an account management approach. Each challenge team knows exactly who their point of contact is here at the Government Digital Service and we have a more sustainable model for the future.
Set timelines
Because of the way we’re funded our timeline is non-negotiable. We launch a challenge a month, so we’ve not had as much time as we'd like to reflect on our learnings and figure out how we can improve the process.
When your department is setting up a catalyst for the first time, it’s important to start small, factor in time to learnand then scale up.
Tell people about your catalyst
You’ll get better quality applications for your funding if you promote your catalyst effectively to the right audiences.
The public sector is complex and can be hard to navigate, so we put our efforts into communicating with cross-government communities instead of relying on senior leaders to cascade information through their organisations.
We focused on how and where we engaged with people and spoke at a wider range of events. This takes time and effort, but it’s well worth the investment.
We’re also continually learning and changing how we talk about the fund. For example, we received fewer applications in rounds 2 and 3 than we did in the first round - however the quality of the applications increased.
This shows we’re being clearer on what makes a suitable GovTech challenge and how many people and resources the challenge-owning organisation needs to commit. It also means we’re not wasting anyone's time with fruitless bids.
Know what good looks like
We iterated our evaluation criteria between rounds 1 and 2. The first round was heavily focused on the return on investment. For example we asked, “How much money would we save the taxpayer if we invested £1.25 million in your challenge?”
This was a good thing to consider as solutions have to be affordable. But we believe you cannot accurately predict this value until you know what the solution is and how much it will cost.
So we iterated our challenge selection criteria. Applicants must now show how well they understand the problem and convince us there’s no existing products they could use instead.
GovTech Catalyst in the future
The 5 challenges selected in round 3 will be announced in January 2019 bringing the total number of challenges to 15.
There’s a lot of interest in the results of the first phases of experimentation as well as what the future holds for the GovTech Catalyst.
What we do know - and what we’ve proven - is there’s quite an appetite in the public and private sectors to work in this way to explore innovative solutions to make services better for users.
We’re looking forward to continuing to learn, iterate and share our findings.
If your department has recently set up an innovation catalyst or plans to, we’d love to hear about your experiences and share ours, so please get in touch.
GOV.UK Verify is a secure way for users to prove they are who they say they are online. It means people can access services, like filing their tax or checking the information on their driving licence, without having to prove their identity in person or waiting for something to arrive in the post.
GOV.UK Verify is part of the wider government Verify programme, which aims to ensure that users can create, use and reuse digital identities across public and private sector services.
Government Digital Service director general Kevin Cunnington blogged about the future of GOV.UK Verifyin October. At the time, we had recently signed contracts with 5 private sector identity providers.
Now, we want to provide more details about the priorities for the Verify programme over the next 18 months. We’ll be working on them with a number of other government departments.
Help make the standards for digital identity easier to follow and use
For the digital identity standards to be widely used, they need to be flexible and clear enough to meet a range of needs. That’s why we’ll be continuing to work with private and public sector organisations to:
make the government identity standards easier to understand and use
make sure people can use more types of identity evidence to prove it’s really them
Help digital identities work across private and public sector services
Users should only have to prove their identity online once. We want to remove barriers so that digital identities work across sectors, enabling users to reuse the same digital identity to access different services.
Make better use of government data
The government has data about its users that public and private organisations can use to help verify users’ identities. This data is never stored in one place or shared without users’ permission.
Making better use of it means more users can prove who they are online and access more services faster.
Help build confidence in the digital identity market
We know we need to help private sector organisations broaden the usage and application of digital identity and grow the emerging market.
By working with organisations and users to provide a clear data, standards and assurance model, we can open up the market and build private and public sector understanding of the importance of a standards-based approach to identity checking.
We will not be doing it alone
We’ll continue to work with other parts of government, standards bodies, trade associations, GOV.UK Verify identity providers and other private sector organisations to ensure digital identity is used to protect services from cyber threats, and other malicious activity.
We'll make sure users can prove their identities and access the services they need to more easily. Together, we’ll do the hard work so users do not have to.
