Over the past few weeks we’ve been running a series of 4 Sprint events around the UK, in collaboration with the governments of Scotland and Wales as well as the Northern Ireland Civil Service and Leeds City Council. 

These events have put a spotlight on the great digital transformation projects happening across the UK and have celebrated the organisations – and the people – delivering them.

For us at GDS, it’s been an opportunity to work closely with our colleagues across the UK and to get a better understanding of their work and ambitions.

Watch our video to see the highlights from the 4 regional events: 

As we prepare for our Sprint 19 event in London in September, here are 4 things we’ve learned from the 4 Sprint events we’ve held so far this year.

At the end of this post, you will also find information about how to register for the London event.

1. We all have a shared ambition

One thing that came through clearly in our work with our Sprint partners is that we all have a shared ambition – to make things better for users. 

At all the events, there was talk of digital transformation, of digitising services and of increasing efficiencies in our organisations. But the overarching theme – the reason for all this transformation work – was to improve things for the people we serve.

This 'users first' approach was summed up by Leeds City Council Chief Executive Tom Riordan, who said the council had moved from thinking about what services children need to thinking about how to make Leeds a better city for children to grow up in.

2. We face similar challenges

As well as this shared ambition, we found plenty of common challenges and issues across the 4 events.

Building culture and building capability were 2 things that were seen as hugely important steps towards our goal of making things better for users. The subjects came up at all the Sprint events.

Communicating well, working in the open and sharing our progress (including at events like Sprint) were seen as important ways to build culture. The work of the GDS Academy and the Scottish Digital Academy were hailed as vital for building capability.

The importance of tools and standards was another common theme. Sessions on GDS’s common components, including payments platform GOV.UK Pay and notifications platform GOV.UK Notify, were well received. At Sprint: Edinburgh, the Scottish Government shared an update of its Digital First Service Standard on the same day that GDS published the newly updated Service Standard for UK government services.

The GDS National, International and Research (NIR) team, who work to build closer links with our national and international partners, were a big presence at all the Sprint events. Our NIR Director Chris Ferguson co-hosted Sprint: Edinburgh, and National Lead Helen Wall co-hosted Sprint: Belfast. Sprint: Cardiff was co-hosted by our South-West and Wales Regional Relationship Manager Sarah Hoy, while Lisa Jeffery, our Regional Relationship Manager for the North, co-hosted Sprint: Leeds.

3. There are some unique circumstances

While there are plenty of shared ambitions and experiences across the UK, there are also some unique circumstances that we can all learn from.

At Sprint: Cardiff, a big theme was the use of Welsh language in communication and digital services. Event co-host Mari Stevens, Deputy Director of Visit Wales, presented much of the event in Welsh, while Jeremy Evas, Head of Welsh Language Promotion for the Welsh Government, gave a presentation on the importance of developing bilingual digital services.

There were learnings too at Sprint: Leeds, where much of the focus was on the challenges and opportunities faced by local government. In a panel discussion on the subject, Leeds City Council Chief Digital and Information Officer Dylan Roberts was asked about what central government can learn from local government. His response was that local government is closer to the user, and is also able to see the whole picture, rather than looking through the lens of a single department.

4. It’s about people, not technology

There was plenty of talk about technology at all the events – including the newly launched Government Technology Innovation Strategy, and the GovTech Catalyst. But these discussions were framed around how technology can be used to help people – both the end users of services and the civil servants delivering those services. Transformation is about people.

It was fitting then that Sprint provided an opportunity for people from across the UK to get together and share their experiences and ambitions. Feedback from the events shows that one of the things that attendees most appreciated was the opportunity to network, meet new people, and build the links that will help us all work together to build better public services.

On to the next event

We’ll be holding our next and final Sprint event of the year on 19 September at London’s Southbank Centre. We’ll pick up on some of the themes we’ve discussed in our Sprint events so far, and share more about GDS’s work and future priorities.

We’ll be announcing more news about Sprint 19 soon on the GDS blog, so make sure you sign up for updates.

In the meantime, you can register your interest to attend Sprint 19 if you’re a civil servant and also register your interest if you work outside the Civil Service.

Through the spend controls process, GDS works with departments to ensure they (and the taxpayer) are getting the best value from anything they’re building or buying. 

As Kevin Cunnington mentioned in his parting words, in his time, we’ve helped save government over £1 billion, including around £353 million in 2018/19.

We’re always working to iterate and improve the spend controls process, and over the past year we’ve been running a new pipeline process for spend controls, which aims to be more collaborative and more beneficial for departments and government as a whole.

We developed the new process with several early-adopter departments and, since April 2018, the majority of central government departments have transitioned onto the approach.

We’ve already seen evidence that this process is saving departments even more time, money and resources. Excitingly, we now see that the new process gives GDS opportunities to help improve projects at an early stage.

Since publishing the guidance last year, departments have been adopting the pipeline approach and talking about it positively. For example, the Department of Health and Social Care recently blogged about their journey. 

Here are some of the things we’ve achieved over the past 12 months:

Lower costs, more time

We’ve written previously about how the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) was an early adopter of the pipeline process, and how this saved thousands of hours which would have previously been spent in governance reviews and could now be spent delivering services to users.

DWP now estimates that the pipeline process has saved 60% in staff costs (the number of times people have to review, assure or question activity) and 40% in hours. This is time and money that has, in effect, been given back to DWP project teams to focus on improving services for users rather than on process, without any increase in the level of risk or failure.

Other departments report similar benefits and outcomes. 

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) estimates that the pipeline process has saved 60% in people costs and 35% in time, while the Ministry of Justice says the cost of governance in running the pipeline process compared to the previous controls mechanism has been reduced by around 27%.

These headline figures are obviously great to see. But what’s equally encouraging is evidence of how the pipeline process helps GDS and departments work closely together to improve the process and to make better services as a result.

Clear support and close collaboration

When we worked with departments to design the pipeline approach, the intention was to help services meet government standards earlier or provide intervention and support where departments needed it. 

Rather than looking at individual services or technology projects, the pipeline process means we work with departments to develop a 15 to 18-month forward look at all their commercial, digital and technology spend.

This forward look means GDS and departments can work more collaboratively at an earlier stage to improve projects and services.

One example of where this has been effective is where GDS worked with BEIS on the Business Verification and Identity Assurance project.

This work started with a discovery project at BEIS to look at how to address the risk of fraud against government services, as well as errors affecting completion rates and, therefore, users’ ability to achieve their end goals.

After the initial work, it became clear that the project would benefit from some support and oversight in the areas of service design and user research. 

Through a series of open conversations and engagement, assurance teams in BEIS and GDS were able to help reshape the approach and focus of the project, while GDS was able to offer a package of support. 

In a recent interview, BEIS chief digital and information officer Karl Hoods said: "We’ve had nothing but positive experiences so far [with GDS], they’ve been able to offer us resource and advice, and help us to deliver some of our projects."

Working together as one government

As this example shows, having early oversight makes it easier for GDS to support departments.

The pipeline approach – which encourages ongoing conversations – has made it easier to scrutinise and provide more constructive feedback for projects. It has also made it easier to build up departmental context and understanding in order to provide approvals in a much more efficient way. 

This approach helps GDS to look more holistically at central government to identify where there might be opportunities to reuse technology, adopt best practice approaches and align to central government strategy. 

These examples are – we hope – the initial positive steps in working better together as one government.

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The Government Digital Service (GDS) employs a lot of people who write software for a living, and a lot of people who don’t. Not everyone needs to know how to code to do their job, but many people would like to learn if they had the chance.

GDS’s purpose is to help government work better for everyone. That means a diverse group of people need to be able to participate in conversations about technology and digital government. Providing opportunities to learn technical skills like coding, regardless of background or job title, helps bring more diversity into our discussions and helps us make decisions that better reflect the society we serve.

We recently ran a series of learning sessions where we taught people who’d never written any code before how to build a simple website using Ruby, HTML and CSS.

‘Making coding more accessible’ at the GDS unconference

In April, GDS ran an all-staff unconference where colleagues were invited to suggest things to talk about. 

Among many other things, we discussed how spreading knowledge of coding across the organisation could help build empathy between teams and roles, and make people more productive. And how it could help empower a more diverse group of people to get involved in technology.

Many people learn to code in their own time, but expecting people to do so creates a hidden kind of discrimination: if you have family to look after or personal commitments in you free time, then you can’t spend it learning.

Ben, a product manager at GDS, told us: "I’d love to learn more about coding but have zero time outside of work…"

If we’re serious about improving the diversity of people who are included in discussions about technology and digital government, then we need to make sure everyone has the chance to learn, regardless of their background.

Following the discussions we held at the unconference, we came up with the idea of 'learning to code' sessions at GDS.

Learning from the community

We knew that the Civil Service and the wider community had done similar things before. Several departments run coffee & code sessions, a group at Defra have been running a ‘learn to code’ beta, and many GDS colleagues help out with codebar (which GDS occasionally hosts). In the community, initiatives like codebar, Rails Girls, Django Girls and Node Girls help people from underrepresented backgrounds learn and participate.

What we did and how we did it

We had the big vision of 'making coding accessible' – now to implement it within 3 months.

This is where our experience of working on an agile development team came in handy as we applied the following principles. 

Agree a goal and narrow the scope of work

Coding isn’t just a skill – it’s a whole new world, which meant an 'introduction' to coding presented endless options. Do we want them to be able to build a thing? Understand the web? Learn a programming language? 

We decided that our goal was for students to get a feel for coding – simple as that. This might sound woolly but we didn’t want to set the expectation that people had to finish building something in order to achieve success from these sessions. 

Define our users

Luckily, we have a large community of software engineers to volunteer as coaches. We prioritised female colleagues and colleagues from ethnic minority backgrounds to attend as students. These demographics are the most underrepresented in tech. And although this is also a known issue at GDS, we were happy to see that many of the coaches who took part in the pilot were actually from the underrepresented groups.  

Work together in the open 

Keeping each other in the loop on all of our ideas and tasks was important to us, so we discussed progress on a weekly basis. This kept us on the same page and set a nice cadence to keep things moving. 

There was no point in reinventing the wheel. We talked to GDS codebar volunteers to get ideas on session format, and we crowdsourced ideas from other software engineers on what content to include. The coaches collaborated on the content for the lessons using GitHub and we discussed our plans for the lessons on Slack. 

Iterate, iterate, iterate

We pitched the course as a pilot (or an alpha, if you will). This gave us the breathing space to make mistakes, test things out and have a starting point for feedback.

There was a mini retrospective of what worked well and less well at the end of each session to help improve the next session. 

Feedback from the sessions and our survey responses will inform how we run the course next time. 

What our students did

There’s lots of excellent educational material on learning to code available under a Creative Commons licence. We based our content on the codebar tutorials and JumpstartLab’s Ruby in 100 Minutes, but we adapted the content to feel a bit more familiar to civil servants.

