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GDS Podcast #39: Improving navigation on GOV.UK Mar 01, 2022

When was the last time you noticed any changes to GOV.UK? We share how and why we’ve updated its homepage and menu bars. Podcast update note: We have made some editorial changes to the podcast published on 28 February 2022 to improve clarity on the work we are doing.

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The transcript of the episode follows:

Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. At GDS, we build platforms, products and services that help create a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government for everyone. And as part of that work, we maintain GOV.UK, the website for the UK government. GOV.UK is used by millions of people daily. The home page alone is used more than two million times each week. We've been improving how people can navigate the site, taking a user-centred and evidence-based approach. We've previously written about this work on the GDS and Inside GOV.UK blog, and this podcast episode will be your latest instalment in documenting how we launched the new menu bar after an extensive A/B test and how we updated the GOV.UK homepage. It will also take a look at what lies ahead for making GOV.UK as simple as possible for people to use. Joining me to explore this today are Sam Dub and Jenn Phillips-Bacher, who work on GOV.UK in very different disciplines, but part of the same team. Sam, would you mind telling us a little bit about the team and then maybe what you do as part of it?

Sam Dub: We're a team of 14, which in the scheme of GDS and the scheme of government is relatively small. We bring a whole range of different perspectives and expertise to this work that includes designers, developers, content people, researchers, and our job is to make it easier for people to find things on GOV.UK, and my role as a product manager is about making sure we're working on the right problems in the right way. We're getting to the outcomes for users that we want to achieve.

Vanessa Schneider: Sam, thank you for that explanation of the team. Obviously, part of this as well is Jenn. Would you mind introducing yourself and what you do as part of the team to our listeners, please?

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: I'm Jenn Phillips-Bacher, and I'm a content strategist on Sam's team. My focus is primarily information architecture and findability. So as a content strategist in the textbook definition of it, it's all about getting the right content to the right people in the right place at the right time. And that's why a content strategist is working on navigation. It's all about improving that mode of getting users to the content that helps them achieve a goal.

Vanessa Schneider: Great, thank you to both of you. While it would be great if we could count on it, but not everyone will have been following the public journey of this work, even though we've blogged about it extensively. So would either of you mind recapping perhaps what's been happening? When did we start changing where users could find our information?

Sam Dub: One of the challenges for GOV.UK is that the amount of content published grows every year. And today it's more than half a million pages, and it might just be one page in that half a million that a user needs. And so in order to find that page, there are, kind of, multiple tactics that they'll use. They might use a search engine, they might use GOV.UK site search, or they might browse through the home page, through a menu bar, through topic pages, to find what they need. And work on that topic system, making sure that users can browse successfully is the focus of our team. There's work going on elsewhere in GOV.UK in partnership with search engines, and there is work planned to improve our own search engine. But the focus for our team right now is browse and how we get that topic system, these menus, the home page, the breadcrumbs, and related links at a content page level, all working nicely together. So users can browse to find the stuff they're looking for. What you've seen go live over the last couple of months are the first kind of public steps of some work that's been happening for around the last year and those public changes have been changed to the GOV.UK home page and a change to the menu bar. So that's the black bar that sits across the top of every content page on GOV.UK. And that's more than half a million pages of the site. And that is GOV.UK's primary navigation. And we've, we put those changes live, we put homepage changes live in December and we put several versions of the new menu bar live in the second half of last year.

Vanessa Schneider: So it's great that you've outlined what changes are taking place, but why was it necessary?

Sam Dub: So the strategy here is about making stuff easy to find, and like, like all good GDS teams, we started with a discovery, and a discovery essentially means validating a hypothesis about a problem. And here it is about understanding what was going on, why people couldn't find things or why people were abandoning journeys on GOV.UK. And in the course of that discovery, we found 3 core problems that users were facing, and they were a confusing information architecture - now this is this is more Jenn's area of expertise and confusing information architecture is not a phrase that a user will come to you and say, "Oh, your information architecture is very confusing". It will be something that you'll notice a user lost within the site and not able to find where they need to be in order to get to the service or the piece of information that they need. So that was problem one. Problem two were issues on smaller devices. So these days, GOV.UK is used most often on mobile, and last year that was, three-quarters of all visits to GOV.UK came from a mobile device, and not all of GOV.UK's pages are optimised for mobile devices. And so that presented navigational problems, and there's a real opportunity there to move from an approach that kind of worked on mobile but wasn't ideal to something that really feels like it's designed for mobile devices, which is where most users are. And the third problem we looked at was an issue of overwhelm. So a lot of users to GOV.UK feel like it's just a lot of stuff. It's the most common phrase that we hear, the most common sentiment in user research will be, "This is a lot. This is too much. I'm not, I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for here". And so in a lot of the design work we've been doing, we've been looking at how to get back to the core principles of GOV.UK that are about a simple, clear experience to make it easy to find things.

Vanessa Schneider: Sam mentioned that as a content strategist, you, Jenn, might have some experience with how to resolve confusing information architecture or sort of what kind of problems that can cause. Would you like to maybe speak to that, Jenn?

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: Sure. So information architecture is one of those phrases that you'll get a different definition of it, depending on who you talk to and what their experience is. So I think in my work within GDS, I'm thinking about information architecture as being the bone structure of the website. A good information architecture isn't really something that you point to or see. It's something that is that scaffolding that supports the entire information space so that people can find what they need. And, and it all kind of depends on the raw materials that you have. So what kind of content you have, what kind of data and metadata that you have about that content, whether you've got images, video and so on. So I always think about the UX and information architect Louis Rosenfeld. He talks about there being three tracks of information architecture, and this is where it fits in with GOV.UK. He talks about top-down navigation. So that's the things like the global menu and the user interface components you might see on a home page. And what that does is it kind of anticipates an interest or a question that a user might have when they arrive. The second thing is bottom-up navigation, so that stuff, like bread crumbs or related content links or 'you might also like'-type suggestions or any kind of contextual navigation with content - that might mean like titles and page headings, or even links embedded inside of blocks of text. And then the third thing is, is the big one, and that's search. So that's really for handling those really specific information needs. So the information architecture is kind of this interplay between top-down, bottom-up, and search. And it's that whole, that holistic information architecture that we're starting to make some significant improvements on GOV.UK.

Vanessa Schneider: Makes sense that we want to take care of this. So, yeah, menus and topic pages, they must play a big role in the user experience from what you've just shared. But making changes to how users interact with them, that would have made a bit of a difference out of the blue, no? How do you test this effectively without maybe negatively affecting users because it must be a bit challenging in a live environment?

Sam Dub: So that's a really great question, and I think something that we're quite careful about. We know that for people finding, finding what they need it is a kind of critical task and GOV.UK is part of a whole bunch of essential processes in people's lives. And whilst we want to make stuff easier, there would be significant consequences to making stuff worse. And so we start with quite an extensive process of research before we make any change on the live site. We'll develop prototypes and then introduce those to users in a kind of test scenario in usability research. And a lot of, a lot of ideas often don't make it past that stage. You your your expectations about what will work, they kind of improve over time. But still, there's a pretty high ratio of stuff that when it meets contact with a, with a user, you'll suddenly discover unexpected problems with it. And so we try and catch that stuff early. And then when we do introduce changes to the live site, we want to use a kind of experimental method. We want to make sure that the change doesn't look simpler, but it actually works better. And that's where we'll use a technique called A/B testing or multivariate testing. And what that essentially means is comparing the performance of two different designs. We do that by users opting in to measurement on GOV.UK. When you accept cookies on GOV.UK, you have the option to accept measurement. And what that means is that at scale we can see how the site is being used. When we introduce a new design, we can compare how the new design is being used versus how the old design is being used. What that then allows us to do is look at certain key metrics and, for example, a new menu bar, we would want to see that a new menu bar is being clicked on, and that would be one very simple metric to see whether it was being recognised as a menu and whether it was being used. We would want more sophisticated stuff than just being clicked on. We would want to see a good user journey across the site, so users opening the menu bar, selecting an option and then successfully navigating down to a piece of information or a service. And we can look at those patterns of journeys across the new design and the old design and see which is more successful with users. So this process removes the, the choice out of this process, the, the bias out of the process, we just see what works for users. That's what we go with.

Vanessa Schneider: I was wondering, were there any adjustments to what you were testing with users based on how they were responding to your A/B testing?

Sam Dub: The way we will work on a design for an element as important as a site wide menu bar: very rarely will it be once and done, so it'll be a process of continuous iteration where we're looking at data. And sometimes the changes are significant and sometimes they're smaller. But there are quite significant differences from the first version of the menu bar we put live, changes to the content, changes to the interactions. And I would imagine it's continuing to refine that over the next few months. What tends to happen is that at the beginning, the changes are quite major. And then over time, you move into a process of polishing the design and you're making smaller and smaller changes and smaller optimisations. And we're getting that with the menu bar, I'd say we're at a point where there might be a couple of little content tweaks we want to try, but we're pretty much there we think.

Vanessa Schneider:Jenn, how does your insight as a content strategist feed into the menu bar?

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: What I'm thinking about is the understandability of the system as a whole, so can people understand the information that is being presented to them? One thing we look at is understandability of labels. And one of the ways that we can do that is a quantitative piece of research method called tree testing. And what that effectively does is allows us to look at a user's click journey through a hierarchical structure. So our, our existing topic system as an example is hierarchical, you use it to narrow down to a set of more granular categories. So we can use tree testing to understand whether the entry points are understandable for people. Are they going down the right path to begin with? Did they get lost once they're inside of that structure? And in that way we can identify where, where people are getting lost, where we might need to make changes to the language that we're using and where we need further qualitative investigation because we can't, we can't know everything from the quantitative. Often tree testing opens up a whole new set of questions that we actually want to ask humans face-to-face. So it's good fodder for ongoing research, which again feeds into the iterative development of things like the menu bar and the topic system. So it isn't, it isn't right until we know that users can find what they need where they expect to find it.

Vanessa Schneider: And does the tree testing run in the background of the A/B testing or is it something that needs to be set up separately?

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: Tree testing is set up separately from A/B testing, and the way that we are doing it at the moment is through a banner across certain sections of the website. So when we have a tree test that's live, you're likely to see it within the topic structure or other pages within the website.

Vanessa Schneider: Great, so that sounds like a really non-invasive way for you to get data on how people are progressing through their journeys without them needing to reveal anything about their personal details. And obviously, as big proponents to agile, it makes sense that we're having a very iterative approach. I was wondering if that was transferable to other parts of our mission to improve navigation because we've talked extensively now about the menu bar, but obviously, that's not been the only area of activity.

Sam Dub: So another area where we're making these kind of evidence-based changes is to the design of core components of the website. And one place where you can see a change that we're really proud of is on the GOV.UK home page, where you see all the topics listed out, the area of the site that you as a user need to click on is now substantially larger. And you might think, 'Well, it's a small change, and it's just, maybe, a design tweak to make the page feel more, kind of, better spaced out'. The change is much more significant than that and actually comes from a different set of user needs. This is about using the website with touch. So users, particularly on smaller devices, I'm sure we've all had the experience of, like, struggling to tap on a link on certain websites. We've all had that experience, maybe where we clicked on the wrong thing, because when you're trying to tap on a link, it's difficult to tap on the right one. Those problems are magnified if you are on a smaller device or maybe have a tremor or a motor impairment. And that, that can be the difference between being able to successfully complete a task on mobile and basically having to abandon and either use a different device or ask someone else to do it for you. So it's quite an important change for us across the site to make these targets so that you have to tap on or click on in order to navigate through the site significantly larger. And we feel that is a good thing for everybody. It should make the website easier and quicker to use on mobile and more accessible in the process. So accessibility, mobile usability, are core principles of the pages, including the home page that we're going to be redesigning as part of this process.

Vanessa Schneider: Sounds like we're on a roll. This kind of work, we've mentioned it before, is never done. So what is next on the agenda for us?

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: So a key part of simplifying our information architecture is working toward improving our topic system, making sense of what we call topic browse. So in GDS lingo, we often talk about mainstream browse, and that's what you see on the home page at the moment. And it's the topic-based part of GOV.UK that includes the top categories you might use to browse to content like 'passports, travel and living abroad', or 'working, jobs and pensions'. So they're quite broad categories that contain all of the content that supports top tasks, so the things that most users are going to want or need to do. For example, like applying for a passport or checking your state pension age, so very task-oriented. But in parallel with that, we have something that we often call specialist topics or specialist sectors. And they're similar, similar to mainstream browse in a way, but it doesn't have a predictable home in the same way that mainstream browse does. So that means that users, who are looking for more in-depth information relating to their business or industry or they're working in some kind of advisory or professional capacity, can't navigate to that content without using search. And what's interesting about these two systems is that they kind of do some of the same things, they're hierarchical and there's an element of curation. So content designers or publishers are deciding which of the content in those topic areas is most important and should be prioritised for individual user needs. So what we're looking at doing at the moment is consolidating these two topic structures into a single browse layer for GOV.UK. So that will allow people to get to a broader range of content, and it will do a better job at reflecting the full breadth of content published on GOV.UK. We currently have about 650,000 content items, or pages, which is huge. It is huge [laughs]. And we're only really surfacing a small fraction of that within mainstream browse.

Sam Dub: What we're working on over the next couple of quarters is to combine these two topic systems into a single definitive browse system that will allow users to find anything that they need on GOV.UK. And that's a real design challenge because what we don't want to do is overwhelm users. What we want to do is make sure there's a route to everything the people need without it feeling like there is this huge volume of content for them to wade through. And so we're working very hard on design patterns, using some of the latest thinking within GOV.UK Design System, like accordions, like the grid patterns that you have seen on the new home page. And we're working to make sure that there are simple routes to information and services. But there are also the people who need it, ways they can dig a bit deeper and they can get to the specialist content as they need it.

Vanessa Schneider: So if users have become interested in the work that you're doing, is there any way for them to engage with it? And I mean users, whether they are the end-user, as in a citizen that is going through the process of navigating a journey, or even teams that are running services in government that might be more of a middle person, and they want to improve how their content appears to users. What can they do to get in touch with you and how can they help?

Sam Dub: So if you're a user of GOV.UK and you're inside government, if you're a civil servant, you can get involved and and talk to us through the cross-government content community, so there's a cross-government Basecamp that you can join and we'll be doing any call-outs for participation and collaboration across government using that channel. And if you're not a content designer, you can talk to your nearest friendly content designer within your department or the managing editor. Each department and agency, I believe, has a managing editor. And they're a great, kind of, point of contact between you and GDS and our work. You can also keep up to date on Inside GOV.UK. We're doing our best to work in the open on this and blogging about forthcoming changes through there. And if you're a user, and you are listening to the GDS podcast, you, the blog should be a really good sense of what's what's coming up. But we hope also, for you. That this is a pretty seamless experience, that we don't expect these changes to disrupt anybody. They will be iterative over the coming year and gradual. And because of the evidence-based way that we're working in terms of the user experience, it should be one of iterative improvement because we realised that for so many people, GOV.UK is critical to their jobs, to their livelihoods. And we're careful about how we're iterating. We want to make consistent progress, but we don't want to disrupt everybody in the process.

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: Over the last quarter, we've been collaborating with content teams from HMRC and DWP to test some of our assumptions. And those have been really fruitful and helpful discussions because it's demonstrated to us some of the areas where government publishers might have a slightly different perspective to GDS in terms of how people are navigating the site. And we've learnt a lot about users who use HMRC and DWP services. We're also aware that some departments with active user research communities are also doing tree testing, and that's somewhere where we could really learn from each other. Understanding the mental models of users who use content that is being produced by each of these departments. And over the coming months,we will also be reaching out to departments and agencies via managing editors to review the specialist topics or specialist sector pages that you have on GOV.UK. And we will support those teams with making any changes that are necessary in order to get them to fit into the new topic system. If you're currently working in government and working on things like topic systems or tree testing of your own content, get in touch. We'd love to hear what you're working on and what you're learning.

If you're a person who works in content or works with content, whether you're a content designer, UX writer, content strategist, information architect, content architect: GDS is a great place to work and develop your career and we're building up our content strategy practice a bit more. So even if you don't see a job title that looks quite right, please have a look at the job description and think about transferable skills. Our content strategy team is made of people who've worked in fintech, libraries, social media, journalism. So even if you think you don't fit the title, do have a look at the job description.

Vanessa Schneider: So it doesn't get more straightforward in terms of calls to action than what you've both shared with us. We'll have the contact details on Jenn's research with other departments in the blog post, and you can subscribe to the Inside GOV.UK blog by visiting [insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk] and on the right side bar, you can find options to subscribe to the blog. And if you're more in the mood for listening, you can find all episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all other major podcast platforms, while the transcripts are available on Podbean, goodbye.

Jenn Phillips-Bacher: Goodbye.

Sam Dub: Goodbye.

GDS Podcast #38: Understanding the complexity of users’ lives Jan 26, 2022

Why build a product people won't or can't use? Our user researchers share their approach to understanding needs for government’s single sign-on.

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The transcript of the episode follows:

Vanessa Schneider: Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. In August, we recorded an episode on digital identity and single sign-on as part of our plans to develop one inclusive and accessible way for people to log in to all government services online. You heard from Will and Helena from GDS, as well as Tom from Veterans UK, who shared how we worked with other parts of government to shape this work. Since then, we passed the digital identity service assessment, integrated our authentication component with the first service, and completed research with more than 800 end users. And it's that research that we want to talk about today. Joining me in this are Lauren Gorton and Charlotte Crossland, both user researchers at GDS in the Digital Identity Programme. Lauren, could you please kick us off by introducing yourself and what you do?

Lauren Gorton: So I'm Lauren. I'm a user researcher on the digital identity programme in GDS, and specifically I work in the authentication team. We look at the credentials that people use as part of the single sign-on. And the first steps of our journey went live in October. So specifically, I focus on the end user aspect of that and focus on the citizen side.

Vanessa Schneider: Fantastic, thanks. Charlotte, could you please introduce yourself and what you do as well?

Charlotte Crossland: Absolutely. Hi, everyone. I'm Charlotte, I'm a user researcher on the digital identity programme, working in the design for adoption team. We've been doing a lot of research with service teams across government. We're building an authentication onboarding journey, as well as looking at identity materials that teams can use to make decisions.

Vanessa Schneider: Fantastic, thank you so much, both. So, not everyone will have listened to the previous podcast episode or read the blog posts that we've written about this work. Would one of you mind explaining a bit more about One Login for Government?

Lauren Gorton: Yes, so One Login for Government is one of the government's major projects at the moment. On GOV.UK there, there are several different sign-ins at the moment, and many different routes users could take. So what we're trying to do is streamline that down, so that in the future, there'll just be one single sign-on for GOV.UK to help improve the journeys for users and reduce confusion for people. That then opens the door to do lots of other cool things in the account space, so that people aren't having to repeat themselves too often in different services, and it helps government to basically join up a bit better.

Vanessa Schneider: Great stuff. I can see the importance in that [laughs]. Obviously, this is a loaded question to ask, given both your roles as user researchers. But I was wondering why is user research so integral to that?

Lauren Gorton: So there's no point in building something if people won't or can't use it. And the only way we know if we're on the right track is if we actually speak to the people who are the intended users. That's probably important for any organisation or business, but it's especially important in the context of government, given how important government services are if people can't access them, that can have a huge impact on people's lives. So we can't really afford to build something which people either can't use or won't use.[For]the citizen side of the research, our approach is to gather insights at all stages of the projects and from as representative a sample of people as possible. One thing is that we're not reinventing the wheel. There have been other government projects that have come before us who've done work on sign-on services. So there's a lot of existing research and insights that we can sort of learn from as a first step. So we, we initially did some very extensive desk research, including research artefacts from Verify, Government Gateway, recent COVID[-19, coronavirus] projects, and, you know, getting lessons learnt from peers in the NHS, who are working on the NHS login at the moment as well. So it's kind of given us a running start, really, to see what worked well before us and what didn't work so well. And we then built on top of that with our own research. So for a variety of different techniques, things like doing interviews with people and conducting surveys, testing our journeys as we develop them and iterating them. And since May, despite the impacts of COVID and issues that we had with research - we obviously haven't been able to go out and actually talk to people face-to-face, we've had to adjust how we work and do everything remotely - but despite that, yeah, we've managed to speak to over 800 end users, as you mentioned, since May. On top of that, it is really important to call out that once something's live, it's not live and then done, so now that we're live with the first steps of authentication, we've also got thousands of users who are now going through the live service and we're getting insights from those people as well. So relying a lot on our feedback form and also the analytics that runs for our service to better understand, "OK, so these are real people, using it in a real-life scenario: how is it working for them, and working, we keep improving it." So it's kind of that balance of we're doing a lot of the research with people to help prep them, optimise before we go live. And then as it's live, we're still monitoring it and trying to improve.

Vanessa Schneider: Well, there's a lot of work going into it, I can see, and it's really heartening to hear that you're taking on the lessons from the past. And actually, that probably relates to the work that we're doing with other departments because they have existing identity solutions, don't they, Charlotte?

Charlotte Crossland: Yeah, absolutely. So our approach from gathering insights from service teams in government has been a bit different from doing research with end users - it's a bit of a different dynamic. The real key to this is collaboration. So like other government platform products our users are peers working across government. I've been working with a range of roles, from product people to service owners, researchers, designers, developers, even data [analysts], both across central and local government. And it's been really fundamental to tap into, again, the existing work that's there; digital identity is a well-trodden area across government. It's a fundamental, it's been creating a space of trust and being as open as possible with teams and departments. It's important that we take aspects of that into our approach, not only internally within the programme, but taking that approach externally across government. Yeah, if the whole team is supporting and involved in that session, we have the capabilities and materials to produce really rich, UR [user research], building up that trust and developing relationships is far more important because they're the teams that are building and developing the services themselves in their everyday lives.

Vanessa Schneider: Obviously service teams will have also conducted user research for their services with end users. How did that integrate into sort of your knowledge base?

Lauren Gorton: Yes, so that was a part of the desk research that we did, kind of, in Discovery Alpha. We went through hundreds of different documents to, to try and understand that. But, as well, we've also since had sessions with teams so, the basic digital service, so they have a really good component for certain aspects of the authentication journey. So we're trying to make sure, again, we're not reinventing the wheel. So if things have worked for, for their end users, it's going to work for [our] end users as well. So we've been, we've met with them, tried to understand the component, looked at some of the data behind it and have applied that, aspects of that, to our own journeys as well.

Vanessa Schneider: Neat, and obviously, this could be really interesting for folks, depending on how long we're going to be in these unprecedented times or with the future of work being maybe more remote working: How was it conducting user research while maybe not having direct access to people?

Lauren Gorton: Good question. So, yeah, that's, that's been difficult. I think it was definitely for user researchers, just in general. It's hard if, you know, you're not in the room with them. And something that user research just needs well to do is to have, like, a good rapport with the participants. And it can be hard to try and build that up remotely and so, you know, reassure people and calm them down remotely over a video call. So, yeah, there are different frustrations to it, particularly if someone runs into an issue in the middle of a session. We can see the screen and what they're doing. But if they go onto a different device because they want to search something on the mobile phone, we can't see what they're doing and we can't help them, so that's caused challenges as well. So it's been a big challenge for communication, I think. But there are, there are positives to it as well. It's quite nice to have a video call with someone, they dial in, you run the session, if it goes well, and then you can just dial off, that's the session done. You can go, go grab a coffee, [laughs] to then try and absorb what you've just learnt. So yeah, there are nice things to it as well.

Charlotte Crossland: Yeah, definitely echo Lauren's point around that interaction, and no matter who you're researching with, whether it's citizens or service teams. It's really difficult to get that rapport up online compared to in-person, where you can read people's body language, their tone, it's a very different dynamic. And I think what's I've learnt the most about doing research with service teams is that they are our peers and, as we've mentioned before, digital identity is a well-trodden area, and it's about collaboration as much as it is user research with those power dynamics that are often associated with it. I think as well, on the analysis side, so we're really fortunate to have tools that really help bridge those gaps from doing analysis in-person to remote ways. They've yeah, they've been so valuable.

Lauren Gorton: Charlotte's raised a really good point there as well, which I totally missed, but afterwards with our colleagues when we're trying to, like, go through what we've learnt in the session. That's been super hard as well because we're not all just sat around the table together with notes and writing on a whiteboard. So yeah, that's been a real struggle as well.

Vanessa Schneider: I think that a lot of listeners can relate to the difficulties that you face, the challenges that have presented themselves. But it is nice to know that there are some things that have helped or some things that are manageable at least, despite the circumstances. So that's really encouraging.So it's great to see that we've got these partnerships going with other departments. How do these partnerships come about and why is that so important to us?

Charlotte Crossland: Great question. So we're collaborating at multiple levels in government departments, so recently colleagues have kicked off strategic department-level work with the big departments and these will continue to be expanded on. We're also working directly with services at service team-level, as well as clusters of services, to give us a really wide and deep view of requirements. So we've been building on from the robust thinking that– of digital identity that already exists within government. The collaboration has shaped the programme thinking, so the development of the roadmap, the functionality requirements, to prioritise in specific work, such as exploring low levels of confidence, which our team is currently looking at. So, as mentioned before, in the previous Digital Identity podcast, as well as collaborating externally, we need to reflect internally and learn from Verify. So to do this, we're ensuring inclusivity is at the core of what we're doing. We're not using third-party or private sector identity providers to verify users' identity. We're not taking a one-size-fits-all approach. We're designing for the needs of service teams, so doing research with service teams has really sought to address these last two points.I think one of the key collaborations, for example, the one with DfE [Department for Education] has come about through one of our key findings, actually, so this is around cluster services. So end users of cluster services are likely to see the benefits of a reusable set of credentials more readily as they're able to use the same authentication username and password to access them. So we've spotted clusters in well-known departments like HMRC [HM Revenue & Customs] or the Home Office initially, but we've also found clusters in all sorts of places across government. So users of Companies House, [HM] Land Registry, farmers using Defra [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] services, drivers using DVLA [Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency] services, as well as teachers or students using DfE services.

Lauren Gorton: Yes, so with our end user research, we've always been researching around the single sign-on and how that benefits our users. The single sign-on is the solution that we feel best helps to meet other user needs we found in research. But to do so in a way that also meets people's expectations and fits mental models as to how people look at government. So in terms of user needs, like, at its simplest level, our users need to be able to access government services, they come to GOV.UK with a task in mind, and that's kind of what they care about doing [laughs] and all they care about doing. They need to be able to do that without having to understand all the complexities of government and have to try to unpick that. So a user shouldn't have to land on the GOV.UK home page and say, "OK, today I'm trying to do this task. This service owns that task. This service sits in this department and that department uses this sign-in. So I need to go over there and specifically it's these credentials I have to use if I can remember what that-- what those credentials are". So, you know, users shouldn't have to do that. And it's not just the case, you shouldn't have to do it, but it also doesn't fit into how they look at government. So we found in our research, and this is general, because mental models, are general, not everyone thinks this way, but a lot of people, sort of, look at government and they see it as a single entity. We talk about "the" government and, you know, that, that's how people see it. They don't think about all the complexities behind it. And as part of that, we have heard people in research sessions and participants saying, you know, "I expect to just have the one account because I'm dealing with the government. I need a government account to talk to the government". So that's what we've, sort of, had coming out of our research sessions. And whilst we've heard that in research sessions prior to going live, again, since going live, we've also seen some data that also supports this too. So for instance, we have our feedback form, which people using the live service can come to. One of our most common themes in our feedback form is one we call "queries outside of our scope". And that's just basically for anything that's actually to do with a different service. So what we are seeing is a lot of people hitting our journey, going into our feedback forms, and they're leaving this feedback about different services or they're saying, "I can't sign in" and, you know, when we go back to them, we unpick it, it's because they're trying to sign in into, like, a Gateway or a Verify [account], because they want to do something with their tax, for instance, they've, they've come to us in error. So we are seeing in live that this confusion is a problem. It's the same with our analytics as well. We're seeing people coming to our journey, trying to sign in and having to go down those unhappy path routes because they're confused about whether or not they do have an account. And it's one of those things from a user perspective, that so long as there are multiple accounts out there, that confusion will exist to an extent. There's only so much we can do with research and design. So the more services we get onboarded and the more we reduce the number of sign ins, it's kind of the only way to really completely get rid of that confusion for people.

Charlotte Crossland: Definitely, teams that have Sign-in already have seen account confusion from end users, it's a very well-known problem. I think, similarly to Lauren's point around service teams, so authentication and digital identity isn't a straightforward team need. So teams often integrate with identity as part of bigger changes and plans they're going through within their delivery cycle, but related to that. So checking people's identity documents is a really onerous process for service teams and government. It's really costly. Identity checks might not be up to scratch, so ultimately online identity checks could save teams a lot of time and money. It's also important to add to that, the offline routes will always be fundamental, so users and service teams will always need offline routes.

Vanessa Schneider: Yeah, definitely important to stress we're not taking anything away from folks. We're just trying to make it easier. We're trying to make it, one, single safe, reliable, fast and effective way for everyone to log in to government services online. That's the mission.So earlier you mentioned trust, and then you also talked about how our new solution isn't going to use third-party providers to verify people's identities. Is that linked?

Charlotte Crossland: Yeah, so on the identity side, our research has been really addressing exploring service team mental models around digital identity. So really digging into how teams feel and talk about identity, understanding the types of language that they use. Equally, we've been understanding how services decide on the level of confidence of an identity check. So who's involved in that decision-making process? What are the roles and teams in the department that are integral to this? And I think there's a really interesting design challenge of how we can effectively communicate how teams go about choosing an appropriate level of confidence that maps back to GPG 45, or the Good Practice Guide. There's a lot of evidence that shows GPG 45 doesn't equip teams to understand what identity profile or level of confidence is most appropriate. The guidance doesn't explain how this choice will affect a services' end user journey. That wasn't the aim of the guidance, but equally, the level of confidence the service chooses should be informed by the service's risk appetite.

Vanessa Schneider: You did talk about your research reveals there are clusters, for instance, in different departments. Are we working with all of them? If not, why should departments be working with us?

Charlotte Crossland: So it's really that sharing of knowledge and insights and that collaboration that can make digital identity a possibility in government, so teams, practical things that teams can expect from the partnership is like access to the technical documentation that we've been testing, so they've really got to shape what that looks like, they've been able to play around with it. How does that work in their integration environment? It's been really insightful for both parties involved.

Vanessa Schneider: Well, in that case, I really hope more teams will register their interest in the private beta. As after all, as you said, you know, earlier adopters will reap greater rewards in the situation, really shaping what gets done. So Lauren, I know on your side specifically, there was quite an innovative approach with respect to how we use user insight to provide a full picture of the complexities of user lives. Can you explain a little bit more about what that involved?

Lauren Gorton: So that was from our Alpha assessment. So, so during Alpha, rather than using personas, which are the traditional way to basically group your users, we used mindsets instead. So the difference really is that, whilst both tools are used to group your users, you can't focus, unfortunately, on everyone individually, we need a way to, to group our users so that we can see the different types of people using the service, and we can include those in the design process and refer back to it. Personas do that by quite heavily focussing on demographics. So you might create personas where you're having different age ranges from your users represented, represented, different ethnicities, gender - even things like do they have an access need? And then what you do on top of that is say, "OK, so what goals will these different types of users have when they're trying to use a product or service?" So that's how personas work with that very heavy demographic influence. Mindsets are different in that we don't think about demographics at all. Instead, we're trying to group our users based on shared behaviours and attitudes in a, in a particular situation. So mindsets focus much more on the different ways people might behave and the reasons which are driving those behaviours. So sometimes personas are the right tool to use, but there is a risk of things like stereotyping and subconscious bias. And to be honest, just in our, in our context, because our users are everyone in the UK plus international people it is kind of hard to use personas because we'd have to make tens of personas to try and represent that, which just wouldn't be manageable or usable. So we needed a different tool to approach grouping our users to make sure we were designing for everyone. And mindsets kind of naturally [laughs] for researchers are a way to do it. So specifically, we developed our mindsets during Alpha whilst we're doing initial prototype testing. We kept hitting this, the same problem in our journey, that at the point in our journey where we needed users to either create an account or sign in, we were seeing a lot of people choosing to sign in, which was just a bit odd because this was before we'd gone live. So obviously GOV.UK Account was a new account. In theory everyone should be choosing to create an account at that point. And when we spoke to people in the sessions to understand what was happening, what we realised was they were getting confused. They had existing government accounts like a Gateway account or a Verify account, and they were trying to use the credentials from those accounts to, to sign in at that point. They weren't understanding that this was a different type of account and many of the people and different teams in the project looking at different areas of single sign-on, they were seeing the same results as well. So we kind of knew it was a common issue. Naturally we tried to test lots of different variations of the journey to try and resolve that confusion. But the more we were looking at it, the more we could see, there were these, sort of, 5 common groups of participants that we could see coming out of it, and those were the groups that ended up becoming our mindsets. So these mindsets were basically focussing on how much previous experience these participants have of using government services and having government accounts - how confused would they then get at this point in our journey? And really importantly, how were they feeling about that and how were they reacting, what were they saying? So, for instance, participants with very little experience of government services, who didn't have previous accounts, they showed absolutely no confusion at this point in our journey, and their attitude was very much, "OK, fine. If this makes sense, what do I do next?" So those were our clean-slate mindsets, because effectively, that's, that's what that group of users were. But then on the other end of that spectrum, we have participants who, you know, they did have an existing account, like a Gateway account, as an example, and they used it quite frequently. And when they hit this point in our journey, they were getting really confused about what to do. They're trying to sign in, and they weren't understanding our error handling about why they didn't have an account and they were reacting really negatively to it. And there were different reasons why they were reacting negatively. But they kind of all revolve around the issue of single sign-on and the fact that we have multiple sign-ins and accounts that exist today. So for some participants it was the case of, they had a Gateway and it was the only account they'd ever needed because they'd only ever done stuff relevant for Gateway. So they thought that was a single sign-on, and they thought it was a single sign-on because they had the expectation they should only need one account when interacting with government. And for other participants, it was more the case of, they were just frustrated because they'd need to create another account. That's another set of credentials to remember. And they also need to remember where to use those credentials. So, yeah, we found these different groups coming out and ended up with five mindsets overall, which we were then using to input into our design process.

Vanessa Schneider: So you mentioned the Alpha assessment. Can you share a little bit about the feedback that you received?

Lauren Gorton: Yeah, so, so within our Alpha assessment. So we had another user researcher, one from Department for Education, who was our assessor for the user research aspect. So. They were very happy with the mindsets approach. They thought it was a good way to look at user needs and to try and understand our users. So we actually followed that up with a session where we kind of explained mindsets and they did another cross-session where we broke down user needs in a better way. So it was kind of turned into a cross-learning opportunity so that, that was, that was quite nice to do.