In the latest episode of the Government Digital Service (GDS) podcast, senior writers Angus Montgomery and Sarah Stewart look back at what the organisation has achieved in 2018.
They discuss what GDS has delivered on the 3 themes of transformation, innovation and collaboration and play audio clips of GDS people talking about their work.
I wanted to expand on the key points the minister made as we gear up for an exciting year of collaboration and delivery in phase one prioritised countries - South Africa, Mexico, Colombia, Indonesia and Malaysia.
I first talked about going wholesale: scaling the Digital Marketplace in my Digital Marketplace vision series back in 2016. I concluded that a global community of collaborators was growing around the idea that user-centred, design-led, data-driven and open approaches can bring about the much needed reform of public procurement and contracting.
Gavin Hayman, executive director of the Open Contracting Partnership, sums up nicely why public procurement and contracting is so pivotal:
It’s the number one corruption risk because it’s where money, opacity, and government discretion collide.
As our minister said, initiatives like the Digital Marketplace mean government can buy the right technology and services from the right people at the right price. This leads to smarter spending of taxpayers’ money to build better things for citizens.
More than procurement
The Digital Marketplace has enabled UK companies to grow and develop a global trading presence. For example, FlyingBinary - a small and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) - is using its G-Cloud services with cities around the world to build cyber security capabilities, counter fake news and safeguard young people with mental health issues.
It’s work like this, supported by the Global Digital Marketplace Programme, which will go some way in reducing the huge amount of public money that’s lost every year globally, as a result of corruption.
Reforming public procurement to help deliver better public services through tackling corruption, is fundamental, but this is more than procurement.
When I spoke to UK Authority last June about extending the reach of the Digital Marketplace, I said the Global Digital Marketplace Programme would be tailored to what individual countries need and was likely to go further than simply the Digital Marketplace platform itself.
Over the past 12 months we’ve been testing and refining the Global Digital Marketplace Programme offer, based on our engagements with in-country stakeholders, including:
national and subnational governments (e.g. states or provinces, cities or municipalities)
the domestic supply chains
business interest groups (e.g. chambers of commerce)
civil society organisations
This has helped to refine the ‘5 pillars’ of the Global Digital Marketplace Programme, which provides an opportunity to look holistically at the end-to-end delivery lifecycle of public procurement and contracting.
There are exciting opportunities for civic participation at every stage of the public procurement and contracting process. Thanks to the OCDS and the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Participation & Co-creation Standards - which recognises principles of good engagement - this enables us to engage with civil society and get their input on how public funds should be spent.
Transparent, civic participation in this way is important because it helps:
those in civil society who are affected by government’s decisions to have a right to be involved in the decision-making process
to build public trust that their contributions will genuinely and transparently influence sustainable decisions, which recognise the needs and interests of all participants
to design and deliver better public services
to tackle corruption
Working with partners internationally, locally
As in the UK with the Local Digital Declaration, collaboration across central and local governments is critical for efficiently and effectively delivering the digital transformation of the public sector.
Our partners in prioritised countries are:
the networks of British Embassies and High Commissions
national government ministries responsible for reform in these areas
subnational governments at state or provincial levels and city or municipality levels
I’m also exploring opportunities with non-government and not-for-profit organisations, who we’ll partner to support our in-country delivery across the 5 pillars of the Global Digital Marketplace Programme.
Also building on our UK experiences, we’re focussing initially on the important spend category of DDaT services, as these are central to delivering national and subnational governments’ digital and transformation strategies.
A key aspect of the next phase of the Global Digital Marketplace Programme, which we’ll start exploring following our discoveries, will be local delivery pilots in a number of cities and municipalities in each country.
We’ll be returning to share early insights from our discoveries in the coming months.
The first ever Services Week takes place next week – from 28 January to 1 February.
It’s a nationwide, cross-government event that looks at how we can work together to deliver end-to-end, user-focused services.