Our students built an 'Apply for a barking permit' website – something a bit silly, but still familiar to those of us working on digital services for government. You can find our 'learn to code' tutorials published on the web.

In 3 one-hour sessions, we paired students with coaches and let them work through the tutorials. The coaches were asked to follow the codebar effective teacher guide, which asks you to:

• explain that it's ok to make mistakes
• let students have a go at answering the questions first
• use pen and paper or go to a whiteboard
• take it slow

People worked really hard, and it was amazing to see just how much progress they made in such a short time.

In keeping with GDS tradition, we got some stickers printed to celebrate the end of our pilot. 

How it went for the organisers

Hong: "As a delivery manager, I consider myself a non-technical person working on a very technical team at GDS.  The team members are inclusive, supportive and lovely but sometimes I find the work intellectually intimidating and ostracising.

Taking part in the sessions as a student gave me a fresh perspective on my own role as well as elevating my respect for theirs. I have a greater understanding of the need to limit 'context switching': coding took so much of my energy and focus. Also, the nature of coding itself requires you to be clear, structured and logical, so I’ll be more conscientious in how I communicate work to my team. 

Overall, the sessions were super fun, the atmosphere was great, and it reinvigorated the joy I have for working at GDS, where empathy is at the centre of our work."

Richard: "I’m a senior developer and the technical lead of a complex product at GDS (GOV.UK Platform as a Service). Like many developers, I sometimes assume that people will magically understand technical words and concepts that a non-developer would have no reason to know. Coaching people who’d never written code before helped me understand how other people see what we do, and build empathy with my colleagues.

At the same time, I was really impressed with how quickly people learned – in less than 3 hours, they were able to understand the abstract concepts of computer programming well enough to build a simple web application. It was enormous fun watching people learn, make mistakes, and work through them."

Feedback from our coaches and students 

Anonymous student: "It was eye-opening in ways that I did not expect. It was like going for a lunchtime walk through a Japanese park (complex, elegant, beautiful and on the other side of the planet)!"

Syed Bokhari - delivery manager: "Great fun, very informative and well run! I have even greater respect for the work that our fantastic developers do!"

Andy Hunt - reliability engineer: "It was fantastic to see how quickly students understood the material and began developing new skills. I think it's proof that anyone, of any age, can learn to code."

Emily Young - security analyst: "I've never really taught anyone before, and the joy you get from sharing something that's important to you and seeing a student succeed is really quite wonderful."

We're planning on running the course again this summer for GDS staff. If you'd like to run a similar course and are interested to learn more about how we did it, leave a comment below.

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Since I joined GDS to lead on Digital Identity, we have been very busy. One of the things I continue to stand for is communicating in a more open way and better telling the story of what we are doing around digital identity, and why it matters to the future UK economy. I have given keynotes at the OIX/Tech UK and Think Digital events on this subject, and continue to engage widely with stakeholders across government and industry.

In my previous post I said we have 3 main priorities for identity assurance:

• rapid alignment around a future plan
• engaging with the identity assurance market
• delivering an excellent service

I can now report that we’ve made great progress in all of these areas, albeit with plenty of work still to do, and that we can now provide further details.  This message is a follow up to the announcement made by the Minister for Implementation, Oliver Dowden, at Identity Week in June.

Why this matters, and the role of government

If you’ve heard me speak recently, you’ll have heard some key reasons that come up over and over again as to why it is critical that we get digital ID right, namely:

• access to services: digital services demand a secure way to gain access digitally
• fraud prevention: digital ID not only stops fraudsters at the point of entry but allows live monitoring of activity to pick up on fraudulent patterns that may arise
• financial inclusion: ensuring that systemic inequality is not replicated
• being able to ‘trade’ on trust: implementing a set of interoperable standards, such that how an ID is verified can be easily understood and therefore interpreted and used correctly
• unlocking value to the UK economy: estimated at significant value by numerous sources (3% of GDP or $97bn (£77bn) by 2030 according to McKinsey); our work here includes allowing identities between the UK and other countries to interoperate

I’ve also articulated our role as government, which includes ensuring that the assets that GDS has created to date (interoperable digital identity standards, operational guidance, technical specifications and a governance model for policy, compliance, audit and liability) are properly transitioned to a model that works across both public and private sectors.

To put it plainly, while our role has included technical implementation (GOV.UK Verify), our larger role and goal is to create an environment that allows multiple private sector actors to be able to innovate and play a number of roles in the digital identity ecosystem going forward. (Keep reading for more thoughts!)

Our role as government is also to ensure that identity solutions are privacy-centric, in line with UK privacy regulations and values, and do not create the equivalent of an ID card system or central citizen register.

Market organisation, call for evidence, ongoing engagement

You’ll have seen that, during Identity Week, the Minister reiterated government’s commitment to the creation of a ubiquitous digital identity market and laid out the first set of activities to do this.

These are:

• a new Digital Identity Unit, which is a collaboration between DCMS and Cabinet Office and which will help bring the public and private sector together to ensure the adoption of interoperable standards, specifications and schemes
• a call for evidence on how to organise the digital identity market and ensure interoperable ‘rules of the road’ for identity (launched on Friday 19 July 2019).
• engagement on the commercial framework for government to buy identity verification services from the private sector, to ensure the continued delivery of public services

Private-sector implementation

Government initially launched digital identity to enable digital access to public-sector services. The number of people using GOV.UK Verify to access services has increased sharply - with 1.2 million users added in the last 6 months - but total numbers  - approaching 5 million identities created - are only a small proportion of what’s possible . Looking at ways to scale, we have found that the vast majority of use cases for digital ID exist in the private sector.

This week the Minister for Implementation announced an important step that will start to open up this potential and help us deliver the next stage of GOV.UK Verify’s development, in which the private sector takes on responsibility for broadening the usage and application of digital identity in the UK.

The pilot we have launched makes two things possible: firstly, it will allow individuals that used their passport to create an existing GOV.UK Verify account to re-use that account to access private sector services; and secondly, it will allow individuals with a valid passport to  create a new digital ID in order to access private sector services. Crucially, at all stages, individuals will remain in control of whether they choose to create and use digital ID or not, and all transactions will pass through privacy-centric technology which enables a “yes” or “no” signal to validate their asserted data, so that there is no  sharing or storing that data in a new database.

What does this mean? This means that non-governmental organisations will be able to pilot implementation of the digital identity standards (previously only used in public sector) for private-sector use cases. If successful, it could mean significant time savings for individuals who previously went through cumbersome in-person processes to verify their identities and financial savings for organisations who can move their identity proofing processes online. It could also mean the reduction of fraud due to standardised ID proofing.

Interoperability across public and private sectors is a key component of delivering on our future vision, providing stronger incentives for organisations to grow the number of people with digital identity. We expect this pilot to provide further momentum for the future roles of private sector actors in this ecosystem.

At the same time, we continue to listen to and work closely with our services, numerous sectors, our users and the international market and believe we are on the right path.  There is still a significant amount of work to do - but this is great progress.

Engage with us

We already have significant engagement with government services (particularly our connected services), the private sector (across all sectors and through key organisations and trade bodies) and privacy experts, including the Privacy and Consumer Advisory Group, who ensure our work meets a high threshold of personal privacy.

We invite anyone interested to contribute to the Call for Evidence, which is open for 8 weeks until Sunday, 15 September.

Continuing to deliver a great service

While recent events represent a major step forward, focus on the future state is just a part of what the GOV.UK Verify team have been doing.

First and foremost, we continue to work closely with our services to ensure they are getting what they need.  We are taking steps to improve the user journey and we’ve updated and improved government’s identity standards, to make it easier for organisations to reuse identities that have already been checked.  We also do significant work on fraud prevention, social inclusion, international standards alignment and privacy.

GOV.UK Verify continues to increase its users: more than 4.6 million people are now signed up. The number of people using GOV.UK Verify to access services increased by 1.2 million in the last 6 months.

We continue to add services: NHS Business Services Authority connected a new service in May, which allows NHS employees to claim their pension.

Continuing to work with you

We know that government needs to continue to provide clarity on direction and strategy for how digital identity can be used across sectors and how the UK digital identity market will develop. We hope these new steps will be helpful.

The mental health network at GDS exists to ensure our colleagues have the mental health support and information they need. 

We do this in a variety of different ways. For example, we send out a regular newsletter, we have a dedicated Slack channel for discussing mental health-related topics, we provide mental health first aid, and host speakers and events. 

We also hold regular anonymous peer-led mental wellbeing Q&As. In this post, I will explain how we organise them and share some tips on how to ensure they’re a success.

What we do to set up our Q&As

The Q&As take place on the morning of the last Friday of each month. We hold them on the online platform Slack, which everyone at GDS can access.

First, we field questions using a Google form, which staff can complete anonymously.

Staff can also use the form to submit answers anonymously. Our most recent Q&A had 10 anonymous questions and around 50 replies from around 20 members of staff.

It takes one person about 3 hours in total to organise and curate the 2-hour event.

People tell us the Q&As are really valuable, even if they don’t ask or answer a question.

After the Q&As, an anonymised transcript is added to a single Google document, which contains similar transcripts from all the previous Q&As.

Tips for ensuring the Q&As run well

These are the steps we take to ensure our Q&As run well:

Find a curator

This must be someone who has the time and emotional capacity to give their full attention to the Q&A when it is up and running. They will also need to be willing to field and deal with potentially tricky questions and discussions.

Set aside a regular time

A regular slot makes the Q&As easier to promote and more reliable for people. GDS Q&As are currently 2 hours long and they take place on the last Friday morning of each month.

We chose Friday mornings because we thought people would be more likely to be free from meetings, or have more privacy working from home. However, we’re thinking of trying Thursdays instead, to fall within more people’s working hours.

Let people know what support is available

At all stages we remind people where they can get urgent help. We have a page on the GDS intranet with resources and support options, including calling 999 or 111, contacting mental health charities, seeking therapy, calling the Cabinet Office listening service or contacting a GDS mental health first aider. 

Be ready for urgent questions

In the event of a worrying anonymous message coming in, we have a pre-prepared message which we send out via email groups and various Slack channels, to try and reach that person and signpost them to support options.

Invite people to nominate a topic

Each Q&A centres around a particular topic, although questions on other areas are fine, of course. We use another anonymous Google form for this, with the answers going to their own tab in the spreadsheet. 

Allow a couple of days for this, to help everyone get a chance to suggest topics.

Invite people to vote for a topic

Allow at least a day for this, to give people time. We ask for people's top 3, then give 3 points for a first preference, 2 points for a second preference, and 1 point for a third preference. 

The voting is anonymous, and the topic with the highest score wins.

Announce the topic and timings 

Let people know when the Q&A will be taking place and what the topic will be. Also, remind them of the form they can use to submit anonymous questions.