Vanessa Schneider: Great, thank you for giving us this overview of mindsets. I was wondering how it might be relevant. How does it strengthen the understanding of complex user needs, maybe beyond single sign-on?

Lauren Gorton: Yeah, definitely. So mindsets they're, they're not unique to single sign-on, they're a really nice tool to use if you want to group users in a different way to personas. So how mindsets were most helpful for us, is, you know, we had a problem that we were trying to understand better why this problem was happening, why people were behaving that way and the reasons driving it. So with our mindsets, they were really useful in designing error scenarios in particular. So we knew, “OK, we've got these groups of users. And at this point in our journey, this group in particular is going to struggle. And the reasons why they're struggling is this. So do we need to put content here to help? Do we need to change the design pattern? If we do that, is that going to impact a different group of mindset?” So it gave us that kind of better picture of how to design with our users in mind and also really help with our user needs as well. So we already had our list of user needs that we had insight on, so we could sort of look at those user needs and say, "OK, do any of these apply more strongly to different mindsets? Therefore, do we need to think about those needs more so when designing for this particular group" and in reverse, we could also say, "OK, now we have these mindsets and we're understanding a bit better why people are behaving the way they are. Can we now see new user needs that we missed before?" So yeah, it's a really nice tool to use that is a general tool. So it goes beyond single sign-on and is really a good way for other government teams to, to better understand the way people will behave and the reasons why.

Vanessa Schneider: You've done user research with citizens now, you've done user research with other departments. How does it feed into the development of the programme?

Lauren Gorton: Yes, so one of our next deliverables in the authentication team will be around account recovery journeys. To create a GOV.UK account, you need to link it to a mobile phone number so that you can authenticate with SMS codes. So when we went live with our MVP [minimum viable product] in October, we knew that account recovery was missing, as a gap for anyone who then loses access for their mobile phone. So it was kind of on our radar as being something that we, we knew we need to-- needed to address at some point after October. Since going live, we have our feedback form, which is one of the best ways for research to really feed into that sort of roadmap and what to work on next. And yeah, in our feedback form we're getting the feedback from people that they are hitting this issue. So that was something that was already planned to do because we'd identified it as a design gap. But the feedback form is helping us to say yes, no, this is definitely a right priority to pursue because people are experiencing that in live. And similarly, also on the themes of mobile codes: again, the feedback form data is also now telling us that the codes are an issue for anyone who lives in a poor signal area and people with international phone numbers, so that's helped us to identify, "OK, actually this is, this is also our next priority the team needs to pick up". So, yeah, we've done some extensive desk research on an alternative to mobile codes, including looking at the whole cyber aspect and security. And we're now doing the design work to introduce an alternative to SMS codes that we can add in as an option for anyone who's either struggling as, as they've told us in our feedback form or who just, they would prefer to use an alternate option.

Charlotte Crossland: Yeah, so I guess our work feeds into both the authentication and the identity product, so our work stream is really committed to delivering and inviting service teams into that auth[entication] onboarding journey. So we're now accepting private beta partner requests for service teams and central government. We'll also be doing groundwork around how to add an account to that onboarding journey, and we'll be looking to publish the technical documentation live on the product page. We're also feeding into the identity stream of the programme as the identity onboarding journey will follow in the third quarter of 2022. So we're really doing that groundwork of developing materials to help teams make decisions around identity strengths, around levels of confidence. And this will ultimately play a central part to that identity onboarding journey. And I think it's not just a one-way approach, so we've been working with identity experts within the programme as well to create an identity tool which uses questions and answers to help teams understand what identity strength could be appropriate for their service. So that's helping us really to bridge that gap between the guidance that is already out there and helping teams make decisions and initial feedback from research has been really fascinating. So by translating some of the logic that GPG 45 sits on, we've been using that and turning it into a really more interactive and accessible format for teams. And we're seeing teams really play around with the tool, and it's really empowering them to consider what solution might be most appropriate for their service. And we're also seeing how these materials could help teams navigate conversations with security or risk teams within that department.

Vanessa Schneider: Brilliant, so you had mentioned the registration for the private beta. How exactly do folks get involved? What are the steps they've got to go through?

Charlotte Crossland: So the easiest way to get involved is to go to sign-in.service.gov.uk. You'll see the GOV.UK Sign-in product page and there'll be a section there saying "Register your interest". So whether you're interested in log-in and authentication or identity, you go to that form and fill it out and then we'll be in touch. And then from there, we'll do a half-hour chat to understand your service at a high level and you'll be then in our pipeline, where you'll be triaged to the relevant next steps.

Vanessa Schneider: So if you're part of a service team in government and if all of this has piqued your interest, get in touch. And if you want to go back to the previous episodes on digital identity and other topics, you can listen to all episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other major podcast platformsand the transcripts are available on Podbean. Goodbye.

Lauren Gorton: Bye.

Charlotte Crossland: Bye.

GDS Podcast #37: How to break into a career in tech Dec 17, 2021

The Government Digital Service (GDS) talks how to start a career in tech. According to a Tech Nation Talent report, young people could be wrongly counting themselves out of a fulfilling career because they’re worried about things like their skills background, where they came from or their lack of “network”.

We asked 3 of our developers to respond to the report’s findings, and hopefully put some of those myths and misconceptions to bed.

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The transcript of the episode follows:

Louise Harris:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast, and our last episode of 2021. Today, we’re going to be talking about careers in tech. Now chances are, if you’re a regular listener, you’re probably already working in a digital, data or technology role. Maybe in government. Maybe in the public sector. Maybe somewhere else entirely.

But hopefully you’re aware of, and are sort of bought into, the long-term career opportunities, flexibility, creativity and satisfaction that a job in tech can bring. But unfortunately, according to a Tech Nation Talent report - that’s not the case for everyone. They surveyed a thousand 15 to 21-year-olds and tuned into almost 80,000 Reddit conversations to understand what young people in the UK thought about a career in tech.

In that research, 32% of men and 45% of women worried they didn’t have the right skills to pursue a tech career. And 24% of women and 21% of men said that tech careers weren’t for - and I quote - “people like them”. People in the UK feel that there are barriers standing in the way of them getting into tech. And they’re potentially counting themselves out of a great career as a result. Which is bad news for them, and bad news for all of us too.

Because diverse teams are better. Teams that reflect the society they serve are more effective. And teams where you can bring your whole self to work are - frankly - happier teams to be a part of. And that’s what we’re trying to build here at the Government Digital Service.

So we decided to dedicate this episode to anyone who is thinking about starting a career in tech - whether they’re 22 or 62 - but who’s maybe been put off by a little voice (or a loud one) telling them they shouldn’t or can’t.

Joining us now are senior developers Rosa Fox, Iqbal Ahmed and Kelvin Gan. They’re going to reflect on what the research found and hopefully, put some of those fears to bed. So Kelvin, Iqbal, Rosa - over to you.

Iqbal Ahmed:

Hi to everyone I'm Iqbal and I'm a senior frontend developer at GDS, which is at the Government Digital Service and joining me today, we have Kelvin and Rosa, who are both senior developers as well. We're here today to chat about some common misconceptions about pursuing a career in tech. I've just been handed a list of things that people, particularly younger people, seem to think about tech careers, and I'm excited to find out what the three of us think about these sort of myths or preconceptions that people have.

So the first one we have is “I don't have the skills to work in technology”. So Rosa, what do you think about this common preconception?

Rosa Fox:

Well, firstly, I think that there are many different jobs underneath the umbrella of technology. So it's not just coding skills. So at GDS, we have jobs such as being a developer, where you do do coding. But we also have designers, project managers, delivery managers, performance analysts, content designers. So, those jobs all require lots of different skills, and you probably already have a lot of those skills. So it could be things like breaking down problems, communicating, being creative, helping other people. And so I'd say you probably already have a lot of the skills. And if you feel like there are some skills that you don't have yet - yet being the keyword - then there's always options to learn.

What do you think Kelvin?

Kelvin Gan:

Totally 100%, I agree with that. I think as well the main thing with a lot of people is that learning on the job as well is a big thing for us, like we have apprenticeship schemes, so you can join us as an apprentice. We put you through a bootcamp as well. So Makers Academy is a London-based bootcamp. And you spend, I can't remember how many weeks, 12 weeks or something like that with them and you get taught on the job and you’re mentored by us as well. We've got a mentorship scheme within.

You’re not expected to know everything on day one. I mean, even I as a senior developer, like I've ok doing this for over a decade and every day I'm learning something new, like it's totally OK to turn up and go like, I need help. I need to learn this. And I also know people who switch careers later on in life, so they want to learn coding. They just do it, you know, you can teach yourself as well. A lot of people we've been working with have taught themselves. Yeah, I don't think you need to worry too much about it.

Iqbal Ahmed:

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I'd say probably one of the big things I would say is like, just try different things out and just see what you enjoy. And I think like, you know, if you do enjoy it, then just get stuck in and just try and learn what you can then. Definitely, as Kelvin was saying, yeah, once that you get into the job and you get stuck in and you kind of get a real feel for it and just the learning, you’ll just learn really quickly, just pick things up really quickly. So, yeah, thank you for that.

So onto the next one. A common myth is “I don't know anything about tech. I’ll never be able to get a job”. So Kelvin, what do you think about that?

Kelvin Gan:

I-I don't think people nowadays really know nothing about tech because we're using tech every day quite honestly, like you've got a phone; you’re using tech you're on, I don't know, whatever social media of the day is, whether it's TikTok or something else. You know you are interfacing. Sorry, interfacing is such an icky word [laughs]. But anyway. [laughs]. You are using tech every day. You just don't really know it. And if you are in- if you enjoy using tech, that actually is the spark. That's the beginnings of it, you know. And more than anything, it's really about curiosity, like you’re using tech and you kind of thinking: ‘how does this work?’ But the other side of it is: ‘how do people use tech?’ ‘How do people benefit from using tech?. And actually that’s like product thinking, for example, like, how can we–or design thinking you know; how can we deliver services to people that are useful? Will make things better for their lives? That kind of stuff, it’s not just about learning the ins and outs of the technical aspects of how things work.

What do you think Rosa?

Rosa Fox:

Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think yeah, you mentioned like phones and social media and technology. And technology just powers so many things; like the way that we consume music and videos, banking, gaming medicine, the energy industry. I read the other day that apparently there's a 100 million lines of code in a new car. So there's probably so many ways that you're using tech without even realising it. So I think whatever your interest is, there's probably a way that it intersects with technology somehow. So that could be quite a fun way to get started.

Iqbal Ahmed:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think I've worked with colleagues that have done, had a degree in fine art. Someone else had a degree in history. You just get like so many people just coming into so many ways to get in. And the team was saying earlier, like apprenticeships and we’ve got these Fast Stream sort of opportunities as well. There is loads and lots of ways to get in there. So yeah, yeah, yeah, tech is everywhere.

So, yeah, so next one we have is that we have to do lots of unpaid internships or work experience in order to get tech jobs. So what do you think about that, Rosa?

Rosa Fox:

Well firstly I think you should never have to do unpaid work, and I think it's, you know, it doesn't create a very good balance in society for people to have to do unpaid jobs because obviously you need a certain safety net to be able to do that in the first place. So if that's not an option for you, then I'd say, don't let that stop you and don't give up. You know, you might be able to find apprenticeships or junior positions or ways that you can learn on the job. I'd also say there's a lot of things that you can do to kind of teach yourself - you could go to maybe technology events. There are lots of free meet-ups that you could go to. There's loads of resources online that you can learn from.

And also kind of maybe looking for someone that can give you a bit more advice about tech careers, even like messaging people on LinkedIn or social media and asking them some questions because often people are quite you know, flattered to answer questions about themselves, and about working in tech. So you know, they might know of some openings for you know, for ways that you can learn skills, hopefully whilst you're still getting paid as well.

Iqbal Ahmed:

Kelvin, what do you think?

Kelvin Gan:

Yeah, I totally agree about not doing, not even having, hosting unpaid internships because that's just exclusionary, and it's not really what we're about here at GDS. But again, you know, hammering home the thing about apprenticeships, they’re a perfect way of getting started, and we're really behind it at the moment. We've got new apprentices starting just early next week, in fact. And I know a bunch of them from years gone past have gone on to graduate into junior roles and have also been promoted into mid-level roles. And they're just great and they really enjoy it as well. And then others have gone on to work somewhere else you know. We put that investment in because we want to put back into society as well as, you know, getting good people through the door to come and work with us.

And again yeah, like Rosa was saying, there’s loads of meet-ups. A load of people will turn up and also coach you, Rosa and I have done that in the past as well. I think Rosa you're still doing that right? I haven't been doing it as much during the pandemic, but yeah, go along to, like loads of free resources, online meet-ups. Great thing about the meet-ups is that you get to meet people who are in the profession and so you can ask them questions straight off, like face to face or online. They also host like, I was going to say Slack channels for people to ask questions. And I also saw a meme today, a tweet today where someone’s son asked them when they saw them using Slack: “oh what’s that? Is that Discord for boomers?”. And that really hurt [laughs]. So in case you don’t know what Slack is. It's kind of like Discord.

Rosa Fox:

I will add as well as going to community things, a thing that can maybe help you with finding work is to build a portfolio up. So, you know, a portfolio sounds quite a fancy word, but it could be like, you know, a short blog post or building small projects. They don't have to be anything complicated, just any small thing that you can learn, even doing a tutorial. If you put that up online and show people that you're actively interested in learning then people will probably be interested in giving you feedback and maybe even a job.

Iqbal Ahmed:

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that. Like, GitHub is really good; a good place to post code and things like that. And if you show like an active GitHub profile; so you know, even just any tutorials or things like that, it’s a really good place to kind of put those up there and just show your kind of keenness and passion for coding and learning and things like that. So. Cool. Yeah, thanks for that.

And the next one we have is that: “it's not for people like me”. So like the tech career or something, might not be for you know, certain people. So Kelvin, what do you think about that?

Kelvin Gan:

I would 100% disagree with that. I think the, for us, the key thing for me, anyway, when I'm working with someone is whether they think about who they're working for. Not the sense of not who your employer is, but who your end user is. Like, that's the way, that's the kind of person I like working with. And that's the kind of people we get in. We come here to do the work for, to help people really at the end of the day. And if you've got that kind of philosophy and attitude, then I don't really care what your background is, where you live, where you come from, whether or, what your first language is, what your favourite food is, all that kind of stuff. Like whether you went and got a university degree. Nah you know, if you come in and work with me and what you care about is what we're delivering for the user, then that's it. And that, you know, you like tech. Enough.

Rosa Fox:

Yeah, agree as well. I think kind of like we mentioned earlier, technology is absolutely everywhere now, and it has so much impact and influence on society. And you know, if you use technology, then you should be able to influence how it's built. And we want a diverse range of voices and people working on the products because, as Kelvin mentioned, the products are used by a diverse range of users. So, you know, more perspectives, more different types of skills and more different types of talents, that's going to create a more diverse team and that's going to make much better products. So, yeah. No, you've always, you're always going to have things to bring to the table and things that might be different about you are probably things that could be really, really useful for the team and you should always you know, be proud of your differences because they make you who you are.

Iqbal Ahmed:

Yeah. Go for it Kelvin.

Kelvin Gan:

Sorry. And one thing I was going to add to that is like, we, you know, I personally like to advocate for people to bring their whole selves, bringing in that difference, it’s exactly as you were saying there as well, Rosa. Sorry, Iqbal go on.

Iqbal Ahmed:

Yeah. Yeah. No. And I was gonna say that at GDS you can see people are keen to kind of spread opportunities to, you know, just try and go out there and try and interact with other of communities and people from different, diverse or backgrounds. And I think GDS is quite keen to get people from different viewpoints and things like that. And that's something, yeah, I think we're very keen to get people in. And yeah, and I'm very proud to sort of work at GDS, because the services we provide, there's no alternative. So you're applying for your driving licence or something like that or paying for some sort of government service, you can't just go to a different website and you know, buy that thing. It has to–we need to make sure what we have is available to everyone. So, yeah,yeah, so that's something that's really great about working at GDS. But yeah, cool cool. Thanks for that everyone.

And the next one we have is: “there aren't many tech jobs around or near me. So that could be a myth some people are using to potentially hold them back.

Iqbal Ahmed:

Cool, Kelvin, any thoughts on this?

Kelvin Gan:

I think for us in particular, at GDS, we support remote working and we're very flexible as well. And like in terms of having to go to an office like we have our three main hubs at different corners of the country. So we've got London as our base. We've also got Manchester and Bristol and so those other parts of the country, you know, we've got these hubs for people to get together and meet and work together anyway. So hopefully it'll be a bit closer to you. Yeah, you know.

It also gives you an opportunity sometimes if you want to go and move somewhere else in the country and work somewhere for a bit, and then you can jump any, like tech jobs are everywhere in the world. So I think that's pretty cool as well about the industry.

Iqbal Ahmed:

Yeah, and also another thing is I think, like Rosa was saying earlier, tech isn’t just Developers and people like that. I mean, there's loads of other opportunities like Product Managers, User Researchers, Content Writers, Delivery Managers. There's so many things. It’s always changing and evolving all the time as well so. Yeah, there could be more jobs out there, it’s just maybe widening the fields and thinking about other things that you might be interested in.

Cool. So the next one we have is: “I don't know anyone who works in tech and don't know where to start”. So, Kelvin, any ideas about this?

Kelvin Gan:

Yeah. So it goes back to finding the meet-ups and networks; you know, like they can be quite varied and niche in themselves as well. So say, for example, you might be someone who has a Raspberry Pi through school or you got given one or whatever. And a lot of meet-ups around the country are centred around that. People who have those want to get together and talk about how they play with theirs or do stuff with theirs, you know. And that's a good in. That's how you can get to know people.

The other thing as well, is the kind of code clubs in the area and just go along, meet them as well, like just introduce yourselves to people or start one, like Rosa did! And it's all online as well. Like, you can join a chat somewhere and say: ‘Hey, I'm really keen to learn JavaScript, I’m totally new to this thing’ and people are going to be like: ‘Oh, great. Welcome to the family, here’s some stuff with, you know, we think you can get going with. Oh if you're stuck with this, this is the way we fixed it’ - that kind of stuff. You know, it's nothing to be frightened of. We're a pretty welcoming bunch. You know, we as a culture, we will–like to kind of help each other out a lot as well.

Iqbal Ahmed:

Cool. Nice. Rosa, any thoughts on this?

Rosa Fox:

I guess I'd add to that to say using social networks can be quite good as well. I know that social media isn't for everyone, but for example, on Twitter, when I first started working in tech because, like I said, I didn't know anyone that really worked in tech, I just followed lots, lots of people, and I barely really post on there. But I do still go on there and read sometimes. So that’s quite a good way to learn about things, learn about conferences or events that were happening, watching, reading their blogs, reading reports that they posted. I know that there are a lot more kind of Instagram tech bloggers now that are really interesting and also people on YouTube. So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of people that are posting about tech online and lots of great people to learn from. So, yeah, that would be my advice.

Iqbal Ahmed:

Cool, yeah, I was actually helping out some network and some group of coders, and they asked if I would mind just providing some mentoring and I really enjoyed it- it was really nice, just like people would just book a calendar invite with me and we just did it online. And it was just 1 on 1, some people were brand new and didn't know much and asked me some questions. And yeah, I really enjoyed it. Really liked sort of chatting to the people. So what you'd be surprised that there would be people out there if you did reach out to them that they’d be more than happy to spend some time with you and help things out. And I do actually know a few graduates actually that reached out to people on LinkedIn. And surprisingly, they got quite a few responses back and a lot of help. So I'd say LinkedIn is really good as well so if you do see anyone, just try and sort of send out a few messages - you just never know.

Cool and now we are onto the final one, which is: “it's no fun to work in tech”. So Rosa, what do you think about that?

Rosa Fox:

I think working in tech is really good. I mean, it's a job where, you know, you get to build things that potentially I mean, on GOV.UK, millions of people use our products every week. So it's amazing to go from having like a plain text file on your computer, writing some code. And then as a result of that, you've got something that people can actually use and interact with. And I think that's like really amazing. It's nice to be able to you know build things that help people and again, that people can use.

It's also a really creative job. So I think people assume that working in tech is quite like nerdy, and it's just the people that don't see the sunlight you know sitting in the basement coding all day [laughs]. But actually, it's not like that. There's a lot of collaboration. It's very creative. You know, you have to kind of think of an idea and make it happen.

And also, the tech industry is generally like, it's quite fun. You know, the tech offices are generally quite cool. They’re usually made in a way that there's space for a lot of collaboration and communication. And I think my favourite thing about working in tech is that you're always learning, things are always changing, it's always evolving. So you never get bored. Sometimes it can be a blessing and a curse because there’s so many things to learn. But as long as you’re kind of like, try not to get too overwhelmed by the enormity of it and just, you know, start small. It's amazing what you can even learn in like one hour. Have a break, do something else and then come back again. So, yeah, I think that's definitely my favourite thing about working in tech.

Kelvin Gan:

Yeah, definitely. Like it is a deeply rewarding role as well. Like Rosa, you're talking about like building something useful you were on the Critically [sic: Clinically] Vulnerable People Service at the start of the pandemic, and that is like mind-blowingly useful, actually like life-saving, you know, sending food to people who are isolating and can't get out at the beginning of the pandemic. And that had so many people involved in it as well, didn't it? And like again, for me as well, working on GOV.UK, the impact that we have on people's lives is so like, it’s a huge responsibility, but it's super rewarding. And then there is the fun aspect to it as well, like you are working with like a huge discipline, sorry a huge variety of disciplines and the types of people who are just really, really great people and really fun to work with.

Iqbal Ahmed:

Yeah, one of the other big things I've noticed as a sort of Frontend Developer is the focus we have on accessibility. So as I was saying earlier in terms of making sure our apps work with uh screen readers and other sort of accessibility tools, like we spend quite a bit of time on that. And yeah, I've just never had that anywhere I've worked on so, and I've worked quite a few years in the private sector. And so, yeah, I really kind of enjoy that at GDS. And also as Kelvin and Rosa are saying, you get to work with Service Designers, Content Designers, Delivery Managers, there's all these different kind of disciplines that you kind of all work together when you produce something and you get like really good feedback from it as well. It's like a really good sort of rewarding sort of feeling. So, yeah. No, amazing, good stuff.

So I think that's brought us to the end of our conversation. So yeah, just like to say thanks to Kelvin and Rosa for chatting to me today and sharing what they know about a career in tech. Hopefully, we've convinced you to think again about whether a career in tech is right for you and - hint hint - to keep an eye out for opportunities to come and work with us at GDS. So you get to work with great people like ourselves [laughs]. And also you can find more about GDS and the work we do at gds.blog.gov.uk. And we also have a podcast and we're also on the socials @GDSTeam and we’re, yeah, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram. And you can find the latest job opportunities just by searching for GDS careers on Google. So thank you very much, and thanks again to Kelvin and Rosa as well. See you later, bye.

Louise Harris:

So big thank you there to Iqbal, Rosa and Kelvin for sharing the myriad ways you can find, and get into a career in tech - whatever your background or starting point.

Don’t forget, you can also find all of our other episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all major podcast platforms and our transcripts are available on PodBean.

Thank you for listening - and see you in the new year.

GDS Podcast #36: Maps in services Nov 30, 2021

We take you from A to B as we find out how the GOV.UK Design System and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs working to help make maps in public services better.

You can help us to make our podcast even better by completing our short, anonymous survey.

The transcript of the episode follows:

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Louise Harris:

Hello, and welcome back to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Louise Harris. I'm the Creative and Channels Team Leader at GDS and your host for today. Before we dive into the episode, I've got a quick favour to ask: if you are a regular listener to the GDS podcast, please take a second to fill out our quick 2 minute survey to tell us why you tune in, what you like and what you don't. You can find a link in our blog post and the show notes for this episode. Anyway, on with the show.

Today we're going to be talking about maps, more specifically maps in public services. Here at GDS, with a little help from our friends, we've started to explore how to make public sector maps more consistent, easier to use and accessible for users. Sound good? Well stay with us because there are lots of opportunities to get involved in this work. Whether you're in central or local government, wider public sector or even outside. To get us from A to B on this interesting topic, I'm pleased to welcome Imran Hussain, Community Designer for the GOV.UK Design System, and Cathy Dutton, Head of Design at Defra. Cathy, Imran, welcome to the GDS podcast.

Imran Hussain:

Hi Louise, thank you.

Cathy Dutton:

Hi Louise.

Louise Harris:

It's great to have you both. So I've introduced you to our listeners, but you don't need an introduction to one another because you go way back. Is that right?

Imran Hussain:

Yeah, we do. We used to work out Defra together, not so long ago actually. Before I came to GDS. So I was the Communities Lead at Defra and I worked with most of the communities in the user centred design space and with Cathy being the Head of Design. We got to work together quite a lot. And it was lots of fun and it's sad that we don't work together anymore. So it's absolutely brilliant to be on this podcast with her again.

Louise Harris:

Cathy, I hear on the grapevine that GDS sort of semi poached Imran over from Defra - have you forgiven us yet?

Cathy Dutton:

Yeah, almost. It helps, we-we still get to work together. So it's all good.

Louise Harris:

So you've both decided to join forces and try and unpick this kind of a sticky challenge of making maps that are used in our public services more accessible, more consistent and, well, just, better. Imran, I'll start with you because I think you and others in the GOV.UK Design System are gonna have a big part to play in coordinating these efforts. But for those listeners who maybe don't know much about the Design System or design in government in general, can you give us a quick kind of whistle stop tour into what the GOV.UK Design System is, what exists to do and what your role as a Community Designer involves?

Imran Hussain:

Yeah, of course. So the GOV.UK Design System is a suite of tools that helps teams in government quickly build usable, accessible services for GOV.UK. You can find it in more than 3,000 repositories on GitHub, and they use different elements of the Design System. On GOV.UK alone, it's used on over 7,000 individual services. But there's many more outside of it as well. So, yeah, it's vastly used and really, really popular, and we kind of need it in government. My particular role is Community Designer on the GOV.UK Design System team: I work with the community. I kind of create space for collaboration to happen, which is really important because we're a contribution based design system. So most of the ideas for components and patterns and things like that come from the community and the community actually build a significant part of those patterns and components as well. So we just kind of do the finishing touches on the team.

Louise Harris:

So that, to me, sounds like it's almost as much about the people as it is about the tech or the design stuff. Right? So it's about creating that environment where a sense of community can really take root.

Imran Hussain:

Yeah, that's that's absolutely, really important.

Louise Harris:

Thinking about this maps work, is that something that's kind of come up from the community?

Imran Hussain:

Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's completely come from the community. And it just came about because it kept coming up on Design System calls. It kept coming up in our forums, people asking about what's the best practice with how to do things maps-wise. And we keep getting help desk tickets around maps as well. We-we've got 2 levels of users on the Design System team. We've got you know, the end users, which are the general public that will use these maps, but our primary users, I guess you could say, are designers and user researchers; and yeah, whether they're interaction designers, service designers or content designers across government who use these components and patterns. So it, it clearly came up as a need and we didn't have the relevant components and patterns to be able to serve their needs at the time, so we-we started this collaboration. And it-it was Cathy that really kind of kicked it off because they, they came up with some things and just kind of said: 'hey, where do we share this?' [laughs]. So now we're creating a space where everyone can share things.

Louise Harris:

Oh, that's really cool, Imran. Cathy, it sounds like maps is something that Defra's been thinking about beforehand.

Cathy Dutton:

Yes, so maps is something that comes up in discussion in Defra a lot. We have weekly drop in sessions that are often around like how we can do maps better. They've been a lot of our services, like flooding and farming, and we did our first accessibility drop-in session last week as well. And the whole top--a lot of topics were about how, how we can make maps more inclusive. So because we speak about it a lot, we try to start documenting some of the stuff we talk about so we don't just repeat the same conversations. And I think it was last summer we started to create our own version of like what mapping standards could be or the beginnings of map standards and guidance - really high level stuff, just like when to use a map, some of the findings we've got, some of the best practise bits - and we, we put them on GitHub. And then for me, that's been really useful because part of my job is speaking to all the designers. So whenever we have someone new join or whenever someone gets in touch and says like: 'we're doing a map, where do we start?', I can kind of point at the, at the standards. And that's how we got involved really. I think I came to one of Imran's calls on a Friday and was just like we have this thing, how can we share it across government because it's not a pattern or component? Or how can other people in government input and improve it for us?

Louise Harris:

And how has that been then? Being able to tap into that wider community across government and see you know, this-this baby that you've been creating in Defra, how has it been watching that grow?

Cathy Dutton:

It's been really good so far actually. The mix of people on the panels that Imran's put together has really helped because we've got, like our efforts were mostly from interaction designers, service designers and content designers. So it's been good to get people from different backgrounds, software development, data specialists and get their input and see what, where they're coming from when we talk about maps. That's been really useful. It's been really good for our designers as well. There's a few Defra people on the panel. So just getting them exposed to like different ways of thinking or different, different, what's the word I'm looking for, constraints around mapping or how we do good maps has been really helpful.

Louise Harris:

And have there been you know, themes coming through in terms of what teams are kind of struggling with when it comes to maps?

Cathy Dutton:

I think so, yeah, there's one particular one in Defra that, we, we kind of go to shape tools quite early and trying to make a shape tool on a map like draw like something out, a position on the map is really hard to make inclusive and accessible. And so that seems to come up quite a lot and could be one of the biggest challenges. We've tried to just start saying it in a different way to see if that maybe helps and just say like a lot of stuff in Defra is: 'can I do this activity in this place' and just trying to find different ways that people could do that. But if we do need a map, obviously it's useful to have standards.

Imran Hussain:

And we-we've just been talking about standards recently, and there was a few different areas that came up like Cathy said, because we've got that really multidisciplinary steering group. We talked about: we wanna include features on architecture, what technology, user interface, data visualisation and accessibility. So those are the different areas that have come up already in terms of any sort of standards or principles that we will design.

Louise Harris:

There’s already quite a lot of energy and interest in exploring this issue. Do you have sight of your end, end goal at this point?

Imran Hussain:

For, for me, it's always based on what the community want to do. So we asked the community and we've put the steering group together, and what people want is really practical things that they'll be able to use in their work. So it's nice to have, you know, the things that Cathy mentioned about getting people together, getting them to learn from each other, we do absolutely want that to happen. I think people want to have real, tangible products or things that they can kind of use. So in a, in a, we've got like a short term and long term aim that we've been talking about amongst the steering group. And the long term aim is to kind of set best practice and develop specific things that people can use.

In the short term, what we're going to do next is probably get together and set some best practice and create some principles, some design principles for maps across the public sector. And we see that as the first step where we get everyone pulling in the same direction. People understand what good looks like and hopefully start changing their practise to try and work in with those kind of principles. Once we have those and we kind of help proliferate those around in the public sector, then I think what we will try and do after that is start to create those specific patterns and components that people can then utilise in their services. So you know, we've shown people what good looks like, what the principles are, then we start getting more specific with: let's design this element of mapping and get that same community in to give us their best practise and we'll create a component that everyone can use.

Louise Harris:

You talked a little bit, Imran, about us having 2 users of the Design System; we've got our ultimate end users: so the people that live in our communities, my friends, your friends, our parents, our colleagues who are gonna be needing to use government and public services; and also our kind of primary users in this context: the service owners and designers and content designers that are going to be building these services and maybe using maps. What's the impact for them if we don’t fix this work?

Cathy Dutton:

Yeah, the biggest, the biggest problem is probably making maps that are accessible and inclusive because it is, they can be quite complex. As soon as you have a map, suddenly you've got layers, you've got keys, you've got things that fly in and out. So it's been, it's been about making them accessible and making them work on mobile devices as well, where some information is hidden. We always have, like one of our standards, one of the first 3 parts of our standards I think, is that if we use a map, you have to make the information available outside the map as well. But that is also quite tricky depending on what the information is. So that's something that we always come back to is like, how can we make maps inclusive?

And then I think as well, we've started talking a lot about sustainability in, in, in Defra, in design in general. And so like maps are quite data heavy. So they're probably not the most efficient way we can use data either so that's something we're starting to talk about more and more as well. And then even just like as you're prototyping ideas, you really want to prototype stuff like quick and use throw away code and testing and try again. We haven't found yet a really quick way to test maps because i-it's quite an effort to do a map in a prototype. And so even just that kind of stuff is a problem. Like if you want to quickly test something, how do you quickly test a map? And we always start without a map, is our default anyway. Start with the, the very bare minimum and see if there's actual need for a map.

Louise Harris:

Yeah, it's really interesting, and I think there's, there's maps and there's maps, right? I think some people might immediately jump to maps as navigational tools, getting us from A to B. But actually, as you've talked there, sometimes they're conveying data about a particular area.

Cathy Dutton:

Yeah, I guess flood, flood is a good example. So the flood maps: you can find out your risk of flooding on a map. I think it was traditionally with icons on maps, which is another, another problem for, for inclusivity. So in that service now, they've done a really good job of using the map as like a secondary tool. So you can find out everything you need to find out about your flood risk. And then if you want to do it on a map, you can. And so that's like working well in that area. Yes, some maps are interactive maps and some aren't, some are just information. The interactive ones are harder, like if we're talking about the shape tool again. We're still trying to work out how you would make a map where you've got to draw shape on it. How can you do that outside of the map? And if you have 2 ways to do it, is that more efficient or is there 1 way? I'm always wary of like 1 ways, 1 way, like there's never one solution for everything.

Louise Harris:

Well it sounds like that's why you know, working towards these standards is such a good first step because it’s, it’s a pretty big problem, pretty broad area that maybe no one’s got quite right yet.

Imran Hussain:

I think it's important to recognise there's a lot of good work out there currently. So there's lots of departments doing really exciting stuff. And i-it was just by chance that I knew Cathy and she's happy to discuss these kind of things with me, that she came and she shared her work; and they told us about, they-they did some great work with accessibility and tried to apply some principles that usually wouldn't apply to maps - like hover over text and highlighting text and things like that. They tried to apply that to maps, and a lot of people don't. But it-it's just by chance that I found out about the work she's doing and we were able to share it. So a-and part of the problem is that if we don't create that space where people can share and feel comfortable sharing and they think that it's going to actually go somewhere, then it'll just stay in silos in different organisations across the public sector and we'll have pockets of best practice. There'll be no consistency and it'll only be people in the know that find out about it and try to implement those kind of fixes. So it's a real great opportunity.

