An online notebook
This is a living list post where I am keeping a note of all the active blogs run by local authorities.
If you have any to suggest that I don’t have listed, please let me know!
Big thanks to the following folk for their suggestions:
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This is a nice and easy framework to use when you find yourself needing to do a quick service discovery to find out some basic details about a service and how it can be transformed.
The point at which you might want to use this is right at the start of your digital work, when you either:
Whichever way you use it, you’ll find it a really helpful way to have a meaningful conversation with the service owner, that will help you get on the same page really quickly.
Some quick notes on how to use this – although remember, you are free to do what you like with it!
If you are running this exercise before choosing which service to transform, this analysis will help you decide whether a particular service is a good candidate. If you’ve already fixed on a service to transform, the outcome of this might a) change your mind; or b) decide how to approach it.
Hopefully this comes in handy! Let me know if so 🙂
The GDS service manual is very clear on the roles required to run a proper multidisciplinary team to deliver digital services. It states that you must have a
And this is, of course, quite right. Doing good digital work means taking it seriously, and that means resourcing it properly.
Indeed, 7 people doesn’t sound like that many, right? Well, in some organisations where the entire digital and IT team is only 10 people, which includes application support and the helpdesk, it’s huge. And most importantly, it’s never going to happen.
In this situation you have to be prepared to compromise. I think you can get this down to three people in terms of a full time digital team, with the need to borrow a bit of time from others to get really specialised stuff done.
What this means though is coming up with some new roles that combine some of those in the GDS list.
First you need someone who understand both digital and services and can work between the two. In a traditional project this would probably be your business analyst, but that won’t quite cut it here. This person needs to be able to do a bit of BA, but also be handy at running user research sessions, writing user stories, and managing the backlog. Some kind of service design thinking would be helpful too, ensuring a focus on building an end-to-end service that delivers on that user need.
In my chat with Ben Unsworth, he mentioned a role in his team called ‘Business Designer’. Now, to be clear, this is NOT the role I describe above, but it is a great title for it!
Second you need someone who can build your digital service for you. This depends on your tech stack of course in terms of the specific skills, but a developer will be the person to do this. Now, in this smaller team, they are likely to need to be skilled in various disciplines, as they are likely responsible for not just the new digital service, but also building the integrations, the workflows, the web forms and so on.
Third, you need an organiser. They will need to be more hands-on than a pure Delivery Manager would be, but would combine elements of that role with more traditional project management activities, including liaising with suppliers and other third parties. The organiser would also pick up some other bits, such as managing the performance of the project, perhaps using OKRs, managing the transition from project to live service and BAU support, and also considering how the success of the service will be judged in the future.
Other specialist roles you either need access to, or some time from up front from, include:
Is it ideal to build end-to-end digital services using just a team of 3 people? No! But the reality of the situation in many smaller organisations is that having dedicated product managers and service designers is just never going to happen.
Having a small, motivated and enthusiastic squad of three adaptable multi-skilled people working together on multiple projects, and this building their trust in one another, can really get a lot done. Just as long as they are allowed to focus and don’t get dragged into other stuff all the time!
What I have neglected to mention until now is the vital importance of having committed involvement of the service you are transforming involved in your project. You need both a leader from that department around, to make decisions and to ensure there is strategic buy-in for the changes being made.
Then you’ll also need some front line folk and managers on board so they can give their perspective and also ensure they feel like they are part of the change, and can champion it to their colleagues.
The question all this leads us to ask, is where can these three people with this amazing set of skills be found? Are there service designers who can also product manage, user research and process map just sitting around in large numbers, waiting to be called upon?
No, of course not. However, I can pretty much guarantee that somewhere in your organisation, there is a great organiser, an enthusiastic techie and, yes, an eager person who has a really good empathetic understanding of the needs of the users of your services.
I am not intending to diminish the professional importance or ability of the roles described in the GDS service manual. Where possible you should always try and find the budget to employ properly trained and experienced people in what are genuinely specialised roles.
But when you just can’t afford to do that, stick to the maxim that you hire for attitude and train for skills. Find the people who want to do this: those with ideas and the fire in their bellies needed to make change happen – and make sure you support them to give them the skills and experience to help them do a great job – whether through training, coaching and mentoring, or pointing them to websites with loads of sensible technology and digital advice.
The local digital declaration is three years old as I go to keyboard. I was privileged enough to be around at the time it was being put together, had some small input into it, and helped to promote it. I think it is well and truly a good thing.
What it does is define for the whole local government sector what digital is all about. It removes those misunderstandings that digital is just about channel shift, or better websites, or one single other thing. It explains that while good digital is not just about technology, it also is about technology, and how you have to get that and the culture right to make progress.