Invite people to submit questions

They can do this anonymously, in advance or during the session, via a Google form or directly on the Slack channel.

Use Google Sheets to organise the Q&A

We channel the responses from the various Google forms to different tabs on a single Google spreadsheet, which keeps everything in one place. 

Guidance similar to that listed here is also included in one of the tabs in the spreadsheet, as guidance for curators. 

Keep an eye on incoming questions

Copy and paste them into the Slack channel, and ask people to reply as a 'thread', not in the channel itself. Have a couple of questions prepared just to stimulate things if it dries up. 

We've found that even if people aren't asking or answering questions, they are listening and are keen to hear from their peers. We usually find that one question every 10 to 20 minutes is a good pace, giving people time to respond.

Close the Q&A 

When you close the discussion, remind people what support is available. 

Share an anonymised transcript of the Q&A

We keep a single document of transcripts from all of the Q&As, with all names and identifiers removed, and share this internally for reference. 

Other mental health initiatives at GDS 

As well as the regular Q&As and peer support network, GDS has a number of trained mental health first aiders in house (in addition to those across the wider Cabinet Office) whom colleagues can approach for confidential advice and signposting. We’re recruiting and training more mental health first aiders, and working with them to ensure they have the support and resources they need. 

We also have mental health and wellbeing champions and working groups who meet regularly. We have mental health support information on GDS’s intranet, which includes a list of mental health-related books in our office library. 

And GDS has also made a 'Time To Change' pledge – a commitment to how we think and act about mental health in the workplace. The pledge will be published soon – watch this space!

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When a tax return is filed online through the Self Assessment service, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) need to confirm a user’s identity. One way users can prove they are who they say they are online is via the government’s identity assurance platform, GOV.UK Verify. The other route is through Government Gateway. 

This year, HMRC saw their highest online Self Assessment peak. This refers to the rush in tax returns that occurs as the deadline of midnight 31 January approaches, usually from the start of the month onwards. 

We prepared for this anticipated demand by working closely with HMRC, learning from previous years and keeping up regular contact. All this work allowed us to help HMRC with their busiest Self Assessment peak and highest number of tax returns made online.

GOV.UK Verify and HMRC

HMRC has used GOV.UK Verify since 2014, and has adopted it for a number of services, including its Personal Tax Account, which the Self Assessment online service is part of. This service helps people manage their taxes, and alongside submitting your tax return, you can control your tax credits and check your state pension. 

HMRC’s Personal Tax Account users have the option of using either GOV.UK Verify or Government Gateway to access the service. Although the majority use Gateway, Verify is still playing an important part in helping ensure HMRC customers can choose digital options. 

How GDS and HMRC prepared for January 

Increasingly, people do their tax return online, with users taking advantage of the online deadline being 3 months later than the paper deadline, and the online numbers are growing year on year. 

There was a 7% decrease from people submitting their tax return via the paper route from last year, down to 700,000 submissions. 

Here’s how GDS and HMRC worked together to prepare for this year’s expected peak.

Early preparation 

Colleagues from both GDS and HMRC, representing Verify and Government Gateway, met in October to begin planning. We looked back over previous years to find ways to improve our service, such as by making sure our processes and procedures were still robust. 

We also organised GDS and HMRC call centres so users could get the advice they needed during a busy and potentially stressful time. 

Changing our online content

We revisited our online content and made changes to make the user pathway as straightforward as possible. For example, we developed our time-out page in response to HMRC’s concerns that we needed more relevant information for the page. And, we worked with content designers to refine our GOV.UK content to direct people more clearly to Self Assessment. 

Regular communication throughout 

The most important part of our preparation was maintaining contact between the 2 departments, especially towards the deadline. During the peak, there was daily contact between the teams based all around the country. 

This dialogue helped us spot any potential issue trends coming from calls made to the contact centre. Despite our huge volumes of users, we had a quiet peak in terms of people contacting the centre, in part due to our preparation having a positive impact on user experience. 

Having both GDS and HMRC involved meant that everything could be shared both ways. The teams built up an excellent working relationship and this will help when working towards next year’s Self Assessment peak. 

Looking forward to January 2020 

All of this preparation led us to having the most GOV.UK Verify users during a Self Assessment peak. Across all different government services, there are now more than 4 million GOV.UK Verify users. 

We are having monthly meetings with HMRC already to prepare for next January’s Self Assessment peak, which is expected to be even higher.

By keeping up regular communication and building on our work this year, we hope January 2020 will see even more GOV.UK Verify users successfully submitting their tax returns online. 

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Through the Global Digital Marketplace Programme, GDS is helping tackle global corruption. We do this by working with international governments to make their procurement more transparent and boost their digital, data and technology sectors. This work builds on the success and expertise we’ve gained through the Digital Marketplace and other UK-based work, such as the Technology Code of Practice, spend controls and Service Standard assessments.

We’re working with national and regional governments in South Africa, Mexico, Colombia, Indonesia and Malaysia. We’ve just completed our discovery phase, during which we researched the digital procurement landscape in those countries. We’re now in the process of defining what our alpha phase will look like. And we’re co-designing it with our partners in the 5 countries. The end goal is to tackle corruption across these countries.

Doing research across 5 countries at the same time, within the space of 7 months, is no easy feat. We previously blogged about how we commissioned 5 UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to help us to do the research across the different areas of digital procurement. 

What we learned in discovery

Not surprisingly, the procurement landscape in each country we visited is unique, with specific opportunities and challenges. At the same time, we found common threads across countries which are likely to strongly influence the programme’s focus in the next phase.

There’s tremendous enthusiasm for fighting corruption and pressure to deliver real change in our partner countries. This suggests the timing is good for the programme’s work, and that our alpha activities will have the best possible chance of gaining traction.

We also found that while most countries have traditional 'e-procurement' systems, few of them deliver the expected benefits. Generally, this is because the systems don’t meet user needs, and the underlying cause is issues with digital capability. In alpha, we’ll look to help our partners develop strategies to address this.

Other issues we found include lots of unpublished and unstructured procurement and contract data, a lack of formalised processes to control spend and to assure delivery of digital services, and a supplier market concentrated among a few large companies.

Next up: building our roadmap

Since returning from our discovery missions, we’ve focused on turning what we learned about procurement in each country into a series of propositions for the alpha stage. These propositions are our ideas for the problems we’d like to solve and what we’d like to test, which we think would be useful to our partners – the national and regional governments – their digital, data and technology sectors, and their citizens.

We’re now returning to each country to discuss these propositions, and develop the strongest ones into a range of alpha projects. From this, we’ll build our rolling 12-month roadmap. 

We can’t do it alone

It’s likely that UK suppliers will play an important part in delivering our roadmap. We’ll look to bring in expertise through the Digital Marketplace for different types of work. 

We want to co-deliver exemplar projects with local country teams, and we want to support them with our user research, service design and agile working skills and experience. We’ll also look to bring a user-centred approach to procurement practice by working with users to design new routes to market or simpler procurement documents.

We’re hoping to further develop the ICT Commissioning Playbook into a beta product. And we want to co-design capability and training strategies with our in-country partners.

Working with overseas governments brings different opportunities and challenges. We’ve reflected below on some of the differences potential suppliers might consider when deciding whether to bid.

The challenges and opportunities of working together

The work on the Global Digital Marketplace Programme is unique and very interesting. It has a large potential impact, given the size and specific situations of the countries involved. One of the unique challenges, however, is the travel. People may be traveling long distances and to different time zones, and they may often be away from home. There have been instances where teams were asked to adapt plans and travel at short notice.

There’s also a need for sensitivity and contextual awareness, to adapt UK working approaches to different cultures and practices. It is important for all our suppliers to operate in line with the Government Commercial Function’s Supplier Code of Conduct while representing the programme. This includes the expectation of operating in a manner compatible with public service values, upholding the reputation of government, and promoting innovation and expertise.

In the discovery phase we worked with 5 different suppliers – each of them working towards a distinct outcome – rather than working with a single supplier. It is likely that we will continue to take that approach. Working alongside other suppliers also engaged in the alpha phase will require openness, collaboration and adaptability to make this approach a success for all parties involved. 

Find out more

Last week, we held a pre-procurement market engagement event with interested suppliers. The event was part of our ongoing engagement with UK suppliers in the Global Digital Marketplace Programme.

You can see the slides and read the questions and answers that came up during the event.

Look out for Global Digital Marketplace Programme opportunities on the Digital Marketplace. 

Service communities are networks of people from across the public sector who work together to design and deliver an end-to-end service, like start a business or get health benefits. Communities meet regularly to 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.

Anyone who works on a service can be a part of a community, whether they work in policy, delivery, operations or other areas. Anyone should also be able to set up their own community. There is guidance to help you do this in the Service Manual.

Here are the benefits that setting up a service community can bring.

Connect with others who work on your service

Setting up a community will enable you to get a full overview of who does what in the wider context of your service. This is helpful because it will let you understand where your work fits in and how it affects others.

It can also let you do things like reduce duplication, merge content on GOV.UK, or share research. Sharing research with other teams means you can learn from each other’s successes and failures or ask for help when you need it. 

Make your service better for users

When users interact with government, they want to do things like learn to drive or get benefits, which most often involve more than one part of the public sector. Since the 'start a business' community started in 2017, service communities have been trying to make it easier for people to complete these tasks. They do this by bringing together people who work on them and adopting a user-centred approach to collaboration.

For example, community members have improved the navigation on GOV.UK by publishing step-by-step guides to their services, like Set up a limited company. They have also reduced duplication in government by reusing resources from one another. Read more about what service communities have accomplished.

Shape the direction of your service

Running a service community makes it easier for you to influence the direction of your service. Having an awareness of what everybody in government is doing on a given end-to-end service makes it easier to spot opportunities for improvement. 

Most often, communities build this awareness by creating something called a service landscape. It’s a visual representation of what each bit of the public sector offers in a service and it’s a great way to understand where to focus your efforts. Read more about how to make a service landscape.

Work towards meeting the updated Service Standard

Point 2 of the updated Service Standard says services should solve a whole problem for users, while point 3 says they should provide a joined-up experience across all channels. Both these points aim to ensure that users can do the thing they need to do without having to understand the structure of government or a department’s internal processes.

Setting up a service community in your area can be a great way to start a conversation around this and increase your understanding of the whole problem you’re trying to solve.

Get started

Service communities can help you do all of these things and more. 

There are currently communities looking at services like starting a business or getting health benefits. They include people from more than 15 organisations, making services easier to use for users and less costly to provide for government. 

If you'd like to set up your own community, visit the Service Manual to find out how.

I recently returned to GDS after a year leading the Data Policy and Governance team at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). DCMS manages the policy around open data, data ethics and data sharing and – while I was there – brought in the Codes of Practice to make the data sharing powers in the Digital Economy Act operational.  