There are workshops, talks and training events happening across the UK, run by more than 20 government organisations including the Department for Education, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the Department of Transport and the Public Health England. The events are open to civil servants and people working for the public sector.
You can see the full agenda for the week. As this is an open agenda - which organisations are contributing to - it will continue to develop right up until the start of the week.
Watch live-streamed sessions
Throughout Services Week there will be a number of live-streamed sessions, which you can watch and listen to wherever you are.
The week will start with a live-streamed talk from Lou Downe, Head of Design for the UK government, reflecting on the past, present and future of government services.
Then every day at midday, you'll be able to watch a case study via YouTube Live. These include Adam Griffiths from the Department for Transport talking about the Blue Badge Service and Steve Borthwick from DWP presenting on Check your State Pension.
The links to the YouTube sessions will be published on the main agenda on the day.
There will also be an open peer support call for people working on services on Monday afternoon. All links for dialling into the talks and meetings can be found on the #ServicesWeek channel on the cross-government Slack.
Why people are taking part
We spoke to some of the people organising events during Services Week about what they are doing and why they are getting involved. Here is what they said:
Laura Billings - content lead, GDS
We’re taking part in Services Week to promote user-centred design and to help civil servants across government learn how they can improve forms.
Forms matter. A badly designed form can prevent people from accessing the government services they need, potentially in times of high emotional or financial strain.
We’ll be hosting a ‘form-a-palooza’ (which is sold out but you can still join the waiting list) where participants will be getting hands on with form audits and digital prototyping, with the backing of the DC Lab in the USA and 6 experts from across government and industry.
Nichole Browne - senior user researcher at the DVSA in Nottingham
At DVSA we are excited to join in with Services Week to identify areas of commonality with other public-sector service design groups and learn new approaches that can raise our capability.
We will be running a lunch and learn session to share our approach to leveraging the full value of quantitative and qualitative data for better user outcomes. We bring the separate disciplines of performance analytics and user research together in an innovative approach which is delivering benefits throughout the service lifecycle.
We’ll show why it is important to work together, share examples of our work and provide hints and tips on how you can develop an effective cross disciplinary partnership.
John Fitzpatrick - senior digital service manager at Ministry of Justice Digital and Technology in Sheffield
Our Sheffield Digital Studio aims to challenge the current situation in the prisons and probation space. We’re looking at things like ageing technology and equipment, legacy databases and poor service provision which make people’s lives - at work as well as behind bars - even more difficult.
In 2017 we launched Service Communities, which aimed to create a new way of working on end-to-end government services.
Service Communities are networks of people with different skills and from different professions and organisations, who are united by the service areas they work on.
We wanted to find out if Service Communities could be a way of helping different people work together on common user-centred end-to-end services. And we wanted to see if they could help to break down some of the barriers that might prevent this collaboration from happening.
Here’s what we’ve achieved and what we’ve learned.
Setting up and supporting communities
We launched our Service Communities work with the Start a Business community, which has members from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), Companies House and Food Standards Agency, among others.
Since then we've launched 2 more communities: the Employ Someone community - which has members from 6 organisations including the Department for Work and Pensions, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and Home Office - and the Import-Export community, which has members from 10 organisations including HMRC and the Arts Council.
We’ve also seen the self-started Get Health Benefits community form and we’re currently looking at 2 more potential communities that we could set up.
In total there are 236 members from more than 15 organisations, across the 4 communities. And they've held 23 workshops to bring the members together.
How Service Communities work
When we set up Service Communities, we intended for them to provide a structure for people to work together across departmental and professional boundaries. We wanted them to be a forum where people could collaborate and share things like policy and legal issues, user research, the types of data they hold that relates to the service and the technology they use.
We’ve seen this approach take hold across the communities. For example, in the Start a Business community, Companies House opened up research sessions with users to other community departments. Some departments and agencies have submitted questions and some have shadowed the sessions.
And in the Employ Someone community it emerged that Home Office were struggling to recruit participants for research on a particular project - but BEIS community members were able to successfully help Home Office recruit.
