Dave

Do you need a digital programme?

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

The mechanics of making digital change happen in an organisation can be really complicated. What works in one place may well not stick in another. It all depends on strategy, structures, politics and personalities.

One common approach is to have a clearly defined digital programme. In many ways it makes perfect sense: you have a strategy in place, and a programme to implement that strategy. Having a programme helps you bid for some (most likely capital) money to help make it happen, you get a clear timescale to work to, and some benefits (savings!) to realise – not forgetting a programme board to report back to the big-wigs on how you’re progressing. What’s not to like?

Let’s look at the pros:

  • Unlocks money ✅
  • Allows you to recruit people ✅
  • Buys technology ✅
  • Clarity of purpose ✅
  • Clear governance ✅

Sounds pretty good! But wait, there’s cons too…

  • Capital money will disappear ❌
  • Those people you recruit are only there for the length of the programme ❌
  • Have you set aside time and money to ensure your new digital products are transitioned to BAU support? ❌
  • What are you going to do about continuous improvement? ❌
  • How are you going to keep those big-wigs excited about turning up to your board, two years in? ❌
  • The admin overhead can be significant if you aren’t careful – who is updating the programme plan, and generating the highlight reports? ❌
  • You’re on the hook for those savings – are they really in your power to deliver? ❌

The last point is crucial and getting consensus on this early is vital. Capital funds for programmes are usually given on the basis of a business case – in other words, for every £1 invested, £3 is expected to be saved. But, whilst the money is funding digital activity, the savings won’t be coming from the digital team – they will be created within the departments where services are being redesigned. As part of a programme, there must therefore be absolute clarity on what savings are coming from where – and a willingness to offer them up when the time comes.

A digital programme brings focus, and resources. It will get you going for sure. The danger is that it is temporary and they rarely allow for the planning and investment needed to maintain a new digital estate in a business as usual situation.

They can also become real pressure cooker environments, causing stress, anxiety and burnout – so you do have to make sure you look after yourself and your team, especially in the run up to board meetings.

Sounds like I am pretty against digital programmes. Perhaps I am – my preference would always be to build a permament team to do this stuff. Make digital change the business as ususal! It takes out a lot of the stress and anxiety, and makes it far easier to embed digital ways of working, and the core concepts and culture of agile, user centred design and so on.

However, in the real world, creating a digital programme is a mandate to get things done, as well as a shortcut to funds, which means people and new technology, if you need it. If you do go down the programme route, then the two most important things to get in place, for me, are:

  • agreement and clarity on savings and where they come from
  • a plan for the transition to BAU for the new digital services, and a properly funded regime of continuous improvement.

Creating good, simple user stories

Photo by Felipe Furtado on Unsplash

User stories are the strongest way you can capture requirements for your digital service and are another key component in taking a user centric approach to design.

Rather than the old way of doing things, of producing a specification document outlining every single feature that a product needs to have, user stories focus on the needs of the users of that product, and specifically on their outcomes.

This focus goes a long way towards producing services that are usable and deliver end to end, rather than breaking down halfway through because a feature ‘works’ technically, but doesn’t do what is expected or needed.

Additionally, user stories can be a great way to bring a product to life when describing it to stakeholders. It really demonstrates a new way of talking about digital services and technology, and can be very meaningful to non-technical folk, giving confidence that you’re doing the right thing.

In a multi-disciplinary team, the user stories are usually the domain of the product manager, written with the input from the rest of the team. If you don’t have all the roles in your team, then do try to have a single person responsible for the compilation of user stories – and try to have someone non-technical doing it, to avoid the temptation to leap into solutionising too soon.

Writing a good user story follows a certain format:

  • As a…
  • I need to…
  • So that…

For example:

  • As a new, and busy resident who drives to work in the town centre
  • I need to apply for a parking permit online
  • So that I don’t run up loads of parking fines

That’s quite a high level example (often referred to an ‘epic’ story), so we can probably come up with a more granular user story:

  • As a resident who has applied for a parking permit online
  • I need to be proactively kept informed of the progress of my application
  • So that I don’t need to keep contacting the council

Note that the user story doesn’t explicitly state here what the solution is. The focus is on the outcome that the user needs, not the technology that will enable it.

The technology is likely to be mentioned in the second main element of a user story, which is the acceptance criteria. These are descriptions of what done looks like for this story. The GOV.UK Technology blog shares a nice method for writing good acceptance criteria, based on the pattern ‘Given… When… Then…’.

Additional information for a user story might include the prioritisation of that story, so the team know how important it is to get that story completed, and also the size – how much effort is likely to be needed for the story.

Here’s some tips for writing good user stories:

  • Keep them small. If they start getting to wide in scope, treat them as an epic and break them down into smaller stories
  • Avoid the temptation of repeating your ‘I need to’ in your ‘So that I can’ – which is a really common error. For instance – ‘As a manager, I need to access my team’s performance dashboard, so that I can view the perform dashboard’
  • Don’t treat individual technical pieces of work as user stories. They might be important to the project, but that doesn’t mean they directly contribute to meeting a user need, and doing so can clog things up and spread confusion about what the outcome of the project is intended to be
  • Try following the INVEST (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable) formula for producing good user stories. It’s a handy framework to ensure your stories are what you and your users need. Read more about that here.