I mean, it's really intimidating to try and fix maps, which I keep joking about: 'oh, Imran, what are you doing on maps?'. We're trying to fix maps in the public sector, but it literally is as wide as that, it's an open goal, you know? There's...no one's got together so far and put the effort into building a set of standards or deciding what good kind of looks like. So as far as I'm concerned, anything that we sort of achieve will be a step forward from where we were before. There's lots of great stuff out there, we're just, you know, I'm, I'm really just kind of collecting it together. I've, I'm, I've got no expert in [laughs] maps, no expertise whatsoever in maps. I'm not a designer, but I'm, I'm good at collaboration. So like, I'm just gonna get all these brilliant minds, put them in one place, get all the goodness from them and will try and put it into a nice, accessible, quite easy to understand format that everyone can kind of share.

Louise Harris:

And what do you think Cathy? It sounds like it is an intimidating area for designers to be looking at and thinking about. But it’s obviously something that you at Defra have been doing.

Cathy Dutton:

I think 'cause, just from being in Defra for like the last 5 years, I've seen how much like because I'm not a map expert either, but there's people in my team that really are. And it's taken them years of working on like flood services and working on maps and spatial information. The knowledge they've built up and the research they've collected and stuff, it just, it's, it's taken them so long and I kind of feel like now they are really, real experts in mapping and that helped us do our standards. But then I think it was just like if every other--I thought that if every other department was doing the same thing, like it just makes sense that that's something we should just do collectively. 'Cause I know that we were lucky enough to have funding to spend a lot of time looking at inclusive maps. But if that can help people who haven't got as much funding or time to sort of start from a slightly higher position by using our-our standards or even them helping us with our standards, then that just seemed like a thing we should be doing. So I'm just, I'm just basically trying to share the great work that the people in my team have done that I didn't do anything of. They all did it and just, it just felt like it was good enough to share.

Imran Hussain:

Yeah, we're, we're, we're both just here to take credit for other people's work [laugh from Cathy], really. [laughs]

Louise Harris:

Aw, I, I think you’re both far too nice to take credit for anybody's work. It feels to me like you’re championing this work.

So we’ve got GDS involved, we have got the lovely folks at Defra involved. Imran, are there any other organisations that are kind of throwing their weight in at this stage?

Imran Hussain:

What I can tell you is we, we originally planned for 60 people at the first workshop and it sold out within 2 days. So we-we had to invite 100 people to the first workshop and it sold out, the next batch of tickets sold out within like another day. So there's a lot of demand and a lot of people are willing to take time aside from their job to kind of participate in this and really make this a thing. So we're really, really grateful for that. I think there's more people, like I said, hearing about it all the time. And the people who work in this area are very, very passionate, and I'm really lucky that we found something that resonates with people.

We're central government so there's a lot of departments from central government that get involved, especially the map heavy departments. There's quite a few people from HM Land Registry, for example. But there's also people from wider public sector. So there's really good representation from local gov, who use maps in their services quite a lot. You know people finding schools, or trying to find their way around. There's a lot of map usage over there. But even just recently, someone from the police GIS service reached out to us on Twitter and see if they could kind of get involved, and someone from Ordnance Survey did as well. So it's, it's growing all the time and as far as we're concerned, the more people we can get involved, the better. Whatever principles we create, the more voices we have, the more robust they will be and the more applicable they will be to different sectors. So that's, that's really, we want to cast a wide net, get as many people involved as possible, really collaborate and come up with products that everyone can use.

Louise Harris:

So it sounds like we're in good company already, but for our listeners who might be interested in this, is it just designers that you think can contribute to this body of work or are you looking for expertise from other disciplines as well?

Imran Hussain:

No, absolutely. It's, we need people from every single kind of discipline to really help this kind of work. Obviously it's really helpful having different types of designers: service designers to understand user needs; interaction designers to really help with implementing fixes for those user needs; we need developers to help design components and patterns. But I think, like user research, for example, is a really key part of this making sure we're meeting people's needs and we understand those needs. So you know, having user researchers as part of it; content designers to help us write guidance; like--and as we said, we're dealing with architecture, technology, data visualisation, so professionals in technical architecture and people who are experts in data and mapping - it's all really, really useful and everything will enrich the work that we're kind of doing. And I mean the--right now is an absolutely brilliant time to get involved because we're still scoping all the problems. So we've, we've set design principles as our first kind of goal. But longer term, we're still kind of scoping exactly what direction we're going to take. So anyone who gets involved can really help shape this collaboration and really input their viewpoint and perspective and that will enrich the overall project. So, yeah, we're very excited if anyone wants to get involved and we'd love to have more voices, as I said before.

Louise Harris:

And Cathy, I want to come to you now because while you're involved in this work, you've also been a partner to the GOV.UK Design System in the past as well. So maybe you could share a little bit about what that was like, what it involved for you so that people who are maybe thinking about getting involved or want to know a little bit more, can understand what it's like and why it's great.

Cathy Dutton:

Yeah, the Design System working group - I think it's still called that - I was on for a couple of years. It's a quite a small panel of people, I think, from all different departments in government. And they basically just review submissions to the Design System to make sure that, I think it's around like checking quality and making sure that we're consistent, but also like making sure that everyone kind of--well I thought it was like making sure everyone felt like a part of the Design System as well, because it's like, it's a central tool but it's for everyone. So that's kind of the reason I love being on that panel, was that like you felt like you owned a little piece of it and you could contribute and have a little voice, so that was really nice.

Imran Hussain:

I'm sorry, Cathy.

Cathy Dutton:

[laughs] Yeah.

Imran Hussain:

I'm sorry, I'm apologising because Cathy had been on the working group since the start and I was the one that asked her to leave even though we're friends. [laughs]

Louise Harris:

Absolutely savage folks. Savage.

Cathy Dutton:

Wasn't that the first thing you did?

Imran Hussain:

It was. It was though. Sorting out the working group. [laughs] No. But yeah, it's, it's really nice to have this relationship with people across kind of government and like knowing Cathy, I knew she'd take it in the right way. She, she did always say: 'hey, if, if you want fresh blood to come in, please let me know'. And it, and it just gave us an opportunity at the time to really rebalance the working group to be more representative of the wider population. So we brought in lots of different roles. We brought in a more equal gender balance. We thought about neurodiversity and made sure there were people with different ways of thinking on the, on the Design System working group so we could represent their needs. We also thought about race, ethnicity, background, all sorts of things. And we're getting better. It's still not perfect, but it's much, much more representative of the wider population. And what we are starting to do, what, what we've said is people who leave the working group, it doesn't mean they're gone. I-it just means we're giving other people an opportunity to come in. So we're starting to kind of rotate our members a lot more. So people will come in, they'll stay on it for like a year, a year and a half, and then they'll pop back out and they might pop back in.

Louise Harris:

And Cathy is the proof of the pudding of that, 'cause she may not be a part of the working group anymore, but she's a big part of what you're trying to do to fix, fix maps in services. So thanks for letting us drag you back Cathy [laugh from Cathy].

Louise Harris:

And if people are interested in, in getting involved or about find--in finding out more, what should they do?

Imran Hussain:

I think the main things are: I-I'm quite available, so feel free to kind of like, get in touch with me, I'm on all the Slack spaces that I can get onto [laughs]: local-gov Slack, like cross-gov Slack. On Twitter as well, my usernames: @ImHuYorks - I-M-H-U-Y-O-R-K-S. But just get in touch and I can like add you to any of the platforms that you will have access to. The main chatter is going on, on cross-gov Slacks. There's a map in services channel.

The other really easy way that anyone can sign up though, is to join the Design System mailing list. So if you Google GOV.UK Design System, pretty much on the homepage near the top, it'll say: 'do you want to get updates?'. And you can join our mailing list. And that's the way that any information about collaboration, workshops will come straight into your inbox and you'll get pinged about it before it happens. So that's probably the easiest method for most people to get involved.

Louise Harris:

Sounds good. We'll make sure we include links to all of those pages and sign ups in the blog post that goes alongside this podcast, too.

So there you have it. We really want you to get in touch and help us on our journey towards improving the usability, accessibility and consistency of maps in public services. Thank you to my 2 guests, Imran and Cathy, for expertly guiding us through this really important topic, championing this work and, please forgive me folks, getting this important user need on the map. If you've enjoyed today's episode, and want to learn even more about the GOV.UK Design System - and let's face it, why wouldn't you? - you can tune in to our February 2020 episode of the GDS podcast where you can hear GDS's Tim Paul talk more about the roots of the Design System and its impact.

And you can find all of our other episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all major podcast platforms and transcripts are available on Podbean. So thanks for listening and thank you both again. Goodbye.

Imran Hussain:

Thanks, Louise. Bye.

Cathy Dutton:

Thanks, bye.

GDS Podcast #35: How our Site Reliability Engineers migrated GOV.UK Pay Oct 28, 2021

Wondered how to migrate a 24/7 product to a serverless platform? We chat about initial user research, developing DevOps skills and the benefits of GDS's approach to this type of tech project.

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The transcript of the episode follows:

Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today, I am joined by Jonathan Harden, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, and Kat Stevens, Senior Developer and co-Tech Lead on GOV.UK Pay.

GDS has many products that rely on our expert site reliability engineers and their colleagues to maintain and improve their functionality. Such as GOV.UK Pay - one of GDS’s common platforms that is used by more than 200 organisations across the UK public sector to take and process online payments from service users. Jonathan and Kat recently completed a crucial reliability engineering project to ensure that GOV.UK Pay continues to operate at the highest standards and provide a reliable service for public sector users and their service users.

We'll hear more about that in a moment, but to start off, can you please introduce yourself to our listeners? Kat, would you mind starting?

Kat Stevens:

Hi I'm Kat Stevens, I’m a Senior Developer on GOV.UK Pay. I've been working at GDS since 2017. And before that, I was a developer at start-ups and small companies.

As a co-Tech Lead on the migration team then, I'm kind of jointly responsible for making sure that our platform is running as it should be. That our team is working well together, that we're working on the right things and that we're, what we're working on is of a high quality, and is delivering value for our users. So it's like balancing that up with software engineering, making sure that you know, that we're being compliant. It's very important for Pay. Software [laughs] engineering is so broad: there's like security, reliability, performance, all of those things. So yeah, it's kind of thinking about everything and---at a high level.

Vanessa Schneider:

I'm glad somebody's got a high level overview. Thanks, Kat. Jonathan, would you mind introducing yourself too?

Jonathan Harden:

Hi, I'm Jonathan Harden, and I am Senior Site Reliability Engineer on GOV.UK Pay. I've previously worked for a major UK mobile network operator, in the movie industry and for one of the UK's highest rated ISPs.

So all of GOV.UK Pay's services run, have to run somewhere. Being a Site Reliability Engineer means that I'm helping to build the infrastructure on which it runs, ensure that it is operating correctly and that we keep users’ cardholder data safe and help the developers ease their development lifecycle into getting updates and changes out into the world.

Vanessa Schneider:

Hmm..exciting work. So you both worked on a site reliability project for GOV.UK Pay. Can you please, for the uninitiated, introduce our listeners to the project that you carried out?

Kat Stevens:

Yeah so recently, we finished migrating GOV.UK Pay to run on AWS Fargate. So previously Pay was running its applications on ECS EC2 instances on AWS. That's a lot of acronyms. But it basically means we were maintaining long-lived EC2 instances that were running our applications. And that incurred quite a high maintenance burden for the developers on our team. And we decided that we wanted to move to a serverless platform to kind of reduce that maintenance burden. And after researching a few options, we decided that Fargate was a good fit for Pay, and we spent a few months carefully moving our apps across to the Fargate platform whilst not having any downtime for our users, which is obviously quite important. Like Pay is a 24/7 service, so we wanted to make sure that our end users had no idea that this was happening.

Vanessa Schneider:

Jonathan, how did you contribute to this migration?

Jonathan Harden:

So obviously, I've only been here for three months, so and the project has been going on quite a lot longer than that. But this is the kind of task I've been involved with, uh, several times now in the last few years at different companies. And so when I joined GDS, it was suggested that I join this project on Pay because I'd be able to contribute really quickly and, and help with the kind of the, the long tail of this migration.

So a-anybody else that's been in an SR- that works in SRE capacity will know that when you do these kind of projects, you have like the bulk of the migration where you move your applications, like your frontend services that users actually see when they go to the website and the backend services that processes transactions. But then you also have a lot of supporting services around that. So you have services like: things that provide monitoring and alerting, infrastructure that provides where, where do these applications get stored when they're not in use and like where do you launch them from. And there was, there was still quite a bit of that to tie up at the end. And the team, it's quite a small team. As a lot of SRE and infrastructure teams do tend to be. And so when I started, I joined that team and I've been helping with the, the, these long tail parts of the migration. Like in a lot of software engineering, the bulk of the work is done very quickly and the long tail takes quite a bit of time. So, so that's the kind of work that I've been helping with in the last few months.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great. Kat, as co-Tech Lead, what was your involvement in the migration?

Kat Stevens:

Let’s see where to start. So when I joined the Pay Team, which was around October

2020, we were in the early stages of the, of the project, so we'd made the decision that we needed to migrate and that involved things like analysing, like co-cost benefit things. I-It doesn't sound that exciting, but it was actually quite cool looking at all the different options. So, for example, it meant that we could keep some of our existing infrastructure. We wouldn't have to move our RDS instances for, for example. We could keep our existing security group, subnets - all that kind of glue that holds all the application, like infrastructure together.

Then there was quite a lot of planning of how we would actually do this, how we would roll out the migration application by application. We've got around a dozen microservices that we were going to move one by one. And figuring out what good looked like. How would we know that the migration is successful. How do we know whether to roll back a particular app.

So for the actual rollout of migrating sort of one application from EC2 to Fargate: we basically did DNS weighting. So we could have both run--versions of the app running alongside each other, and then you can have 5% of the traffic going to new apps, 95% to the old app. And you can gradually switch over that weighting and monitor whether there are any errors, whether like the traffic suddenly dips and things aren't getting through. So that was all part of the plannings. Like what, what stages would we reach to say like, that yes, we're confident that this change has been positive. And like having a whole, like overview view of what's happening when. Estimating things as well - that's alway, always pretty, [laughs] pretty difficult. But we, as the more apps we did, the quicker we went and we sped up on that. So that was good.

And yeah, there's a whole bunch of other things we, we had to get involved with over the last few months as well. So that's things like performance-testing the whole environment to, you know, we wanted to have confidence that the new platform would be able to handle like the high levels of traffic that we see on GOV.UK Pay. Also we wanted to look at how we would actually deploy these apps. Having more confidence in our deployments, moving to continuous deployment where possible. So while those things weren't like directly impacted by Fargate, doing this migration like gave us the opportunity to explore some of those other improvements that we could make. And yeah, I think we've really benefited.

Vanessa Schneider:

That makes sense, it's always nice to not just keep things ticking over, but making big improvements, that feels really rewarding, I think. Can you give us an impression of what the situation was before the migration maybe?

Kat Stevens:

On our previous infrastructure, we were running ECS tasks on EC2 launch types - so those are sort of, relatively long-lived instances that we had to provision, patch, maintain. And the developers on the, on the rest of the team, and I--we're not necessarily infrastructure specialists, but when developers on our support rota would end up spending sort of like maybe 5, 6, 7 hours a week just maintaining our EC2 instances, we kind of realised that something had to change [laughs]. And use it, moving to a serverless infrastructure, it's just completely removes that burden of having to provision and make, roll our AMIs, our machine images. We, that just doesn't happen anymore. And we've freed up our developers to work on features. And yeah, the, the infrastructure burden on Pay is just so much less.

Vanessa Schneider:

Oh, that sounds really helpful. I’m not sure if migrations are an every-day kind of job for site reliability engineers or software developers, so I was wondering if there’s anything that stood out about this process, like an opportunity to use new tools, or a different way of working?

Jonathan Harden:

So yeah, it's fun to work with new tools. But there, there, you get to--part of working here, and something I've seen in the time I've been here already, is that we don't rush into those decisions. So it's perfectly possible to see the, the new hot thing in the industry and rush straight for that without a good understanding of what are the trade-offs here. Everything has some trade-offs. And here at GDS, what I've found personally is that we put a lot of effort into understanding what, what's involved in the change; what will the experience be like for - I mean, the customer experience, the user experience, people actually paying for services, that needs to remain rock solid the whole time - but what's the, what's the experience like for developers? So developers have a cycle. They, you know, they write code, they want to test that code somewhere, they want to get it approved and push it to production. And, and so right now, we're undergoing a process of replacing some of our deployment pipelines. And as part of that, we're, we're in the early stages of this, but we're doing real research into how will our change of that be for the developers. And there's something really, really, really rewarding about looking at the different options available, seeing what is the new, the newest cool things, are they where to go? Do you want to go to something a bit, a bit older and a bit more stable? Is there a happy medium? What will the experience for developers be like there? What will the maintenance burden be like?

And one of the things for me here is that I'm seeing that e-even down in the teams, it's, these decisions aren't being taken by somebody higher up saying: 'we're going to move to this thing, make it happen'. And instead we've, we're doing research down in the teams that are going to do the work, speaking to the developer-- we're going to be speaking to the developers and surveying all the developers about what do you want from not just the change to stay the same, but change to make an improvement. And it's really, it's exciting to work with the new tools and the new possibilities, and it's also exciting to be involved in making those decisions.

It marks quite, it was quite stark for me when I first started and I was told this, this major project is going on and it's likely to be 3 to 6 months before we start work, start work on doing it because we're doing the research up front and it's happening in the teams. People are spiking on cool things. Which means even if it's technology that you don't get to use eventually, or that you choose - not don't get to, but choose not to use eventually, you know, the teams are helping to make this choice. You get to try out a bunch of different technologies. And one of the great things with that at GDS is: there are different parts of GDS, and different parts of GDS are using the tooling that is suitable for their area, that makes their area best, work best. And that does mean that there's scope for if you decide I want to work on this other cool thing and this other team are working on it, you can move into one of the other teams and work on that new cool technology.

Kat Stevens:

I mean, I-I-I agree totally. I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to move to Pay was to get more experience working on the infrastructure side of things. On a previous teams it was more sort of stuff like cool software engineering. And on Pay, I've learnt more Terraform than I [laughs] ever thought was possible to know. And loads of other skills like: I've got so familiar with like all the, the intricacies of it as well. And kind of like sort of pushing it to its limits almost, and trying to get the best out of the tools for our, for our team and for our projects. And yeah, it's, it's, it's been really exciting. I mean, one of the new shiny tools that we've been looking at was cloud watch, and we use it for running our smoke tests now. And that was part of the, we kind of like rolled that into the, the Fargate migration project because it seems like a good way of us, like checking that our deployments were working correctly. It took a little bit of wrangling for it to get, fit that into our deployment pipeline. But, but it is really cool sort of like seeing the new thing just falling into place. And now it looks like some of the other teams are following us and using that, that tool as well. So it feels, it feels [laughs] quite nice to be a trailblazer.

Vanessa Schneider:

No pressure to get it right then [laughs]. What were some of the things on your mind when you were making those selections then?

Kat Stevens:

We wanted to make sure that we'd made the right decision. So we did spend a fair amount of time actually analysing all the options. In the end, we, we went with Fargate, purely because it meant that we could reuse some of our existing infrastructure.

Overall we kind of prioritised what was going to be the lowest risk in terms of how we were going to do the migration. Like would any sort of mi--you know, would we need any downtime; would this impact like our, our paying users; would it impact on like our service teams, the actual sort of government departments who use Pay; would it im-impact other developers who were actually trying to build new features. And if they've got a platform that's shifting underneath them, that's always going to be difficult. So we were really trying to go for an option that met our needs and like achieved our goals of reducing maintenance burden, saving costs as well, obviously. And yeah, [laughs] just making it, making like Pay an easy, you know, simpler and easier to be a developer on. And weighing that up with, you know, what, what's this like you know, new and shiny thing, like what's all this. Like you know, because there's so many tools out there. But if it's going to take us like a huge amount of effort to actually migrate to them, then I--is that benefit actually going to pay for itself or not? So we, we actually did quite a lot of the investigation analysis, a big spreadsheet [laughs] trying to calculate how much like developer time like in hours per week of what's being spent on infrastructure maintenance and kind of trying to estimate what-- how that would change when we moved.

Vanessa Schneider:

Cool, that sounds like the bigger picture view the co-Tech Lead would have of course. Jonathan, any, any benefits that stood out to you perhaps?

Jonathan Harden:

The, the process of trying these things is really interesting. One of the things that we do at GDS that is not something I've ever experienced elsewhere, I know it does happen elsewhere in the industry, but is, we have what I call firebreaks. So they're a gap between quarters. Now when I say quarters, we're not like planning so these 12 things will happen in the quarter. We are, like our team is running a full Kanban approach because we're an infrastructure team that do some support. And one of the things with those firebreaks is they're a week long. So I've worked lots of places where you do hack days and hack days are great but one day isn't really very much time to truly try something deeply. On the firebreak, you get the opportunity to work, to try something that might-- you know something's coming up. You know you're going to do this migration. You've got some thoughts about, 'ooh, there's this technology. I've heard it's great. I can give it a real try and I can prove to other people that this is something we should seriously consider, especially if it's really exciting for you'. Or you might use the opportunity as well to, to scratch an itch that's been bugging you.

So like I-I- just to give you an example of what: we've just had a firebreak. And during that firebreak, we saw several different versions of Terraform. For people that know Terraform, some of them were the versions that use the older version of the language - so HTL1 - and some of them with the version that used HTL2, and it means they're not very compatible. So I used that firebreak as an opportunity to upgrade all of our Terraform to get everything up to the very latest. And like that's really scratched an itch for me. And that's not necessarily super exciting for everybody, but for people that have to work on this day to day, it is very, very, very [laughs] exciting. And, but other people did spikes on trying out a whole deploy-- new type of deployment, which is part of what we're doing going forward. And I'm seeing across the other teams, the developer teams, people trying spikes from potential product features, it's very exciting to see those things happening in other teams and people really trying out, and not just a quick hack, but like really trying: 'can we get somewhere with this, and what's the opportunity for using this in the future?' And it's what people wanted to work on. And that's really, really, that was really exciting for me as, as a part of the research, like the ongoing research, the fact that they happen every quarter. It's very exciting.

Vanessa Schneider:

Kat, firebreaks - what’s your opinion, are you a fan?

Kat Stevens:

Obviously at GDS like our quarters like, you know, we do carry over work between quarters, but it is nice to have that, that week or so where you can just like think about something else. You can, it's, you can recharge, you can reset little bit, you can try something new. And having like the, like the support from senior management to do that as well and have that space to experiment and try out new things to fail as well, I think that's so important. And even if your product like, never makes it outside a firebreak, you can, it will stick in your memory. And so when 6 months later they say, 'oh, maybe we should try this' and you can actually say: 'that might be a disaster. I remember it from my firebreak' [laughs]. Or you've got that background knowledge to just give context on a wider discussion, perhaps. I think it's so useful.

And also it kind of gives you an opportunity to potentially collaborate with people who y-you don't normally work with or with people in different roles as well. So rather than just us working within the migration team or the feature teams, we can kind of chop and change. You can work with like User Researchers or Content Designers and do just the things you wouldn't normally do. And or even if you just need a little bit of time to do some housekeeping or tidy ups and stuff that's, like Jonathan said, is just scratching that itch. So I love, I love a firebreak.

Vanessa Schneider:

It sounds like the firebreaks have been really productive then - are there any other wins you can share from the migration as well perhaps?

Jonathan Harden:

One of the interesting things, for me one of the interesting things about working in Pay specifically in GDS, is that we have to maintain PCI compliance because we're taking payments. Now that's not something I'd ever done before coming into Pay. So the, the first thing I did in Pay was learn about PCI and spend some time learning about what it, what it means to be compliant. But part of that is called protective monitoring. So you have active scanning going on looking for 'is anything nefarious happening over here, has anything goes wrong over there'. And that means that you, people have to spend time responding to those reports. And those reports, you occasionally get a false positive. But spending all that time dealing with those reports and investigating them like that's, that's all been freed up now.

But that means we can focus on future improvements more. So we've, our, we have a new environment to test performance of the application in. W e're going through a process at the moment of making it so that that environment can appear when it needs to appear and go away when it doesn't need to be there. And that, of course means saving money, which you know, we work in the Civil Service, this is taxpayer money. This isn't like venture capital, it's the money that all of us pay in tax. And so it's like even more important to make sure that we're spending the right money. It's not to not spend money, it's to spend the right money and only the money that you need to spend. And so we're able to spend time making sure that we can have that environment scale itself down and scale itself back up and use that learning of scaling up and down those environments to start working on potentially auto-scaling the other environments so that they respond to meet demand instead of needing to be at the capacity for peak demand all the time.

This is, the-these are quite exciting things in themselves, but like we wouldn't have, we wouldn't necessarily have the time to do these smaller improvements that, you know, that will save money. They'll make a big difference in how much we spend.

Vanessa Schneider:

What about you Kat, any thoughts?

Kat Stevens:

Yeah, so previously while the majority of our apps were running as tasks on EC2 instances, we did have a couple of Fargate apps running. And people were a bit nervous about updating them and deploying them. But now we are deploying to Fargate everywhere, suddenly, it doesn't seem so much of a big deal anymore. And so we've been able to kind of demystify some of those extra auxiliary apps. We've had really good feedback from the developer team saying like: 'this is great. We don't even have to, you know have like a, mental energy spent on worrying about this app anymore'. And that's kind of like the same for our other sort of, the, the bits and pieces that go under the radar. So this is something we're kind of looking at now is: how do we make sure our NginX proxies are patched and up to date and get deployed quickly, and it's not going to be a, a huge mental effort even [laughs] to kind of even think about how do we do this: 'we don't do this very often. Am I going to have to look this up again?' We can automate more of these processes and just have a more stable and reliable platform.

Vanessa Schneider:

It can be intimidating when you don’t do a process frequently, just wanting to make sure you get everything exactly right, I think a lot of people can relate to that, but it’s so good [laughs] everyone’s confident now!

Kat Stevens:

Big factor but yes.

Vanessa Schneider:

So, obviously, Kat, you aren't a Site Reliability Engineer, but working on this project has given you the opportunity to upskill in the area. Is that right? Is that a common practise? Is it, is it normal for Software Developers to sort of take on a project like this to learn these things?

Kat Stevens:

It's interesting. I think the role of a Software Developer at GDS, it can be so broad. And there's so many different types of things you can work on. I was working on Python projects for a couple of years. And I've sort of like, dipping my toes into a bit of Ruby and bit of JavaScript. And...but, but the previous team I was working on, the infrastructure was very stable and there, there wasn't really any, a huge need to like revamp it or do any major bits of work on it. So while there was a couple of bits and pieces ad-hoc here and there, it kind of felt like the, the infrastructure side of the whole software engineering ecosystem, [laughs] for want of a better word, the, the, the infrastructure side of it was, was a gap in my knowledge. And so it's been really good to be able to move to Pay and like roll up my sleeves and get stuck in and you know like, figure out all these IAM permissions, what, what needs to be done where and actually sort of like get, getting that experience in like lifting the hood and seeing what's powering the, the actual software underneath. And almost like going down through the layers and yeah, [laughs] it's been, it's been really eye-opening actually. Like...previously, I would have never described myself as doing any sort of DevOps side of things, and I was actually quite like scared of Bash scripts. And now they are, yeah, well, I wouldn't say second nature, but they're not so scary anymore [laughs].

Vanessa Schneider:

That's a great outcome in my books. Jonathan, is it common practise to have somebody come in like that for you? I mean, obviously you've not been at GDS for a long time, but I was just wondering how this compares to the private sector.

Jonathan Harden:

So lots of people want to be a Site Reliability Engineer, it's a very kind of hot field. It's a very cool area to work in. And I don't just mean across the industry. I mean, I think that's a, I really, really like this role. I've put on many hats over my career and this is the one I'm enjoying the most by a long way. But, so in a previous company, I was like leading a team of infras-- there we were calling ourselves Infrastructure Engineers, but we were hiring Site Reliability Engineers. And actually, we found that it, it was, in some ways it was better to have a more diverse team in previous role as well. I mean, like, I always believe it's better to have a diverse team anyway in all aspects. But having people from a software engineering background and people from a systems administration background, like a traditional SysAdmin background, bringing those people together, especially if you've got one or two experienced Site Reliability Engineers already, works really, really well. People want to upskill into this area. Upskill isn't even necessarily the right word. People want to move into this area. It's not that it's an upskill, it's, it's, it's sideways. It's a different kind of role. And it means that they're very enthusiastic and they really want to learn these things and they want to demystify the scary things like Kat was talking about. So me personally, I've been, she mentioned Bash, I've been using Bash for many, many, many years [laughs] since about 2001, I think something like that. So that's not scary for me, but for people who haven't worked with it, I can help them with, like you know, I can help people and I can mentor them and I can show them good practises are.

Vanessa Schneider:

I don't think I've heard a better recommendation for folks to become site reliability engineers - keep an eye out on our vacancies as there are continuously opportunities at GDS to work on exciting projects like this migration, or broaden your skill sets. But just to recap, would you say there’s anything you’re particularly proud of as a result of this migration?

Kat Stevens:

The--like the actual how we did the rollout itself like with zero downtime. I thought that was pretty cool. But also maybe kind of like in the ways that we actually worked as a team around it as well because it was quite a long running project. And I think there's some interesting parts about how we like re-reassured ourselves that we were doing the right thing. Like, you know, regular retrospectives, firebreaks like we've mentioned, like how we dealt with unexpected work coming along because [laughs] as well as being like the migration team, we are also kind of the infrastructure team. So any kind of unexpected bits and pieces that came up, it would be our team that, we would have to like temporarily pause the migration work and pick up you know, whatever it was. So how we responded to that and you know how we communicated with each other, I-I think that's kind of a whole, a whole other podcast in itself almost.

Vanessa Schneider:

It sounds like there is an amazing community that you can tap into to keep up to date, make sure that work isn't being duplicated. And clearly there’s a lot to be proud of regarding the product performance.

Jonathan Harden:

Yeah, so something that I found a little different here from other places I've worked, even larger organisations, that actually really helps with the sharing of information: so we, we have various like show and tell type catch-up meetings but for a wider than just your small area of the, of the business. So we have a catch up every week amongst all the infrastructure people. And there we all talk about what are we working on right now; like what things are we looking at in the future; are there challenges that you faced; how is the business as usual stuff going in your area. And conversations often come out of that into: 'oh, you're trying out this new technology?' Or you might, because we have it every week, you might mention like: 'oh we're starting to look at this thing' and you'll hear other people's opinions on either the thing you're trying or what you're aiming at or what they've done.

So we, I was mentioning we're doing this tuning our deployment pipelines, so we have a-a few peo-teams are all doing that as well. And so we have a channel where we're talking about that. And as people are trying things, they're putting in that channel like what they're trying, how it's going, like what the challenges they faced are and, you know, asking for help as well: have other people tried this; what, did you manage to solve this issue or that issue. And I really feel like the collaboration across parts of GDS and the wider Cabinet Office is, is really, really good. within the infrastructure side, it's really good. There's definitely like beyond the infrastructure I do attend, we do have show and tells where people get to show like the thing they're working on that's not just infrastructure related, and that's been, that's really good as well for just understanding like the wider landscape of what's happening across Cabinet Office. And that's that's really, they're really helpful to communicate those things and to work out: 'are we working on the same thing'; 'are you about to start working on the thing that I'm working on'; 'have you already done this and can you give me some pointers'. And that's really good.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, it’s nice that you've had the opportunity to share your learnings with the community. Do you have any, maybe, more personal reflections on this work perhaps?

Jonathan Harden:

Yeah. So working at the Cabinet Office, it's the first time I've worked for the Civil Service and I'm very aware it's, it's different than the other roles that I've had because I'm like, I feel like I'm kind of helping wider society. We all have to pay the government for all sorts of things. And Pay supports many different services, including - on a previous version of the GDS podcast, you talk to some of the product people from Pay, and I listened to that before I joined Pay, before I joined GDS, and it was really interesting to hear the esoteric services that we have - but of course we have some, we have some bigger services as well and other government departments coming online all the time. And knowing that the infrastructure we're working on supports the ability for the public to pay things that they need to pay to the government or they want to pay, you know, they, like you said, they might be buying a fishing licence or something like that. And that's, knowing that we make it easier for people to do that and that it's done in a way that focuses on the accessibility of the service so any member of the public can try and pay through us and will have, not reach barriers like their screen reader software can't work with the service.

These are, knowing that I'm giving this back as part of my role, it makes a big difference to me as an Engineer. It's, it's, it's kind of the first, one of the first times where I've not have some kind of crisis around like, 'oh, am I giving back to society, wider society?'. And now I really feel like I am. And that's a real big part of what's making me so happy here among working on a fantastic team and a great org, and on cool technology, of course.

Vanessa Schneider:

That's so lovely to hear, Jonathan, [laughs] thank you for sharing. If you are similarly minded and want to try and help wider society, do keep an eye on our careers page. That's: GDS careers dot gov dot uk [gdscareer.gov.uk] for openings. It could be in site reliability engineering, it could be general software developer, it could be very different, but we're always looking for new folks to join us and bring their perspective into the organisation.

Thank you to Jonathan and Kat for joining me on the episode. If you like it, you can listen to all other episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast, like Jonathan has, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other major podcast platforms, and the transcripts are also available on PodBean.

Goodbye.

Jonathan Harden:

Toodelo.

Kat Stevens:

Goodbye!

GDS Podcast #34: Collecting information from users Sep 28, 2021

Our Collecting Information From Users team and a guest from the Home Office share how we’re helping people in government to create accessible, affordable digital forms.

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS.

Today, I’m chatting with colleagues about our work supporting teams across government that collect information from users using online forms, paper forms or a combination of the two. We've been partnering with other government organisations to investigate how they're currently collecting this information and what kind of help they might need. Because right now, almost all of the forms on GOV.UK that have been downloaded around 7,000 or so times are PDFs or other document-based forms. Usually they are inaccessible, hard to use, and on average teams spend 8 minutes more on processing the information they collect, compared to online forms. This is bad for users, and also bad for government, as it’s inefficient and misses opportunities for using the data for analysis. Worse, these kinds of forms are growing by approximately 6% every year and we estimate it would take the existing form-building service teams more than 70 years to convert just the existing PDFs into HTML forms.

So I’m joined by Harry Voss, Senior Product Manager, and Moyo Kolawole, Senior User Researcher, from GDS, who are part of a team working on a solution that will make it much easier to digitise existing forms, and make it simpler for people in government to create new digital forms - even if they don’t have technical expertise. I’m also joined by Suzanne Mycock from the Family Policy Unit in the Home Office, who has been contributing to the research our team is conducting.

To kick us off, Moyo, would you please introduce yourself to our listeners?

Moyosore Kolawole:

Sure. Hi I'm Moyo Kolawole. I'm a Senior User Researcher on the Collecting Information from Users team at GDS.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great, thank you. Harry how about you, would you please introduce yourself?