I was excited to get stuck into a role that’s so challenging and full of opportunity. I’ve been back at GDS for 3 months now and I’ve certainly been kept busy. 

In June, we launched the Government Technology Innovation Strategy and published a guide to using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the public sector with the Office for AI. 

The innovation team at GDS is working hard to bring the objectives we outlined in the strategy to life, and looking for new opportunities across government. So I’d like to share our next steps here. 

Building data science capability

Data underpins innovation, and it has been a significant area of interest for me over the past few years. 

Although I have policy running through me like a stick of rock, I first got the opportunity to look at data while working at the Cabinet Office in 2013, when the UK had the G8 presidency. 

One of the big issues at the time was transparency and open data. I led a small, agile team to develop what’s become the International Open Data Charter, and helped organise the programme for the Open Government Partnership Summit. 

The GDS Innovation team and I are now working with colleagues at the Office for National Statistics Data Science Campus on a data science capability audit. It’s an exercise to understand what capability there is: what organisations across government and the wider public sector are already doing with data, and to see how mature they are in this respect. 

From this, we’ll be able to see how we can best support them in terms of training, development, recruitment, tools, and any other challenges that might arise. We hope to publish our findings before the end of this year. When data is properly understood and managed well, it can have a transformative effect on how government serves its citizens. 

More than data

Of course, data isn’t everything we do. The focus for us over the next 6 to 12 months is doing what we set out in the Government Technology Innovation Strategy. This means looking at AI and continuing our work on GovTech Catalyst, as well as studying data science capability. 

The Innovation team is using the Government Technology Innovation Strategy and guide to using AI in the public sector to identify projects we can support more. 

Collaboration

Collaboration is central to our work. We’re looking at the spectrum of innovation right across government. I spend probably half of my time going out to Whitehall to learn from others and talk about what we’re doing in our team. It’s important to understand what’s happening across the public sector, and feed that information back to the team. 

We’re building a strong relationship with the data team in DCMS and its AI team. For example, we’re collaborating with the Office for AI to further develop the AI Guide, including a piece of work with the World Economic Forum to develop new guidelines for AI procurement. This way of working is replicated across the whole team. We know that we don’t have all the answers or all the resources, so if we collaborate and take on a range of views, we are more efficient and produce better policies!  

Collaboration is important internally, too. I feel lucky that I’ve come back to such a lovely team – some that I’ve worked with before, and some that were brand new when I returned to GDS 3 months ago. Everyone is really interested in and motivated by their work. 

I’m excited to be directing such a wide variety of projects within the Innovation team, helping the public sector gain confidence in taking risks and trying out new things. 

To hear more about innovation at GDS, join as at Sprint 19 on Thursday, 19 September at the Southbank Centre. You can register your interest to attend Sprint 19 if you’re a civil servant and also register your interest if you work outside the Civil Service.

If you have any views or feedback you would like to contribute to the next stage of the Innovation team’s work, email the Technology Innovation Strategy Team.

Over the last couple of months, a new community at GDS has emerged. Muslims at GDS is a community for people who belong to the Muslim faith or anyone interested in learning more about it.

In this post, Arfah Farooq, a community development manager, and Dilwoar Hussain, a senior frontend developer, explain their personal motivations behind setting up the community. They also talk about how you can set up your own community, and share things to consider when working with Muslim colleagues.

Why we set up the community

Below, we share our stories of what motivated us to set up the Muslims at GDS community.

Arfah Farooq, community development manager: product management and delivery management communities

I started at GDS 4 months ago. I am the community development manager for the product management and delivery management communities.

Communities are a massive passion of mine. I run MuslamicMakers outside of work – a diverse community of Muslims who are making and changing things in tech. We’re creating spaces for Muslims to be not just ‘included’ but to own their work spaces and industries.

When I joined GDS, I was disappointed to discover that there wasn’t a Muslim community or even just a Slack channel for me to connect with other Muslims. I started a month before Ramadan (the holy month for Muslims when they fast for a month) and I wanted to connect with people at GDS so we could have a shared experience and also to have some support in regard to my faith.

When I spoke to other Muslims at GDS to understand why a community like this didn’t exist already, I was told: “there just isn’t enough of us” and “we spoke to another Muslims and they suggested it might be discriminatory to have a community just for Muslims”.

Working on a community as part of my job is one thing but creating an organisation-wide one felt a bit daunting. It would have been easier if the community was to be centred around an interest. But when it comes to faith, there is a fear that people may judge you.

I’m not visibly Muslim so unless I mention it, you wouldn’t know. However, it does play a massive part in my identity, my values and my lifestyle so there are things to consider when it comes to working with me.

Thankfully, I’m unapologetically Muslim so I’m not afraid to mention I need a prayer room or I won’t be joining for after-work drinks in a pub. For other Muslims, it can be sensitive territory and they may need to build their confidence to embrace their identity. That’s why I thought there was a need for this community.

I saw that a Christians at GDS community existed already and that gave me the confidence to kickstart something. But before I did the brave move and created a new Slack channel for the Muslim community, I worked with existing long-standing Muslim colleagues, like Dilwoar, who were also very passionate about this.

Dilwoar Hussain, senior frontend developer: GOV.UK

I started at GDS about 2 years ago. I am a senior frontend developer on GOV.UK. Faith is a big part of my day-to-day life.

There are a lot of duties that – as a Muslim – I need to perform on a daily basis, such as the 5 daily prayers done at specific times every day. When I interviewed for my role at GDS, it was important for me to be open about this and the fact that I could only take the job if I was allowed to pray in the office and attend Friday prayer. The colleagues on the interview panel were very reassuring, and it’s never been an issue.

Despite the culture of openness at GDS, there were loads of simple questions which I found difficult asking as a new starter, such as “where is the prayer room?” or “where is the closest mosque?”.

I was new to the team and I did not want to start off ‘on the wrong foot’. I was afraid of being ‘labelled’.

There was not much support available at the time. Within the first few months, I got to meet a few other Muslims that worked at GDS. The community was very small – I think it was about 5 or 6 of us. We had a few ideas about setting up a network but there didn’t seem to be a user need for it – we all knew who we were and we supported each other through direct messages on Slack and private channels.

As time went by, there seemed to be a growing number of Muslims joining GDS. We did not know who everyone was and a lot of people found it difficult (like I did) to ask the simple questions. This was when Arfah joined and she asked the same question that I had 2 years before: “Why don’t we have a Muslim network?”.

How we set up the community

Here are the steps we took to set up the Muslims at GDS community.

1. We started a conversation

We don’t tend to have conversations about faith. But to get a community going, you need to start a conversation. A simple message online can help you connect with like-minded people. And then you can start exploring the possibility of a community together.

There might be other opportunities to start a conversation too. For example, there might be a religious festival coming up. Bring it up with your colleagues, talk to your line manager, discuss the practicalities of what’s needed. Have a look at the Cabinet office faith toolkit for support.

2. We created a Slack channel

We created a channel on Slack – an online communication tool that everyone at GDS can access. We announced it widely, which allowed people to join if they were interested. We asked people to introduce themselves when they joined the channel.

3. We took the community offline

It’s as easy as picking a time and date and asking the community to meet for lunch. This will allow people to connect offline and bond over some food. It will also allow you to see who else is passionate about the community and may want to get involved in a working group.

As we kickstarted our community just before Ramadan, it made sense to organise a show and tell on Ramadan. Arfah did a talk on Ramadan and tech over lunchtime, to share her experience of fasting and the different tech platforms she uses to keep in touch with faith as a busy Muslim. We’re hoping to do a similar talk on Hajj (an annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and a key pillar in Islam) and tech soon.

As Ramadan came to an end and we were celebrating Eid, we wanted to share the experience with our non-Muslim colleagues. Community work is about giving, and giving is also a value that’s intrinsically linked to our faith. We decided to organise a free Eid lunch, where everyone from the community contributed food from around the world. We asked for donations, which were then passed on to GDS’s partner charity – the Dragon Hall Trust. This was a massive success and really allowed our community to become more visible.

4. We created a basic structure

Three months in, we now have a basic structure which allows us to keep the community alive.

We have a working group made up of a handful of people who are really passionate about this work. We come together every 2 weeks to work on initiatives. We also have a Trello board to keep track of our work.

From September, we are hoping to host monthly lunch and learns for the community and the wider organisation. We believe that by doing this we’ll enable our community members to develop their confidence, share any expertise they have, and – most importantly – inspire other members by simply role modelling and being visible.

We also hope to offer our non-Muslim colleagues a chance to visit the local mosque and learn about what we do in the community.

Things to consider when working with Muslim colleagues

We thought it would also be useful to share some tips for anyone who works with Muslim colleagues. So, here they are.

It’s ok to ask your colleagues if they have any requirements when they join your team. Not all Muslims are open about their faith. It’s always good to have an initial conversation with new joiners to let them know they can talk about things if and when they need to.

If you have Muslim colleagues, think about making social events inclusive. Muslims do not drink alcohol, so certain environments can be difficult. Muslims also don’t eat non-halal food, so if the venue doesn’t provide halal food, make sure it has at least a vegetarian option.

There are usually 2 or 3 prayers that overlap the working day, and each of them usually takes 5 to 10 minutes to perform. This varies depending on the time of the year so ask your colleagues if they need a short break when meetings are longer than an hour.

On Fridays, between 1pm and 2pm, there is Friday prayer, known as Jummah. This prayer is obligatory for all Muslims so be mindful when scheduling meetings during this time.

During the month of Ramadan, not everyone will be fasting. If they are, try to make things more inclusive or be mindful about running events. If in doubt, simply ask them.

Different individuals are at different stages of their faith. Someone may not be practising when they join the team but may start to practice. So, make it easy for them to be open about their change in circumstances.

You can follow and message Arfah on Twitter @Arf_22 and Dilwoar @DilwoarHussain to learn more.

Check out the Cabinet Office Faith and Belief toolkit.

Over the summer, GDS welcomed 6 interns from the Summer Diversity Internship Programme (SDIP). 

They’ve been busy working in various teams to support GDS’s work and learn more about working in the Civil Service. 

They’re all undergraduates or recent graduates, from diverse backgrounds, with a varied set of interests and career goals. Here’s what they’ve been up to as part of their internship. 

Matthew - SDIP intern, Strategy

I have been fortunate to have worked within the strategy team as part of my internship. I have spent the majority of my time here researching and drafting a policy positioning paper. I have also written a synopsis of GDS’s spending review engagement, and taken minutes at meetings with senior civil servants. 

I have enjoyed the fantastic working environment at GDS, and everyone within the strategy team has been helpful and welcoming. Colleagues at GDS have been generous, taking time out to share their experiences and offer fantastic career advice. 

The SDIP internship has been a brilliant opportunity, which I am grateful to have been a part of. There were opportunities to participate in a variety of central events and Fast Stream coaching programmes, and I was assigned a mentor who has supported me throughout. This experience has been pivotal in my decision to apply for the Fast Stream next year. 