Hundreds of councils have signed up to it. Many did so, I am sure, because it was a commitment to doing things right, and because they believed in it. I suspect some signed up because they wanted to be in the cool crowd, even though they weren’t really bought into the whole thing. Plenty signed up because it meant they could apply for some funding. That’s a shame, but it’s understandable.
The truth is, signing up to the declaration is easy (thanks to it being a good digital service!). Living up to it is hard, and I would wager that not one single council could really say they are living and breathing every ambition and commitment in there. But that’s ok – it’s fine to be aspirational, as long as you are actively aspiring, and not just doing nothing.
Signing the declaration, or making a big deal of trying to meet all of its statements if you signed it a while ago, is a great way of getting some momentum going on your digital work.
Here’s 5 ways how to get cracking right away:
Get some senior people together on a Teams or Zoom call, and take them through the declaration. Focus on the elements of it that are likely to resonate with them, such as:
Encourage the leadership that this presents a clear to do list to become a sector leader in digital, as long as there is some commitment to making it happen – and maybe have a few small exmaples up your sleeve of things you could get on with quickly, and can report back to show progress.
A key part of the declaration is bringing the really positive open working culture of the internet age into our organisations. The best way to do that? Start blogging.
Seriously, it is not hard – and it is a great test of your mettle as a change agent in your organisation, and of your organisation’s commitment to the digital agenda, particularly if the culture where you work is one where blogging is a tricky thing to get started with.
There are loads of models to follow, but the really easy one to do, I would suggest, is:
Boom! You’re on your way to an open, digital culture. Now get cracking on laptop stickers and posters.
Sometimes this is seen as an incredibly daunting thing to do, but actually done the right way service assessing is a great way of introducing people to what is really important in delivering good digital services.
Now, for those working with very estblishment outfits like GDS and others, service assessments can be pretty formal gateway style checkpoints, to prevent poor digital services from going live. That’s exactly how it should be for such organisations, but if you’re just starting out, then a bit of compromise is needed.
Instead, use the service assessment process to demonstrate to folk across your organisation what good looks like, and how much of a positive impact just doing a bit of user research could have, or how we could be really sure our information security is spot on, or indeed how we could have saved money if we’d just used that thing IT bought last year, rather than buying another new thing just for this service.
Find some enthusiastic friendly folk to be on your panel. If you can find someone from another organisation who has done it before, all the better. People don’t need to be digital experts, they just need to be interested and curious, and maybe have had a read of the service standard beforehand, and be good at asking sensible questions.
At the end, rather than a strict go/no go decision on whether the service can go live, you’ll have a list of improvement that could be made to it, or maybe a checklist of things to do on the next service you’ll work on.
At Croydon we did a very early service assessment on our own digital blog which was a great, low risk place to start. Here’s the summary report which gives a flavour, and how it’s not that scary a process, not really.
The declaration fund enabled a lot of projects to get going, and several of them have survived into being in a usable state. That sounds like faint praise, but it isn’t – it’s only right as you go through the cycle of discovery to alpha then beta then live that some stuff drops out along the way. We can’t do everything all the time, after all.
Take a look through, especially those that made it to the beta phase, as these really ought to be thing you can make use of. I’m particularly proud of LocalGovDrupal – an open source, website in a box for councils that is now being used by several councils, including Brighton and Croydon.
If you’re at the right stage to make use of something built by the sector for the sector, then that has to be a great win for you, your organisation and your digital plans.
Collaboration is key to the declaration, which is music to my ears. It’s what drives SensibleTech, after all, and inspires me to share this stuff with you all.
You can get together with others in exactly the same position as you in other organisations up and down the country by connecting through groups such as LocalGovDigital and OneTeamGov. There’s also a bunch of helpful people on Twitter who you can track down and LinkedIn can be useful too for meeting folk and finding out what others are up to.
Also take a look at the events that folk like Nick Hill run, which are free and provide loads of opportunities to meet and learn from others.
If you’re nervous and not sure where to start with joining some of these network, just yell, I’d be happy to introduce you.
Personas are a great place to start with user centred design, particularly if the whole practice is new to your organisation. This is because they can provide a quick and cheap way of ensuring your project puts the different types of user at the heart of your service design process.
Personas are fictional representations of the different types of potential users of your service. Well written ones can bring the important user types to life, which is why it helps to make them as realistic as possible. They also help to give the project team focus, by constantly reminding them of what really matters to their users. Finally, they are a great way of engaging stakeholders with your work, introducing personality and something relatable.
They can have their downsides though:
So make sure you use them properly, and most importantly of all – do your research first!
To make your life easier, here is a simple template to use for your user personas. Feel free to amend it in any way you like to make it work for you.
Hope it’s useful!