Harry Vos:

Yeah, sure. Hey, folks, I'm Harry Vos, I'm a Senior Product Manager at Government Digital Service. Um, I've been around for like 4 years or something, err, and, err, yeah I’ve been looking at forms and how people collect information from members of the public and businesses, err, since December. So I've been really lucky to be working with some amazing people across government. Thanks for having me.

Vanessa Schneider:

No worries, thank you. And finally, Suzanne, would you like to introduce yourself as well, please?

Suzanne Mycock:

Hi there. My name's Suzanne Mycock. And I'm a Guidance and Forms Editor. I work on the Guidance Rules and Forms team, part of the Family Policy Unit within the Home Office. Err, our team manages 3 of the main tools needed to implement policy, all of which are vital for caseworkers and customers. So that's coordinating secondary legislation, managing guidance and managing application forms.

Vanessa Schneider:

Suzanne, as I mentioned, there is a mountain of work to be done to improve forms, but maybe it would help listeners if you could start us off by explaining how the process of creating or editing forms works for you?

Suzanne Mycock:

So for us it tends to be led by policy teams, so if a policy changes or if a new policy comes into play, sometimes they'll need a, a form to to support the work that they're doing to collect information from end users or applicants. Now, it's not just a case of a policy team coming to us and saying we need a form, we need a paper form, can you go away, create that for us? It’s kind of bigger than that, because it depends on a number of factors.

Many of our forms are now on GOV.UK, they’ve been digitised and, um, that they sort of stand for quite a number of the forms that we used to, we used to be responsible for. Um, that number has has shrunk. But as you just said a few moments ago, we are sort of being asked to create sort of bespoke forms, um, for low usage routes, really, or forms that may not need to be around for years and years. It might just be to suit for a short term policy or a, um, intermediary policy.

So what happens is a policy team will come to us and say that they need a form. Um, we will then take that to a board and it is up to the board then to decide whether the form will, um, exist as paper or whether it will be digitised on GOV.UK. Um, and as I say, err, that decision basically comes down to the cost, the usage and how long that form would be needed for. So it's kind of, it's all kicked off by policy and rules changes and policy changes. And then if it's decided that, yes, it's it’s suitable to go, err, on a paper, paper form, the policy team will come to us with a basic set of questions that they want to ask, the information that they want to extract from from the applicants. And we will then go away and we'll put that onto, um, our software.

We'll try and build them a form as best as we can that meets accessibility needs, because that obviously is our number one priority, making sure that everything that we produce or try and make sure that things that that we produce going forward is, um, now and going forward, should I say, is as accessible as it possibly can be. Although we do have, sort of, some legacy forms, um, that are based on paper and can only be printed out and filled in by hand.

The, the work that we have on forms tends to come in sort of peaks and troughs so we can be extremely busy on forms, um, or we can have no work to do on forms for, for a while, because as you're probably aware, we don't just work on application forms, we sort of cover a wide spectrum of work than than just application forms. But it tends to be driven largely by things like policy changes. Now, they tended to happen a couple of times a year, but just recently we've sort of had, sort of several changes, um, throughout the year. So, um, we've sort of had a few, a few peaks this year and sort of late last year, err, for various reasons.

But again, it depends on the sort of the, the extent of the changes, because sometimes they're very minor and it could just be changing one question, err, which takes no time at all, or if it's a case of building a brand new form, um, that can actually take with some of the software that we use, um, believe, err, to like, can take a good sort of three days to, to build and pull the accessibility text behind that.

And the reason it takes so long is, is partly because the, the software that we currently use is no longer supported. So it's becoming slower, more clunky, more difficult to work with, and, um, it's very unstable. Err, so that sometimes means that if it's not behaving like it should, it can take us a little bit longer. Err, and of course, it depends how long the form is as well, so if it's a brand new form sometimes it can just be a couple of pages. Other times it can be a 40-page form. Um, so it, it depends on, on those different factors, really.

Policy are the ones who inform whether, whether a form is needed. Um, and policy teams will work with legal representatives, obviously, to make sure that the content of the, the forms is, um, sort of legally upstanding. Um, but it will also work with operational staff to make sure that the, the form is capturing the kind of content that they need to be able to process application forms. Um, and then decisions are also made by the senior management team when it goes to the board to decide on whether it's going to be paper form or whether it's going to be purely, um, digitised. So it's, um, it can be a very sort of fast moving environment, err, depending on sort of the, the nature of what it is we're involved with, because obviously we've been involved with some sort of high profile areas.

Vanessa Schneider:

I'm actually curious to hear what you think works about this process and what doesn't.

Suzanne Mycock:

I think for, for simplicity purposes, the process works quite well. People know, err, where to go to, to, to ask about forms or to ask for changes or new forms. Um, so I think that works pretty well. People know, um, where they can get that information from.

When people do want changes to forms, it's quite a, err, cost effective way of, of making those changes because we don't have to go to a third party and ask them to make those changes. We can actually physically do it on our team. So it's a cost effective and easy way to make and maintain forms.

I like to think that we are sort of continually striving to make sure that we produce accessible forms, um, accessibility to, to us is obviously ensuring that a, a product is available and can be used by everyone. Um, so that would mean that people with certain conditions or disabilities can access exactly the same information as everybody else and that it is easy to access and to use. And it is something that we are aware of, um, and we want to get better at, at doing that.

We try to talk to specialists. So, um, accessibility specialists in the department and sometimes in other government departments as well to sort of try and glean best practice from them. Um, we are aware of our responsibilities under the accessibility regulations, which is why really we’re, we’re keen to get involved with this project, because the more we can do, err, to make our forms accessible, the better, because we just want to create a service or a product that is going to work for everybody and to take our responsibility seriously. So whilst we may not be 100 percent there, I think we've sort of certainly got the, the ethos on team to to and have the desire to want to be there. And we are happy to engage with anybody who can help us get there. So, um, I, I think we're, we’re doing OK, but we could do a lot better.

Vanessa Schneider:

That makes sense. I was actually wondering, Moyo, you've been conducting a couple of research sessions. Do the things that Suzanne is highlighting chime with what other people on panels have said, or are the responses very varied across what works for them and what doesn't work for them when creating forms?

Moyosore Kolawole:

I think a lot of what Suzanne has said has resonated, um, a lot across the different form builders that we've been able to speak to across government. There’s this real desire to be able to fulfil these accessibility kind of guidelines, um, the 2018 accessibility guidelines. But there is a lack of kind of like time or a lack of, um, knowledge around how exactly to do that. And I think it’s, err, a barrier, like the process of creating accessible forms or knowing what to include to make forms more accessible for, for instance, um, users who might have visual impairments and therefore, you require screen readers to access information how to best design forms for them. There's, it's almost like, a lack of knowledge around how exactly to put it in practice to be able to fulfil these, um, WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines.

And so I think there's a real desire for a solution that not only tackles the problem of inaccessible forms, but also helps kind of upskill those who are creating the forms, um, to learn more about how they can also, you know, be better at thinking with accessibility in mind while designing. Um, so I think a lot of what Suzanne has said has definitely come out in our research.

Vanessa Schneider:

Well, it makes sense that others feel the same way. Um, I was wondering, Harry, there are clearly common themes that are emerging. I was wondering if there's anything that you have a bigger picture on, err, besides potentially the accessibility point that, um, that really speaks to why this needs tackling.

Harry Vos:

So, I mean, our vision being that every single form on GOV.UK is, err, accessible, easy to use and quick to process. And it's in that order, really, I suppose, because accessibility is, is really about, um, people's, err yeah, people's rights under the Equality Act and people, you know, not being discriminated against right. How do we make sure that everybody can complete these forms first time, err, not sort of like battle through this thing that is really tricky to use and get stuck and we've got to call up because I don't know I don't even know what question you're asking me here. I don't actually have that information.

So there's this whole, whole thing that's kind of like around this form design and then and then also about like sort of speed of processing, a lot, we hear from a lot of teams that, um, you know, so many forms come in, err, to to their to their team inbox or, err, to to their in, in, in some circumstances in their post tray, err, and and and the forms don't have the information they need to make a decision about that person or that business or that sector.

And, and so, you know, it was kind of interesting to pick up on what Suzanne was saying around, you know, the policy role as having to work with those operations teams to actually understand like what is it that you need to make that decision about a person. And I suppose if we can if we can speed that up, um, you know, just simply through making sure, does does that form have everything they need to make up the decision, um, err, through you know, the things like sort of validating that that the information that is submitted is is is in the format that we would expect. Um, so if someone has put, err, the, the date of application instead of their date of birth, you know, is that something that we can we can be like, oh that's a really obvious thing. Like, um, well, let's let's fix that.

So we should see some improvements there as well. And, and, and we reckon, err, just through some, some simple changes to, like, how the information gets collected, should be able to speed up, err, things by, on average 8 minutes per per form and in terms of that just having the right information to make the decision. Um, so it's going to vary from service to service and from form to form. Um, but there's some kind of big improvements we want to make there.

Vanessa Schneider:

I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit more about the scale of what you're trying to tackle here.

Harry Vos:

Yeah, it's a it's a it's a big it's a big challenge. Um, I’m not going to lie, err, there’s, there's over 5,000 form pages on GOV.UK and, and each of those, err, can have, you know, any, anywhere, anywhere from between sort of one and in some cases hundreds of of of different forms attached to those pages. Um, so it's a really big, err, challenge.

And and and like you mentioned at the start, um, most of them remain solely as sort of document-based forms, err, which, err, you know, which despite everyone's best efforts, sometimes do you have accessibility problems. And so, um, yeah, it's a really big, it's a big challenge. And I think it's something that the appetite is there. So you know we heard, you know Suzanne you’re mentioning you know you really want to you and your team have got accessibility at heart and you're thinking about how to make this service as easy as possible for people to use.

There's lots of teams that, that that sort of want to do the right thing, err, and, and, and, try and improve those forms. Um, but, yeah, sometimes the sort of software isn't always there, um, for people to sort of, err, to to make those improvements. So it feels like a good opportunity. And yeah, we're hoping that, yeah, if you're if you're listening and the, this issue resonates with you, you know, we'd love to hear from you and find out how we can help you and partner up as well, um, because this is not something that the Government Digital Service can just solve ourselves, we're not just going to sit here and magically make this problem go away. Err, you know, we need, we need to sort of come at this together as as government collectively. So, yeah. Really keen to sort of meet and meet new people and and and listen and and find out about your problems.

Vanessa Schneider:

It definitely feels rewarding being the convenor of this kind of work and, and trying to get everybody, err, around the table on this issue. I was wondering, how are we approaching this process? Obviously, um, we’ve, we've been doing some research. That was the discovery phase. What else, what else is happening?

Harry Vos:

So, um, after we’ve kind of wrapped up our, what we call our sort of discovery research, so trying to understand more about this sort of problems, and whether this is something that our organisation is well positioned to actually affect, um, we kind of like concluded like, yes, this is a problem, that it's not going to sort of go away, and also that, yes, we think we can affect it.

So now we're really in that stage of, OK, we know that there are different ways of, of, of creating a form. Um, and, you know, we have a hunch that, um, online forms that are using, err, sort of web browsers to sort of complete forms and things like that, err, can be more accessible than, err, some of those document-based forms. Err, and that you can do that in a way that doesn't demand that the person creating that form has a sort of strong accessibility awareness because, um, well, Suzanne’s team, like you've got lots of, err, accessibility awareness. Um, sometimes the software isn't, doesn’t always help with that. But, um, there are other teams that are maybe more sort of policy specialists and, and, and people who’re trying to really understand, like, OK, what are the decisions that we want to make about people, err, to, to sort of provide them with some sort of public good, some public service, thinking, maybe more in that sort of like the sort of policy intent space. Err, and, and, and, won’t have those sort of specialist skills. And that's, that's kind of like that, that that should be fine.

And and I think that's the thing we really want to test is, you know, can we provide, um, better, better tooling to, to create those forms, err, without having to to demand that everybody is a specialist, err, designer, or accessibility person or um, that sort of thing. So, um, yeah, we've got a bunch of different, um, prototypes, if you like, of, of different ways of creating forms. Err, and we're going to be working with, err, people like Suzanne to try and sort of test out, OK, if we if we're using this this way of making forms versus the existing way and also what effect does that have on the quality of the forms and the accessibility of the forms, their ease of use, err, that sort of thing, so really excited to sort of start testing these.

It's, it's one thing to sort of try and understand the problem and do that sort of user research and that data analysis in that sort of exploratory phase. But now, when we’re, like, starting to test things, we can say things, like, actually let's - before we get too carried away with it - let's actually find out if that's going to work. So for me, that's the really exciting bit.

Really our goal is to to to compliment some of those existing forms, err, with with online forms that can be completed in a Web browser, err, on on a phone or, or anything, you don't need a printer, don't need any sort of special software to sort of edit it and start completing that form. That's, that is the goal. But, um, in 2018, err, 10% of the UK adult population, err, weren’t using the Internet. So there's clearly a whole bunch of, of people that we must support, err, and continue to support with, err, the existing forms that, that might be more designed around, err, print use.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, Moyo, so Harry's obviously giving us this big overview of what will, what will come up, I was wondering how do you then in practice carry this work on?

Moyosore Kolawole:

Yes, so we're doing some really exciting kind of user research. Um, I think there's a real need to understand our users better.

And one way in which we're trying to do that is like Harry’s saying, testing out these prototypes and kind of seeing behaviour in action: Can our intended users actually even, um, use these ideas that we've come up with in our team huddle and think this will work. Does that actually work in practice? And so I'm really excited to start kind of testing out behaviour in action.

And the way we're doing that is by setting up, um, a research panel of form builders across government with a variety of experience. So if you’ve touched a form once in your entire professional career or you’ve, you’ve just like spent 3 to 5 days working on forms in a given period, like we want to speak to so many different types of civil servants across government who have this, um, experience with form building to become like part of our panel. And our panel basically looks like, um, just being an ongoing research partner with us. When we, err, come up with these ideas, coming in like ripping it to shreds and being like this wouldn't work for this reason because our team is structured in this way or this sounds like a really great way of meeting this potential challenge or I like this idea, but let's reframe it in a different way. I think those people, everyone has a part to play in product development, not just people whose job title kind of reflects a DDaT role. So by DDaT I mean Digital, Data and Technology professionals across the civil service.

I think everyone - from the users that we're intending to solve the problems for, up until the team who are creating the product - have a part to play in, like, kind of, like, defining how this product, um, develops. And so in our research kind of sessions that we’re planning out, we’re testing out some of our riskiest assumptions, um, things that could really like test our product when we come into development, um, things such as do people even need a form builder? is one of our riskiest assumptions that we need to test.

And this is a time to do it in our alpha phase, where we've understood that there's a problem and we're trying to now understand what the solution to that problem is going to be. We, we’re making sure that we're being really kind of broad and wide in our thinking of how to solve the problem, but making sure that we're trying to solve the problem with our users in mind. And that comes right back down to ensuring that our research sessions are really kind of, like, full with people who have a variety of experience, who have a variety of, kind of, like, knowledge around the form space to really help us understand what works and what doesn't work.

And I think one thing that for me is quite exciting due to my background is that, um, this is also a behaviour change project ultimately. It's not just product development. We're trying to understand how can we shift people away from doing X to do Y. And I think a lot of the time what came out in this exploratory research is that, established ways of working are really like kind of confined and that ultimately like kind of impacts how people create or view the creation of forms. And so if we are trying to create a product, we don't want to just slip into established ways of working.

Why would we use a GDS, for instance, form-builder or something that GDS promoted for us to use? We need to ensure that people understand, like this is why we believe this tool is better to use for form creation than this tool because of these reasons. And this is what, how we think it will help you in your ways of working. And so we also need to do some kind of thinking and research around how our users behave around form creation and what we can learn about how we need to kind of like create, um, interventions or triggers or nudges to encourage people to change their current ways of behaviour with the view of accessibility in mind. Um, and so we're doing kind of really interesting parallel research at the same time, we've got that testing, but we've also got that behaviour understanding, um, element as well, which I'm really looking forward to.

Vanessa Schneider:

So you mentioned the alpha phase. Do you mind just telling me quickly, what does that refer to?

Moyosore Kolawole:

Yeah, sure. So in any kind of product life cycle, you split it into the discovery, alpha and then beta stage, um, and the discovery stage is mainly where you kind of explore the problems faced, you have knowledge that there is a problem. You're not quite sure exactly what it is. You're using that space to explore all the different facets of the problem before coming down to, OK, this is exactly what problem we're going to tackle, um, going forwards. So the alpha phase, um, is when you take that problem that you've identified and you start kind of concept testing solutions to that problem, you're not defined to, um, a specific solution. And it's all about kind of like using that space to explore different ways to solve the problem that you've identified in that discovery phase, before moving onto the beta stage where you're starting to test out some prototypes that you probably defined normally in that alpha stage of how are you going to, like, solve the problem. You start testing out with private, um, partners or collaborators who can give you ongoing feedback about how your product is doing and to solve that problem. Um, so that's really what an overview of the kind of product life cycle is. Um, and so when I say we're in the alpha phase, we're in that stage by where we’re, we've got the problem, we understand the problem space a lot more. But now we're trying to, kind of, idea around how exactly to solve that problem.

Vanessa Schneider:

No, it's really wonderful to get an insight into how methodical your approach is. I hope that's very comforting to people who haven't even heard about this work that it's ongoing and who are interested in contributing to it. Like both Harry and Moyo have mentioned, if it sounds like this might help your service team, why not get in touch with us and help us in building a solution that will work for everyone. It doesn't matter if you are in Digital, Data or Technology, Moyo did say, um, if you have anything remotely to do with forms, this could benefit you. This does bring me to Suzanne. I was wondering how it was that you became involved with the GDS team. What convinced you that this was worthwhile doing?

Suzanne Mycock:

I think for our team, I, I, I'd like to think that we, we want to be an exemplar, um, as far as sort of forms creation is concerned. Um, and I think I kind of, sort of, said to, to Harry at the time, it was music to our ears, because the more help we can get to create the forms that we want to create, that the better, really. Um, and we sort of looked to, to people such as Harry and Moyo and, and various other colleagues who have more experience than we do and who probably, um, are better placed to, to tell us what, what we need to do to meet accessibility requirements.

So to work with, with you is, is absolutely fantastic for us because it just gives us, at the end of the day, it’s going to give us the confidence to know that we are producing the right kind of forms for the people that use them. Um, and that ultimately is, is our goal.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you. Um, so to take things back a couple of steps in time. This isn’t new work. Technically. Harry, I think you know a little bit about the history of this. Would you mind sharing with listeners why this is different?

Harry Vos:

Yeah, for sure. Like I said, I've been, I've been looking at forms since sort of December time, but there are a whole bunch of people that know way, way, way more about forms than we do. So, yeah, whether, yeah, it's learning from Suzanne, whether it's learning from, um, the amazing group of people in the cross-government form building community. So, so people that have been, you know, testing out different form building technologies and approaches that we can learn so much from.

So and and and going back even further there was a team at the Government Digital Service called the GOV.UK Submit team, and they were also looking at sort of similar problem, at around how to how to sort of tackle all of these these these document based forms on GOV.UK and and make them much easier to use. And sort of quicker to process. I think, I think there's a couple of things that that, err, that we can sort of, err, many, many things we can learn from that community and that group of people, if you like.

So one thing is the actual way that form building works on a sort of technical level of how do you configure the questions and how do you make sure that once you've done that configuration, the resulting form is accessible and easy to use and quick to process. A lot of that really hard work’s been done. And so we can sort of learn from, from all those teams, which is just, yeah, we're extremely grateful for.

Some of the technology that they’ve developed is, is, is really, like, advanced, err, when it comes to sort of building accessible forms. And we think that, um, although that might be targeted at, err, sort of digital specialists as the users, if we can take advantage of of some of those technologies and but make them sort of simple enough for for for someone who isn't a sort of techie person, err, to use. Um, we think that there is a lot of benefit we could get from sort of reusing that. Um, so as opposed to us just starting completely from scratch. So then that way I think we're very fortunate.

Suzanne Mycock:

That's kind of great for, for somebody like me to sort of hear, because we're often deemed to be forms experts and we're not because we don't you know, we're not specialist designers. And sometimes it can make you feel a little bit exposed sometimes, when people come to you and expect you to have the answers for everything and to be able to build something um, when we're not really equipped with the right, err, sort of knowledge to do that, we're not really the experts.

So if, as, as Harry's kind of said, we could sort of pinch bits from from platforms that especially designers do use and make it, um, simple to use for people like myself who who don't have that specialist knowledge, but people come to, to create the forms, that would put us in a very sort of, err, good position really, um, and give us a confidence as well to know that we can use this the software and equipment that we've been given. But neither are we sort of expected to be sort of a specialist designer, or a specialist as such.

Harry Vos:

Suzanne if, if it’s, if it's any consolation. I studied design for, for like four years, err, and I still don't know my way around some of these softwares are just really quite complicated and, err, and then and then we try and sort of use that for forms because it's the sort of best thing we've got for now, like that it's always going to be a little bit of, err, a strange transition. Just kind of reflects moving from sort of paper to digital, if you like. So fingers crossed we can find something.

I suppose that where things are slightly different is so since the GOV.UK Submit team, um, the accessibility regulations sort of came into force the, sort of, following year. Um, and, and I think that's really sort of changes prioritisation, if you like, um, because whereas before the focus was maybe on the sort of efficiency side of things like can we reduce the waiting time to hear back about an application or whatever government service they're trying to access. That might've been sort of the goal back then. It is still sort of one of our goals, but I suppose, it’s kind of looked at things in a broader perspective. So when you broaden things out, you start to look at, um, you know, some of those lower volume services as well. So, um, you know, a lot of the Digital teams, they’re typically working on some of those higher volume services like get a passport, things that are sort of very commonly used, you've got some brilliant digital teams across government behind them.

You go down a little bit and so you start to look at sort of under 100,00 transactions per year, you start to go down into that sort of median volume bracket. And then there you've got some sort of digital teams maybe working on something for some of the time. So just to sort of roughly explain that model. Um, you've generally got a technology platform that does the sort of form building, but actually that is designed for specialist designers and user researchers, err, and developers. Um, that's a platform that then supports a team of people to then go and support the policy and the operations teams that are going to be designing and running that form, providing a service to them. And that's just like a really brilliant model that works fantastically for those medium volume services. You're going to get something like that that’s, that's really easy to use, accessible, quick to process. That, that's great.

But unfortunately, that approach is still too expensive for the vast majority of services because the vast majority of services are actually quite low volume. So you've got a lot of, sort of what we might call, like, niche, niche services, but, um, like “pay tax as a minister of religion” or “apply for an exemption for, err, electronic waste”. Err, yeah, this is kind of like fairly like specific niche services the government has to provide, and, and that ultimately won't ever be able to sort of afford like a full digital team on them, or even, a sort of a digital team for sort of part of the time. And so it's like, okay, that's the majority of government services. What can we do to help, help those teams take, take advantage of, of online forms and things like that with those goals of accessibility, ease of use and speed of processing in mind.

Vanessa Schneider:

It's true, our government services are for everyone. So don't be shy, listeners. If you don't work on forms, maybe you know somebody who does: get in touch with our team. How can they get in touch with you? How do they get involved with this?

Harry Vos:

That's a great question. Err, our team email address is collecting-users-info@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk Now that's a real mouthful.

Moyosore Kolawole:

But yeah, we're really keen that throughout this entire process of kind of concept, testing, product development, et cetera, we’re really collaborative, um, with a whole variety of people, from people who are just really interested in what we're doing and those who have any sort of experience in this whole form creation process across government, no matter what your job title might look like. So we'd really encourage you to get in touch and keep up to date with what we're, we’re doing, if you have the relevant experience. And also just like super interested in our work, we'd love to hear from you and learn from you, um, as we go through this entire process.

Vanessa Schneider:

All right, so thank you to our guests for joining me on the podcast, as it's such important work to tackle this challenge and supporting your colleagues across government who may not have that much resource or knowledge, as we just shared. Just to remind listeners, again, if you work on a service that requires information from users and you use forms to collect this information, please get in touch with the team so we can ensure that the solution works for you, too. And if you like this episode, you can listen to all other episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast and all other major podcast platforms. The transcript is also available on Podbean. Goodbye.

Harry Vos:

Thanks for listening.

Moyosore Kolawole:

Thanks for listening, bye.

GDS Podcast #33: Digital identity - working with government services Aug 25, 2021

We discuss lessons learned when it comes to digital identity, the importance of cross-government collaboration, and how other service teams can get involved.

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS.

Today, we will expand on our plans to remove unnecessary complexity by developing one inclusive and accessible way for people to log in to all government services online. An easy way to prove their identity just once, that also gives them control over who has access to their data and why.

I'm joined by Will Myddelton, Product Manager, and Helena Trippe, Senior Service Designer, both in the Digital Identity programme here at GDS, as well as Tom Stewart, Assistant Head of Modernisation at Veterans UK, that have been working with GDS to test their technology and processes. So let's start with you Will, would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners?

Will Myddelton:

Of course, Vanessa. Hi everyone. I'm Will, I'm a Product Manager on our Identity workstream. And what that means is on Digital Identity, we've split the work into 3 streams. We have one for authentication, we have one for identity, and we have one for managing data. And my work is to lead the work on our 3 teams that are thinking about the identity part of that puzzle. And as a Product Manager, really, my role is to set the direction that we're going in. And the way that we really do that is by building a shared understanding between all of the different teams so that we all understand the problem that we're working on, with the goal that we can work as the wonderful autonomous human individuals that we are.

Vanessa Schneider:

Fantastic, thank you Will. Helena, how about you, would you please introduce yourself?

Helena Trippe:

So my name is Helena. I'm a Service Designer in Will's team and in the Digital Identity stream. I have been in the programme since, for-for a year now. And it's really, really fantastic to see the excitement growing both within the programme and also across service teams for the work that we're doing. And it's growing in momentum all the time.

And my role within the team has really been to act as a little bit of a glue. We're a multidisciplinary team: we have User Researchers, we have Interaction Designers, we've got Business Analysts and trying to make sure that we are feeding in a lot of the learning back into the product development as we iterate and learn from service teams.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great. Thank you, Helena. Finally, Tom, would you like to introduce yourself as well, please?

Tom Stewart:

I'm Tom Stewart. I work for Veterans UK, a pillar of Defence Business Services, part of the Ministry of Defence. I'm the service owner for a service called the Armed Forces Compensation and War Pension Scheme. Essentially the, the service is: if you are, if you are a service person or you were a service person and you have an injury or a condition that you believe is attributable to your time in the service, then you may be entitled to some form of compensation. And we're, we're digitising what was previously a bit of a paper heavy service. I run, I-I lead a little multidisciplinary team. And my role was the, the kind of overall responsibility for the development and the, the operation and the, the continuous improvement of the scheme.

Vanessa Schneider:

Fantastic. Thank you, Tom, for introducing yourself as well. So there are people who might not be following GDS's work within the digital identity space, it's hard to believe, Will and Helena, but can you tell me about what your team has been working on?

Will Myddelton:

Anyone that's been working in government over the last 10 years knows that GDS has worked on a product called Verify for a long time, and Verify came from a really good place. It is a real common need of service teams to be able to check the identity of their users. We knew that right after we made GOV.UK right back at the start of GDS and Verify was started to address that need.

The pandemic was a, a really big event for digital identity in the UK. Verify usage shot up. But at the same time it magnified all the problems that there were. And so in last year's spending review, the government committed money back to GDS, which given some of the reputation we've got for doing digital identity in the past, but we're really honoured to, to be trusted to do this, to tackle digital identity from the centre of government once again.

And so what we've been doing since really 1 April - like that's when our, our funding settlement came in and we've got a year of funding - is we've really been trying to work out what the right approach to tackle digital identity this second time around is.

And we've had to be really open with ourselves and with the people that we speak to. And believe me, people around government are open with us about what we've got wrong with Verify. But we've also had to be open to the fact that there were some things that we got right in Verify that we're going to continue. So since 1 April, we've done a discovery period on identity and we did twin discoveries, one into the needs of end users and one into the needs of service teams.

And then from June until where we are now, we've been in an Alpha. And so what we're doing in our Alpha is experimenting with different ways that we can do digital identity better at GDS for the whole of government; and particularly how we can, this time round, design a digital identity product based on the needs of service teams.

Because my observation from having worked on Verify in 2015 and then having worked on, like, the next generation of platform products that we made in GDS - like I was involved in the Notify Alpha and Beta and I worked on Pay and I worked on all those Government as a Platform Products - is that by the time we started those, we'd changed our stance on how we thought about developing products for the whole of government.

By the time we came to 2015 and did all those Government as a Platform products, we had to instead develop things that were so good that services wanted to use them. And we developed a number of ways of thinking about product development for platforms that are going to be used by service teams across government in that 3 years, 2015 to 2018.

And so really why I'm here and what we're trying to do in our Alpha is, we're trying to apply those techniques to a very, very complicated and slightly overwhelmingly complex space of digital identity. We're trying to design a product that solves digital identity for the UK users of government services in a way that service teams will adopt because they love it.

Helena Trippe:

And if I can add a little bit of the how, I guess, in terms of how we've been delivering that: we started very early on, even in Discovery stage as, as we've moved into the Alpha, kind of honed that a little bit more, to work very collaboratively with service teams, engaging them early on and trying to really put things in front of them so we get their feedback quite quickly and working iteratively to, to make sure that we can test their expectations. We can understand kind of how they understand identity, what are their mental models around it, that we can also start testing how we are communicating these things to really get feedback really quickly and iteratively and kind of engage them throughout the process. So that's, that's kind of something that we started through the discovery and are continuing to do that through the Alpha. And I believe we'll continue to do and, and grow as we, as we move on.

Will Myddelton:

We're, we are trying to make it easier to access government services where every user has a single set of credentials, typically username and password, that they can use to access any government service in the future so that users don't have to remember lots of different passwords, but also so that like new and exciting things can happen with the future of digital services, where we can start to think about sharing data more easily between services.

And so a key part of that: digital identity is no longer a standalone thing for us. Digital Identity is really a feature of your login to government or your GOV.UK account.

So at the point at which a service like Universal Credit knows that, it needs to know that you are who you say you are to pay you our money, the idea is that you will be logged in with your account, you will do an identity check that will allow Universal Credit to pay out money to you. But then that identity check result will be saved so that every other service that you use after Universal Credit doesn't have to go through the same process. So there's a huge user benefit there, which means you don't have to do this very difficult process again and again.

And there's actually a huge government benefit there, which is that we can start to design services that expect you to be who you say they are, which, which opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you so much for sharing with us, yeah, what, what you are working on. I was wondering, why is this work important for government service teams?

Will Myddelton:

That's a really good question. So...like with all the platforms that GDS makes for government service teams, we've got 2 sets of users and the really obvious one is the end users. And it's really important that we get the identity journeys right for them. But the less obvious one and the one that it's always taken us a while to work out how to design for are service teams around government. So we've done maybe 50 different interviews and research sessions so far with service teams about identity over the last 6 weeks.

And I think there's, there's kind of a few big reasons: one is that it makes identity checks easier for their users. Checking people's identity documents is often quite an onerous process in government. You might have to go down to the Post Office and hand stuff over. You might have to go to have an interview with a passport examiner. You might have to send your passport away - like there's lots of examples where passports are sitting in envelopes in government like processing centres, and that means the user doesn't have that passport for a long time. So services care a lot about their users. And so making things easier for the users when it comes to these difficult things like proving your identity, that's a really big benefit to the service teams.

A second thing that has come out of the research is that, services care a lot about including all their users. So one of the things when we talk about identity that service teams are very worried about is that, yeah, there can be a digital journey that might work for people that have like high strength identity documents, like passports and driving licences and are able to do things digitally online - and that's fine for those users.

But services are very worried about people that don't fit into that group, and that's a lot of people. And so they're worried about that for a couple of reasons. One: because the people that run services are generally really good people and they care. Like they just care, and they want to include everyone that should be able to use their service. And if we're running an identity check and that's the thing that excludes them, then that's a real problem.

But the other reason that service teams care a lot about this is: cost. And it costs service teams an awful lot to, any time someone can't do something in a kind of automated routine way, and that service team has to do manual processing or they have to procure a contract with a supplier so that the people can go and do things with them. So there is actually like a quite a hardcore cost saving element as well, which is that the less inclusive our platform is or identity checks are, the greater the burden of cost, time and effort the service teams have to bear.

Really, what guides all our work at GDS about platforms for service teams is that: we think that service teams should be able to spend their budgets and their time and their human creativity solving the problems that are unique to their service and identity is not really a unique problem. So really behind all of our work is this goal to save service teams time and money by not focussing on problems that everyone has, and instead to be able to focus on their unique users and the service that they're doing.

Helena Trippe:

I think in terms of the findings that we've been seeing through the research, is that service teams really want to be able to do the right thing. So as part of the, the product page concept testing, we started to see that as they kind of engage with information, particularly around like choosing the right level of strength or understanding what documents can be used, they're constantly kind of making those calculations in their head around kind of what's the right trade off, for the sets of users that I'm, I-I need to kind of make sure that I get through my service.

But also, I think another aspect, that for me was really interesting was that we, we also need to kind of be, be aware that we're trying to kind of give them the tools and the information also to make a case internally; to be able to help them convince, I guess, external and internal stakeholders and decision makers about why this is a good thing to, to, to use in the dot. And that, that was really, really, really mind-blowing, at least for me [laughs], in terms of making sure that we can get them to see themselves in, in, in the tools and the information that we're providing.

Vanessa Schneider:

That’s great to know. Obviously we have a service owner present which is priceless, so if you don’t mind me asking, Tom, what are your thoughts on this?

Tom Stewart:

Yeah, I thought perhaps I could add a bit of colour to some of the things that Will and Helena are saying. So when you consider our users, you know, a great deal of our users are, are veterans right? And I say the word veteran, and, and I'm going to guess that many people listening today, your, your mind immediately went to a 90-year old Chelsea pensioner with a red coat.

But of course a, a veteran can be 17 years old, a veteran can be someone who's had one day’s service, accidentally shot themselves in the foot and, and are, are out of the service. And that person is still, is still you know very much a veteran. But that person is a, you know, a lot more digitally literate than the, probably than t-t-the Chelsea pensioner.

I suppose what I'm saying is the, going back to Will's point, i-it was about inclusivity. You know, that's very much at the front of our minds as we, as we develop this service. Cost, yes, i-it, but, of course it factors in. Making it easier for our teams, yes, absolutely vital.

But the, the, the last thing that I don't think I've heard mentioned yet is also, it's about, it's about plugging into the kind of strategic landscape. So my, my ability to, to verify users, has, has a much wider applicability for our business. So, yes, it's great I can use it for Armed Forces Compensation, War Pension - fantastic. But there's so much more that I can do with that. And actually, once we have done all of the work with the integration et cetera, we can quickly pivot at that point to right, ok, we've cracked this. We're answering a whole question. Now what can we do for these people over here?