Nicole - SDIP intern, Engagement and marketing

I recently started as an Engagement and Marketing Assistant for the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Profession. I’ve been helping to promote GDS Academy masterclasses and the DDaT Fast Stream.

My work involves shadowing my manager in important meetings, creating engagement strategies for campaigns, managing social media projects, and learning about exciting upcoming technologies. In my first couple of weeks, I kept busy by organising an intern’s Instagram campaign for GDS!

The friendly team at GDS made me feel welcome from the start. Colleagues treat me as an equal and are eager to share their passion and knowledge, and offer guidance wherever I need it. 

So far, the internship has proven that no matter what our backgrounds are, we can all excel in the Civil Service. I’m excited to see what more I can achieve in this field. 

Working in the Civil Service in the run-up to EU Exit is also a privilege and an incredibly useful experience. I now have the confidence to adapt to a fast-paced environment and keep up to date with technological and political developments. My daily life and work has a unique tone, which no other internship could give me, and I truly feel that my work here benefits the public.

Georgina - SDIP intern, DDaT capability

The past 6 weeks have opened my mind to the possibility of a career in DDaT. I have been working as part of the DDaT Capability team, which supports government departments to implement the DDaT Profession Capability Framework in their own business units. This framework outlines typical skills required for digital, data and technology job roles to create consistency across government. 

I took every learning opportunity I could while at GDS, shadowing colleagues both within the department and externally, which is something the programme encourages. A particular highlight for me was spending a day at the Department for International Trade, shadowing a DDaT Fast Streamer. 

I think it’s really important that the Civil Service reflects the society it serves and I shared my interest in diversity and inclusion at GDS with my line manager. As a result, I was given the responsibility of contributing to the development of a diversity and inclusion strategy for the DDaT Profession, which will inform work done in the future. It was really rewarding to oversee a long-term project from the initial research stages to the finished product. This allowed me to strengthen my skills and develop new ones. I have also been introduced to new areas of interest, such as user research.

Before my internship I would never have considered a DDaT role but that is no longer the case, which is only a testament to my experience here at GDS. 

Jeeves - SDIP intern, Common platforms

I applied for the SDIP this year because I wanted an in-depth experience of government. After finding out I was successful and had been placed in GDS, I was excited and shocked. The information overload seemed insurmountable at first, but the combination of a supportive team, and diving head-first into my work meant those challenges swiftly dissipated. I discovered that GDS is all about people, not just technology.

GDS is fantastic at what it does – whether it’s modelling agile working, building products or upskilling civil servants through the GDS Academy. 

I’ve had a number of valuable opportunities while working on the Engagement team. From presenting at Civil Service Live, to leading a stakeholder mapping workshop, and even writing part of a submission to our Permanent Secretary, John Manzoni. I was also able to spend time on the GOV.UK team to work on EU Exit preparedness. 

Above all, I have experienced the freedom and trust that GDS places in its staff to get high-quality work done, by balancing independent responsibility with collaborative working. Following this experience, I hope to gain a place on the Fast Stream in the future!

Christian - SDIP intern, User-centred design

My internship at GDS has been somewhat of a learning curve. I was assigned to the User-Centered Design (UCD) team, which exists to support designers and their teams to build government services. To achieve this, the UCD team runs a variety of courses for public sector bodies on service design, accessibility training and GOV.UK prototype kit training, providing a structure for designers and user researchers to collaborate and share best practices. 

During my internship, I collated feedback from these courses into a report that displayed common pain points and provided short and long-term recommendations for the future. I presented my research to the team. I also helped organise the team charter into a fluent and coherent text. 

During my internship, I have really learnt  the importance of putting users’ needs at the heart of any project. If I could describe my experience at GDS with a phrase, it would be ‘fun, professional growth’. 

I am also mindful that this opportunity was possible because the government saw a need to have a Civil Service that properly represented the demographic of the UK and I am grateful for this effort.

Tina - SDIP intern, GovTech Catalyst

I applied for the SDIP internship in my final year at UCL after it was recommended to me by some course mates. I joined the GovTech Catalyst team, which is responsible for allocating funding and helping to develop emerging tech. It focuses on providing innovative technology to address various challenges across the public sector, for example, finding technology that can identify still imagery from Daesh, as part of counter-terrorism measures. 

What’s stood out for me the most during my internship is the breadth of experience I was offered. Not only did I get to shadow important team meetings and make significant contributions to my team, but I also got to participate in a crisis management workshop at the Ministry of Defence and attend a networking event at Number 10. In light of EU Exit, it is an incredibly exciting and dynamic time to work in government and I would highly recommend it to anyone considering a career in public service.

Thanks GDS!

While the different schemes have offered different opportunities, we’ve all benefited from each other’s experience and skills. GDS staff have been extremely welcoming and have shown such kindness in helping us progress in our careers, from proofreading job applications to having informal chats about their experiences. We’re all so grateful for this experience of working in government, and can’t thank GDS enough for having us. 

Find out more about the SDIP programme.

Applications for the DDaT Fast Stream open on 26 September 2019. Find out more about the DDaT Fast Stream programme. 

A year on from launching the GDS podcast, senior creative writers Angus Montgomery and Sarah Stewart talk about their jobs.

The pair discuss their career paths and the role of writers in government, and how clear writing can help people to do their jobs better.

If you’re asked to write a blog post, opinion piece or presentation, here are Angus and Sarah’s 10 tips for clear writing:

1. Establish ‘The Point’

Don’t write anything until you establish ‘The Point’: what you want to say and why it needs to be said. Once you know the answers to those 2 things, write them down. Keep The Point close to you as you write. It’ll keep you focused, concise and motivated.

2. Write it like you’d say it

If you’re trying to describe a difficult technical concept, then explain as you would to a friend. Try saying the sentence out loud before you write it down.

3. Don’t try to sound clever

Don’t use ornate sentence constructions or complex words. Don’t use acronyms or jargon either. You’re writing to be read, so make your writing as readable to as many people as possible.

4. Show the thing

If you’re trying to tell someone about a product or a service, show it. Explain how it works, say what it is, don’t use metaphors, don’t dress it up.

5. Know that you are not your writing

Yes, your writing has come out of your head and through your hands, and it's informed by the experiences you’ve had, but it is a separate entity. Once you understand that, negative feedback won’t derail you. You will view your work dispassionately, and be better able to focus on making your writing as clear and effective as it can be.

6. Share your work

Sharing your work will give you the clarity and perspective you lack if you write in isolation. Asking for feedback is daunting, so let people know what the purpose of the piece is and how you’d like to receive feedback.

7. Read (poetry in particular)

Read widely. You’ll get a sense of what good and bad writing is, what to do and what to avoid. Poetry in particular can teach you about conveying complex ideas in a limited space. It can also teach you about the music of a sentence and how a piece scans.

8. Never start with a blank page

A blank page can be daunting. So write something down. We suggest writing down The Point (see point 1). Write a working title. Paste your notes into the doc. Write down all the information you have about your audience. Then at least you’ll have made a start.

9. Know when enough is enough

This means don’t overdo it and don’t underdo it. Write enough. Refer to The Point (point 1). Have you achieved what you set out to do? If you have, step away from the doc. If you haven’t, go back and fill in the gaps. Imagine you are a reader or the person in the audience. Would they be satisfied with the level of detail?

10. Stay human

When you write, you (a human being) are conveying an idea to another human being. Writing is a skill that takes time to develop so don’t be too hard on yourself. Do your best and be kind when giving feedback. 

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I was out sailing in the middle of the ocean, somewhere between Darwin and Christmas Island, when I received an email that read something along the lines of 'would you like to lead GDS for a period of time?'.

My response was immediate and resounding. Absolutely yes. I rushed back at approximately 5 miles per hour for another month or so.

Since taking up the interim appointment, I’ve been asked about my background, how I intend to lead the organisation and where I think it should go, so I thought I’d write a blog post.

Learning the ropes 

I was delivering more for less and meeting user needs long before I joined any government department. At the age of 8, I was given the chance to run the garden bar at the family pub (soft drinks and nibbles only, I stress).

The job taught me 2 things. Firstly, people like good service. They liked to be listened to, they liked to be served quickly and efficiently. They also like to get the best value for money; it turns out asking them how much change they need generates some interesting revenue outcomes.

Perhaps it was that early experience in service delivery that informed my career choice.

The first job I had that didn’t break any child labour laws was at the Ministry of Defence (MoD). I was a systems analyst and systems designer. I coded the system that managed the location of military assets.

Being a coder during a time when documentation was for wimps was an experience. I wasn’t put off, however. I still dabble in coding in Python and JavaScript today. 

I then went on to work in a part of the MoD which sought opportunities to implement digital solutions – the somewhat questionably-named Exploitation Unit. 

I worked in the Equalities Office during the implementation of legislation to allow same sex couples to marry, and then I headed it up for the roll-out of gender pay gap reporting.

I’ve worked in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) leading transformation, HM Treasury handling efficiency, the Cabinet Office addressing air travel for the Prime Minister, and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) on gambling policy. Among other roles….

Outside government, I’ve been Head of Operations for an IT engineering business. I also went on secondment to the charitable sector as Director of Programmes for a multi-faith research body. Time spent in this sector drives your awareness of costs; I recall that a colour print of A4 was 7 times the cost of black and white. And also how much free consultancy we expect of this sector by inviting them in for a meeting. After all, they’d be honoured to meet with government!

Staying on the right track

I have already stated my aims during this time are to accelerate momentum on our business right now, including all the essential work on EU Exit. It’s a huge part of our current effort and it’s exhilarating to be at the very heart of preparations and support.

We also need to build our future, setting the boldest goals for digital advancement across government, a big push on data analytics, digital identity and embedding of innovation. To do that, we need the right resource, capability, powers and influence. 

And I have a duty to help land permanent leadership of GDS in a way that we don’t miss a beat and so we can springboard into the future state for digital government. 

In the offing

I’ll be joining ministers and GDS colleagues talking about those things –  and the future vision for the organisation in more detail – at Sprint 19.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Sprint 19 brings together people working across government to learn more about how digital transformation is improving people's lives. Register to attend Sprint 19.

The content community team is working to build effective, adaptable and scalable learning experiences for content designers across the public sector. We're doing this work so that the content in online guidance and services is clear and user-centred, helping people get information and complete critical tasks more easily.

This is an update on our last blog post ‘We’re redesigning cross-government content learning’, where we described how the team was moving away from classroom training as the dominant approach, towards a broader model of learning – underpinned by the principles of learner experience design (LXD) and communities of practice.

LXD means putting learner needs at the heart of the design process, to create learning experiences that are engaging and effective. Bad LXD is when “not only did you fail to learn something, you had a horrible time trying”.