All the communities are now meeting regularly and we’re seeing lots more examples of community members working together productively.
What Service Communities have achieved
Thanks to this constructive collaboration, we’re now seeing a number of tangible outcomes from across the communities.
Start a Business community members also helped BEIS's business support helpline team shape its re-procurement process by running a workshop to understand how other government organisations use the helpline
the Import/Export community, Start a Business and Get Health Benefits communities created cross-government service landscapes for their service areas
We’ve seen real potential and outcomes from the community members working together and we’ve seen benefits from linking the communities up with other Government Digital Service (GDS) teams like the step by step services team on GOV.UK.
Where we want to go next
It has never been the intention of GDS to run these communities ourselves. We are merely creating the environment to let organisations, teams and people collaborate effectively with each other. Our experience so far has shown that there's a strong appetite for this collaboration and this way of working can lead to tangible benefits.
We’ve learned a lot so far about how communities can form and grow, and we want to take this approach to other service areas.
We'll also continue to iterate what GDS offers and how we work with communities so that we can best support them.
And we want to make sure that Service Communities can help to make inclusive government services that work for all users. This means having an understanding of all the potential barriers and challenges. So we're exploring fully inclusive ways to research and design for all users and how this can work across communities.
Our ultimate goal is the communities become a self-supporting, sustainable approach to designing user-focused end-to-end services in government.
If you're interested in the work Service Communities are doing or think a community might be applicable to the service you are working on please get in touch. You can contact us on the #servicecommunities cross-government Slack channel or send us an email.
As part of the first ever Services Week, a series of cross-government events have been taking place around the UK looking at how we can work together to deliver end-to-end, user-focused services.
Here's a recap of some of the highlights, as told through social media.
Absolutely loved form-a-palooza this morning. Great to create a low-fidelity prototype and transition to user testing withing minutes. Thanks @GDSTeam#servicesweekpic.twitter.com/DVuTFMBS7p
Day 2 of #servicesweek taking the mobile innovation space on the road. Staff experiencing virtual reality and how we are using it for property walk throughs such as schools pic.twitter.com/sBtb276HoF
For #ServicesWeek across the civil service we hosted a prototyping surgery - an opportunity to meet colleagues in other depts and show what we do! #phedigital thanks to all who came pic.twitter.com/OhOL2SmwB3
Delivery manager Annika explains how our teams have enjoyed learning and sharing with @HMRCdigital, local government and more pic.twitter.com/mEEuewqfy4
Great conversations about the importance of intent behind words and the the importance of user needs when thinking about design patterns. #ServicesWeekpic.twitter.com/SyGO81yfGI
In the latest episode of the GDS Podcast, senior writer Angus Montgomery talks to Kit Collingwood.
Kit was, until recently, a deputy director at the Department for Work and Pensions looking at data transformation. She is also a co-founder of the OneTeamGov movement.
After 10 years working in government, Kit has now left for a new role at consultancy ThoughtWorks.
As we have previously blogged, GovWifi has been designed to replace user and guest wifi with a single secure wifi connection.
With increasing numbers of public sector workers having to be mobile, it’s important for them to be able to get online wherever they’re working. GovWifi has made this easier and users have told us they really appreciate not having to ask for guest wifi passwords when visiting other buildings.
GovWifi is used more than 2 million times a month, which is twice as often compared with a year ago.
Supporting IT teams
Having made GovWifi easy to use for staff, we next turned our attention to departments’ IT and support teams. These are the people who install GovWifi and provide help and assistance to civil servants and public sector workers using the service in the buildings they manage.
Until recently, registering an organisation on the GovWifi network was a manual process which involved emails and telephone calls.
As more and more organisations signed up to join GovWifi, this was sometimes a slow process and it took time away for us to develop new features.
GovWifi is used by more than 100 organisations around the UK
Automating the process
We knew we had to make this process simpler for IT teams and the best way to do this was to automate everything. So we built a self-administration portal that allows IT teams to register themselves with GovWifi.