Helena Trippe:

What we started to see as well is particularly from speaking to local authorities - so we have been speaking to a few local authorities as part of the, the, the research process, that almost identity is an enabler for them to do all sorts of things, including getting staff onto the systems to be able to allocate work or do casework or, or process council tax information.

Vanessa Schneider:

That is brilliant to hear. So I know that within 4 months, you've talked to more than, I don't know, it's been hundreds and hundreds of end users, multiple dozens of service teams. I'm really keen to find out what it is that you've learnt so far?

Will Myddelton:

Yeah, I mean, there are new learnings too. So talking about the approach we've taken, I think it's important to talk about that, that we take 2 different approaches when we're thinking about designing the service team.

So, so the one that we talk about mostly here is, is a very bottom-up approach. It's recognising that services are delivered by small groups of motivated people working in a really distributed government, where actually sometimes the lines of communication and control from the top of the department are not always clear. So sometimes sitting at the centre of government, it looks like you can make a change around government by speaking to the departments and that that will filter down. But our experience with Government as a Platform is that's, that's absolutely the opposite of what's going on here.

So we have a 2-pronged approach to how we think about designing with service teams. One is that we, we, we want to speak to people who are working in service teams, any people - Product Managers, Technical Architects, caseworkers, policy people - because these are teams of people and they, they vary considerably around government, so we want to speak to people who are thinking about identity.

And the reason we want to speak to them is: we need to be able to do a user-centred design process with those people that might include, like interviewing them about their context and their needs or showing them prototypes of what we're doing and seeing how they land with them and how we're talking about it or like actually watching them integrate with our system. So when we're, got some documentation, sitting them in with Developers and watching them go through our onboarding steps. And all of that is in service of: we're trying to shape the product to meet their needs and then we're trying to communicate about the product in a way that makes it clear that we meet their needs and then we're trying to make the product easy to use so that there are no barriers to them using it.

Unfortunately, in government, like there is no like recruitment agency that goes out and finds us service teams and there is no list of service teams in government. So what we really have to do, and we learnt this on Notify and Pay and Government as a Platform, is we have to generate hype about what we're doing and then have people come to us. And that's a really good test for us, because what it says to us is: if what you're doing is not exciting, you're not going to generate demand, which doesn't give you people for research, which means you can't generate a product that meets user needs. So it's a really high bar for us to go through. But that's the bar that, that makes this stuff work for us; is we have to generate excitement and then turn that excitement into research sessions with people that haven't seen our product before and then use that to develop a product that really excites people. It's like a little virtuous circle.

So we spent a bunch of time setting up that process and part of why we're on this podcast and talking about it so that anyone that hears this that works on a service team or knows people that work on a service team is thinking about identity, we would love you to get in touch and take part in our research. It's fun. Like we are really, you know respectful people, we're here to understand your stories. And you will get to play with the early versions of our prototypes and our product and you will get to influence direction. So that's the bottom-up approach.

But we also are not naive. We understand that there is a top-down approach as well. So we are out engaging with all of the major departments that provide identity solutions. In the last couple of weeks, I've been in really quite amazing sessions with HMRC [Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs], DWP [Department for Work & Pensions], Home Office - these people that have been grappling with identity for years, and they're very graciously sharing their learnings and their challenges and things that they should tell us to watch out for.

But Vanessa, what you really asked is what we've learnt, so one of the things that we've learnt is that we, we do have to be able to talk about how we're different to Verify, because people that think about digital identity know about Verify. And unless we mention it, it's the elephant in the room. So, so there are 4 ways that we're different to Verify.

The first is that we're really focussed on the idea that this is for everyone this time. We didn't do inclusion well enough on Verify. We've got a team of people, we've got objectives, long-term objectives and goals in our programme, set around making sure that we don't exclude people. So that's one really big way.

A second way that we're different is that we don't have what are called third-party identity providers. So the way that Verify worked is you would have to pick a private sector company to verify your identity. And what it really did was it separated us from all the performance data that we should have been using to improve the system, because all of that was hidden away from us in these third-party companies by design. But it meant it was really hard for us to make incremental improvements to our product.

The third way that we're really different is that we're not taking a one-size-fits-all approach. Verify had a very much all-or-nothing approach. You set the level of identity that you wanted and people either passed or they failed. And if they failed, firstly, the service didn't get any information about why they failed or what they'd passed on. And secondly, the user had to enter all that information again next time around. None of it was saved.

So we're experimenting with lots of different ways this time that we can take a much more nuanced approach to help pass across information about the 'was successful' to the service teams so they can pick that up and do their own checks on the service if they need to. And on the user side, anything they've already entered and already passed is saved for any future identity check.

And then the final way, which you'll hear me go on about and you are hearing me go on about till I'm blue in the face, is that we are designing with the needs of service teams from day one. So I know we said that it can't all be about what's different from Verify, but it is really important for us to talk to teams about what is different from Verify as a way to show that we have learnt.

Helena Trippe:

In terms of the findings, but also I guess what's really exciting from a service design point of view is that we've also been kind of trying to understand, how - within the constraints that we, we need to operate within - so, you know, making sure that we deliver something that's easy to use, that's simple enough, so that it's not too complicated in either for us to build or for service teams to integrate with, having and exploring, I guess, where the identity check might be fitting in within a service journey.

So we started to see from the early discovery work, but also some of the prototype testing that we were doing on the product page, how people were kind of trying to understand as well, “well, how do I fit the identity processing, the identity journey within my, within my own kind of service journey?”.

But also kind of, again thinking through those trade-offs that they're making. So: “ok, so if I put it in the beginning of the journey, will that create too much of a barrier for my users? Or if I put it at the end of the journey, will that allow me then at least to collect all the eligibility information that the applicant has submitted and then take a view as to whether the applicant can actually go ahead with this particular identity journey or another identity journey that might be available?”. So that, that was really interesting to, to see and kind of see the appetite as well for, for that.

I was just going to add, I guess that, a thank you, actually, for your service teams. I think they've been incredibly generous with their time, incredibly generous with their knowledge. We've, we're learning. And it, and no, no matter how many times you go out to speak to people, you kind of always, I'm always amazed at how, how generous people are in terms of sharing their time, their knowledge and what they've, what they've learnt. So a big thank you.

Will Myddelton:

Yeah, I-I-I totally agree with that, Helena. So I think that, from the 50 research sessions we've done with service teams about identity so far, I think there's 3 big questions that we know we need to answer really early on in that service team’s experience of our product.

So the first one is: “what on earth is an identity check and how does it fit in with my existing service?” And the reason that's so important to answer is because until we've, like, communicated the ways that our identity checks can fit in, you know, whether it's at the beginning or the end or at multiple points in a service, is really difficult to talk about, like the other benefits of them, right?

As soon as teams understand that, they move on to the second question, which is, “ok, fine. But how do I know this is going to work for all of my users?” And the research that we've done over the last 2 or 3 weeks has really led us to think that there's 3 ways that we need to talk about that.

One is we need to talk about how accessible our product and our identity checks will be. But to be honest, service teams just expect that we will do that and we expect that we will do that as well. So that's more of a reassurance than a, a big question.

The 2 things that we really need to talk about and be clear when it comes to inclusion are: what documents people can use - because services are very aware that not everyone has passports and driving licences, so we need to be very clear that our system allows people to use many more documents to prove their identity than simply driving licences and passports - and secondly, and I think the thing that has emerged really strongly from the research, is we need to talk much more convincingly about what it means to do identity checks in different channels.

And then the third question that we need to answer, which, let's be honest, is not a question of any service thing comes to us with, but as a result of the way that we're thinking about the product, is: “what are these 3 strengths of identity check or 4 strengths of identity check? And how do I pick the one that is right for my service?”

And I think this is the hardest thing that we face because it's quite a weird, abstract thing, these strengths of identity check. Because for each strength of identity check - we, we call them low, medium, high and extra high - you might choose a higher strength if you're doing something risky, like paying out money, and a lower strength if you're doing something less risky, like letting a user view some non-controversial data about themself.

But it's really hard to help services see themselves in that strength system because what you're doing in that strength system is you're trading off, like, risk of fraud and risk of security by going higher, but the higher you go, the fewer people are going to be able to complete that check because the harder it gets. And we're, we're really focussing on how we can explain that in a way that makes those trade-offs obvious to users.

And I think if I step back from those 3 questions, I think we've learnt something bigger in the last few weeks, which feels like a bit of an 'a-ha' moment for us, which is that the strength of the check plus the document that the user brings and the channel that the user does it in, combines to create a unique user journey for that context. And because it's combinatorial - there are 4 strengths, you might have 10 documents, each of which can be checked 2 or 3 ways across 4 channels - you're talking about hundreds of unique user journeys.

And so I think the thing that we've learnt over the last few weeks is that our core challenge is helping service teams understand what is going on with that weird, like, multiplicity of user journeys because they're going to be sitting in the service’s journey. So they need to know, before they even think about how to integrate, they need to understand the implications of those things.

And I'll say, I'll say one more thing that we’ve learnt: there is sometimes a tension between the things that our service team users need and that our job is to resolve that tension. So on the one hand, service teams need widely inclusive identity checks, and on the other hand, in research, service teams expect to be able to do things like specify which documents they will accept or which channels their users can use.

But actually, if you think about the user journey, is the result of strength plus document plus channel: the service only gets to choose the strength. Because the user gets to choose the document they have and the user gets to choose the channel. Services can't choose the documents and they can't choose the channels because that widens the inclusion of the product, which is a bigger need for service teams. And we've learnt that there is sometimes a tension between the, the different needs that service teams have. And we're going to have to do a better job of explaining why our product has decided to, to do things in a certain way.

Vanessa Schneider:

Well, I was going to ask you, Tom, Will mentioned a bit earlier in his answer that hype is necessary in order to generate interest of service teams. Is this conversation the kind of hype that drew you in?

Tom Stewart:

Absolutely. I-I-I love this conversation. I love the process of, of user research from beginning to end. I can absolutely attest to the, to the fun part that Will mentioned. We're having some great conversations with, with GDS and your teams just now. I-I'm particularly sensitive around content, around the language. So I, so I think I've been particularly challenging with some of your content design team about, the use of particular words and things like that. You know, all in, all in, for the best possible reasons, you know, to get the, to get the best result, best product.

We've, we've also had some particularly interesting conversations in Defence around that, again, the, the levels that, that we've been talking about. And a-again, I'm sitting here nodding away, whilst Will was talking. So, again, some really rich conversation.

To get back to your question, it was about the hype. And absolutely, yep, yep. We've, we've been caught up in that. We are encouraging it. We are, we're helping that, we're helping that, that that hype, we're helping to keep that going basically. I've been involved in this work for some, well really from its inception.

And I-I think it's absolutely a vital part of my role that I go back to Defence and I'm really, really quite loud about this work, you know. Anyone that will listen, anyone I think should listen or should know about this is hearing about this work because of the work that we're doing in Veterans UK. The, the, the hype is essential.

Vanessa Schneider:

[laughs] Brilliant. Well we're always looking forward to new listeners. I was wondering, how is it that you found out that this work was happening? How did the first contact to the GDS team get established?

Tom Stewart:

So, so I was one of those teams where Verify was a, an integral part of our, the technical solution. But we, you know, we engaged uh, with GDS and said, “right, how can we-- you know, presumably you've, you've got something in the pipeline. You know you're developing something new. How do we, how can we help you with that? You know, how can my, how can my user research assist you? You know, how can my Service Designer assist what, what you're doing over there? You know, can we, can we share our work?”

Vanessa Schneider:

That makes a lot of sense, it's great to see that the relationship has been such a productive one from the beginning. Well, in that case, Will, Helena, I just want to know, are there more opportunities for service teams to get involved with you? How do they do that if it's the case?

Will Myddelton:

I mean, yes, of course, there are. Like we're, we're, we're built on the goodwill of colleagues around government. Our products are only as good as the amount of, like, colleagues that volunteer their time to take part in research sessions.

The easiest way is to go to: sign hyphen in dot service dot GOV.UK [sign-in.service.gov.uk] and you'll see the GOV.UK sign product page and there's a big button on there called 'register your interest'. And whether you're interested in just login and authentication, which is what that page is mainly about, or whether you are interested in identity, if you register your interest on that page, one of our researchers will be in touch with you to do a preliminary interview to understand what your needs are, and then we triage that and you will be involved in one of our research sessions that is most appropriate to you and your service.

Please get involved. And some of the kind of research that we're likely to do over the next few months: some of it is like concept research - like there's going to be this product in the future, like how do you talk about how it would meet your needs or what wouldn't meet your needs? So that, that's really helping us design what the future state is, which then helps us design all the steps to get there.

And we also simultaneously doing research on the authentication products that we have launched first. So that's about like the first use of that as in your team. So if you want to integrate authentication and GOV.UK accounts into your service, you can, we're going to be doing research with people that look at the, the onboarding steps. Because what we've learned from doing these platform products in the past is that: it's not easy to onboard these platform products. And the way that we need to talk about it gets shaped by you know, round after round after round of that research.

So yeah, we really value that. And like Tom has said, we think they're actually quite fun experiences to be part of as well.

Vanessa Schneider:

Right, brilliant. So you've heard it, folks, get in touch. We've clearly covered a lot of ground already, but I was wondering maybe, Helena, you could start us off with telling us what's next for you.

Helena Trippe:

So, as Will suggested, we've kind of, as part of the, the, the research that we've been doing in the past 6 weeks, we've been very much focussing maybe a year, 18 months ahead, looking at the future of, the future state, of the identity product: trying to understand how teams and service teams engage with those concepts to also understand whether we are understanding it in the right way as a programme and have consistency, in terms of what we're talking about, particularly around kind of strength levels.

But I think for, for us now, there's a lot of focus on supporting as well the onboarding for the authentication journey, including looking at some of the support models in the service, management models around supporting users and service teams to link up with the authentication side of things and the sign on side of things. So that's quite exciting. I think we're very much trying to explore the extent as well of the self-service kind of model for support and what we can put in place to make sure that people feel supported, but also that it's not too much of a burden for us and service teams to, to be able to deliver that.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great, Tom, how about you, where do you see this going next for you?

Tom Stewart:

So we, we're squaring up for a Beta assessment towards the autumn this year. Which is very exciting. And there's a lot work going on just now to work out, to, to work out where precisely this work with GDS, where that lands. Like you know, should I, should I postpone the Beta perhaps for a more, for a more complete service or do I just turn up at the Beta with you know, very clear plans as to what my, what my plans are for the future and hope that I can still make a compelling, convincing case that we should be able to go live in the interim. So there's a lot of really rich conversation going on around that just now.

And otherwise, the plan is to-to very much pester you and GDS and make sure that we, that we stay as close to the front of the queue as possible, to continue working with you to continue to take your advice, but also hopefully to continue to have some of our advice received in kind. So, yeah, very exciting times for us in general.

Vanessa Schneider:

Well, consider yourself forewarned [laughs] Tom told you he'd pester you. Will, do you want to round us off with what you think's up next for you?

Will Myddelton:

So we got a new Director, Natalie Jones, who's joining us in September. And that's really exciting. She comes with a huge amount of experience of delivering really innovative and you know, worthwhile, usable, workable digital identity products with the Home Office. So we're really excited about Natalie joining our programme.

Beyond that, identity work goes through its alpha self-assessment in September. So our identity teams are all hyper-focussed on that. A little bit nervous. Little bit excited. Getting people from around government to mark our work is a sign of a robust assessment process. And so we're, we're proud to take part in that. But it is also you know, tough, as anyone that's been through service assessment will attest.

And we are going live with the first service that will be using GOV.UK Signin for authentication, and that will be in October. So that's a really big deal for us. And Helena talks about we're focussing on supporting the delivery of that. So we're downing tools on some of our identity concept work for just a few weeks so that we can make sure that that launch goes smoothly because all of our identity work builds on top of the authentication work.

Vanessa Schneider:

I have to say, I am really excited by the picture that you're painting, so I can't wait to see how it goes.

Thank you for joining me today on the podcast. It's been really great to hear how GDS is co-designing this work with other parts of government, hearing how it's being received by those parts of government, and just making sure that it's a truly collaborative product that works for all users, whether that's citizens or colleagues in the public sector. So just another reminder, in case we haven't said it often enough, if you are a service team in government and you're interested in becoming an early adopter, or if you work in a public sector service team more generally and want to share your experience for our research, you can visit the product page, that's: sign hyphen in dot service dot gov dot UK [sign-in.service.gov.uk] and you can register your interest. That was snappy. [laughs]

You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on PodBean.

Goodbye!

Will Myddelton:

Goodbye.

Helena Trippe:

Goodbye.

Tom Stewart:

Thanks everyone. Goodbye.

GDS Podcast #32: Technologists at GDS Jul 28, 2021

We talk coding, solving common problems once and share some of the exciting challenges our developers, engineers and technical architects are working on.

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Louise Harris:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Louise Harris and I head up the Creative and Channels Team at GDS. In this episode, we're talking about our wonderful technologists. The Site Reliability Engineers, Technical Architects and Developers who work in multidisciplinary teams to engineer solutions to our complex architectural needs, evolve our infrastructure and tooling to keep us resilient and online, and develop digital products and services used by millions of people across the UK, and that are emulated by governments around the world.

Technologists are a mainstay of how we help government transform and tackle complexity for users. Think about GOV.UK: it's actually 50 front and back end applications that are independently hosted and maintained that enable us to host over a million pages, deal with millions of visits a day and fend off regular Denial-of-Service attacks. But thanks to our technologists, all our end users see is a single site they can access day and night to get the information they need from government.

Tackling that kind of complexity is not always easy, but it's definitely worthwhile. And it's what GDS is here to do. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Himal Mandalia and Louise Ryan to talk about the important role GDS technologists play. Louise, Himal, why don't you introduce yourselves to our listeners and tell us a bit about your roles.

Louise Ryan:

Hello, I'm Louise Ryan, I'm the Lead Technical Architect and Head of Technology in Government as a Platform. I joined GDS just under 4 years ago and I joined us from the private sector where I worked in a digital agency as a Technical Architect.

Himal Mandalia:

And I'm Himal, I'm Head of Technology for GOV.UK, and I joined about 5 months ago, and I've been working in digital circles for about 6 years as a contractor in several roles, including Developer, Technical Architect and a Technology Advisor.

Louise Harris:

So, Louise, it sounds like we've been lucky enough to have you at GDS for a couple of years now, and Himal, we've recently lured you over from another part of government. What is it that appeals to you both about working at GDS?

Louise Ryan:

Oh wow. Such, such a big question. There's so much to like about GDS and working in digital in government in general, really. I always like refer people to the GOV.UK Design Principles and the Service Standard. So if you take a look at that, it's all about doing things the right way, about doing things for everybody, having a multidisciplinary team focussing on what the actual problems are, not solutionising. Building services, not just websites, so we continuously improve things. All sorts of that stuff, but also the tech we use is really cool as well. So it's, it's pretty modern stuff: lots of Infrastructure as Code, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Delivery and lots of automated testing. Yeah, I mean, I could go on for a long, long time, but this is a, you know I think it's a brilliant place to work and I love it.

Louise Harris:

And Louise, just, just for our listeners who are maybe less familiar with Government as a Platform, or what we call GaaP, can you just run us through a bit what it’s all about?

Louise Ryan:

So Government as a Platform [GaaP], is a suite of digital services designed to meet common needs which can be quickly integrated into-into other service teams services. This helps reduce duplication, variation and it-it enables other digital teams to build their digital solutions much quicker, much faster, much more efficiently.

In terms of what the various services do, Notify is, is an extremely busy service. It's used by, I think around 4,700 other services. That's around 1000 organisations across the public sector using it. So it's scaling at around 120 new services joining every month. So that is, that's pretty big. So in, in, in terms of the last year, they've seen a-a 25 fold increase in volume of messages. And so that was a massive scaling challenge for the team that they, they just really smashed out the park. They're mostly hosted on the PaaS, which is really cool, and it's kind of asynchronous architecture so there's a lot of queues helping us process messages. You know it enables us to scale and enables us to retry when things break. So it's,it's good architecture.

[GOV.UK] Pay take payments, take card payments for your digital services. It also, you can also use Apple Pay and Google Pay to pay for stuff. I think one of the main selling points of Pay is how much we care and test about the, the journey, the paying experience for people who use assistive technologies. So we really put a lot of effort into making sure it works really well for everybody. That's built mostly on Fargate, and, and uses some you know, it's got to be PCI [Payment Card Industry] compliant, so it's a, it's a complex, necessarily complex architecture. It scales really well and it's been used by, I think, over 550 large services now, and it's processed over a billion pounds.

[GOV.UK] Platform as a Service: you host your, you can use Platform as a Service to host your web apps in the cloud without relying on, without worrying about the infrastructure underneath. So you can build your app in Python, Ruby or Rust or pop it in a container and then push it up to PaaS. And there you go, you've got a running app in the cloud. Also provides a bunch of backend services you can use. So backend services means databases like PostgreSQL, things like ElasticSearch or queue services like simple queue service from AWS. That's, that's the scale of this is, is, is very impressive. It's being used by just over 121 organisations and between the two regions in London and Ireland that it's hosted in, it's hosts, it's running around 2,800 apps at the moment. And they're processing an amazing amount of incoming requests: so we've got an average of around 300 requests per second coming through those pipes. So that's quite cool.

And then we've got the Design System and the Prototype Kit Team. The Design System look after GOV.UK frontend, which is that set of styles, patterns and components that other teams use to build their frontend. What's really important about those patterns and components is that they've been researched extensively and tested extensively across a vast array of digital devices and operating systems and with real people and with assistive devices. So we can be sure that they're, you know they're, they're working. So obviously we do that once so service teams around the country don't have to keep doing that work. It really is an open source project as well, the Design System. It actively seeks contributions from the design and frontend communities a-across, across government. And that's, that's really cool. And it's yeah, it's used quite. It's, GitHub tells me it's, it's in use by over 2,600 other repositories.

Louise Harris:

That must be so cool to be involved in work that’s being forked off, and used in so many other contexts. Is it safe to say that there’s some stuff that you can get done at GDS that maybe you can’t get done elsewhere?

Louise Ryan:

Yeah, I think it is. We are at the centre of government, being part Cabinet Office. If we're not going to do it in the centre, then it's not just gonna magically happen elsewhere in government. Those tools exist so other service teams can-can really benefit from having things done once really well in the centre so they don't have to keep reinventing that wheel. They can-they can just get started really quickly and benefit from all that work that we've done really well just once.

Louise Harris:

And it's not, it's not just teams kind of in and around the UK government that are getting to benefit from that approach either right? Some of our code has also been forked by international governments to do their own thing too. What do you think are some of the sort of GDS led technology success stories out there?

Louise Ryan:

Oh, wow. Yeah. So there's lots of examples of this happening. So take, for example, Notify. That's been forked and used by the Canadian government and the Australian government to create their own notification platforms. And, you know, t-t-that doesn't just-just happen and then stop. We continue to collaborate with those teams working on this platforms so we can all learn from each other. And it's not just about the tech either - that's really important thing. So obviously Notify have developed a whole bunch of operational practices and services around the service itself. So we share, we share those as well and you know, help people figure out what works, what doesn't.

And it's not just Notify. So PaaS. PaaS works with, that's Platform as a Service, they work with their equivalents in-in Australia and, and the US government to share best practice. And then you've got the wonderful Design System that's been forked by a lot of countries. And not just other countries, but other authorities within-within the UK. So, for example, my own council, Wiltshire Council, they forked the Design System and used it to build their own website. But in terms of other countries. I think it's used in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and the Netherlands. So, yeah, massive, massive success stories of-of re-use of our, of our hard work.

Louise Harris:

Wow, so lots to be proud of. And Himal, I guess same question to you - what is it that drew you to GDS?

Himal Mandalia:

I think GDS is sort of interestingly positioned right at the centre and, and being sort of highly visible, like it can be an exemplar of what good, sort of long live teams, services looks like. So all of the things that are articulated in the Service Standard, in the Technology Code of Practice, you know, we-we work to those ourselves since we-since we developed them. But I think what we've quite clearly put out very recently in the GDS strategy for the next 3 years, the core 5 missions, particularly the ones around GDS being the place, essentially the shop that builds and runs the common components and platforms that the rest of government build services on top of. I think that is now clearer, clearer than it's ever been. And you know there's something that, for me anyway, when I was thinking about a bit of a career change last year, drew me and I thought: this is a really interesting time to come in and join. There's a-there's a real sort of transformation of energy in the air again.

Louise Harris:

So it’s great for our teams to know that their work is having an impact not just here in the UK and for our users, but also around the world as well. And Himal, like you say to be part of that, what did you call it, transformation buzz? I think that kind of flies in the face of the idea that jobs in the civil service are sort of slow or old school right?

Do-do you think there are other misconceptions about what a technology job in government might be like, versus what it’s actually like at GDS day to day?

Himal Mandalia:

I think what's interesting here is, you know we're about a decade into a transformation journey that's bringing in the sort of technology practices around Continuous Delivery, being Agile, having autonomous self organising teams and a lot of the-the technology driven processes that surround that in the ways of working. And I think it's easy for us to lose sight of the uneven distribution and maturity of this across government. So I think it's, I think it's interesting because government can't be seen as a, as a monolithic thing. I think if you're outside and you're thinking of you know, if you're, if you're a Developer or a Reliability Engineer or a Technical Architect and you think, you know you want to work in government, you want to work in the public sector - and that could be local authorities as well of course - it is, it is a very unevenly distributed landscape of maturity. I mean, I would say we're pretty much at the, at the higher end of the maturity curve at GDS here, of course, because what we've been doing for the last decade. And I think what's exciting for me as someone that's worn many hats and played different roles in this sort of journey is: it's, it-it can be, it can be rewarding to work somewhere where a lot of the basic capabilities, the fundamental enablers are already in place and you can deliver value and work with teams. If you consider GDS, then you would find something that's much more a-akin to a sort of modern sort of conventional tech company.

Louise Harris:

I think that digital maturity curve point is such a good one. Because yeah, with almost 10 years under our belt GDS has definitely been through a lot that foundational and capability building stuff that some other organisations might still be grappling with, and I think that gives us a kind of view on what their pain points are so we can shape products and platforms that are gonna meet their needs at different parts of the curve.

And I think that actually leads us quite nicely to the next thing that I wanted to chat to you both about.

So our regular listeners will know that earlier in the year, we launched our new strategy and centred it around 5 key missions. If you missed it, check out our May episode of the Podcast where you can hear our Chief Exec, Tom Read, talk more about that.

But in essence I suppose, over the next few years, our focus boils down to this: helping to create services that just work for the user. So no matter how complex the underlying systems are or how much these people know about government, we’re going to make services that just work.

So mission 4 in our strategy that’s looking at how we can make sort of effortless for departments and agencies to digitise their services by looking at centrally-developed common components.

Louise, maybe you can tell us a bit about what’s happening in that area?

Louise Ryan:

I mean to sum it up, you know, we've got a bunch of really cool services that are already providing value. So as a piece of work, that's ongoing to just make sure they keep delivering value and can scale with the increasing usage that they experience.

We're also you know, obviously building on top of that and looking what else we can do to meet user needs. One exciting part of that is the work we're doing in the collecting information from users team. So that team is well, I think it sums ups, sums up its work. It's...you know, we want every single form that's published on GOV.UK to be accessible. That's huge. A lot of the forms on GOV.UK at the moment are published in PDF or, or other document formats.They present challenges, especially to-to users who, who need to use assistive technologies such as screen readers or magnifiers. And actually completing PDF online is-is no easy task either. It's pretty difficult. Whereas completing an online form is a much better user experience and hopefully much more accessible. So it's, that is a, that is a massive problem space, and a really interesting one. And we're just entering an Alpha-Alpha phase with that team. So it's, yeah, so it's very exciting challenge we presented with ourselves in, in GaaP.

Louise Harris:

And I don't think we can really kind of understate the scale of that challenge, because I think everybody around GDS we treat PDF's a little bit like our, a 4 letter word. But the team blogged recently and I think equated that if, without doing this work, if we were just relying on the existing kind of form building systems that were out there, it would take government about 70 years just to convert the PDF's that already live on GOV.UK, which are obviously growing, if not every day, then certainly most weeks. So super important work. Was there anything that came out of the discovery that-that surprised you folks?

Louise Ryan:

I think-I think you've, you’ve hit the nail on the head. It's the scale of the challenge. And it certainly surprised me. But when you, when you think about it, it's, it's not that surprising, actually, because there's teams right around government that don't have the digital capability to do anything else. This is, you know PDF's and other, other document formats are the tool they have, so that's the tool they, they have to use. So, again, GaaP is uniquely placed in the centre of government to do something about that. And that's, that's hopefully what we'll be able to do in the coming years.

Louise Harris:

So it sounds like through Government as a Platform right now, we are already kind of solving common problems at scale. But, but what about - and sorry to make you solutionise on the fly here Louise, because I know that everything we do is evidence based and user led - where do you see the next, beyond the collecting information from users work, do you see any themes emerging about where that next common problem is that GDS might want to solve?

Louise Ryan:

Yeah, so we are doing some research on this, so, but I don't want to pre-empt that, but I'm, I can, you know, there's, there's stuff we already know that, that service teams have to just keep doing over and over again. There's you know, there's thin--complex problems that don't seem complex until you really dig into them. So things like a postcode lookup. Service teams have to keep doing that, is-is there a way we can, we can provide a solution for that in the centre?

Louise Harris:

And that's all such important stuff right if we, if we want to deliver the transformation at the scale that we, we all want to see.

One of our other central focuses is going to be this idea of joining up services so they solve whole user problems even if that means spanning multiple departments. Himal, I guess - as the platform for government services - GOV.UK is going to be pretty fundamental to how we get that done right?

Himal Mandalia:

Yes, so it's interesting because people can get a little bit, a little bit confused about what we mean when we say GOV.UK. So if we think about it as sort of layers of the onion: the sort of widest layer you have, what is known as the GOV.UK proposition. So that, as a user, you know, you go somewhere, you see a website, you see something that's branded with the crown and the stylings around that: that's a GOV.UK site. But it could very easily be a transactional service you interact with for--to do ev-everything from paying your taxes to a prison visit to renew your driving licence. And those are all on the GOV.UK proposition. So they feel like a single website as you move across them. And we have mechanisms like the Service Standard. If you work to that, that means that you're going to end up with a pretty joined up journey.

But for me, the-the-the layer of GOV.UK that I work on and the technology I'm responsible for, that's the GOV.UK content. That’s-that's the main page that you come to when you go to www.GOV.UK. That is a large platform with hundreds of thousands of pages of content that we-we hold and a set of tools that we run for thousands of users across government to create, to offer that content, to edit it, to manage it, including our internal content teams here. And we also run technology, which, of course, delivers all those pages so they-re, they're available globally.

Louise Harris:

And right now, a lot of that content is quite static right? Because we need to publish it and serve it quickly and then hold it in the cache and serve it up again over and over.

Himal Mandalia:

Yeah, exactly. GOV.UK delivers a lot of content right now, but it's usually...it's relatively static, it's relatively flat content, it's pages. And one of the things that we're exploring now is if you have an account, if we, based on consent, if we know some things about you - your approximate location or other attributes we have - we may be able to tailor that content. We may be able to personalise it, to put content in front of you that's relevant to what you're doing. Maybe even be proactive, send you personalised notifications with of course, a full consent model and opt in and easy opt out around that.

But in order to do that, in order to personalise the content or even have content chunked up so it can be contextual, so a different snippet is mixed in based on a tag or some piece of data that we're using to construct that, that, all of that will require a fundamental re-architecting of GOV.UK's applications. So the front end applications need to change dramatically in order to stitch together that content in real time. The way that content is stored, the way it's structured, the schemas that are used to determine how that content is broken down into small snippets, how it's tagged, the taxonomy - all of that needs a rethink and redesign. And the publishing tools themselves, the tools that are used by the service essentially that is used by the content creators, that experience they have in not only creating content, but the taxonomy they're applying to it, how they're tagging it - all of that needs a rethink and a redes-redesign as well.

So that sounds huge and it is. But it's not a sort of big bang, all at once programme of work. This is an incremental and iterative stream of work, like, like how we do everything, which is going to, which is going to be done bit by bit. The interesting challenges that we are talking about rebuilding the ship while there are people in it bit by bit. And this is very much that Ship of Theseus metaphor right? We're replacing the planks, and when we're done, it's going to be a very different looking ship. It's going to be a ship that does very different things. But we're not even completely clear exactly what it looks like, but if we really extend the metaphor, we do have a good idea of where we're going.

Louise Harris:

And that personalisation agenda that you talked about there Himal, it sounds to me like it's going to ma-make [laughs] the site work a lot harder. I mean, we're already processing thousands and thousands of kind of transactional services, but this sounds like a real shift. You talked about the GOV.UK Account functionality as well, which obviously we piloted last year and had, I think, about 50,000 people sign up for that as part of the Brexit Checker, Brexit Transition Checker. We’ve obviously been iterating that software ever since. Can you tell us a little bit about where we’re at now with Accounts?

Himal Mandalia:

So what we've done to test the hypothesis with the Brexit Transition Checker and the-the prototype account functionality, which which has been amazing, which has been an amazing learning experience because we have had, as you, as you mentioned there, 50,000 people sign up, but because we're working off of an architecture and an infrastructure set up that doesn't support this yet, we have done those as, as a separate applications, which we've used, we've hosted in, in Platform as a Service, in PaaS actually, one of the products Louise mentioned and is responsible for which is, which is great, just to be able to use our own tools for things like this.

But in order to have that as part of GOV.UK's core architecture, to support more of that personalisation, that's what we do need to have that re-think, that re-design and that re-architecting of all of our frontend apps and our publishing tools and the content platform.

So I'm currently working on the future platform services and architecture strategy for GOV.UK. So all of the things I've just mentioned there are going to be sort of written up in plain language around what we're thinking of. And I-I view GOV.UK breaking out into a few really simple long term value propositions or services and platforms, and they are: presentation, or the frontend, what you experience as www.GOV.UK when you go there; the publishing service or tools that our thousands of users across government use; a content platform, that engine, that heart of content that does all the heavy lifting; and underneath all of that, the infrastructure platform that runs the applications, the databases, all of those things. And really looking to put an emphasis on the content platform, that engine of content and trying to move to a world where we can almost think of GOV.UK as a, as a sort of headless machine, that it does have a frontend, but really the most prominent part is the functionality that does all the lifting. Because in future there may be an app, there may be other ways, we may be syndicating content - these are all things we want to test. But having the flexibility and the ability to do that is, is vital because the way people, the way people interact with services online is quite different now to how it was a decade ago, and so we need to move on and have a much more Agile, much more flexible architecture that lets us meet users where they are rather than having a, just a website. You know we don't, we don't live in that era anymore.