To make life easier, here is a simple template for writing user stories. Feel free to amend it any way you like!

Hope it’s useful!

Interesting links – 18 Feb 2021

I find interesting things to read, bookmark them, save a chunk of text as a quote, and then occasionally copy and paste it all into a blog post, so you don’t have to.

Digital Inclusion Toolkit: now live

Leeds and Croydon Councils recently won central government funding to create a comprehensive and collaborative how-to guide for digital inclusion.

Link

Delivering and accelerating in a pandemic – DWP Digital

Within DWP Digital our Technology Services team designs, builds and operates that platform, and in the last 10 months has ‘moved mountains’ to keep those services going.

Link

Working Smarter Field Guide

Learning informally and socially means connecting our individual work with our teams, communities, and networks. It requires honing our curiosity and seeking out different perspectives and ideas. It takes more than individual sensemaking to understand complex situations, so we have to find others to challenge our assumptions and learn at the edge of our professional abilities.

Link

The tiny video toolkit

People ask me [Coté] how I do the tiny videos. I hope to do a screencast at some point, but in the meantime, here are some notes.

Link

Announcing our new digital skills training offer – MHCLG Digital

We’re inviting local authority staff to apply for one of 10 certified courses with FutureLearn, covering a range of topics such as accessibility, design, decision-making and leadership. We’re testing the water with a small number of licenses and courses, but if we get enough positive feedback we’ll look to purchase more and make it an ongoing thing.

Link

A CDO chat with Kit Collingwood

As part of an occasional series, here’s a video of a conversation I had today with Kit Collingwood, Deputy Director for Digital and Customer Services at the Royal Borough of Greenwich. Kit shares some great insights and has some really interesting views on digital transformation in local government, so I really do recommend you watch the whole thing!

If you’d rather listen to it, you can grab the audio-only version here.

Monthnote February 2021

February is a short month, of course, but this one seems to have lasted for ages! Perhaps the impact of lockdown.

The month started with snow, and we had a good amount here in south Lincolnshire, enough for Ruth and I to make a pretty good effort at a snowman. It’s interesting, I think, that there were none of the histrionics that normally accompany heavy snowfall in this country. Most people were at home anyway, so it was fine. Turns out that’s probably what we ought to do every time there is heavy snow – just stay home and get on with things as best you can. It doesn’t last long.

The end of this lockdown appears to be approaching, but for those who are missing their social life, I Miss My Bar is a fun website, providing some ersatz pub-like atmosphere for wherever you happen to be.

I’ve had to start house hunting again – my hopes for being settled in one place for a while were dashed when my landlord put a for sale sign up outside my house! Charming. Hoping I can find somewhere where I can just be for a little while and give me a chance to save up properly for a deposit so I might buy myself a house in the future.

Work continues to be a challenge – there is almost constant change happening, and this brings with it the need for a lot of organising, adjusting, explaining and planning. It is exhausting, particularly when in the context of the pandemic. The (non-covid related) death of a member of the team this month hit many of us hard, especially those that were close to him. A reminder of the important things, and of how fragile life can be.

I’ve not blogged much this month, but have a few ideas for things to write about – and the fact that I have now finally discovered how to write posts in WordPress using the old classic editor might help me a bit! Not a fan of the block editor that has come in recently, so being able to avoid it is great for me.

I published the ‘CDO Chat’ with Kit Collingwood, which at the time of typing has over 550 views, which is amazing given its length and subject matter!

I shall have to find a willing victim for another soon!

I’ve also got my first coaching group organised, and we started things up yesterday. Technically that’s in March though so I shall say no more about it for now.

Book-wise, I thought it had been a slow month, but on checking it turns out I did ok:

  • Judgement on Deltchev, Eric Ambler – pretty good espionage thriller, set in a fictional Eastern European country after the second world war
  • The End of the Affair, Graham Greene – absolutely superb, obviously
  • A Room with a View, E. M. Forster – had a lot of fun reading this, nice to follow the Greene with something rather lighter
  • Asylum, Patrick McGrath – I love McGrath’s unreliable narrators, and this is a classic example. Fantastic writing. Rather oddly, my paperback was missing the first 13 pages of the story (!) so I had to read the start as a free sample on my Kindle!
  • The Anglo-Saxon Age, John Blair – an Oxford Very Short Introduction, a series I love. I’m a bit obsessed with Anglo-Saxons and early English history at the moment (blame lockdown!) and this provides a gloriously concise summary.

This month in movies…

  • The Grand Budapest Hotel – almost too whimsical, but some great performances amongst an amazing cast
  • Hail Caesar! – great fun
  • Inside Llewyn Davis – literally nothing happens, but it does so beautifully
  • The Lighthouse – utterly bonkers. I have no idea what happened in this film
  • The Ides of March – a slick political thriller, very engaging

I’ve also really been enjoying the US version of The Office on Netflix, and Channel 4’s Great Pottery Throwdown. Continuing my current obsession with medieval English history, I can also thoroughly recommend 1066 – A Year to Conquer England, which is entertaining and informative, even if it employs some slightly odd and distracting techniques at times.

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