As ever in GDS, we wanted to know precisely what the user needs were to make automation as easy as possible. So we met with a range of organisations - local authorities, central government departments and arm’s length bodies - to find out if they had any issues when signing up to GovWifi.
We then built a prototype of the self-administration portal and invited a few organisations to try it out. Thanks to their comments, criticisms and suggestions, we refined the product and now have it up and running on GOV.UK.
We’re still testing it and continuing to fine tune it based on user feedback. But organisations can already check whether they meet the technical requirements needed to access GovWifi, view the terms and conditions for joining the network and create an admin account.
How to get started on GovWifi
Managing GovWifi accounts
The admin account is where the advantages of having a self-administration portal become obvious. Here, apart from registering the organisation onto the GovWifi network, IT administrators can also:
add their IP addresses to the GovWifi server to get access
add team members as administrators
view and agree the terms and conditions for using the service
And handily, you can see at a glance whether GovWifi is fully operational or not.
More than 100 local and central government organisations have signed up for GovWifi around the UK.
It's now available in more than 300 HMCTS courts in England and Wales, is used by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency all around the coast and numerous hospitals, police and fire rescue services.
So if your organisation is not yet on GovWifi, now’s the time to apply.
The GDS Academy provides people with the digital and technology skills needed to transform public services. It's open to civil servants, local government employees, devolved administrations and other public servants.
Previously known as the Digital Academy, it began life in a room at Fulham Jobcentre. Initially it was set up to grow in-house digital capability and upskill civil servants at the Department for Work and Pensions.
From these humble beginnings, the GDS Academy has grown to be a centralised public sector training resource. Today, there are 4 academies in London, Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle and our model has influenced other international governments to set up their own versions.
We will continue to develop by opening academies in more locations and offering a wider range of courses and programmes. This will help ensure we continue to deliver on one of the Government Transformation Strategy’s ambitions of having one of the most digitally skilled group of public servants in the world by 2020.
Expansion
We are growing nationally, internationally and in the training we provide.
Alongside our 4 permanent locations there have been pop-up academies in Birmingham and Newport. In Leeds, we've recently moved into new quarters in a tech incubator hub. We’re investigating new locations to set up in and we’ll continue to run pop-up academies in the meantime.
Our international reach is growing: Two GDS Academy facilitators visited Canada last year to share how we had upskilled our public servants. After this visit, the Canadian government set up its own version of the GDS Academy. We also offered our support to the Scottish government when it was establishing the Scottish Digital Academy.
We’re increasing the number of local authority students by linking GDS Academy training opportunities to the Local Digital Declaration principles. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s Local Digital Fund provides committed funding for more than 1,000 local authority staff to attend training.
And we’re delivering courses to health organisations, including Public Health England, to help adoption of digital and agile ways of working.
Changing ways of working
Since 2012, the number of Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) job roles across government has increased and there are now around 17,000 DDaT specialists in government.
This growth led to the establishment of the DDaT Profession and the DDaT Capability Framework - a common set of roles, skills and career paths for 38 roles that every government organisation can use.
The GDS Academy is aligned with the framework. This means public servants can get the most appropriate learning and development. The training also includes awareness courses for non-specialists and those in digital roles, as well as courses for senior leaders. Our popular 10-day digital and agile foundation course is accredited by the Learning and Performance Institute.
He explains his passion for emerging technology, his plan to encourage its adoption in government and how teaching in rural Japan helped equip him for the role.
They also discuss the highlights from the past year, his work on the emerging technology strategy and his surprising first job in tech.
You can subscribe to the GDS podcast on Apple Music and all other major podcast platforms.
You can read transcripts of all our podcast episodes on Podbean.
The Women's Network at the Government Digital Service (GDS) ran a training and mentoring working group last summer, where we asked our members how could we improve the offering at GDS.
We had a high volume of responses and spent some time thinking about what we wanted to achieve.
We decided to focus on mentoring, as we knew from our research there was a need for a mentoring scheme that could help everyone at GDS, not just the Women’s Network.