Louise Harris:

So sounds then like we want to shift to a, a bit more of a channel agnostic approach then. Louise, you’re a Technical Architect, what’s your take on Himal’s just said?

Louise Ryan:

Yeah, it's-it's a bit daunting actually [laughs]. Himal won't mind me saying that. You've got, it's a, it's a big job to re-architect such a big and important platform as GOV.UK. It's, it's really exciting. And it, you know, it's, yeah, you won't be on your own Himal. You know, the rest of-of GDS is-is very interested in this work as well, and there's crossovers right? Government as a Platform is very interested in, in what's happening with GOV.UK Accounts, because we might be able to use those features in our services. So for example, [GOV.UK] Pay: when someone's paying for something, if they're signed into their account, maybe they can save that, that payment method if they want to. Yeah, just solutionising on the fly, because obviously we'd need to research that to see if it was a, a thing people would be interested in. But, but obviously we you know, we're keeping a very close eye on what, what Himal's up to and, and wanna be part of it where we can.

Himal Mandalia:

I-I 100% agree with that, Louise. I think the thing here is, I think the, I think what we're doing with our, with our Digital Identity programme, with the GOV.UK Accounts, it really is, it really is that golden thread. It is the thing that ties all of this together. It does, it does offer the cohesion between all of our products and services. So we blur the boundaries between them. And I think notifications, payments, the publishing, the content delivery, all of that, and then, and then you bring into that all of the services across government as well, they're all tied together through your account. So what you end up with ultimately is a completely seamless experience, a citizen shouldn't need to, shouldn't, you shouldn't, it shouldn't even occur to them that a separate group of people delivered this piece as opposed to another bit.

Louise Harris:

As you say some kind of huge, huge programmes of work coming up, sounds like we're probably going to need a few-few additional crew. If-if people are interested in getting involved in this, where-where can they go to find out more?

Himal Mandalia:

So if you search for GDS careers, you'll find our careers site. We have a, we have a campaign going to hire Developers right now, but more will be launching soon. I'm particularly keen on trying to see about bringing juniors in. We need, we need more, we need more juniors into to-to-to not only be working with our teams, but also to be engaging in things that we've done previously at GDS like firebreaks, where you get that little bit of free time to experiment and come up with things. And of course, there will be a range of more senior roles as well. They'll be, they'll be more roles going out across-across the board at all levels.

Louise Harris:

So there’s lots of really great new job opportunities coming up across GDS. For people who might be interested in that, what would you say the culture is like in our teams?

Himal Mandalia:

I think having, having just come through a crisis, or crises, where we were highly visible and doing a lot of work to surface essential guidance around Coronavirus, we've had to organise ourselves around mission focussed teams, which has meant a-a lot of the work that we planned and even written about, I-I think I've, since starting you know, I've dug into some of the blog posts that we put out in 2016 and 17, amazing planning around publishing tools and platform that we were not able to pick up or continue because, because of emergency work, urgent priorities around Coronavirus and some of the work around Brexit as well, those are all things we can return to now.

H aving gotten to know my technologists community over the last 5 months, I think there's a real appetite to return to some of those longer term value streams - so working on services, being in long live teams, and what I'd mentioned earlier around things like a publishing service and content platform. You know, really giving groups of people, not just Developers, but Designers and everyone involved in a multidisciplinary team, that agency and that long term ownership over a problem and o-o-over, over the improvement of something. So I think some of that excitement is coming back now. And so, yeah, it's, it's a great time to join. It's a very active community.

Louise Ryan:

I-I don’t think I’ve shouted from the rooftops enough about how important long-lived autonomous teams are. They really are the, the reason that Government as a Platform has been suc--as successful as it has. There, there's people that are really committed to these services, really understand the problem spaces inside and out and just, yeah, deliver amazing results and outcomes as, as a result. And yeah, this is, this is not just from a technical perspective that you know, we-we-we couldn't build the tech we build without the help of our, our user-centred design colleagues and product and delivery.

We are...the selling points from me I mentioned earlier is-is how we work in teams, as a unit, how we figure out with things that we-we should be working on, making sure they are the things of most value and really understanding the problem space and then developing the tech to solve those problems. And that, that, that way we work is to me as a technologist, is, is very compelling and, and reason alone to join but...Also we use some really modern tech - so our programming languages in GaaP are, are Python, Java, Node and then we've got some, some other programming language such as Go in the mix, but we build stuff on, on really modern technologies. So a lot of stuff on Amazon Web Services. As I said, we use modern practices like Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, we do a lot of automated testing so we can deploy with confidence multiple times a day to make sure, yeah, we're getting our stuff out there quickly and getting people to actually use it as fast as possible.

And hopefully that's a, that's a compelling story about why GDS is a really good place to work. I didn't actually mention the culture in, in all of that. And I think that's what you actually asked me. But the-the agile culture here is-is to be open, to be transparent, to share what you're working on with others, and that can be through show and tells, through pairing, through having your code open in, out there on GitHub. I really, I really like the culture at GDS. It's a kind of, you know, when I was in the office, come up to my desk and ask me anything kind of thing. No question too silly. Yeah. I think it's a, it's a lovely place to work.

Himal Mandalia:

Yeah, I think the only, I think the only thing I'd add and Louise said it all there really was: you know, if you a technologist that's passionate about open source development and the technologies that were mentioned there and you, if particularly if you're old enough, you have friends like me who are old enough to remember when open source was very much the underdog, and you know, we were, we were all sort of part of a rebel alliance trying to-to do a good thing. It's amazing that this is now converged with trying to do good for the public as well. So. I could, I couldn’t think of a better argument to sell it than, than that: you get to use cool tech, do open source stuff to do good for tech and do good for the public. I mean, what more do you want, really? And we pay pretty well as well.

Louise Harris:

That's pretty cool, and if people want to find out about our code, which obviously we publish openly where we can, where can they find that?

Louise Ryan:

All our code is published on GitHub. So you need to go to GitHub. And it's Alpha GOV.UK is our organisation. It's all in there. I can't remember how many repos that there are, but there's a lot [laughs].

Louise Harris:

Okay well if anybody’s got a quiet Saturday afternoon, and they fancy digging into literally thousands of repos, head over to our GitHub to do that.

Yeah so there you have it, an inside look into how technologists at GDS are doing the hard work to make it simple for users. Some seriously impressive and exciting stuff, and if you want to stay up to date with what's going on, please do follow us on the GDS blogs and check out our GitHub. A reminder that if you're a Developer, Site Reliability Engineer or a Technical Architect who fancies a new challenge as part of a great team doing work that impacts literally millions of people, you need to search GDS careers because we're hiring now.

Louise, Himal, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and chat to me today. I don't know about anyone else, but you have been left with the impression of our technologists acting like a bevy of swans, calmly and gracefully gliding across the surface, totally belying all of the hard work and energy that's happening just underneath to make sure we're headed in the right direction. And thank you to you, our listeners. Remember, you can find all episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all major podcast platforms. And our transcripts are available on PodBean.

Goodbye.

Louise Ryan:

Thank you, bye.

Himal Mandalia:

Thanks everyone.

GDS Podcast #31: The vision for GOV.UK and the roadmap to get there Jun 30, 2021

Rachel Tsang and Ross Ferguson share how the GOV.UK roadmap contributes to GDS’s mission of building a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government.

The transcript for the episode follows:

-------------

Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. For those of you who tuned into last month’s episode, you’ll know that GDS has launched its new strategy centring around 5 core key missions:

GOV.UK as the single and trusted online destination for government information and services;

Joined-up services that solve whole problems and span multiple departments;

A simple digital identity solution that works for everyone;

Common tools and expert services;

and Joined-up data across departments.

Today I am joined by Rachel Tsang and Ross Ferguson from the leadership team of the GOV.UK programme to hear more about how their roadmap objectives are contributing to making GDS’s mission - of building a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government for everyone - a reality.

Ross, could you please introduce yourself?

Ross Ferguson:

OK, thank you. So I'm Ross Ferguson and the Deputy Director for Portfolio Delivery within GOV.UK. And this is actually my second tour with GOV.UK. I started as an Associate Product Manager when GDS was first set up. GOV.UK was the first product that I worked on and I later worked as the Head of Product Management for GDS. And then after a little overseas tour, I was very pleased to return to GOV.UK in January and, yeah, very excited to be back and to be working with Rachel.

Vanessa Schneider: It's good to have you Ross. Thank you. Yes, Rachel, would you mind introducing yourself to the listeners, please?

Rachel Tsang:

Of course. So my name is Rachel Tsang and I am Deputy Director for Governance and Assurance on GOV.UK. Like Ross, I am, I sort of boomeranged back to-to GOV.UK. So I was, I did a previous role and then stepped away to do something else. And I'm really, really thrilled. I think that's a, it's not a necessary condition to working on GOV.UK that you come back. I think it is testament to like just how much people enjoy working, working on GOV.UK. Before that, I so, I joined government as a Social Researcher and did a range of roles in different government departments and yeah, have settled here in GDS.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you. So as mentioned at the top of the episode, the GDS strategy strongly relies on GOV.UK as outlined in GDS's first mission, which is to establish GOV.UK as the single and trusted online destination for government information and services. It'd be really great to hear from both of you how this mission influenced the update to the GOV.UK roadmap.

Rachel Tsang:

So I think fundamentally our mission for GOV.UK is to provide a joined-up, personalised, and, and proactive service - we-we blogged lots about that recently. And we-we've evolved continuously since GOV.UK was first created in 2012. And what we're looking to do now is really a big step change in-in our offering for GOV.UK. Fundamentally, it's-it's about changing our offering to continually innovate to meet changing needs. I think that that is the crux for how we're feeding into the wider GDS strategy and vision.

Ross Ferguson:

Yeah, absolutely. I think departments, GDS with GOV.UK and, you know, spend control standards alongside departments has done a really, really good job over the years of bringing services that were previously paper-based and office-based, online. And a lot of them are really great in isolation. But we know that the people who use GOV.UK don't experience them, don't want them in isolation. They don't, it's not a nicely compartmentalised linear process. You know, they-they want them in combination. So really, the next maturity step for Government Digital has to be that these services are joined up. Which means that departments need to coordinate with one another.

GDS is in a great position and GOV.UK is a great platform for, for enabling that join-up to happen in a coordinating sense but also in in a public experience sense: that there is one domain that the public knows they can go to to get the guidance, to get access to the services. And, you know, that's what they would expect in all other walks of life when they're transacting with lots of, you know, utilities and and and entertainment. So it's perfectly reasonable that they should expect that from government, and government is perfectly capable of doing it. So that's work that we want to really accelerate this year. And, you know, it is a big undertaking. So it's something that will continue in the, in the years to come.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yes, speaking of joined-up services, I'd like you to listen to a couple of interviews that we recorded with colleagues in the different GOV.UK teams that are working towards the objectives of the roadmap. So first we’ll actually be hearing from Tina Mermiri, who shares about the work done to connect insights across GOV.UK to enable those joined up services. This is so that government understands its users and users understand the government.

[Start of vox pop]

Tina Mermiri:

I'm Tina Mermiri, the Head of User and Data Insight for GOV.UK. I set out the data and the insight strategy for the programme, and I oversee all the work within data science, performance analytics and user research. So as a team of experts, we have 3 wider objectives and that's understanding GOV.UK users and their needs; that's facilitating data-driven decision-making internally and across wider government; and it's also monitoring the impact of the work that we deliver and the products that we ship. So with performance analytics, we're looking at how people, or users engage with the site, what content they're engaging with and how we can optimise their journeys.

Then we complement that with the user research to understand what their issues are. We get feedback from them. We're actually looking at why they're trying to do certain things that are, that are failing and how we can optimise those journeys as well. And so what the data science community does is go into a little bit more detail with some of the more complicated techniques whereby we might want to look at some of the data that we've got behind the scenes and create some models and scores and look at something like related links and surface them on the site for users that have done something similar to other users and make their journeys easier. So it's all going back to optimising the journey, making it as smooth and frictionless as possible with the power of data behind that.

We're using Google Analytics to power a lot of this data. And Google Analytics has a cookie consent. So we will only track people who have opted in to tracking, which means that our data is not 100 percent representative of all our users, but it's pretty indicative of what they'll be doing. It also means that we hash out any personally identifiable information. We don't actually track that and don't use it for any of our analysis. And we've worked really, really closely with the privacy team to make sure that, you know, privacy is at the heart of all the tracking that we do and all the consequent analysis that we conduct around it. So personalisation, the way that we're looking at it is two-fold. On the one hand, it is without any personally identifiable information. So it is just looking at common journeys and similar content that's being consumed by different users at aggregate level. So that's the one way of doing it where we don't collect any other personal information and we don't personalise it based on their background or any of the demographics, we don't even track that right now. But it is about that journey and other similar journeys. And then on the flip side, we will eventually be trying to do a little bit more personalisation based on people who hold accounts with us, where they will, again, share some of their information with us as part of their account. And that is information that they will have opted into as well. And we will hopefully use that to personalise further, based on, based on their location, for example, and other similar attributes that we want to start building on.

The nature of the data that we collect and making sure that that's representative is, is very, very important. So we could do a lot of really clever stuff with it. But if it's not in a good place, then the output-- if the inputs aren't reliable, necessary, then the outputs won't be as reliable either. So we're spending a lot of time on revisiting the way that we collect some of the data, the way that we cleanse the data, the way we make sure that it is reliable and ready for us to use. So that's one thing that we're investing in quite heavily. And we need to make sure that we're asking the right questions without, like, probing, leading wording. We need to make sure that we're able to differentiate between attitudes around, let's say, GOV.UK or what they're trying to do and wider government. We need to make sure that our data is representative across all our very, very wide range and diverse users.

I think the work that we're trying to do and the opportunities that it opens up for users and to make their journeys easier is, is, is really impressive.

[End of vox pop]

Ross Ferguson:

Tina's a...and her crew, you know, clearly, clearly know what they're talking about. She was, she was giving great insights there into, you know, just how important the data usage is going to be to powering the sort of whole journeys work that we’re wanting to do, the personalisation. It's all, it's all dependent on us making, you know, proper, proper use of that, of that data. I think that she, you know, she did talk well about the tooling that we're starting to bring in to help us with that. We are, we're definitely stepping up the recruitment that we do of-of these data disciplines. And, you know, and I think it's about bringing our, the, the data scientists and engineers that we have already and have had for a while much more closer into the work with the with the team so that they're they're kind of doing less reporting and they're doing more in terms of the tactics and the and the strategy work.

Rachel Tsang:

On the objective to connect insights, I'm not sure we're allowed to have favourites, but this one is-is really, really important to me because I think it really goes back to the heart of why GOV.UK was first created. Right? You think about the world before 2012, where there are almost 2,000 websites, and you needed to understand the structures of government to interact with it. And so we've come a long way. But fundamentally, the way that we analyse and approach problems remain siloed by departmental boundaries. So you know, the work that we are looking to do over the next year to join up those insights, to be able to understand aggregate trends and patterns, that's super important, not just for GOV.UK like in helping us to improve the product, but for the rest of government more generally in terms of how we approach a much wider whole user journeys.

Vanessa Schneider:

And I guess as with any insights, what’s important is what you use them to enable. I think it’s time to hear from Daisy Wain, one of our Lead Performance Analysts, about what we’re doing to translate insights into a more personalised and proactive service for users.

[Start of vox pop]

Daisy Wain:

My name is Daisy. I'm the Lead Performance Analyst on GOV.UK. It's my job to make sure that we are at the cutting edge of analytical technologies and practises to make sure that we're aligned with what the latest developments are and to make sure that they're fit for purpose, for what we want on GOV.UK that obviously has a strong focus around privacy and security.

So one of the things that we've been doing is doing a cross-government data commission. So it's been working as a small team to find out all the different transactional services there are in government, what data attributes they all collect, and if they have an account that's associated with that transactional service. And if they do, how many accounts there are, and all that sort of thing. And obviously what that allows us to think about then is how we can use that data to be proactive. So, for example, if we were to have, if we were able to know somebody's postcode or to know their date of birth, we can then start to infer things about them. So that means we can proactively show them things on GOV.UK that are specific. So, for example, we know you live in Scotland, we can show you the Scottish content first and foremost, as opposed to the English. What else we can do is obviously helping the product teams to deliver the first trial of the account. So that was what we did on the Brexit checker. So that was the product where any person could go through a series of questions related to their personal circumstances around, you know, where they live, what their nationality is, what their plans are for business and for travel, and what the output is, is a series of actions that you may need to take related to the changes related to Brexit. And the account allows you to store that information, to revisit it and to get notifications of when that might change. The job as an analyst is to look at how people are using that thing so we can look at the sign-up journey to see perhaps where certain steps might not be working as well. And then that starts to help us build a picture about the types of people that would like to use this account and where the value is.

I think it's important for us to think about developing this, like, next generation of GOV.UK and how people interact with government and government services. But it can't be designed just for people that want that. We have to consider people that would not want to opt into that world and to make sure that we are still designing things that allow people to not have to consent, but still have that optimised journey based on the data that we have available on those people, which is non-consented, kind of basic, so from the server. Obviously this is an important aspect for people that don't want to have that universal government sign-in, which is completely, completely within a user's discretion. So from an analytical perspective is, what can we learn about your behaviour on GOV.UK that allows us then to personalise your experience and even be proactive. It could be that you have the option to save some of your preferences. So there's things that we can start to do, which is purely based on your behaviour on GOV.UK that we can say, “hey, we think this might be useful for you” purely based on this behaviour, and then you can opt in to say, “actually yeah, that's handy. I want that to happen. I want that to persist”. Or you can equally say, “no, I'm not interested. I just want it to be, I want to be completely anonymous”.

I also think that some of the biggest hurdles around this is making sure that users’ experience reflects the reality on GOV.UK. There is an expectation, I think, around - for some users - that government is government and everything is joined-up behind the scenes. And there is a confusion around “why do I have to tell my, the tax service my personal details and I have to tell the-- things related to my vehicle, the same details. Why are they not joined up? Also, why can't I sign into this thing and do the other thing?” So the hardest thing is like how can we build something that has those privacy concerns at the centre, but also then reflects users’ expectation of how to, how to interact with government. Meeting those expectations but from our perspective of delivering it, it's how can we do that kind of crosscutting, bringing all of government services, different departments together, creating this kind of, almost this single sign-on vision, which is what we're hoping to achieve in the long term, where you only have to do things once. But how you do that is very, very challenging. The front, the front of it looks simple. The underneath is horribly complicated.

[End of vox pop]

Vanessa Schneider:

I think one of the areas that really impressed me was how much collaboration there is across government on it. And essentially that you've got this buy-in on this objective through the commission.

Rachel Tsang:

Definitely. I think we were saying before, this isn't just a project for GDS or for GOV.UK, right. It-it only really, really works, and you only get the real value for users if you're enabling that cross government collaboration. And to be honest, that-that is tricky because departments don't necessarily always have the same priorities; there, there is a lot of stuff that is happening across government. But I think we all have the shared objective of fundamentally making things better for our users. And I think the extent to which this is driven by data and driven by insight is incredibly powerful, right? Because it's all very much evidence-led and led by what is going to make a difference to meeting user needs.

Vanessa Schneider:

Definitely, and I think, again,Daisy also reiterated something that Ross mentioned before at the very beginning, actually, about how the user perception of GOV.UK isn't that there are these separations between the different departments, that it is just the monolith of government and how we're really trying to make that perception of reality. I was just wondering if you had any more reflections on that, Ross.

Ross Ferguson:

I think that GOV.UK makes it possible to engage with and transact with government as-as one thing, if-if that's helpful to you as the, as the user. But it is also possible to say you're a-a particular-an academic or maybe a business user - there are you know, we also do cater for those more specialist journeys through, through government as well. I think that's one of the things that GOV.UK has over the years put a lot of effort into, listened to a lot of user feedback, made use of the data that we have had to get that to get that right. And so I, you know, I like what Daisy was pointing out there that: when we're thinking about personalisation, we're thinking about it like, you know, individual needs and that somebody might be operating, coming, coming to GOV.UK, as you know, a private citizen, but they might also be a business owner. And, you know, we-we-we want to be able to-to cater for those different sorts of profiles that one person could-could have. And, you know, and that's what we, that's what we do well. We--is the care and attention we pour into these kinds of nuances, these-these complexities. These--Daisy's right to say that it's-it's complex. That's what we love. That's what we're here for. That's what every person on GOV.UK is here for, you know, to-to do that hard work to-to make, to make the things as simple as people need it to be for their circumstances.

Vanessa Schneider:

And it's also beautiful how you're working at it from both ends, whether somebody wants to fully connect all of their personal information that government holds, make sure that everything is bespoke to them, or if somebody prefers to really just have that interaction standing on its own, and just as they need to be in touch with government, they'll handle it on a case by case basis and and just sort of like be shepherded down the right path without government necessarily knowing everything about them.

Ross Ferguson:

Yeah, I think that there is so much that we can do with all the data that we generate automatically through, through our logs and that we've gathered over the over the years and that we can analyse very quickly to be able to make pretty good bets about other information on GOV.UK, other services that would be of interest to you based on the patterns of usage in a given session. Which is, you know, very unintrusive. And, you know, I think that there's lots that we can do without people telling us lots of attributes about themselves and having to sign up to things - that will always be at the core of GOV.UK. However the account is very exciting because it will put the user in the position of being able to say, to build up a profile for themselves and be able to choose how they then use that, and that will just make government work so much harder for the public.

And I think that that is maybe a little bit of, has been a pipedream for many for many years, but it's a reality that we can that we are delivering now, that will start to see come to fruition over the next year. And I think the public will be really excited about that and it will help make government more efficient. And so I think that's-that's something that everybody wins from. And really, you know, the teams are excited about that, not just the account team, but all--that's one of the good things about what I'm seeing on GOV.UK is the way that the teams are working alongside one another. There are data insights teams that have been really proactive about how they get in touch with our team that's working on starting and sustaining a business journey. They're saying to the accounts team “look we could, we could really benefit from this functionality, this feature, can we share data on this”.

Vanessa Schneider:

We obviously need a really solid foundation for all of this work, so I guess that’s why our objective to ensure GOV.UK is always available, accessible and accurate is so important. Let’s hear from Kati now on what’s happening in that area.

[Start of vox pop]

Kati Tirbhowan:

I’m Kati Tirbhowan, I’m a senior content designer in the GOV.UK Explore team. Our team is working on making GOV.UK easier to navigate and we’re currently working on ideas that include improvements to the site-wide navigation, mobile experience on the site, page-level navigation elements, so things like how the breadcrumbs and related links work on the site.

In our team we run multiple rounds of user research to improve our designs and we're doing research with different types of users. That's people who come to GOV.UK for different reasons to do different things. And within those groups, we're also including users who might have low digital confidence or skills or access needs, for example. And then each discipline brings their expertise to make content accessible. So that's from design to developers, to content design. And for content design, for example, we've got our content guidance that includes an accessibility checklist that we use to design and review content changes as part of our regular work on the site.

And in our team we've also just done some accessibility testing on the new site-wide main menu design, which is one of the ideas we're working on. And to do the testing we used accessibility personas the GDS accessibility team have created and those personas are really helpful and an engaging way of raising awareness and understanding of accessibility. And from that, we identified some improvements we can make to the design and we'll continue using those personas to test our work as we go on. Um we’re also optimise-- mobile-optimising the pages and components that we're working on. So they feel like they're designed with mobile in mind, and that includes things like expanding the touch target. So the area you need to tap on to follow a link so that they're larger and easier to use, um especially for people who have a tremor or a long term impairment, for example.

I think one challenge is the size of GOV.UK. It's a huge and varied site, with many different types of content, and GOV.UK provides the route to hundreds of government services operated by departments, as well as the guidance published by every department. You also have a lot of people looking for information and services to do important things in their lives. And that means for us it's critical that people can find what they need quickly and as easily as possible. And it really is the hard work of all the teams and all the different disciplines and all the talent that makes it happen.

And one of our design principles is “do the hard work to make it simple”. And I think people are really passionate about this and care about making things work for users the best we can. And I feel like this is a big part of it, making it such a great place to work too. We can help to make a real difference.

[End of vox pop]

Ross Ferguson:

I might point to this one as being one of my one of the areas I care about the-the most. I think getting the basics right is so foundational to the innovation that we might want to put on top of that. It's really important that GOV.UK is there in times of need for people. It has to be reliable. And it's the sort of site that you go to when you're not sure if the internet's working properly, you can go to GOV.UK to see well, if GOV.UK's up then it's and then everything's all right. So we do put a lot of stock in making sure it's reliable, that it's secure, that it's performing quickly and smoothly for people.

And, yes, that-that would--includes how our search and navigation works, how our-our pages help people to find their way around the information services and through it. And so, yeah, we've got some-some pretty major changes taking place to the navigation on GOV.UK planned. That starts with a test, of course, because we like to, you know, to test with users before we go, you know, rolling this out to everybody. We will do some multivariate, or A/B testing, with a proportion of our users on GOV.UK, who will see the site in slightly different ways: so the menu bar at the top will have some, some new options in there. And through the early testing that we've already done, we're pretty confident that's going to help people to find information quicker and then to find other related information if they, if they need it.

A lot of people will want to come to GOV.UK, get the thing that they're after and then get going. But some people will want an ongoing journey. And so this new navigation bar helps people to understand where things are and how things relate to one another. And then later on in this year, that same team, well obviously they'll continue improving that that nav, but they will also then be working on the homepage, which, you know I suppose, it's a kind of a cliche that people say, well, Google is the homepage, but actually, you know, really you know, a lot of people it's actually one of our it's like our top page is the homepage - lots of people go there. And so it can work harder, we think, helping people to understand what's timely, you know relative to events that are taking place in society, maybe or maybe because they've given us, they've signed up to an account and they want maybe a more personalised experience. So we're going to start with some changes to the homepage, which make it clearer what's, what's available and what's timely. And so these will be really two of the biggest changes to the design of GOV.UK, really since-since its launch in 2012. And so we're obviously a little bit excited about those.

Rachel Tsang:

Yeah, definitely. So I think fundamentally it all starts with this, right? We support millions of users every day. And to be able to do that effectively, we need the platform, we need the information and services on it being reliable, resilient and secure. You can't have accounts and personalisation without this fundamental infrastructure. And-and so it's super duper important. And I think it also touches on something that's been implicit to what we've been discussing throughout, which is about retaining user trust. And that is inherent in how we need to build the account, that's inherent in how we do personalisation, but it's also inherent in just being available, accessible and accurate.

And you know, we think about the sort of the premise of the work that we're doing now to increasingly personalised GOV.UK, right? We start from the premise of like, well, people's expectations have changed. They think about how they interact with you know, like Citymapper or with Netflix. And-and so our premise is that why should, why should the user experience of interacting with government be any different? That's the starting premise, but for us, it--trust takes on an extra important angle, and this is where having that infrastructure of content, of the platform, of availability is so, so important.

Vanessa Schneider:

You're so right, you're so right. But, yeah, obviously what's coming through through all of this is really that it's all about iteration. I mean, trying out new concepts is a part of iteration, isn't it? Like GOV.UK accounts is building on things that already exist. But one of the bigger questions really is the: how everything that we're doing right now supports what the rest of government is doing. So we talked with Anna Sherrington, who is working on that objective within the GOV.UK team.

[Start of vox pop]

Anna Sherrington:

Hi, my name is Anna Sherrington and I'm the Lead Delivery Manager at GOV.UK and I'm responsible for supporting the government priorities of the day objective. What that means in practise is that I work with a number of multidisciplinary, highly-skilled teams to ensure that GOV.UK is responsive to the issues of the day and that we are the source of the government is saying and doing and what it means for people day to day.

So there are 4 teams working on this objective at the moment, 2 are concentrating on coronavirus, 1 on Brexit and 1 on starting a business. This means we have around 60 people working on this objective. At the height of the pandemic, we had more people covering our coronavirus work and the team structure has been changing as the situation with the pandemic has developed. For example, last spring and autumn when things were very busy, we had a weekend and late evening support rota in place in order to support any updates as they happened. And although we don't have these rotas anymore, we still have the flexibility and the teams to support plans. So we have really adapted to changing needs for this objective. I feel very fortunate to be working with the teams I’m working with and very proud of the work we do every day. There's a very supportive culture within the teams and we have made it our priority to build resilience and flexibility with everyone's wellbeing at the forefront of our minds. And this has been crucial.

[End of vox pop]

Vanessa Schneider:

A lot has been achieved in the past year first of all, and it's important to recognise that. We've really managed to-to sort of scale up in a way that we are resilient.

Rachel Tsang:

Talking about resilience and being able to meet the government's priorities of the day, I would completely agree with you, like it's been an extraordinary 18 months and it's super important that GOV.UK is, as the online home for government, is able to be able to be comprehensive and responsive to provide support for the government's critical priorities of the day. For-for the past 18 months, that's been Coronavirus and Brexit. And we've seen som,e we've seen some record levels of traffic. So I think during the pandemic we reached a peak of it was around 42 million page views at our daily peak. And that that is truly extraordinary, thinking about how the value and the importance of GOV.UK has grown over time. And I think what the last 12 to 18 months has shown us has really been the value of the value of GOV.UK as this critical source of truth, the value of collaborating across government, we've already talked about that, and the value of making sure that we're providing that trusted, accurate information and support to the millions of people that are relying on GOV.UK.

Ross Ferguson:

I am not surprised that given that people on GOV.UK are the sorts of people who will care about pixel widths on things like hover states and, you know, and and and punctuation to almost the pedantic degree - but I would never say that - that come, you know, a national, you know, emergency, an unprecedented event for for the UK and the world, that those people would rise to the occasion. You know, nobody wants a pandemic but thank goodness we had GOV.UK as a place that, you know, the civil servants, and GDS, GOV.UK and then across the government could all use to collaborate with one another in the creation and curation of guidance and services very, very swiftly. But also, you know, and then the public could be given a really clear steer on where they could go.

And so I think that it's been interesting looking at the usage patterns we see, yes, an increase in the number of people overall coming to GOV.UK, but, you know, an increase in the regularity of those visits. So I think that that cross government collaboration that we saw come to the fore during the intense COVID period, paid off. And actually I think that it's, although we are glad that there's not the same urgency, I think that focus on collaboration does need to continue on now for and lots of aspects of running government, but particularly in that digital space where we're, we're good in the UK at digital government, but we're still not meeting our full potential. And so I think if we can keep that focus on-on good public services online, across government collaboration, I think that they, I'm very optimistic about the future for-for the digital government here, here in the UK.

We want to be doing more and we want to be doing better. And because that's what people here in the UK want us to do, and I think, you know, where you mentioned our, our blogs, podcasts, our code is all open. And we you know, we do, we share this so that our peers and other governments internationally also at the local level here in the UK can, you know, can can benefit from that and that we can benefit from their feedback and their scrutiny as well. I think that's-that's one of the things that I think the GOV.UK, GDS, UK dig-government digital does really, really well that that openness, that willingness to share and that drive to keep-keep doing better. And I think that that's what and that's what that gets me really motivated.

Vanessa Schneider:

We have now come to our final objective, is: be channel agnostic. So personally, I know we've done fantastic work in collaboration with third parties like search engines in order to link content outside of the confines of the website itself. I was just wondering, maybe Rachel, you can tell us about how such partnerships came about and how this has changed things for users.

Rachel Tsang:

Definitely. So I think we, unsurprisingly, are huge fans of-of collaborating. You mentioned that we've done some good work recently with Google to make sure that more GOV.UK content is available through-through rich search results. We also did some good work on the recent local elections as well. And so I think we start from the premise of wanting to collaborate and to think about how we can make more of our content more available.

I think the broader objective on being channel agnostic, I mean, we know that users are increasingly accessing information through other channels. Right? Search engines or voice assistance and-and so on. I think we also know that in May of this year, it was around 67% of our users that were accessing GOV.UK on mobile. And we see that number increasing year on year. So the work that we've done so far is good. We're-we're responding to changes in user behaviour where possible. But this objective for this year is really about enabling that step change. So through coronavirus, all of our services were designed as mobile-first. But what we need to keep pace with technology. So this is thinking about exactly to your question, designing for provision for access to-to GOV.UK information and services beyond the website. And that's yeah, super exciting because I think it's-it's keeping it's keeping pace with the user needs and changing user behaviour.

It highlights how the 5 objectives that we have for our roadmap for the year, they're not, there's a huge amount of interdependency there. Right. We started out with the fundamental building blocks of being available, accessible, accurate. We build on with like supporting priorities of the day. We talk about personalisation. We talk about being channel agnostic. You put all of that together and like holistically that is about GOV.UK and enabling users to access information about government and services in a way that is tailor, that is personalised, that suits their needs.

Ross Ferguson:

GOV.UK's getting close to being one of the top five, most used to most visited sites in the, in the U.K., and it goes up that-that list every-every year. And so I think that people will always value there being a site that they can go to or certainly they will value that for-for many, many years yet. There have to be other other channels that you are able to benefit from the information and parts also the services that are on the GOV.UK platform. And because, again, you might not know that you you could benefit from that information and other services, other parties might usefully be able to suggest, OK, actually you need you need to know this from the government or actually at this stage in your transaction with us, actually government can is the best place to help you with this.

And so I think that we want to explore those and call them partnerships, those and those crossover's a bit a bit more. Yes with some big household name technology companies, but also with groups that are involved in civil society. And this could be a national, it could be at a local level as well, and they are providing great support and services to-to their and their constituents, their members, their-their users. So I think there's a lot that we can do there.

I think what cuts across all of these, whether you're using a voice assistant more, you're perhaps engaging with some citizens advice and service or information on BBC is that you want to know that that information from the government is-is-is quality, is reliable. And so I think that that's where the GOV.UK verification, the GOV.UK brand, if you like, can really, really be useful there. And that is new ground for us. It's exciting perhaps to be--have a presence off of our own domain. And, you know, you mentioned we've been talking about trust earlier on, whatever we do in this space has to be underpinned by trust. And to get that right, we'll do experimenting and we will, we will talk to users because that is what we've always done. And that will keep us right.

Vanessa Schneider:

So before we start to wrap up, I was wondering, what are you most excited for on this journey? Let's start with Ross.

Ross Ferguson:

That's a tough, that's a tough question. I-I am excited to see what the, what the response to the account will be. I'll be interested to see the way when we--as we roll out across the whole of GOV.UK this year and how people will respond to that, whether they will see it as a good utility. I'm anticipating the feedback, anticipating it being positive. What-what I'm looking forward to most is, is the detail about what more it could do and about how it should interact with services. I think that will give us a lot to go on.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you Ross. Same question to you, Rachel please.