The content design community of practice is a group of people who share a profession and who learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

Making learning work for everyone

The GDS Academy aims to make the most digitally skilled public sector in the world. The bit that our team focuses on is raising the level of content design – one of the user-centred design professions. 

Civil servants and public sector colleagues are tackling complex issues in a fast-paced environment. Technological changes are shaping our jobs faster than ever before. So we need to create learning experiences that keep up.

We know that we aren’t always the content experts, because knowledge is being built collectively across the community. Sometimes we create the learning content for a course, like the required learning for GOV.UK publishers. Sometimes we fully co-produce the learning content with the community. And sometimes we create a framework in which people can share their knowledge, and community members themselves provide the learning content. 

We also know that our learners are busy, and that taking the time and budget to travel to attend longer face-to-face courses isn’t always possible, or necessary. So we’ve looked at ways that learning can be more accessible to more people. 

This has led to us developing a range of alternative learning formats. 

Creating a new set of learning products and programmes

1. Self-study video tutorials for new GOV.UK publishers

To get a publishing account on GOV.UK, central government civil servants have to take and pass 2 self-study online modules that cover content design basics and how to use the publishing system. Departmental managing editors sign them up. Learners take the course at their own pace and in their own location. 

Compared to the previous 2-day face-to-face classroom training, this version:

• saves government £40,000 a year in learner travel and accommodation
• reduces the time to get a publishing account from 6 weeks to 5 days
• frees 72 days per year that our team can now use to create learning experiences for the content design profession more widely
• is scalable up and down to manage peaks in demand

2. Online social courses for content designers across the public sector

Using online learning tools and the recaptured team capacity from the changes described above, we can now support more content designers. People who were previously blocked from attending resource-intensive face-to-face courses because seats were being prioritised for GOV.UK publishers, can now participate.

A pilot 'Introduction to content design' course on FutureLearn has shown us that:

• people can learn and apply new practical skills on a fully online course, and that online courses aren’t only suitable for knowledge transfer, as shown by the fact that learners were able to create their own browser prototypes to test content by editing HTML
• there is demand and need for more training in content design skills, as over 500 people applied for 100 spaces on the pilot and they come from a wide range of international governments, public agencies and local councils
• learners are engaged in this type of learning and willing to share good practice, and there were over 1,000 comments on the course from learners sharing knowledge with each other, and a 40% completion rate, compared to the 5% industry average

3. Reciprocal skill swaps

We ask content designers to name 2 things they want to learn more about, and 2 things they can show another colleague. We do our best to match everyone with someone to help, and someone who can help them. People commit to at least 1 hour together.

This framework allows content designers to:

• learn specific, practical skills from a peer at the time they need them
• benefit from increased connection and reciprocity across the community built by this purposeful network weaving

The content community team can:

• tap into powerful collective intelligence of the profession to help people address bespoke learning needs
• find external experts or produce learning content to cover learning requests that we can’t currently match from inside the community

4. Mentoring

Based on a recent pilot, we are now building streams of mentoring to support content designers throughout their career.

The early career mentoring pairs content designers with 2 or more years experience with people new to the role. In the current round, content designers from 17 departments and agencies are taking part. This also strengthens the community network and helps knowledge and experience flow between organisations.

The near peer skills exchange is mentioned above.

Potential future streams include cross-profession shadowing for content designers interested to move to a related user-centred design field. And action learning sets for people in senior roles who use less practitioner skills and more design leadership.

5. Live online learning

We are trialling 45-minute sessions covering topics sourced from the community. Sessions include input from community practitioners followed by practical activities that people do together online.

Feedback from a session on data-informed content showed that participants who can:

• name 3 or more ways data can be used to improve content went up from 31% to 85% 
• understand the GOV.UK data tool and find the information they need quickly went up from 22% to 75% 

Content designers on a field trip to UsCreates as part of the peer learning programme. Thanks to Robbie Bates for presenting.

6. Self-directed peer learning

In partnership with Enrol Yourself, a group of content designers explored their own learning questions together over 6 months, culminating in a showcase at the cross-government content conference.

This way of learning showed that people:

• were actively addressing real-world issues for which there is no standard training 
• increased in workplace self-efficacy measures like ability to question the status quo, learn from mistakes and invent new ways of doing things

See the full impact report.

7. Cross-government design crits

A safe space for designers to share work in progress and get advice and feedback from peers. Run by the user-centred design community.

8. Cross-government content conference

And, of course… the massive peer learning festival that is ConCon!

What is next and how you can help us build it

We are:

• learning how each format works, to understand what is effective and what to scale or not
• working with heads of profession and the content design community to detail a learning curriculum based on the 'content designer' role description in the Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework
• figuring out a clearer front-end process for learners to find and register on the various learning experiences
• putting learners at the centre of everything we create and helping others do the same, by developing a new set of learning standards based on the methods behind the Service Standard

If you want to help us with the early first draft of the learning standards, you can email us.

To find out more about learning opportunities for content designers sign up for the monthly content community newsletter. 

Laura is a community lead at GDS. You can follow her on Twitter.

It’s been a year since I gave the last update on how we are supporting service design across government. A lot has happened since then.

Service design is an established role among the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) family of professions. The DDaT Profession team recently counted 100 service designers in central government organisations — and we know there are more. Many more people are applying service design approaches and techniques both in central government and in the wider public sector, including the NHS and local government.

Earlier this year, we updated the Service Standard so that it now encourages service teams to look at users’ whole problems and provide a good service across all channels. To help teams understand and meet the updated standard, we have tried some new support formats.

We have improved the design guidance in the Service Manual. Co-created with hundreds of people working on services, it now lists specific characteristics of a good government service. The new guidance has been very well received and is being used across the world in public and private sectors.

In this post, I give an overview of the various formats of support and activities available to people working on improving public services in the UK.

Getting people together to design better services

Throughout the last year, we have supported service communities around government in service areas like ‘start a business’ and ‘import-export’. We have published comprehensive guidance on how to work across organisational boundaries and blogged about the benefits and practicalities of setting up a service community. These communities consist of people with policy, operations, technology and user research roles – all unified around the goal of making the service better for its users. 

At the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), service designers started a service community around ‘get health benefits’, and HM Courts & Tribunals Service has kicked off a community around ‘what to do when someone dies’ to improve content on GOV.UK.

Beyond service communities, people working on services continued to get together to discuss topics like legacy and greenfield service design, creating inclusive services with diverse teams or designing for context, as part of our quarterly cross-government meetups across the country.

Three public servants – a service designer, a user researcher and a policy adviser – participating in a workshop at a cross-government service design meetup in London.

Training hundreds of public servants in service design

In the last 20 months, we have run the 1-day introductory-level service design training 20 times, training 540 public servants in 6 locations across the UK. This has been led by 2 trainers from GDS, with support from service designers from the DWP, the NHS, the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government, and Hackney Council.

Demand for the entry-level service design training is steady and always outstrips our capacity, and demand for more advanced training is also growing. Once people have grasped the foundations of how service design can be used to improve public services for users, they are often keen to start practising it themselves.

In April this year, we piloted a new, 2-day ‘Service design in practice’ course. It is a direct continuation of the 1-day course. Since the pilot in Shoreham-by-Sea, we have run the training in Leeds and in London. We will continue to offer it to people who have attended the introductory course approximately every other month.

A participant of a service design training session working on a journey map, using sticky notes to mark failure points and inefficiencies for users of public transport services.

And we’re not slowing down – a few weeks ago, we piloted a ‘service mapping masterclass’. This responds to the need to go deep into one specific service design area. It also reflects the idea that creating visual representations of services and their users adds a lot of value to service teams. The 1-day masterclass gives an overview of different types of maps and a history of mapping in service organisations, and it lets participants create various maps themselves. Tickets for the pilot of the training were gone in a few hours. We will roll it out more widely in the autumn this year. 

All upcoming service design training can be found on the user-centred design community events and training page. It is free of charge and open to all employees in central and local government, in arms-lengths bodies and the NHS. Some training is exclusively offered to groups who are underrepresented in design in government.

Providing direct support for people designing services

Training is a great way of being introduced to new ways of thinking and working, and a great way to learn new skills. Once you are back in the office, it can be difficult to apply the things learned in your own context. To help address this, we have run monthly remote peer support calls for almost a year.     

Public servants are offered help via a monthly 1-hour video conference. They can dial in, share service design-specific challenges they are facing and discuss with fellow user-centred design professionals what to do next and how.

Service designers and policy advisers from across government discussing issues during a monthly peer support call.

Sometimes, circumstances are difficult to explain over the phone and bigger issues are hard to solve from afar. 

For more than a year, a small team of service designers at GDS has offered practical advice and hands-on support for service and policy teams in departments. The team focuses on helping teams plan and scope projects, as well as support teams throughout the discovery phase. They have traveled to York to run design sprints, helped people in Crewe to conduct user research more effectively, and helped people in Croydon to map their end-to-end service. The mapping workshop has enabled the service team to create a shared understanding across teams and plan their work more efficiently across user research, content design and interaction design.

Sharing service transformation stories

In late January, we organised and facilitated the first ‘Services Week’ across the UK government. Twenty-one government organisations in 10 locations participated. They ran show and tells in their organisations, workshops, drop-in clinics and lunch and learn sessions to increase the awareness and understanding of how to use design approaches for user-focused service transformation.

As part of Services Week, we invited 5 service teams from different organisations across the country to share their transformation stories as remote case studies over lunch. If you work in the public sector, you can access the video recordings through a private link, which you will find in the #servicedesign channel of the cross-government Slack.

In May, we built on this experience and started ‘Service Thursday’. On the first Thursday of the month, one service team from somewhere in the UK presents how they have used user research and design to improve service provision and outcomes for users. This is followed by time to answer questions from the people watching it live remotely. So far, we’ve had Public Health England, HM Passport Office and HM Prison & Probation Service sharing their change stories. The recordings of the case studies, which are currently only available to people working in the public sector, have been watched more than 1,500 times. ‘Service Thursday’ will continue every first Thursday of the month with new case studies while previous ones are available to public servants.

Defining the service designer role in government

We’ve been working with heads of design across government to update the service design role skills and skill descriptions in the DDaT Profession Capability Framework. The update will reflect how the role has matured in government since the framework was published in 2017. It will help departments and teams continue to hire service designers into their organisations, and it will help service designers identify what skills are required at each level and what a career path might look like.

How to get support when designing services

Throughout the last year, we have iterated and extended existing formats and created multiple new ones to support people designing government services. To get help, you can:

• join the #servicedesign Slack channel to get in touch with service designers in government, and join the next Service Thursday remote case study session and peer support call on 5 September
• sign up to the monthly user-centred design newsletter to learn about upcoming service design training across the UK
• get in touch with the UCD Communities team if you’d like to write a blog post for the cross-government blog about service design that we're about to launch
• join the next cross-government service design meetup in London on Thursday, 26 September
• email the Service Design Support team if you think you’d benefit from service design advice when you’re starting to design a new service or improving an existing service

3:30pm 

The Head of Accessibility for UK Government, Richard Morton, is on stage now talking about the new public sector website accessibility regulations and what public sector organisations need to do to comply. 