So we set up a working group with the goal of improving awareness of mentoring. We also looked at the best way for how people could be matched, the resources and training available for mentors and mentees and how the scheme could be evaluated.
How the scheme works
The scheme is open to anyone working at GDS. We aim to match people looking for mentors with someone who has the appropriate skills and experience.
If you’re looking for a mentor, you can fill out our signup form where we ask a few questions about your goals. If you’d like to be a mentor, you can also fill out the form and outline the types of skills you can offer.
The matching committee then meets monthly and looks through the anonymised profiles of mentors and mentees and puts them together, ‘Blind Date’ style!
After matching, we contact the mentor to check they’re still available. Priorities can change and it’s important the mentor can give a time commitment to the mentoring process.
Once they’ve confirmed, we introduce the mentor and mentee to each other via email and give them guidance on how to get started with the mentoring relationship.
We also want to offer ongoing support after the matching process has happened. So we’ve set up a Slack channel and a mailing list to better communicate with our mentors, and updated the guidance on GDS wiki.
The matching committee at work
Should I become a mentor?
The role of a mentor is to encourage the personal and professional development of a mentee by sharing knowledge, expertise and experience.
Mentors can have a wide range of skill levels and backgrounds - your experiences will be valuable to somebody! Being a mentor can help develop coaching and listening skills, and allows you to get a fresh perspective outside your usual network.
It’s also great for people who want to get management experience and build their own confidence. It’s very satisfying to see your mentee progress over time and achieve their goals.
In December we ran an Agile coaching skills session to help support mentors. This included guidance on how to balance the mentor’s role as an advisor, with coaching techniques to help encourage the mentee to arrive at their own solutions.
Do I need a mentor?
Having a mentor is not just about career progression or getting a promotion. A mentor can help you improve technical skills and coach you through a specific problem you’re having, or can simply be an impartial listener.
The mentoring scheme also offers reverse mentoring, where someone is mentored by someone junior to them - this can be a great way to get feedback and get a broader perspective on the organisation.
Speed mentoring
The Women’s Network also ran a Speed Mentoring event in October 2018. A room full of enthusiastic prospective mentors and mentees gathered in the GDS Academy to learn about the benefits of mentoring and having a mentor, and to get some general tips.
Then we began mentoring in pairs, discussing each others’ goals and challenges, and swapping to another pair after 5 minutes in rotation.
This event was a great success, and we plan to run another later this year.
The team running a retrospective after conducting research in Indonesia
The Global Digital Marketplace aims to help international governments make their procurement more transparent, and to boost their digital, data and technology sectors. It builds on the success and expertise we have gained through the Digital Marketplace in the UK.
We’re working with national and regional governments in South Africa, Mexico, Colombia, Indonesia and Malaysia. We’re now in discovery, researching the digital procurement landscape in those countries. The aim is to figure out the most useful work to do in the next phase of the project, and – ultimately – to help tackle corruption globally. Warren Smith blogged about what GDS is doing in this area in January.
Our team set-up
Our team has about 20 people, from GDS and 5 supplier partner organisations. While that might sound like a recipe for mayhem, the project was set up this way on purpose. Here’s why.
The GDS team wasn’t big enough to do the discovery on its own. We could have looked for a supplier to help, but the global scope and timing of the work probably would have limited bidding to large organisations, and we were concerned about being dependent on a single large supplier. We also wanted to open up opportunities to a broad range of potential partners.
We were also hoping to find specific and relevant expertise, and of course to get maximum value for the contracts. To do those things, it was important for bidding to be open and competitive, and not limited to big, global organisations.
Breaking the discovery into chunks
The solution was to break the discovery into smaller chunks, and enable suppliers to bid for each of them.
This opened up the bidding to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and 4 were awarded the contracts: Rainmaker Solutions, Caution Your Blast, dxw digital (who partnered with Oxford Insights), and Spend Network. Each supplier has to deliver a specific outcome, and all the outcomes have to add up to a coherent discovery outcome.