Rachel Tsang:

I think for me this is going to sound incredibly broad, but I think it's the energy around the delivery that we're doing right now. Like, we've got a really clear vision and direction and we've blogged and can I say podcasted? We've podcasted about it. And I think having that honesty and clarity about what we're doing and being really open about it is super important. Right. And I think that buzz is we're-we're kind of generating that buzz out externally.

But it is also very, very much with the team that's delivering on GOV.UK. And that's super exciting. And-and we can, I--can I talk about recruitment? Because I know we're very, very, very keen for lots more people to join GOV.UK. And we've got super exciting vision. We've got a clear direction of travel. So we are recruiting lots and lots of different roles. So user researchers, data scientists, product delivery, design, technology. I would say, particularly in the technology space as we design the architecture we talked about we platforming earlier on and so worthwhile having a look at the GDS career site to see our live roles, have a look at the blog. Ross and I, we published a blog post on four tips for applying for a job on GOV.UK. And we're hiring with a particular focus on our Manchester hub. Indeed, both in--both Ross and I are based up North.

The only thing I would add with that: this is actually really exciting, I think this is important to both Ross and I is that we are investing in junior roles, right. We want to build our-our pipeline of talent and invest in the development of people. So I would say that this isn't just about recruiting at a senior level. We're looking at all sorts of roles and all sorts of levels. So please do come join us.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you to both of you for joining us today on the podcast, and thank you also to all of your colleagues who joined us to share their contributions to the GOV.UK Roadmap objectives.

As a reminder, we are currently recruiting across GDS, and quite extensively for the GOV.UK programme. So we invite you to look at our vacancies and apply if you’re interested in any of the opportunities.

You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on PodBean.

Goodbye.

Rachel Tsang:

Bye.

Ross Ferguson:

Thank you very much. Goodbye.

GDS Podcast #30: Tom Read talks GDS’s future strategy May 28, 2021

Tom Read, CEO of GDS, sits down to chat about his first few months and what’s next, taking us through the GDS strategy for 2021 to 2024.

Do you enjoy the GDS Podcast? Help us to make it even better by completing our short, anonymous survey.

The transcript for the episode follows:

-------------

Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today I'm joined by the Chief Executive Officer for GDS, and that's Tom Read.

Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. I know that you joined GDS back in February, which in these times feels like an eternity. But could you please introduce yourself and what do you do to our listeners?

Tom Read:

Sure. And thank you for having me. So I'm Tom. I'm the Director General and Chief Executive of the Government Digital Service. As you said, I've been here just over 3 months now. So effectively my job is to set the strategy for the Government Digital Service, work out how it aligns with ministerial priorities, how much money we've got, what we're currently working on, and then keep out of people's way as much as possible and let people get on with delivery. That's sort of what I'm here for, I think.

Vanessa Schneider:

OK, I hear it's not your first rodeo at GDS: do you mind sharing how this experience is different?

Tom Read:

Yeah. So I was, I was at GDS from for about 2 years in 2013 to 2015. Back then, I mean, everything was quite different. I worked in Liam Maxwell's area, which was the sort of, the more, the tech area than the digital area, and I was brought in to run a technology transformation programme in the Cabinet Office itself, plus DCMS [Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport]. It was great fun, really good fun.

How is it different? I don't know. It's... GDS back then was was smaller, much more sort of a scrappy start-up. It had this sort of triumvirate of real heavy hitters in Mike Bracken and Liam Maxwell and the Minister, Francis Maude, now Lord Maude. And so it had a really, it sort of felt very much on the bleeding edge and it was very much going out and trying to push down some doors to get people to-to let it exist and let it really make a difference. I think a lot of that spirit is still, still here in GDS. But there's a little thing I've written in-in our new strategy, which is we're not in start-up mode anymore. And I think that's it's quite important to recognise, we-we've, we've done that phase and now we're sort of maturing a little bit. So it's slightly different. But the spirit is the same.

So after 2015, I basically I did 2 years of just like super intense work, like it was just, you know, really, really fun. So much fun but incredibly tiring. And I basically sort of said, right, that's, that's it. That's my little tour of duty in government done. And I-I went off and joined a consultancy and about 3 months in working for the consultancy, which was a lovely place, really lovely place, great people. I suddenly thought, ‘ack, I'm not done, actually. I-I-I really miss government already’.

So later that year I applied for a few roles and I was successful in a role as the Chief Technology Officer at the Department for Business, as was. And I'd worked there with amazing people like Emma Stace, Mark O'Neill and other people, it was just - Andrew Greenway - it was, it was a really great team. And we really started to create a digital movement in that weird department because it's like a small policy department with loads of arm's length bodies. And it was good fun and we really got going.

And then there was the machinery of government change. So energy and climate change came in, education went out so universities and things went out to education. And I don't know if any of our listeners have been through machinery of government changes, they're like mergers acquisitions in the private sector. I kind of saw the writing on the wall. I thought that there isn't space for, for 3 directors in what was to become BEIS [Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy].

And so I started to look around government and it happened. There was a vacancy coming up at the Ministry of Justice [MoJ] working for Sir Richard Heaton, who I worked to when I was at GDS, he was the Perm Sec[retary] of the Cabinet Office and one of my all time sort of heroes in government. And so I was sort of managed moved across to MoJ. And that's where I've been for the last 4 and a half years. Up until now, by a long way, the best job I've ever had in my career. It was just this incredible, meaningful work of helping some of the most vulnerable people in society to fix their lives and get an education and get their lives back on track. It was brilliant. So yeah, I've been, I've been in a few departments.

Vanessa Schneider:

Well, they tend to say, don't meet your heroes, but it seems to have worked out really well for you. I also wanted to give a shout out to Emma Stace because the Department for Education Digital and Technology team has just launched their first podcast episode with Emma in it.

Tom Read:

Oh, awesome. Oh, well, fantastic. Well, listen to that one. She'll be amazing.

Vanessa Schneider:

[laughs] But also listen to us!

Tom Read:

Obviously listen to us!

Vanessa Schneider:

So it's clear to me, just listening to you that you're passionate about digital government, always coming back to it as well and looking at your resume in general. But I was wondering why that was. What is the power of digital?

Tom Read:

What is the power of digital? That's a really good question. So the thing that's unique about digital teams in government, but also outside government, is we just have a relentless focus on users and how they work. And I know a lot of bits of government do that as well - it would be a bit insulting to policymakers to suggest we're the only people who do that.

But any bit of digital design, whether you're working for a supermarket or a retailer or a bank or government, you have to design around how users use things because otherwise they don't use them. And then you're wasting everyone's time, right? In government, I think we've used digital, now more the word data, user needs, these sort of things, kind of as stalking horses, they're, they're ways of expressing designing things around how users work. And I just think that's a great opportunity.

I also think government itself is fascinating because some some bits of government have been around for hundreds of years and some bits have been around for a thousand years. And without being simplistic, some of the processes haven't changed very much in that time. And so you can stick a website over it. But really, you need to look at the whole, you know, policy through to what outcomes you're trying to get, the process, and then digitise that. And I think that's really missing from how we talk about digital in a lot of cases.

Vanessa Schneider:

So, you mentioned obviously that you've been here for 3 months and some people make a big deal out of it - the first 100 days somebody has spent in a new job, especially in a leadership position. Is there anything that you're keen to share that you've learnt in this time, or maybe you found something that surprised you?

Tom Read:

Yeah, I mean, just so much. It's quite weird hearing it's been 3 months actually, because, in the nicest possible way, it feels like a lot longer. And I do mean that in a positive way. I've learnt a lot. There's, there's a lot. GDS is a funny place because everybody's got an opinion about GDS just anywhere in government. And beyond actually, everyone's got an opinion about what's good, what's bad. There's a whole set of people on Twitter who seem to spend most of their lives just commenting on what on what GDS is doing. And it's really peculiar. And so coming in, or sort of back in, but, but into this role from a department has been fascinating.

So it's sort of off the top of my head, a few things I've I've learnt. One is I think the, GDS is just completely full of, like, super intelligent, incredibly civic-minded people who care. And I think, yeah, I don't want to go on a soapbox rant about this, but that's probably the thing that people really miss when they're judging GDS, is just how much people care about, you know, service design and, you know, the underlying technology and content design, accessibility, all these things that really matter. It just, it really infuses everything when you're speaking to people. And there are people who have been here for like 7 or 10 years who just still have the same absolute passion for improving public services, which is amazing. I mean, I've got a short attention span, so a lot of respect for those sort of people.

On the, on the, sort of, the more complex side. I think, the first, we still sort of hark back quite a bit to sort of the first 5 years of, of GDS, which I don't think is uncommon in a sort of quote unquote start-up. You hark back to the early days - I was speaking to a friend who works at Monzo recently. And he was saying everyone still talks about when there were 30 of us and we were trying to build from scratch. We're not like that anymore. So I think, I think a lot of people still look back at where we had all this support and we were crashing down doors and building things. And it was busy and we were on stage a lot. And then there were 5 years of much quieter GDS over the last 5 years - still doing very important work, but taking much more of a collegiate view. And I think one of the things I've been puzzling through over the last 3 months is how do you get the happy balance between those 2? I think maybe we need to get back a little bit into the setting direction and pushing delivery as well as working together.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah I mean, I think one of the things that people remember when they hearken back to those good old days is also the mottos that sprung up. There's a lot of stuff that we say at GDS that has spread beyond, that's really been used a lot. For instance, doing the hard work to make it easy for the user. So obviously our ambition is to make dealing with government easier. Where do you think we are in this mission?

Tom Read:

That's not what I thought you were going to ask me. So I think we're at a really interesting point. So thing, things that have been done well over the last 10 years, we talk a lot about the really good services. There are lots of services in government that are better than you would find in the private sector. And I think that the narrative that government's never going to be quite as good as the private sector: I've worked in the private sector. It's just not true.

We're all roughly trying hard, dealing with legacy, dealing with complexity, competing demands, that kind of thing. So there are a bunch of things that have been done just incredibly well. So, you know, the passport service is just an exemplar. There are amazing things in digital tax. There's stuff we were doing at MoJ, there's there's stuff at DWP [Department for Work and Pensions], which is really, you know, pushing the boundary and properly, you know, micro-services, architectured services that will last and stand the test of time.

Equally, I think I think we just declared victory way too early. So it's one of the first things I was sent when I joined GDS was, I was like, we've got a list of the the paper forms in government, you know, the, the services that have never been touched. And I was sent a spreadsheet with with 4,000 lines, and each line is a PDF or a Word doc, that a user has to download, fill in, so they need a printer, then they can fax or post it. So you either need a fax machine - I genuinely don't know how that, how that technology works in the digital age - or you go to the Post Office and I think it's just not good enough.

So I think from that perspective, we've done a lot. We've embedded amazing digital talent across government. GOV.UK is standing firm and is still a really excellent sort of front end of government. But we've got a lot more to do. And I also think we're slightly, we have still been thinking in the context of 10 years ago, where it was a publishing layer and then individual silo transactions, I think we need to move beyond that now. We'll probably talk about that a bit more later. But I think we need to move beyond what was a good idea 10 years ago and iterate - use some of our, use some of our own secret sauce for that.

Vanessa Schneider:

I am so curious. Where did you think I was going to go with that question? [laughs]

Tom Read:

I thought you were going to ask me about some of the mottos [laugh from Vanessa] and whether they still stand up. So, you know, ‘the strategy is delivery’ and you've got on your laptop ‘Make things open. It makes things better.’ In fact, I've got it on mine as well. I-I thought you were going to ask about some of those things.

Vanessa Schneider:

Do, I mean, if you want to riff on that, go for it. [laughs] [laugh from Tom]

Tom Read:

There is a lot to be said for the, the memory that goes with catchy, meaningful slogans like ‘strategy is delivery’. It's great because the strategy was never delivery. Right. The strategy was deliver something quickly and make it so good that once people come to tell you stop doing it, they'll look like idiots because you built something brilliant, fast and cheap. It's not-- the delivery isn't the strategy. Strategy is let's not talk about it. Let's let's deliver something and then we'll have something to show for it, which is great and similar with, you know, the talk about user needs, not government needs. It's still government needs. It's just if you build it around how users work, then the service is cheaper and it'll actually be used online. It's it's sort of proxies for for what we're trying to do. Big fan of that sort of proper marketing.

Vanessa Schneider:

So I was wondering if you wanted to reflect on the mission of GDS now and for the next 3 years in context of the 5 points that you outlined in your blog post?

Tom Read:

Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing we're trying to do is we need to kind of say, what are we really going to focus on? Because it's, I don't just want a shopping list of what we're busy with. It's like what can we uniquely do in GDS? We've got this, like, incredibly privileged position of being in a centre of government. We're reasonably funded at the moment. Good ministerial support. What are we uniquely able to do in that position? Let's let's leave the departments to do, to do what they do.

So we've we've we've come up with with 5 points, as you say, and I'll sort of rattle through them, but sort of explain why I think they matter. So the first and kind of most important one is we have to keep the things that we're already running running. So we, GOV.UK is a obviously fundamental part of what we do. We need it up to date, we need the publishing tools to be modern. We need to be iterating some of the design patterns around finding content, around exploring, sort of navigating content. And we need to re-platform it. It sits on a tech stack in the cloud. But but that's coming out of support. So so keeping things running, it's not always sexy, but it is the most important - if we do nothing else we'll keep GOV.UK running.

The second thing we really want to go to is, focus on is, is kind of what I meant earlier around moving the dial from just doing transactional services. So we want to focus on what we're calling whole, whole services or solving whole problems for users. So an example. And we're not sure which examples we're going to use, right. But an example that that we're looking at at the moment is around having a baby.

So if you if you are a person and you're having a baby, I've made a list here. Things you might need to know about, that government can help you with are: maternity pay, shared leave, maternity allowances, registering the birth, getting child benefits, getting tax credits, finding childminders, getting nursery places. And at the moment, you need to understand all of those things individually. Then you need to apply for each to work out whether you are eligible. It's, well, well-intentioned nonsense. And really what you should be able to do is what you would expect in a commercial transaction where you would go on, you would have your details already stored and it would say you are eligible for these 5 things. One click and we'll sort it out for you.

And I think that's, maybe that's pie in the sky, there's so many reasons why that might not work. But that's what we're going to aim for. So so we're going to go hopefully for, as I said, really early days. And a lot of people have thought about this before. We are not unique in this, but we're going to look at maybe 5 or 10 ideas and try to push them through to delivery and work out: does GDPR stop us doing this, does money stop us doing this? Does the fundamental structure of government and accounting officers accountable to Parliament stop us doing this? I don't know, but we’re gonna have a good crack at it.

Vanessa Schneider:

I think I saw on social media, because that's part of my role as well behind the scenes, that there has been work on that previously by the government, I think it was in the days of Directgov and Business Link, that life services was actually already a concept. So will it be resurfacing that kind of work? Are you going to look back at the old material and see what learnings you've made since?

Tom Read:

Probably, yeah. So Jerry Fishenden, formerly of this parish, blogged about tweeted about it. I think it was before Directgov actually, that that that screenshot. So that was kind of based around life events. So having a baby is one. I think, I think some of them aren't life events. Some of them are whole, just just whole problems, like going abroad isn't really a life event. But you do need to think about what - particularly now - you need to think about passports, COVID[-19], political unrest. You need travel insurance. You need, yeah, vaccinations, you need visas. You know, that's not real life experience. It's more a collection of whole problems to solve one thing, which is the person wants to go abroad and needs government help. So we'll definitely look back on on on on that thinking. There's very little new under the sun. But equally, we haven't done it yet. So we need to, we need to press on and deliver.

Vanessa Schneider:

No it's that agile principle of iteration, isn't it?

Tom Read:

Right, exactly. [laugh from Vanessa]

Vanessa Schneider:

All right. You've obviously mentioned that we're looking at areas that maybe aren't being captured by government departments and also haven't had that attention previously. So I was wondering if there are still opportunities for us to learn from other departments in that area. I know, obviously, like the thing that you were mentioning with the forms, those are sort of those low-usage services, is that right? Will we be leaning on government departments that own those services a little bit or will it be solely in our purview?

Tom Read:

It's a really good question, we cannot do, there are bits that we can do ourselves from the centre, but they are quite limited. I talk to, I keep talking about the getting the balance right between centralisation and working with government departments, things like the long tail of digital forms in government. That's something we can't force people to do. The, we kind of have a two-part strategy here.

So you'll be aware that there's a new bit of Cabinet Office called the Central Digital and Data Office. And basically that's set up to take the the strategy, policy, capability, those sorts of bits, and also the spend controls and like the mandate. And so they will be looking at which departments, which agencies, which bits of government still have a lot to do. And flagging that, being, you know, I don't know, a scorecard or something, but some way of measuring progress.

We're ‘good cop’ in GDS. So our job is to build platforms, continue the work of government, so platforms, so Pay, Notify, we're going to build a way of submitting information in forms. And there may be 3 or 4 others that we're looking at. And the idea is if departments haven't digitised their simple lower transaction services, we'll give them everything that they need to do that, and we'll give them some help if they need some help to do it, and kind of slowly remove all the possible reasons why you wouldn't digitally transform. So we're the, we want to be the oil, the enablers to to help the long tails transform across central government primarily, but but also local government.

Vanessa Schneider:

And if you're interested in any of those products that Tom mentioned, we have a couple of podcast episodes that could be of interest [laughs]. So is there any chance that you can share more about what's happening at GDS right now with that focus?

Tom Read:

So we're in planning stages, is what I'd say. So we've got some some platforms that are really quite mature now, so GOV.UK Notify, I don't have the data with me, but GOV.UK Notify has an awful lot of organisations using it. We're going live with the alert cell broadcast system. And other platforms we're in planning stages. It's really looking at what are the barriers to adoption. And then we're also going to spin up a team to look at what are the next 5, what are the next 5 things that should be done centrally, may have already be done in 5 departments. So can we bring those together and package it and offer it back as a service, or do we have a federated approach to the platforms? We need to look at those different options over the next 3 months.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, just to add in, it's been 2.9 billion messages sent since May 2016 when Notify started up. So honestly, hats off.

Tom Read:

It's cool.

Vanessa Schneider:

And a shout out to Pete Herlihy. I hope he's enjoying New Zealand. [laughs]

Tom Read:

I'm sure he is.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah. So I was also wondering, I think there might be some work on single sign-on and personalisation. I was just wondering if you wanted to give a sneak preview on those?

Tom Read:

Yeah, sure. So a single sign-on for government and a way of verifying your identity. So fundamental parts of our strategy for the next few years. We've got money this year. We've got a lot of political support for this. The, some of the most brilliant people I've ever worked with anywhere, worked on Verify over the last sort of 6 or 7 years, genuinely, just utterly brilliant technologists, designers and that sort of thing. And, and Verify worked, right. It's branded as like, that didn't work. It worked for millions and millions of people.

Equally, there are some design patterns that that that that haven't quite worked. It didn't work for for certain sets of users in government. And we are now in a position where we take all of that learning and we're going to effectively build a new set of services that allow, as I said, a single sign-on for any services that need them across government and a way of proving your identity to government regardless of your social situation.

I'm really excited about this. I'm genuinely excited about this for a couple of reasons. One is we've got all that learning from Verify that we can pick up on. Secondly, a load of governments around the world have done this now, they've they've they've gone out and built on what we did and they've built their own. Thirdly, we've got proper buy-in from across government, real buy-in from ministers and senior officials in DWP, HMRC [HM Revenue and Customs], Home Office. Everyone's kind of on board for this. They know this is needed and our new sort of, very sort of collaborative approach that we're taking is-is hopefully going to bear fruit.

Vanessa Schneider:

It's great to have those big hitters on board. Those are the services where users will find themselves logging in, in order to access the information that is specific to them, which I think brings us quite neatly onto personalisation, no?

Tom Read:

Sure. Yeah. You'll probably be getting the feel for this, that a lot of what we're talking about is interdependent. These aren't completely sort of separate silos of delivery.

Vanessa Schneider:

Then what is in government, right?

Tom Read:

Well, exactly. So the way to imagine this, we're not simply building a portal, that's first thing to say. I know that’s sort of a bogey word in government and or digital design in general. GOV.UK for a lot of people is just there to get information from. And that's fine. That's fine. For for for other people, for whom government is very important because they don't access it 4 or 5 times a year, they need to go in quite regularly because they need a lot of help from government or they’re going through something quite complex in their lives.

The concept is that you will use single sign-on to log on to a GOV.UK account. And from there, you will be able to access services ideally with one click, as I mentioned previously, you could have one click access to things you're eligible based on what we already know about you, or you can change your data. So the the great mythical beast in government is this thing called Tell Me Once. Right. So we we don't have a single register of citizens in UK government, but we have hundreds of them. We have, you know, our addresses, our names, dates of birth, addresses will be in a lot of databases across government. And if we move, I don't move very often because I'm at that stage in life, young folks move a lot and it's likely that most of those bits of data are wrong across government.

So that's sort of, a by-product of a personalisation is we should be able to update that data and push it out to other parts of government in a really seamless way. And what's really exciting about personalisation, though, is there are, there's so much information on GOV.UK and so many services. You kind of need a Ph.D. in Government Studies to be able to to know how what you're what you're eligible for, what's out there. If you could personalise it by saying, you know, so for me, I'm in my 40s, I have children, I travel sometimes, I earn a certain amount. The amount of information on GOV.UK will shrink right down to, I'm making up numbers here, but 5, 10 per cent of that information and I should only be offered services that are relevant to me.

And I think from that you're doing, you know, that old adage of - it's written on your laptop - doing the hard work to make it simple. We're doing the hard work of trying to get information about a person and yes, shrink down the complexity of government to what, to what is relevant. And equally, we're not going to mandate this, right? That's really, really key to remember. If people don't want to do that, you will be able to go into your GOV.UK account and, you know, show what data we're linking and and de-link it. If you don't want to do even that, you know, you can continue accessing services how they are now and certainly we’ll always have an assisted digital method for people who don't want to or can't access services in the ways I'm describing. But I think personalisation is-is the big, our big play over the next few years. I think it will be transformational for a lot of citizens.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, you mentioned the next few years. Obviously currently you're in post the next 3 years, am, is that right?

Tom Read:

Well, no, that's that's kind of artificial. I think, I'm here forever. Right. So what I've been trying to say to people, I think because GDS has had quite a lot of change at the top, I'm just trying to make it clear that I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. I think if I'm still here in 5 years, you know, maybe somebody should start to say: ‘you should probably freshen up soon’. Equally, I'm certainly not staying less than 3 or 4 years. I mean, we've got a lot to do. I'm already enjoying it.

Vanessa Schneider:

I was going to say, this is this is what you're doing for 2021 to 2024, is that right?

Tom Read:

Yeah. I've, I've, I've tried to-to sort of focus on the current Parliament cycle.

Vanessa Schneider:

Right, but it's a lot. [laughs]

Tom Read:

It's a lot. It's a lot. And we don't do anything. I also didn't, I sort of think it's slightly artificial sometimes to say, you know, here's our 10-year strategy. Who knows what on earth is going to be happening in 10 years in terms of maybe they'll be tech innovations or maybe they'll be - more likely - machinery of government changes or something else. So I want us to focus on, you know, more than a year, less than 5 years. So our Parliamentary cycle, it also slightly secretly sharpens the focus for colleagues in the Treasury and so on for for the upcoming spending review.

Vanessa Schneider:

Very strategic, I see. I know why they hired you. [laugh from Tom] Do you want to dabble in a bit of future casting? What happens beyond, or you know, say we achieve everything that you set out? What can we do after?

Tom Read:

I have absolutely no idea, I don't think. So, I think - what do I think? - The, the, the-I'm sort of stepping into areas of the Central Digital and Data Office here rather than GDS, I think. But.

Vanessa Schneider:

It will influence our work. No doubt.

Tom Read:

We work hand in glove already. It really will influence our work. I mean, things that I'm really interested in long, long-term is the there is still a relatively low digital literacy across senior policymakers and ministers, you know, with some notable exceptions across government. And I think that will change organically. I think that is changing already. But I'd quite like to see, yeah, without wanting to be hyperbolic, I think fundamentally the way we do policymaking, it's not wrong. But it's the way we've done it for a lot of time.

What what what slightly worries me about that way of doing it is 2 things. One is we've never properly stopped and really understood what are the most important policy changes for users, for people out there. You know, really, would this policy change your life or is there something else that we could do for the same amount of money with the same ambition that would change your life more? And I think we need to, the very qualitative, but I think we need to do more of that when we're doing policymaking right at the beginning. That's one.

Two: We tend to use data to prove hypotheses rather than than to suggest policy ideas. Really, I think we should be, you know, the really good work that Alison Pritchard is doing over at the Office for National Statistics around creating a data analytics platform that takes government data from all departments. That that's key because you should be able to look at the data, use, you know, authentic machine learning or similar, or just complex algorithms and say ‘find the connections’ that we don't quite know. What is that group, that for some reason they share a set of character traits or share a set of socio-economic situations? And then later on, they are the people who end up in prison or big users of the NHS or similar. And let's create some policy initiatives from the data. I think that would be spectacular. So anyway, so once we fix, once we've fixed all of the long tail of government and we've made GOV.UK personalised and we've done a digital identity service, we've moved all the legacy technology in the government to the public cloud, we've made everything secure. Yeah, that's where we'll go next, I think.

Vanessa Schneider:

Obviously yeah, that-that's some amazing work to look forward to, I hope. But I think we should finish on the hardest-hitting questions that I have for you today.

And we'll start off with Marmite. Yes or no?

Tom Read:

Uh, yes.

Vanessa Schneider:

Working from home or working on location?

Tom Read:

Both.

Vanessa Schneider:

Jam before cream or cream before jam on a scone?

Tom Read:

Oh, well, my mum lives in Devon, so I'm going to get this the wrong way around and she'll be very upset. But jam and then cream.

Vanessa Schneider:

Ooh, that's the Cornish way.

Tom Read:

Damnit.

Vanessa Schneider:

Early bird or night owl?

Tom Read:

I'm a night owl. I'm not good at morning's.

Vanessa Schneider:

Morning coffee or gin o'clock?

Tom Read:

[laughs] Both! That's healthy isn’t it?

Vanessa Schneider:

We've been stalking your Twitter feed. [laugh from Tom]

Planes, trains or automobiles?

Tom Read:

Well, I'll get in trouble with climate folk won’t I? Look, I really care about it. It's...I really miss travelling. I really miss travelling.

Vanessa Schneider:

You're allowed to say cycling, walking, canoeing.

Tom Read:

Yeah, a bit of that. Bit of, I don't really canoe. I really miss travelling on-on planes. I do live near a flight path and I'm quite enjoying not having planes going over. So I'm a hypocrite like everyone else.

Vanessa Schneider:

Totally understandable. And this is quick fire isn't it.

So Batman or Superman?

Tom Read:

Sup--Batman.

Vanessa Schneider:

All right. All about the journey or the destination?

Tom Read:

[laughs] I don't know!

Vanessa Schneider:

Too, too airy fairy for you, that's OK, no worries.

What about crunchy or smooth peanut butter?

Tom Read:

I don't eat peanuts, so neither.

Vanessa Schneider:

Allergic?

Tom Read:

No, just don't like them.

Vanessa Schneider:

Fair enough. And finally, what do you think of the idea of an office cat? I know this one's hot on people's minds.

Tom Read:

So. I'm a big fan of an office cat. I think we should have an office cat. I don't know if it's practical. We talked about an office dog when I was at MoJ with a, with a little you know, pass on its collar that was quickly squashed by our DGs [Director Generals].

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah I feel like I've put a cat among the pigeons by mentioning this. So [laughs] [laugh from Tom] there's always, there's always chatter amongst the staff, ‘Oh, can we please have an office cat?’. But unfortunately, because we share this building with other tenants, it's not been, not been an option, apparently, especially with cat allergies. I don't know how they get away with it, with Palmerston and FCDO [Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office], for instance, you know, there's probably going to be people with cat allergies. But if you can put in a word, the cat people will be very grateful.

Tom Read:

OK, here's my most political statement of this whole interview. I will look into whether we can get an office cat. I think it's a great idea.

Vanessa Schneider:

Oh, fantastic. Well, I've run out of quickfire hard-hitting questions for you.

Thank you so much, Tom, for coming on today and sharing with us what you see as GDS's new mission and how that's going to be achieved. If you want, you can listen to all the episodes at the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on Podbean.

Goodbye.

Tom Read:

Goodbye.

----------------------

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GDS Podcast #29: Role of Product Teams in Greener Delivery Apr 22, 2021

To celebrate Earth Day 2021, we spoke to people working in different digital roles in government about how product teams can contribute to greening delivery.

The transcript for the episode follows:

-------------

Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I'm Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS.

Today we will be talking about how product teams can play a role in greening delivery. While digital ways of working often mean moving away from paper-based processes, there's still plenty that can be done by professionals in the public sector to contribute to environmentally sustainable practice. The government has recognised the role it can play and set out its ambition in the 2011 Greening Government ICT Strategy. The strategy provides a vision for a sustainable digital delivery and ways of working.

Last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is also known as DEFRA, published the newest iteration of the strategy covering the government's approach until 2025. In it DEFRA identified opportunities across the government estate to deliver energy-saving benefits, for instance, in server utilisation and software design, or to include sustainability criteria in procurement.

In today's episode, on Earth Day, we'll explore this important issue and hear from colleagues who are taking steps to make their delivery more green. Joining me now are Adam Turner and Emily Labram. Thank you both for being here today. Would you mind introducing yourself and what you do to our listeners? Let's start with Adam.

Adam Turner:

Hi, everyone. Yeah, Adam Turner. I work for DEFRA. And for my sins, I am in charge of sustainable ICT across all government departments. So to, to make that happen, basically I-I-I write the strategy and I chair the cross-government group. So manage the governance to make this kind of stuff happen and help and advise departments on delivering all that goodness.

Vanessa Schneider:

Brilliant. Thank you, Adam. Emily, how about you?

Emily Labram:

Hi everyone, I'm Emily Labram. I'm a Lead Product Manager at the Government Digital Service. Right now I'm working in digital identity, which means I'm helping make it easier for users to access government services online. And previously I worked in the world of infrastructure at GDS, so I got very interested in how sustainably we were hosting our services. And that's where I also met Adam and worked with him on improving the sustainability of our hosting.

Vanessa Schneider:

Perfect, thank you.

So Adam, at the top of the episode, I shared a bit of information about the Greening Government ICT Strategy, but would you mind giving the listeners an explanation that's not quite so amateur?

Adam Turner:

[laughs] Not amateur at all, Vanessa. Yes, so the tagline for the strategy for the new one that we published in September 2020 for the next five years is: responsible and resilience. I don't actually use the word sustainable or green in the title at all, but basically what I'm trying to say through the strategy, what we are trying to say, is that all our ICT is is delivering goodness. It's part of the solution to the climate crisis and not part of the problem.

So within that, we have broken it down really into 3 key areas. So this is around firstly net zero ambitions, obviously tied into government ambitions for net zero by 2050. So it's linking your ICT sustainability targets with your departmental or organisational sustainability targets.

The second one is around circular. So everything around what we would used to have called waste, but now we more commonly talk about resources. Because if you're using less of the world's resources and you're using, for example, remanufactured ICT and you're taking ownership of that stuff potentially at end-of-life and thinking about where it goes, then you've got more control over the system.

And then the third one is around that kind of social aspect. And, yes, much of this is in the procurement space. But there's also a need to understand this from a design perspective as well. The Prime Minister set out a statement on modern slavery last year that highlighted ICT as a high-risk area. So we need to make sure we're squeaky clean in that area.

Vanessa Schneider:

That definitely brings it much more to life. Your [laughs] examples seem much more practical than sort of the high-level stuff that I mentioned, so thank you for that.

Yeah. So, Emily, as a Lead Product Manager I believe you are, and an advocate for sustainability, I was wondering where you see the opportunities to improve sustainability in your area of practice.

Emily Labram:

Yeah, so a couple of years ago, I started to wonder what the role of Product Managers and digital teams was in bringing down our emissions in line with our net zero targets. And I realised that actually getting a working knowledge of where emissions actually are when it comes to building and running digital services was the first step.

I realised that because services are called digital [laughs], and because they're hosted in 'the cloud', that it's quite common for Product Managers, especially people like me who didn't have a technical background, misunderstood that digital services and the cloud are something almost immaterial. That was the first shift that I made when I started realising that actually [laughs] to host a service, keep it up and running, involves these vast data centres. They are very real, they are very material, and they are kept running by electricity and water [laughs]. Electricity which you know could be produced in any number of ways, some of which could be by burning fossil fuels. And all of that was something of a kind of revelation [laughs] for me a couple of years ago.

And I do think that that started to get complex pretty quick [laughs]. But just to get started by thinking, all right, let's get a working knowledge of the sorts of emissions that my job actually produces was a good first step.

Vanessa Schneider:

Oh ok, interesting. We actually spoke with Mohamed Hamid, or Mo, from the Chief Digital Information Office in Cabinet Office, and he has some more insight into server space and the impact it can have on the environment."

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Mo Hamid:

So my name is Mohamed and I'm a Lead Infrastructure Engineer at the Cabinet Office. What that means is I look after the connectivity and the backend of infrastructure that supports the services that we offer to our users. So for us and for me, our users are, are the Cabinet Office staff that consume and use laptops, IT infrastructure, wireless connectivity, internet, access to the internet from offices and then things like-like the VPN, for example.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great, so we're discussing how to green delivery in different parts of ICT within government, so I was wondering where can it go wrong - is there something such as "overengineering" in your line of work perhaps?

Mo Hamid:

That's a great question...for me you know, just over-engineering: it is possible. In today's world, there's a big drive to move things to the cloud. So traditionally you'd have your data centres on sites in the office somewhere and you'd have a server room and that's where you would host things like email or applications. But however, there's a big trend to moving offsite to the cloud. And often what I find, and from experience is: the, you know, looking at it from a green environmental perspective is often not thought about and the reasons for that is varying. But one of the reasons would be that isn't really thought of with the requirements. There's all--the requirement seems to be, 'yep, we need to shift, lift and shift, migrate into the cloud'.

‘Do I just simply migrate all the servers and create virtual machines in the cloud in the very same way as I would do in a physical server room?’ No, you wouldn't do that. You would make use of the cloud tools that are out there and and finding out you know, how do I make use of those tools to better serve the users and the environment.

So to delve even further, what that means is: so in the traditional server room, you might, you might have a lot of servers running and some storage behind that, and that all requires power, and that's all producing CO2 gases, somewhere in the lifecycle there. You, you, you don't need to just have servers running all the time in the cloud. You can only have it running at a minimum level. And then when demand increases, for example, you can then spin up more servers. So this is, we're talking about scaling here. Do I need five servers running 24/7, you know, 30 days of the month all the time? Probably not. You probably, you know, at night time, your demand may decrease.