3pm

Behind the scenes at #Sprint19 – GDS staff have been working hard for months to make today's event happen.

2:20pm

Our delegates have just taken part in breakout sessions, which focused on: GDS common components, the GovTech Catalyst, the GOV.UK Design System, building digital capability, diversity and inclusion, and the service assessment process. 

If you’re interested in any of the topics covered during the breakout sessions, you can read more about them on our blogs. 

GOV.UK Design System

Our GDS colleagues recently blogged about how we made the GOV.UK Design System more accessible. We also had a guest post by a colleague from NHS Digital about how they adapted the GOV.UK Design System for use in their health and care services. 

Diversity and inclusion 

We blogged about using data to make the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Profession more diverse. 

A data scientist from GDS blogged about his experience of taking shared parental leave. 

And our 2 colleagues shared their story of starting the ‘Muslims at GDS’ community. 

GovTech Catalyst

We published a 1-year-on blog post about the GovTech Catalyst programme to talk about what the team has learned and what’s coming up next.

Digital capability 

People and skills, and building capability have featured a lot on our blogs recently.

We blogged about the first round of the Emerging Technology Development Programme. 

We celebrated the GDS Academy’s 5th birthday and shared stories of how the Academy has impacted its students. 

We also shared what our interns learned during their placements at GDS.

Common components

We’ve been blogging quite a lot about GOV.UK Verify. First, Lisa Barrett set out her vision for the programme. We also blogged about what we’re doing to keep GOV.UK Verify secure from identity crime and fraud. And we blogged about our work supporting the HMRC’s biggest Self Assessment peak, which was a very popular topic among our audiences. 

We also blogged about the benefits of using GOV.UK Pay and what we’ve done to make it easier for smaller organisations to set it up. 

12:30pm 

We’ve heard a lot of interesting talks this morning. 

During the lightning talks part of the morning, Aleks Bobrowska from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) spoke about how the DWP Digital team are using and sharing data to tailor support for jobseekers in different regions. 

We also heard from Daniel Fyfield from the Department for Transport about the Blue Badge service, which helps you park closer to your destination if you have a disability, including a hidden one. 

Next, Lyndsay Baker and Jon Sanger from GDS talked about how GOV.UK has worked with departments to prepare for EU Exit. 

There was also a panel discussion – the topic was ‘strengthening digital partnerships across the UK’. The panellists were: Caron Alexander, Director of Digital Shared Services at the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Colin Cook, Director of Digital at Scottish Government, and Caren Fullerton, Chief Digital Officer at the Welsh Government. 

We’re now taking a break to have lunch and do some networking. Check back here in an hour for an update on what’s been happening in the #Sprint19 breakout sessions.

11:20am

We’ve just heard from Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office, The Rt Hon Oliver Dowden CBE MP. 

He spoke about the progress we’ve made and the work we’ve done in the past year, including our work on the GovTech Catalyst, the publication of the Technology Innovation Strategy and the guide to using artificial intelligence in the public sector, the impact GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Notify are having, our work on GOV.UK Verify and digital identity, and the role of the GDS Academy in upskilling civil servants to enable transformation. 

He also spoke about the challenges lying ahead, and about how we can ensure that the pace of innovation and transformation continues.

Then, John Manzoni, Chief Executive of the Civil Service and Permanent Secretary for the Cabinet Office, introduced a showcase on digital collaboration across government. 

Come back to this blog after midday to read a summary of the lightning talks that are taking place now. 

10:45am

GDS’s Interim Director General Alison Pritchard has just welcomed everyone to #Sprint19. 

10:15am

While you’re waiting for our next update, you can read some recent blog posts about how digital transformation is improving people’s lives:

• How model office testing is helping our bereavement service, DWP Digital
• How we recruited and tested with Healthy Start users, Digital health and social care
• New ‘Register your trailer to take it abroad’ service goes live, DVLA digital services
• Why we built the new ‘Teaching vacancies’ service, DfE Digital and Transformation

You can also watch our video to find out how Leeds City Council is using GovTech Catalyst funding to develop technology that can help improve the condition of social housing in the city.

9:45am

Today’s main event is due to start at 10:30am with an opening address from GDS’s Interim Director General Alison Pritchard. A couple of weeks ago, Alison blogged about her journey in government so far and what she’s looking forward to delivering over the next few months. 

Alison’s opening talk will be followed by a keynote from Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office, The Rt Hon Oliver Dowden CBE MP. 

Next, John Manzoni, Chief Executive of the Civil Service and Permanent Secretary for the Cabinet Office, will introduce a showcase on digital collaboration across government. 

Our attendees will see how we’re making it easier for people to find work and live independent lives, and helping citizens and businesses prepare for the UK leaving the European Union. 

Come back to this page later to see more updates on what’s happening at #Sprint19.

9am

#Sprint19 is about to begin – welcome to our live blog, which we will be updating throughout the day. Make sure you bookmark this page and come back to it to see what’s been happening. 

Our delegates are already arriving and getting excited about the day. Here’s what they’ve been saying. You can join the conversation by using the hashtag #Sprint19. We’re tweeting at @GDSTeam. 

This year’s Sprint is different

Last year, we held one big Sprint event in London. This year, we changed things up a little bit. We’ve already run 4 regional events in addition to the one happening today. You can read our blog post to find out about what we learned from the regional events. 

You can also watch our video to see the highlights from the 4 regional events:

Applications for the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Fast Stream programme are now open. You can register for the programme now. 

In this blog post, Anna and Kevin – Fast Steamers based at the Government Digital Service (GDS) – talk about their experiences of the scheme and share their tips for applying.

Anna – Governance and assurance lead

As a history and Asian studies graduate with no digital experience, it may seem unusual that I wanted to join the DDaT Fast Stream. However, I wanted to experience the opportunities available in digital and get a chance to get practical training while working.

While I don’t use my academic knowledge day to day, my degree has been helpful in other ways. For example, skills like writing in different styles, working to deadlines, presenting, processing information and learning things quickly, are all things I do each week. 

Digital expertise is not required for the DDaT Fast Stream. Instead, the assessors are looking for people who think for themselves, communicate well and can solve problems. You must also be eligible to work in the UK and have at least a lower second class degree from any discipline, unless you are already a civil servant, in which case you do not need a degree. 

I am just finishing my first year on the DDaT Fast Stream. Since October 2018, I’ve worked as a product manager at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and a governance and assurance lead at GDS. And, I’m about to go on secondment for 6 months to the charity Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, to work on digital strategy. Below, I talk about what I’ve learned during my first year on the scheme.

Learning on the job 

A big part of the Fast Stream is learning by doing. From my first day at MoJ, my colleagues accepted me and respected my opinions. 

I joined a team that supported and developed 5 live services. In my first week, I had to complete a backlog of tasks and prioritise the work of 7 people who were getting ready to work on a 2-week development sprint. 

While this was daunting, it meant that I was part of the team and making decisions from day one. I had the support of a manager who could step in if needed and supported me in front of more experienced colleagues. My learning curve was steep, but the people in my team helped me develop by teaching me and trusting my judgement.

Discovering different parts of digital

Before starting on the Fast Stream I had a very narrow idea of what digital meant. By doing different postings, I found different areas of digital work that I otherwise wouldn’t have known existed. 

I’m now interested in user-centred design, specifically user research, which helps teams learn about users and create services that meet their needs. I’ve been able to do user research in both of my placements so far, despite neither being a dedicated user researcher role. 

At MoJ, I visited users in Nottingham and observed them using our products. At GDS, I sought out user research experience and shadowing opportunities. I then applied user research to the non-digital area of risk management.

Tips for applying for the DDaT Fast Stream

The Fast Stream assessment process is long and can be intimidating. It’s designed to find people who have initiative, are creative thinkers and work well in a team. The assessors are looking for people with leadership skills. This means applicants with confidence in their abilities, team players, and people who can make decisions under pressure. The assessment centres are designed to test this, but not to catch you out. 

I would recommend the DDaT Fast Stream to someone who likes solving problems and asking: ‘Is there a better way to do this?’. Working in DDaT attracts people who are collaborative, creative and passionate about making government work better for citizens. The flatter hierarchy and desire to shake things up sets working in DDaT apart from other areas of the Civil Service.

Kevin Xu – Assistant Private Secretary, Director General’s team

I joined the DDaT Fast Stream as I wanted to use innovative technologies to help solve society’s challenges. My background is in philosophy, and I am specifically interested in the ethical use of technology and data. Since starting one year ago, I’ve seen how data and emerging technology can have a huge positive impact on people’s lives. 

Delivering data projects at HS2

My first placement was at High Speed Two (HS2) Limited, the company responsible for developing and promoting the UK’s new high speed rail network, where I was a data science delivery manager. 

This role had 2 parts. Firstly, as a delivery manager, I was responsible for managing the output of a development team. I developed expertise in digital ways of working by undertaking a 2-week agile course at the GDS Academy. Secondly, I worked as a developer to support the production of a data validation pipeline. I learnt a number of programming languages, such as Python, which I used to process and validate our data, and SQL, which I used to manage the databases storing this data. Through this, I developed an understanding of what good data looks like and the potential for how it can be used. 

Data Science Accelerator 

During my placement at HS2, I was also fortunate to be able to take part in the Data Science Accelerator, a capability building programme hosted by GDS. As part of the programme, participants work on a data science project that benefits their home department – for me, this was to predict noise pollution levels along the HS2 route. 

This involved spending a day a week for 3 months extracting data, visualising data and using machine learning techniques to create predictive models. I was supported throughout this experience by a mentor data scientist from HM Revenue & Customs who helped guide the entire process.

I learned that as important as technologies are, innovation is really about the people. I really enjoyed getting to know the other participants as well as the Data Science Community, all of whom were willing to share their knowledge.

Innovation at GDS 

The relationships I had built at GDS helped me fit directly into my next (and current) role as Assistant Private Secretary to the Director General of GDS. This role involves acting as a bridge between the head of GDS and the wider organisation.

I also work as a ministerial point of contact and engage heavily with the ministerial private offices in the Cabinet Office, coordinating submissions and briefings.

During my placement, the Government Technology Innovation Strategy was published. This sets out how government will prepare to use emerging technologies to build better public services. Alongside this publication, GDS also published a guide for using artificial intelligence in the public sector. For my role, I had to communicate with ministerial offices and the Director General on both these publications to align the strategy with their views. 

Tips on applying 

The important thing during the application process is to remain calm and have a broad and open mind in thinking about how different issues will affect each other. This will be especially important in the assessment centres, where they overload you with information.