This felt pretty daunting – none of us had experience with working as part of this kind of team before. We decided to approach it as an experiment to see if we can make multi-supplier delivery work.
Our findings so far
Here’s what we’ve found so far:
1. It can be done!
So far, our discovery has shown us that it is possible to bring people from different organisations together to operate as one team. Even if they and their organisations have different remits. But, unsurprisingly, this way of working needs to be approached differently from working as part of an in-house team.
Discovery teams going through their research findings and sharing what they learned
Each supplier team will naturally be focused on their own outcome, because their success will be measured against it. Therefore, our goal was to encourage them to focus on the overall outcome of the programme and to foster positive relationships between the different supplier teams. We did this by making sure that each team understood what the others were doing, and also through organising social activities, so that we could get to know each other better.
2. We found expertise, even where we didn’t expect it
Breaking the work into smaller, themed chunks helped us find expertise, even in areas where we didn’t expect to find it. For example, Spend Network is a specialist in open data and contracting, while Rainmaker has a strong presence in South Africa and is using it to support the discovery work there. The team is stronger for it.
3. Balancing central direction with autonomy is tricky
When working as part of a multi-supplier team, you need to balance the need for central oversight of the work with the different suppliers’ ability to decide how they deliver their outcomes. And this is hard to get right.
One example of this is the backlog: we have several – a central one and others that the suppliers maintain. Trying to merge or align them just hasn’t been practical, but it means there’s no place with a complete view of the team’s work. We’re continuing to look for a better solution to this one.
Another example is how we manage user research. Early on in the discovery, we decided that we wanted to have a common approach to research – use the same consent form, log our research participants and our findings in the same way. Essentially, we wanted to have common standards so that each team could quickly grasp what another team had found.
The suppliers we work with relied on the programme team to make that happen. This initially put a lot of pressure on our internal researchers, who could not dedicate as much time to their own research.
We are now much better at delegating tasks. We’ve already noticed the supplier teams supporting each other during the overseas research trips – through highlighting findings relevant to other teams and ensuring a consistent engagement with our stakeholders.
4. Overlaps can happen but that’s ok
Naturally, there are dependencies and overlaps between the suppliers’ work, and these are high risk – it’s easy to end up with two groups doing the same thing, or something falling between the cracks. To address this, we’ve run workshops focused on overlaps, and we have a wall in our team area dedicated to visualising them.
For each overlap, we decide collectively how we are going to manage it. For example, if 2 research teams want to interview the same participant, they decide whether they can team up or not. If they are going to run separate sessions, they decide how they will manage the participant’s expectations – making sure the participant understands why that’s the case and that they’re not asked the same questions twice.
5. A strong central presence is needed
Obviously, someone needs to facilitate the work of the team, and look at and manage the overlaps between the work of the team members.
But we’ve also found that the most important central function is setting clear goals and constraints, and keeping a focus on the overall outcome. This central role on our team is assigned to a product manager.
This is still a work in progress – our team is in Malaysia this week, and South Africa next week. The results so far are encouraging, though, and we’ll be back soon to tell you more about what we’ve found in the discovery.
New regulations have come into force which means from next year, every public sector website and app will need to meet certain accessibility standards.
We want our teams to reflect the society we serve. An inclusive and diverse workplace will help the UK government work better for everyone.
GOV.UK Verify is a secure way for users to prove they are who they say they are online. It means people can access services, like filing their tax or checking the information on their driving licence, without having to prove their identity in person or waiting for something to arrive in the post.
Last month, Minister for Implementation Oliver Dowden announced 
The first ever Services Week takes place next week – from 28 January to 1 February.
it takes for a user to apply or renew online. It's expected to reduce application time to 13 minutes. . Check out the work the #ServiceDesign team have been doing through the link in our bio. . #GovernmentDigitalService #BlueBadge #Application #ServicesWeek #DigitalGovernment
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The Women's Network at the Government Digital Service (GDS) ran a training and mentoring working group last summer, where we asked our members how could we improve the offering at GDS. 