Something to highlight about my 2 placements is both how similar and different they are. While both roles heavily involve innovative technologies, what I think is most interesting was the perspectives they were seen in. At HS2, I acted on a tactical level, using data science techniques to directly support strands of work. In contrast, at GDS, I think about innovation from a more strategic level, thinking about the key stakeholders and our direction of travel.

I’ll be moving on soon to the Home Office in a new role as business change manager. This will involve a completely different kind of work, but I think, more importantly, a different kind of perspective. And I think that’s really the key benefit of the DDaT Fast Stream and why it is worth applying for. You get to see and experience such a wide range of things that really do build that deep and broad insight into government and innovation. 

Applications for the DDaT Fast Stream Programme are now open. Find out more and register.

The International Design in Government community brings together design-minded public servants from all over the world to share best practice, discuss shared challenges and learn from one another. It started at GDS in 2017 and has grown rapidly; there are now 1,500 members from 66 countries and 6 continents. 

In September’s episode of the GDS podcast, Laura Stevens, writer at GDS, speaks to 2 of the founding members of this community – Kara Kane, Community Lead for User-Centred Design at GDS and Martin Jordan, Head of Service Design at GDS.

Kara and Martin talk about how the group began, its development and its impact, and they reveal some top tips on community management. They also discuss the group’s meet-ups. The first International Design in Government Conference happened in 2018 in London, and this year there have been global events in the US and Scotland so far.  And, the pair talk about this year’s final, and biggest, event in November: the International Design in Government Conference in Rotterdam. 

If you work for a government anywhere in the world, you can join the community by applying to join the Google Group.

You can subscribe to the GDS podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms.

You can read a transcript of the podcast on Podbean.

Subscribe for blog updates.

Earlier this year, GDS formed a Sustainability Network to help our department reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

We were inspired by the government’s commitment this year to reduce emissions to “net zero” by 2050, and the government’s Sustainable Technology Strategy 2020.

We decided to measure how much CO2 is produced as a result of our work, so we started with the largest potential source – our digital services.

Why we chose to focus on our digital services

When we think about reducing emissions, we often think of flying less or switching the lights off. We don’t tend to think about the energy it takes to keep digital services like GOV.UK up and running. But at GDS, this is actually our biggest potential source of emissions.

The IT industry actually uses 3.6% of the world’s electricity, and it produces 1.4% of the overall greenhouse gas emissions.

Websites like GOV.UK stay up and running thanks to thousands of computers in data centres. These computers are powered by electricity, which is a potential source of CO2, depending on how it’s produced.

At GDS, we use data centres from various companies, including Amazon Web Services (AWS). We decided to find out how our data centres source their electricity, and how much CO2 they produce through keeping services like GOV.UK, GOV.UK Verify and GOV.UK Notify running.

What we wanted to find out

To estimate the climate impact of our digital services, we wanted to find out a couple of key things:

1. How much electricity does it take to power our digital services?
2. How much CO2 is produced by that electricity? This would depend on how much of the electricity is generated from ‘green’ energy like solar or wind, and how much comes from burning fossil fuels.

To tackle these 2 questions, we asked our hosting providers for data on our electricity usage and CO2 emissions. We also made a rough estimate of our overall electricity usage. And, we estimated the amount of CO2 emissions produced by our electricity, using data from this electricity map produced by a company called Tomorrow.

Problems getting the data

We asked our hosting providers, Amazon Web Services, UK Cloud and Carrenza, to tell us how much electricity we use, and how much CO2 we produce.

Only one of our providers, UK Cloud, agreed to give us data about our electricity usage. For Amazon and Carrenza, we made a guess about the amount of electricity we use, assuming a percentage of our monthly bill.

In addition, neither Amazon nor Google currently shares information about how much CO2 their data centres produce. Although they claim that some of their data centres are “carbon neutral” or “100% renewable”, they do not explain to what extent they achieve this through offsetting – for example, through renewable energy projects elsewhere. Offsetting is useful, but it’s more important to avoid emitting CO2 in the first place.

We want to host our services in the most sustainable way we can. So we need to know how much CO2 is actually produced per kilowatt of electricity, per data centre.

Hopefully, our hosting providers will provide this data soon, now that Amazon has announced new commitments to measure and reduce emissions.

How much CO2 do GDS digital services produce?

Because our hosting providers didn’t share our electricity usage data with us, we went ahead and estimated it, based on the information we did have, including our recent bills. 

We estimated that the maximum amount of CO2 we produce is around 4,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. That’s the equivalent of the CO2 produced by the energy used by a village of 400 homes every year. Or the fuel burned by 770 cars, on average, in a year.

This is almost certainly GDS’s largest source of emissions. So we are keen to find ways to bring it down to zero, in order to meet our commitments.

What’s next

It’s encouraging to see the largest hosting providers, Amazon and Google, make announcements about measuring and reducing their CO2 emissions. If our providers make their data centres more sustainable, this will reduce our emissions. It will also benefit all their customers, including other teams in government.

Over the next year, we’d like to work with colleagues across government to:

1. Reduce the electricity we need to run our services – for example, by making our digital services more efficient
2. Keep asking our providers for better data to help us develop guidance on the most sustainable data centres by region and country 
3. Update the Service Manual’s guidance – 'Deciding how to host your service' – based on what we learn

Let us know in the comments below if you’d like to work together to reduce the climate impact of government services.

Jen Allum speaking at Sprint 19.

GOV.UK marked its 7th birthday last month. We’re rightly proud of the work we’ve done on GOV.UK since its launch in 2012. 

We’ve taken nearly 2,000 government websites and combined them into a single site. GOV.UK is now the government’s trusted online communications and public services channel. 

We support nearly 14 million visitors a week to find the information they need and to do the things they need to do with government – like learning to drive, registering to vote or finding out what they need to do to prepare for Brexit.

And, after all our effort to cohere and create consistency across the whole GOV.UK estate, it now works pretty well for users who know what they need to do, or what they want to find out. Like renewing your passport or subscribing to travel advice notifications for your next business trip destination. 

But over these last 7 years, both technology and user expectations have changed in profound ways. GOV.UK can’t continue to expect to rely on a reactive engagement with our users or to think of ourselves simply as ‘a website’. Instead, we have to shift to an offering that is proactive, low-friction, channel-agnostic and more rapidly iterating.

In practice, and on a consent-based model, this means informing users of things they need to do, helping them understand the things they may not realise are relevant to them, guiding them through complex life events and getting them to the next stage in their task. This means we need to look beyond discrete, singular transactions to whole-user journeys. 

This has been our aim on GOV.UK for a while. Lots of our work over the past couple of years – such as structuring content around topic areas and building step by step journeys into GOV.UK has pointed in this direction. Now we have a vision and a plan, and we're developing a model for how to do this.

Working on whole topics – like starting a business – we will start from the premise that we want to give the right people the right access to the right things at the right time, in the way they want to consume and receive that information. 

This is the next big phase of GOV.UK.

Everything based on consent

Our ambition is to serve users based on the way they want to interact with government.

While some users will want to share as little information as possible, some will want – and expect – government to effectively use data about them, and about the thing they are trying to do, to deliver a better service. 

We’re researching, testing and designing the basis of a consent model that supports the spectrum of user needs about sharing data. We’re thinking about how such a model could be applied across GOV.UK and the value it would derive.

This work is reliant on a secure and privacy-centric digital identity ecosystem – which is provided through government adoption of the UK’s digital identity standards. It is also reliant on government being able to share data across departmental boundaries when there is a need.

Our work on Brexit has really highlighted the need to explore this potential. With the Brexit Checker, which provides links to content and services after users complete a checklist, we have been able to get as close to a ‘personalised’ set of results as is possible without actually collecting any data about the individual user. It does a pretty good job – and returns over 19,000 variations of the results page – but we know from research that users want an even more customised set of actions.

To be explicit, users who want to access GOV.UK and read information will always be able to do so as they can now. People who want to provide information just at the point of need will still be able to complete individual transactions. And people who want their data joined up and used will be able to receive a more proactive and relevant service from government.

Joining up analytics

In a parallel but separate piece of work, we are also looking at how we can use anonymised data across the whole of the GOV.UK estate to give us a consistent understanding of how GOV.UK is being used and how people interact with government online. 

Although GOV.UK looks like a single ‘thing’ to the user, in practice the architecture is more complicated. Individual services are operated by individual departments (for instance, the part of the site where you apply for a passport is run by the Home Office), each of which conducts its own analysis of site usage.

What this means in practice is that we don't have a consolidated view of user activity across GOV.UK, which seriously limits our ability to iterate the platform in line with user needs and at scale.

Joining up analytics on GOV.UK has been something we’ve wanted to do for a while. We have been engaging with relevant departmental colleagues and with our minister since the start of the year on exactly this ambition. Eager watchers of GOV.UK will also know that this was trailed by my predecessor, Neil Williams, and those before him too. Indeed, the fact that we do not already have cross-domain tracking across the whole GOV.UK estate is unusual, as for most digital organisations this is considered standard practice.  

Having joined-up analytics will allow us to design products in the way that people actually use them – not in the way we think they might be.

Meeting users where they are

Unlike many publishers or commercial organisations, we’re not incentivised by statistics like page views or the number of visitors. Our interest is in making sure we are where the user is. 

Taking a channel-agnostic approach means recognising that content designers, publishers and product teams in government are no longer designing for a desktop view. They are producing services and information that are already being consumed predominantly on mobile – and may soon be consumed by channels we haven’t even thought of yet.

You might have read about our work to accelerate delivery via voice assistants, and we are making further inroads into how we present information in a better way in search engines too. We want to move to a model where we structure information once so it can proliferate across whatever medium the users wants to access it on. The rate of change in technology and user expectation is rapid. We must continue to change with it. It won’t be easy! 

Tackling whole problems

Our work on Brexit has been a lived example of exactly how we want to work on ‘whole problems’. Brexit is the first at-scale example of how the GOV.UK team have brought together all the individual services and pieces of information available in order to deliver a joined-up, complete and user-centred service.

We’re already looking at the next topic areas that we may want to work on with colleagues across government, and now need to accelerate how we do this. Having a single view of users and their needs will enable all of government to work together to tackle whole problems, ensuring we can proactively help users not just with single transactional services, but with whole user journeys.

This brings together all the elements I have talked about above. 

It’s about government understanding its online performance based on anonymised user data – from end to end. 

It’s about government developing the methods through which users can choose how much data about themselves – and about a thing – they want to combine in order to receive a more proactive, tailored and low-friction interaction with government. 

It’s about offering a whole spectrum of services based on consent – from browsing content to signing up for push services.

It’s a GOV.UK built not just for user needs, but around user needs.

It’s the next big shift in the way our digital public services are delivered by the government.

Read more about the work we're doing on GOV.UK on the Inside GOV.UK blog.