Vanessa Schneider:

Having flexibility in a contract so that you can scale up and down is quite handy. Is there any other sort of best practice advice that you have to pass on to anybody else who might be working in infrastructure engineering and is listening to the episode?

Mo Hamid:

Yeah, sure. I mean, I mean, I don't think I can cover everything, but I think one of the things you need to look out for - and it's best to do this from early on - is to not use tools that will get you locked in to one particular cloud provider. Perhaps in the future you may want to migrate from cloud provider A or to cloud provider B, or you may want to host in A and B together simultaneously. So being locked in one isn't a good thing because you-you-you might have other players in the future, or we might have a player that are more, more, are more green.

Number two, when you're designing your your IT, or your infrastructure, whatever you're looking to-to provide, security I think also plays a part. Not just because you want to protect your-your services obviously, but also from-from your services being used for other malicious things.

So I had a friend who was running a couple of servers in-in the cloud infrastructure, and then one day he realised that one of his servers was running at 100% CPU consistently all the time. So he logged in and checked you know, what's going on here, had a fiddle around, looked throughout, looked through his server environment and then realised his server was being used for bitmining. So, you know, cryptocurrency, finding the next Bitcoin and his server had been compromised, there was some malicious scripts running. And therefore it was running at full CP, 100% CPU. Imagine that at scale. And then that again is bad for the environment.

Vanessa Schneider:

That is fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing all of these like pieces of information from a world that's so different to what I'm used to. I was wondering if there is anything final that you could think of which relates infrastructure engineering to sustainability yet mentioned?

Mo Hamid:

Yeah, I mean, a final thought for me is probably on a more personal level, I think everyone can probably follow this is: things like clearing out clutter in our emails. And I'm, I'm, I'll put my hands up first for this - I'm, I'm the worst at this. I think I've got about 10,000 emails in my personal inbox. So clearing the up helps because you're, you're, that doesn't need to be stored anymore and because it doesn't need to be stored anymore, eventually down the line that will get deleted. And think of you know, zoom out a bit, in the, that data centre thats running that email server will have it deleted and have more storage space freed up. And then that, if we all do that, there's less storage space needed. So these are little things that we can do. So clear up your emails if you can.

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Vanessa Schneider:

So that was Mo. I was wondering, is there anything that you particularly connected with what he was saying or is there anything that you found particularly noteworthy that you'd like to explore?

Adam Turner:

Well, first of all, go Mo. That was [laughs] that was awesome. It's really heartening for someone like me who's been working in this for over a decade to hear someone talking so passionately and eloquently and usefully about this topic. So fantastic.

I'll just pick up on a few of his points. Absolutely, sustainability's a non-functional requirement. People forget this. It should be thought of in the same way as accessibility, availability, security, safety. All of those are-are the same, and you need to think them at the beginning. The challenge is in infrastructure is that industry will be saying we're getting greener by default.

Across government, we've got this thing called Crown Hosting, who are super efficient, and in terms of energy efficiency and green energy and the way that they run things. So y-you move there and it's going to get greener. But the, but the reality is in lots of ways--well there's few things [laughs] going on.

Firstly, we forget to turn off the old stuff. So that carries on running. Because of complications, because it's often not as simple as you've just got a single service sitting on a single set of servers right? So you turn off bits of it, but you've got to leave all the rest of it going. You just lift and shift your-your stuff and you carry across those requirements. And, you know, as again as Mo was saying, you-you don't need to be running this stuff 24/7 in the cloud. You only, you only need to spin it up when you actually need it.

But to do this takes a bit more work. You need that sustainability thinking in there as a non-functional requirement with some expertise right at the beginning of any projects and programme when you're looking at the infrastructure, when you're making the choices so that you know that you go to the right place, you don't end up with that vendor lock in, you-you are controlling the service that you are consuming in the same way that you're managing the costs, you are tracking your use of carbon, and you're getting that data back from those service providers. Because we all need this as increasingly the world will be looking on digital to prove that it's providing a net gain, and not--as I say not being part of the problem.

The-the bit about bit [Bitcoin] mining was-was fascinating. That's--it's a really good classic example of an you know, unintended consequence [laughs] of digital being this huge, huge energy consumption, which is currently estimated to be on par with the consumption of Argentina. So it-it's absolutely incredible and currently unmanaged.

Emily Labram:

Yeah, I totally agree with-with all of that, and yeah go Mo! [laughs]. And Mo reminds me of several very conscientious Engineers that I've worked with in the past. And it's been a process as a Product Manager to learn the role that every member of the team actually plays in simplifying the services that we build on a continual basis, rather than just going super fast and optimising to deliver the features that you know, are user-facing.

So to Adam's point about the non-functional side: reliability, security, sustainability, all of that, it needs to be made, time needs to be made for it. As a Product Manager, I've learnt [laughs], I've learnt to understand that actually I do need to be managing and tracking things like infrastructure cost at the same time as all the other perhaps more shiny user facing metrics that I might otherwise be tracking. So something I've learnt as a Product Manager is to track those as what I might call what we call health metrics.

Vanessa Schneider:

It's great to hear reliability standing out to you folks so much, ‘cause it feels like that coincides with our next clip, where I'm talking to Matthew Hobbs, or Matt, who’s a front-end developer working on GOV.UK. So my understanding of this area is pretty rudimentary but from what I know front end is pretty important in providing that reliability of services - but clearly there's also scope for sustainability!

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Matt Hobbs:

Sure, my name is Matthew Hobbs or Matt Hobbs, I'm the Head of Frontend and a Lead Frontend Developer at the Government Digital Service.

Vanessa Schneider:

So for someone who doesn't know, like myself, what front-end is, can you please first explain what falls under front-end, and then, because I'm not [laughs] asking enough of you, how can it be used to support our ambitions of becoming more environmentally sustainable?

Matt Hobbs:

That's a big question.

Vanessa Schneider:

It's a big one.

Matt Hobbs:

It's a big question, yeah.

So essentially, a lot of the computation that happens in a user's browser happens within the frontend essentially. So what you see as a person coming to our website that is essentially the frontend - the pixels being drawn to a screen - is the frontend code essentially. So there's a lot of computational power that goes into that. So by optimising the frontend, you can actually make things better from a-an environmental point of view and from a performance point of view and from a user interaction point of view as well. So that's essentially where fron-frontend comes into this piece of the puzzle.

Vanessa Schneider:

So do you have a practical example where you have perhaps optimised the code in order to improve the performance and make it more sustainable when it comes to website content?

Matt Hobbs:

Yes, so probably the, the one that I always go back to is, is from around about 2018, 2017-2018, where we were delivering our fonts for GOV.UK in a very specific way. It was quite an old school way of delivering fonts that was actually making it heavier, as in the page weight heavier for users. And we reworked how they were delivered to users, or delivered to browsers. And therefore it sort of streamlined the experience and actually cut down the amount of data that was actually being used on the frontend. And it, overall, it should have improved the experience for-for the vast majority of users.

Vanessa Schneider:

So I was wondering on that front, does it matter what kind of equipment the user has when it comes to how you code it? Or should the code work for anything, whether I've got an old Nokia phone or the newest iPhone?

Matt Hobbs:

So where, how we approach frontend development at GDS is using a methodology called progressive enhancement. So essentially we build the lowest minimum viable product first and then layer on additional features as they as, as you work through it. So if, if you're using a modern browser and it supports modern features, it will get a more modern experience. Whereas if you are on an old, old browser on an old device, they will, users with these devices will receive an experience that works, but it won't be all the bells and whistles essentially.

As you are on more modern hardware and you are on a more modern browser, it's able to cope with that. Whereas if you are on an old device or an older browser, there's the assumption that the actual hardware involved in the device won't be able to cope with that additional code.

Vanessa Schneider:

Brilliant. So if we have anybody who is a frontend developer listening, is there any way that they can access this kind of best practice?

Matt Hobbs:

Yes, we have, we have some guidance in the service manual and we also have some guidance in the GDS way as well.

Vanessa Schneider:

So if they’re working on their own and are faced with a huge project, do you have any words of advice or motivation?

Matt Hobbs:

Well, yeah, I mean, the, and as you would say around improving accessibility for a website, the it's important to realise that it doesn't always need to be solved at once as long as you are improving it a little bit every day. And it's better than it was the day before. That's essentially the best you can do. And that's essentially how you should look at web performance optimisation as well as the sustainability aspects is: have I improved it today? Yes. Then we're going in the right direction.

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Vanessa Schneider:

Right, that was Matt.

Emily Labram:

Yeah, I love what Matt said, and I always, I've discovered how important Frontend Developers and Designers are in the effort to reduce complexity, to reduce cost emissions and also the beautiful like win-wins that Matt was talking about.

So I love the fact that in improving performance that Matt would also be making it possible for users who have older phones to carry on having a good experience, which means they don't have to throw their old phones away, which is something that I with my old brick really [laughs] appreciate, and also makes a service more equitable, inclusive. Which is something that, because we're in government, we have to care about making things work for everyone, making things accessible for everyone. And it's also something that makes working government super exciting because we get to care about this. So, yeah. Thanks, Matt. Very cool.

Adam Turner:

Yeah, e-equally loved what Matt said. The-the things, we've talked largely about greening ICT so far, but, but what Matt's picking up on there is that sustainability is about all three pillars - you know, it, it's social and environmental, and about cost savings as well. And, and those three things in balance.

So if you're making a service, if you're designing service, making a webpage as easy to use as possible, and as Emily said, you can still work on a Nokia 3310 - although that wouldn't actually be possible, would it? But I think that's really, really important because those end users have a better experience: it's quicker, it's slicker.

And often to remember from a sustainability point of view, often in-in terms of government services especially, we're replacing older sort of paper-based systems or manual systems, which, which of course has that saving as well. So you want something that works crisply and cleanly and, and it needs to be simple.

And obviously the-the more simple it is and easy to use, the happier the-the end user is and who ends up using less energy. And you've got happier people and they've saved time and the whole thing's costing you less to run, and it all fits together really nicely. But it's a massive growing area that isn't really appreciated yet. And if you spend a bit more time, a-a bit of thought into what you're delivering, you're going to end up something that's going to keep everyone happier and, you know, will run more efficiently and cost you less.

Vanessa Schneider:

So there's definitely something about taking your time and getting it right the first time to make it last - so the way Matt was talking about progressive enhancement, it's nice to know that you know, nobody will have to go back to the code and redo it from scratch as innovations come and go, like it’s, it's built up in a simple way, a bit different from the way that teams will occasionally accumulate tech debt because there are urgent deliverables.

Emily Labram:

Yeah, I love that too. And as I've got more senior as a Product Manager, I do see now that my role as a Lead Product Manager is to push back sometimes and to create space for teams so that they do have the time, they have the time and the freedom to do things in the right way, to do that hard work that we always talk about at GDS to kind of make things simple for users.

And...it's really a delivery thing as much as it is a product thing, but it's about the way that we work: and the, it's iterative, we use the Agile approach and that that means that we do reduce waste because we test early and often, we find out what works from the riskiest first. And that means we can deliver little bits of value early and often continuously, and that we waste less. So that's a kind of key, key part of how, as digital people, we, we help in the effort to kind of reduce emissions.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, it, it kind of reminds me of the reuse, reduce, recycle mantra actually.

Adam Turner:

Yeah, there's an awful lot of research out there from, from universities showing now that, you know, that kind of law of ever increasing performance of things and increasing capacity - is it Moore's Law? Can never quite remember. But yes, the, basically you can go, you can use refurbished servers and they are performing, or even outperforming new servers. And obviously, if you're buying refurbished kits, that stuff hasn't been dug out of the ground, sort of virgin resources, you're re-utilising as well. So embedding that kind of circular thinking into your hosting et cetera, it, you know the, the pace of development is not something that's scary anymore. It's quite fine to use a more sustainable alternative.

Emily Labram:

On that point about circularity as well, I also wanted to recognise Product Manager's role to, to sometimes notice that we can retire things, whether that's even just a feature that no one's really using or whether it's an entire product or service and then, and continually retiring things from small to big as well as continually building that circularity also helps, I think, to kind of minimise the amount of energy that we are using to keep the stuff that we have up and running.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, yeah, definitely good points. I know that we've been talking sort of about the physical quite a lot. But actually the thing that the user most interacts with when it comes to government services is the written word - so we have the good fortune [laughs] of one of GDS's content writers sharing their perspective with us.

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Rosa Ryou:

Hello, my name is Rosa and I'm a Content Designer with the GOV.UK Accessibility Team. But what that means is I help other Content Designers make sure that everything on GOV.UK is as accessible as possible to everyone who visits GOV.UK.

Vanessa Schneider:

Brilliant. So it's like guidance, attachments like PDF or HTML preferably, of course. And I think would, would easy reads fall into content as well?

Rosa Ryou:

Easy read does fall into content. And that is to do with accessibility. So there, there is some guidance on that. But it can also be simple things like heading structures and using images and how to make that accessible, how to make your videos accessible. And all those little things also help save the environment as well, because it means people will spend less time looking, looking at things.

We do follow a style guide. So that there is consistency in how any piece of content is-is presented to our users. All our content is about making it easier for for people to find the information they need or to complete a transaction that they need to do to get on with their lives.

A good piece of, good content design is almost something that you don't actually notice. It's just there. And next thing you know, you're like, 'Oh, I know the information that I was looking for' or 'oh wow, I've just applied for a new passport. Didn't even know that was going to be that simple' kind of thing. So in that respect, you-you're making your users save a lot of time on whether it be their desktop, on mobile. And I think that has to be good for the environment because they're spending less time.

Vanessa Schneider:

Definitely, yeah, I think there's so much that content design can influence on the user end of things with reducing their electric consumption. Another thing that I was thinking of that falls into content design is also sort of the-the guidance that you give on use of images, for instance, or trying to apply plain English, is that right?

Rosa Ryou:

Yeah, yeah, that is very right. I mean with images, we are very clear that you really shouldn't be using images for decorative reasons. And I think you will, you'll probably have noticed that a lot of the times people like to have an image on a page just because that's what they're used to doing it. But if it adds absolutely no value to the content, then there's no need for you to add an image.

But of course, there will be instances where you may need to have an image: for example, if you're showing graphs or charts. But even then, we make sure that it's not, it's not a massive file size so that it takes a long time to upload or anything like that. And but we also make sure that any image used in GOV.UK that there is enough description within the text so that if you don't have the image, you'll still be able to understand the whole content.

It's a bit like, it's a bit opposite to your university days actually. You know how you-you have a word limit for your essays [laugh from Vanessa] and you write 100 words and you're thinking, well, how can I make this like 500? I think in content design you start with 100 words and you end up with 20 words.

[VOX POP ENDS]

Emily Labram:

Oh Rosa's so brilliant. Yeah, well, that was all about the beauty of doing away with anything unnecessary and getting to something incredibly simple. And I think it just speaks to the role that every single person on a team, in fact, every single person in the organisation actually has in cutting away that kind of cruft, that waste and getting to the simplest process or the simplest experience for users. And in that process, getting rid of unnecessary electricity usage, waste, et cetera, and therefore emissions.

Adam Turner:

Yes, I-I loved what Rosa was talking about. I've-I've fallen foul of-of these guidelines, I must admit, so I've learnt things the hard way, despite working in sustainability for as long as I have developing strategies and, and reports that I've laboured over, created fantastic diagrams only to have the GOV.UK style team say: 'really? [laughs] Do you need that? And what it makes you realise is yeah, actually a lot of it is just fluff. So you just read the facts and boil it right down.

Vanessa Schneider:

I think one of the things that makes me really excited about Rosa's contribution is also a lot of the time people maybe get told that, you know, words don't really necessarily have the same impact. But in this case, the words are making the impact, you know, by thinking about how you phrase things, thinking about being able to be more concise or making things easier to understand. It then means people are spending less time on the page. They're able to go-get ahead with what they're doing much faster. And that that has that, that effect that people are essentially using less electricity and contributing less to emissions. So, yeah, I don't know, I just sort of like that cheesy thought of the pen is mightier than the sword.

Adam Turner:

Hey, it's, it's not cheesy at all. Like I say, I had to learn this the hard way. It's so easy when you're designing a-a website or creating a document or a, content or whatever to say refer to diagram, you know, reference image one or something. But you're not actually explaining it. And it really makes you sit down and think about what it is that you're trying to get across. And there's some really, really great people across the content teams across government that have, that have got this nailed in, in how to make this simple and effective. And you're right, it takes up less space, got less servers running in the background, and people can access the information quicker and more efficiently. And that has to be a good thing.

Emily Labram:

Also on that, it's about getting the right trade offs, I think is what you know, the-the great skill that the Content Designers have is that they're able to, to get to that 20 words, but those 20 words are actually the right ones and they get across exactly what's needed, even though there's hardly any words there at all. I think what you're pointing out, Adam, is these trade offs are quite painful sometimes. You-you might have invested loads of time in-in kind of perhaps it's a particular feature or it's a piece of content or it's a you know, a user journey and, and then having those brave, difficult conversations to kind of challenge and go: actually, do we need all of that? How does that actually work in user research in practice, and being ready to sort of kill off stuff that isn't working.

I think that's why you need highly skilled people in these disciplines in order to help make the best possible trade offs between you know, for example, the amount of bandwidth that the NHS service is using for video and the amount of usefulness of that video to users and getting the amount of bandwidth for the, the exact decision right, and, or iterating those over time.

Adam Turner:

So I'd like to make a couple of little plugs, if I may. Firstly, the, the strategy that we mentioned right at the beginning Vanessa, mentions the idea of a responsible digital citizen. And the idea behind that was me trying to get across - and I've been engaging with the DDaT profession across government to try and make this happen - is that every single role across the Digital, Data and Technology profession across government recognises that they need to think about everything through the sustainability lens. And I think personally that's really important. And I think what we've heard today is even in the most unlikely places, like how, how we put things on a webpage and you know, how we think about the phrasing of those words to replace a picture, and actually that's going to be better, is, is having a huge sustainability benefit.

So the other quick plug I'd like to mention is the professional body of IEMA, Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment, and their basic drive is that everybody in every profession should think about sustainability. So that's just as relevant to us here in Digital and Data as it is to everyone else.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, so obviously we've heard from three colleagues and we've had Emily as well in the podcast, giving us these practical measures that maybe people who are listening who work in the digital space could apply or convince their colleagues to apply. I was wondering whether we can maybe pull back a little bit and think about sort of like what effect we're hoping this will have. And maybe that's something, again, for you, Adam, to talk about. But I know, Emily, you're quite invested in in sustainability work as well and it might be an opportunity for you to reflect on why this is important to you as well.

Adam Turner:

Sure. So, as I say, the most important thing for organisations out there to, to, you've got to understand where you are at the moment. And the most effective way of doing that is to look at your current ICT footprint. So there's numerous ways you can do that. But effectively it's your asset register with a bunch of assumptions tagged to it. And then once you understand that and then you start looking at your ICT waste, you get this, this picture of where you're at.

Now obviously increasingly we've been talking about the move to the cloud. And the big chunk of the work we've been involved with for the last couple of years has been working with our cloud suppliers to try and understand our footprints in the cloud. We've been working really closely with our key service providers in public cloud, private cloud and more traditional hosting to try and get to the bottom of that. Once we got all of that - and we are publishing a new report in the next couple of months - and we've got the last 10 years worth of reports up there, you can see the government footprint for our hosting.

All the stuff that we've been talking about today you would hope would help bring that figure down and it would get lower. And then all the other benefits in digital that kind of, that we've all experienced through COVID, you know, all that reticence that was out there for using tools like Zoom, with cultures that told people that they had to go to offices, they had to commute - suddenly that's all up in the air.

And you can see all of the savings across, carbon savings from travel, from hopefully flights - we'll see where that one goes - from...well, other areas as well. And y-you can see all those coming down and they've been enabled through digital. But we don't want digital to keep rising up. Data growth is rising exponentially. But the hosting of that is not rising exponentially because we are managing to green the grid and operators are greening.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great, thank you, Adam. Yeah, Emily, any personal reflections regarding why, why you want to have this positive impact on environmental sustainability?

Emily Labram:

I think what motivates me is to know that I am doing, doing my bit in my role, that I know how my role connects to the commitments that we've made as a nation. And that's taken two forms now.

First thing is hampioning the commitments that we have made and making sure that as an organisation, that we are tracking, we are managing our emissions in the same way as we manage the other things that we care about. And so I have pointed to Adam's work and pointed to the tools that are available and asked questions at the relevant moments. [Laughs] And we've made some good progress there.

But the other thing I think I've realised is that it's about really focussing on what I can do within my craft and within my role and how I can become a more deep expert on what it means to do Product Management in a sustainable way, what it means to lead Product Teams and enable them to do, to build products in sustainable ways. And that's where my effort and my interest is now.

Adam Turner:

I think it's important to recognise where IT and digital has moved from. And it's moved into the centre of organisations and therefore vital to deliver their corporate agenda and their commitments. So whatever organisation is out there, it-it, it's unfeasible to say that you, you can deliver the objectives of your organisation and your commitments whoever you are, whether your sustainability organisation or not, you can't do it without digital and tech.

But I think it's very important to know that we're, we're at the beginning of this journey in recognising how everyone can get involved. And it's great, the, the momentum’s there. Everyone's really passionate about this. Everyone's recognising that they need to cut down on their flights. Think about, you know, the meat they consume. Think about where their energy is being sourced. And slowly but surely, we're waking up to the role of digital and tech in that. And as we learn more about this, we as a profession can share expertise. And it's been wonderful to hear all of these examples today. And get this as part of training for everyone and share best practices and really start to create the momentum to push this forward.

Emily Labram:

I was going to recommend Designing for Sustainability by Tim Frick. And I would say if there's any digital folk listening who want to just start to get a more, a general understanding of where emissions are and how they can be managed and reduced in digital team, that's the book that's helped me out the most.

Vanessa Schneider:

Gosh, it's so exciting [laughs] hearing you respond so positively to what's already happening in government. I know it's Earth Day, which of course will be a reminder to many to think about the impact their actions have, but much more encouraging that even when it's not Earth Day, these efforts are underway here.

So on such a positive note, I want to say thank you so much to all of our guests for coming on today and sharing all this best practice and giving us motivation, hope, advice to do our best when it comes to greening in government, especially in the digital space. So you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on PodBean. Goodbye.

Adam Turner:

Bye. Thank you.

Emily Labram:

Bye everyone.

GDS Podcast #28: Demystifying GOV.UK PaaS Mar 31, 2021

The GOV.UK Platform as a Service team provides insight into how the service works and how it helps public sector organisations to host digital services.

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today we will be talking about GOV.UK Platform as a Service. GDS has a reputation for creating best in class digital products and services for government, and GOV.UK Platform as a Service - or GOV.UK PaaS for short - is one of them.

GOV.UK PaaS helps public sector organisations to secure and swiftly host their digital services without worrying about infrastructure. It’s currently used by 131 organisations, runs 1,652 applications and recently celebrated passing its live service assessment, providing a joined-up experience across channels.

Joining me are Clare Barnett and Mark Buckley. Thank you for being here. Would you mind introducing yourselves to the listeners?

Clare Barnett:

Yeah. Hi, everyone, I'm Clare. I'm a Senior Researcher on GOV.UK PaaS. And my role involves spending most of my time with users of GOV.UK PaaS, understanding what they need from our platform, understanding how current features work and what we can do to improve them, and also understanding how we might need to develop the product in the future to help meet needs that we're not currently catering for.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great, thanks, Clare. Mark?

Mark Buckley:

Hiya, I'm Mark Buckley, I'm Product Manager on GOV.UK PaaS. And that means that a lot of the user needs and things that Clare identifies and other folks on the team, I help to prioritise in order to iterate and hopefully make that product better.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great. So both of you mentioned GOV.UK PaaS and I also gave an introduction at the top of the episode but I’m sure [laughs] our listeners would value hearing from an expert what GOV.UK PaaS actually is.

Mark Buckley:

So GOV.UK Platform as a Service - or as we abbreviate it to PaaS as it's quite the mouthful - is a cloud hosting platform essentially, where service teams around government and public sector can use us to host their applications and digital services in the cloud. So whether that's a service living on GOV.UK like the Teaching Service or a simple informational website such as technical documentation or something like that, they can host their app, those applications on our platform.

The platform side of it, and is doing this sort of hard work of connecting and running the infrastructure that underpins the World Wide Web. So is akin to the plumbing in a house. So, yeah, we take care of that so the service teams don't have to.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great, thanks Mark.

Clare, as a user researcher, can you tell us why should people use PaaS? Does that come up maybe in your work?

Clare Barnett:

Yeah, it absolutely does. And, you know, I'm talking close all the time and I'm always hearing: one of the things that we hear is how we can improve the product. But we're always hearing the good stuff as well and why people use us. And I mean, essentially PaaS is there to help teams avoid unnecessary overheads.

So it means that they don't have to run the infrastructure themselves and they don't need to have Web Ops capability in-house, which means they can focus their time and budget on running their service. And what we hear from our users is that using GOV.UK PaaS, it means that they can avoid procurement blockers, it's much easier to-to use us than it is other commercial services because they don't have to go through long procurement processes.

We also offer a great developer experience, which we've spent a lot of time developing and improving over the years. And we're trusted - we hear from a lot of users that the fact that PaaS is developed by the public sector for the public sector is a really good thing for our users. It helps avoid lock-in with expensive suppliers and it feels much more collaborative as well. And overall, we're offering teams much better value for money than, than some of the commercial providers out there.

Vanessa Schneider:

Do you ever have people coming in thinking they know what PaaS is and you've got to clear up a couple of misconceptions?

Clare Barnett:

I mean, I think we have people who maybe think they can use PaaS in a slightly different way to the way that they, they do. But I mean, I would say some of the common misconceptions are that: it's only for developers. And actually that's not true at all. We do have a number of designers using GOV.UK PaaS to host their prototypes. So yes, we-we do have some misconceptions, but we're able to clear those up quite easily.

Mark Buckley:

Yeah, I-I suppose more often than not, we get misconceptions the other way, as in they don't know what PaaS is or aren't clear on sort of the benefits or the purpose for us.

A lot of teams we hear from: 'oh, well, it's only for, available for central government. It's made for central government by central government'. But that's not the case. We've done a lot of work over the years in opening up those contracts and focussing on the-the needs of not just central government, but the wider public sector. So we have teams and services from the devolved administrations, Northern Ireland Assembly use like pretty extensively, local authorities use us, NHS use us, College of Policing use us there - so we have representation from right across the public sector.

And I suppose another kind of misconception is that GOV.UK PaaS is only suitable for very simple services, such as, as I mentioned earlier, sort of a static website or something like that. But again, that's not true. We have quite we're a, we're a very flexible and powerful platform actually. And some of the services that folks might know: so the Document Checking Service is running on GOV.UK PaaS and GOV.UK Notify, which is, over, certainly over COVID, has become pretty much the UK's notification platform that also runs on GOV.UK PaaS. So we-we have the kind of full spectrum of services living quite happily and running reliably on GOV.UK PaaS.

Vanessa Schneider:

I imagine that listeners know maybe of the word cloud, cloud hosting - because we do have a sizeable audience in the Digital, Data and Technology space. I'm sure they also know that there's commercial providers in this instance. So what motivated government to create this tool rather than just relying on external providers?

Mark Buckley:

GOV.UK PaaS, yeah, is not the only Platform as a Service offering or cloud hosting offering that is available to public sector. Indeed, there is a somewhat confusing overlap with G-Cloud where you could procure different types of cloud hosting provider potentially. But we as a GOV.UK PaaS is a Platform as a Service which when it comes to cloud hosting and that type of thing, is different from Infrastructure as a Service, which is generally what private sector infrastructure providers would provide.

And if services or teams decide to use that, they will have to stitch together and do all of that kind of plumbing themselves because there's sort of more raw materials. And in-in doing that, will have to hire and recruit significant web operations capability. Because we are a platform, we've done all that, built it once with the needs of government at its heart. So to-to fit with the-the kind of M.O. of the rest of the government as a platform products. So GOV.UK Notify, GOV.UK Pay and our ourselves: we built it once so that it can be reused and across the public sector, so that there isn't that same duplication of effort. And cloud infrastructure and hosting is not a simple kind of area and takes a lot of investment. So it's, you know, the, that we've provided or invested a lot in that is beneficial hopefully to other service teams.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, definitely build once, use many, it's a favourite phrase in-in our organisation.

Right. So obviously, you are working on the product itself. I was wondering if you maybe in user research, hear about the kind of challenges people have been able to overcome thanks to GOV.UK PaaS or whether you've got a particular case that you'd consider a success story.

Clare Barnett:

Yeah. So we-we hear a lot of the time that teams are able to move a lot faster when they are using GOV.UK PaaS. So they're able to deploy faster. Just generally it kind of helps their internal processes. We take away a lot of the work that otherwise they might have to do themselves.

So some research that we did recently around users evaluating PaaS for use. One user actually said to us: ‘largely all of the effort is offloaded onto ourselves’. So they see the value for money in that the-the service doesn't really feel like very expensive at all. You know we're taking away a lot of the work that-that users would actually have to do in their teams, that's being placed on us.

On top of that, the support that we offer is really comprehensive. So whereas if a team was using a commercial competitor of ours, they might be paying quite hefty sums to have a support model in place. With GOV.UK PaaS, they get all of that included and they get access to 24/7 support. So it-it really is-it's the speed at which people are able to operate and the fact that they can reduce their team size, they don't have to have web ops capability. And the fact that overall that these things combine to help them save money and get bet-better value for money in the long term.

Vanessa Schneider:

If someone is curious to find out more, maybe take their own time and to look at information, where can they go?

Clare Barnett:

Yeah, so if you'd like to find out more about PaaS and how it works, then you can go to our website, which is cloud.service.gov.uk for more information. If you're already using PaaS, then you can contact our support channel, and again, if you go to cloud.service.gov.uk, you'll see a support thing in the top right hand corner of the page.

Vanessa Schneider:

So obviously we've heard brilliant things about PaaS now, but don’t just trust us seeing as we are the organisation [laughs] that developed GOV.UK PaaS. We’ve actually chatted with some tenants. So first off we will be hearing from Himal Mandalia.

[VOX POP STARTS]

Himal Mandalia:

Hi I'm Himal. So I've joined GDS recently as Head of Technology for GOV.UK. I've been working around government digital for about the last 6 years. Working at the Ministry of Justice Digital and the Department of Education.

So I've just joined about a month ago, but over the last few months since last year, there's been some experimentation running, some trials around GOV.UK Accounts.

As part of the trial, the first step was to-to offer an account along with the Brexit Transition Checker. So as a user, as a citizen, you-you go through a journey, you get to some answers that you might want, but then you may want personalised notifications when some of that content changes and you may want a return journey, you may want to come back and, and see, see what you selected previously.

Now, that's not being hosted along with the sort of main GOV.UK stack. GOV.UK is quite a large, complex service made up of many, many applications which are hosted on an infrastructure platform that's fairly manually set up and we are shifting over to something that will meet our evolving and quite sophisticated needs.

But for the experiment particularly the-the Accounts prototype - GOV.UK PaaS was the obvious thing to use for that. You know, just get it in there. You can deploy to it easily. You can tear it down. You can spin up additional things. And, you know, in my role as Head of Technology, I'm quite comfortable with advocating PaaS for any additional things like that. And as we, as we, as we go about re-platforming a lot of those components for GOV.UK, I definitely want to keep PaaS on the table as an option for some of those services that are very modular, that can just be, be stood up and, and then run very easily.

Vanessa Schneider:

Do you mind sharing what you think the advantage is of hosting on GOV.UK PaaS versus other solutions?

Himal Mandalia:

What things don't you want to have to worry about? What things are just, you know, what's termed the undifferentiated heavy lifting. It's really the same for many of these use cases, and you just want it to happen magically. You don't want to have to think about it. You don't want anyone doing it. And a lot of that is that that site reliability engineering, the the infrastructure engineering required to create the environment in which your application lives. And you and this is where, this is where PaaS comes in because that's all set up for you. A developer can just issue a few commands and create an environment, and launch the app.

I was describing this to some non-technical stakeholders and leadership in DfE a year or 2 ago, there was some confusion around, you know, why would we want PaaS when we have a cloud platform already? And I said, well, it's like having access to a-a really, really high quality construction site. So you've got your space to-to build your roads and your houses and you've got these amazing construction tools, but you need a level of specialism. You need actual-actual architects. You need people that can lay, can lay the electricity, wires under the road. You need to do a lot of stuff to build a few houses, but you have complete control in how you set, in how you set that up.

PaaS is much more like moving into a, moving, moving into a flat that's just ready, and all you need to do is worry about the furnishings, what you're going to put in there. And that was a very sort of loose sort of metaphor that I kept sort of pushing the boundaries on, and it broke a few times. But it's, it's, it's pretty much that: it's that, it's that thing, your application just needs somewhere to live. You just want to take care of that furnishing layer of it, not have to worry about the wiring up the walls for any electrics.

You know, organisationally you need a range of options. You do need the very low level infrastructure offering for-for the things that are very differentiated. And you need to have a very customised infrastructure build. But you also need those things that remove all of that heavy lifting and just let teams put apps out there.

And I think I've encountered in some places a very one dimensional view of what cloud means. It's, it's, it's basically a case of a one size fits all solutions, which is, which is not really the nuanced view that's needed. A nuanced view is ensuring you have the capabilities across the spectrum to handle all of your use cases. And some will be very IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service. But PaaS should definitely be there. And I think the, I think, I think the zenith of something like that is fully self-serve PaaS, which is, which is where we are with GOV.UK PaaS. It's, it's, it's great. And we just need to keep iterating it, improving it.

[VOX POP ENDS]

Vanessa Schneider:

I was wondering if anything particular stuck out to you or maybe we can discuss what it is about people working with PaaS that you all go to building and construction metaphors [laughs]?

Mark Buckley:

Yeah, well, thanks to Himal for speaking so eloquently and positively about GOV.UK PaaS.

A couple of things sort of jumped out at me that it'd be really good to sort of reiterate. And one of those is: Himal mentioning it's not a, there's not a, it's, it's not a one-dimensional, one-size-fits-all when it comes to PaaS. There's absolutely no reason why services and departments can't use things in addition to PaaS, or as well as PaaS.

So Himal mentioned where there are those really sort of complex or specialised differentiated services. Then absolutely GOV.UK PaaS probably isn't the platform for-for them. But there are also vast swathes of services and applications across government that are quite typical, sort of 3-tier applications as they're kind of known in development terms. So there might be a presentation layer and a data layer and application layer all mixing together. They work really well on GOV.UK Paas, and that essentially is probably the majority of the services that run on GOV.UK, for instance, or not on GOV.UK but are part of that.

So if you're searching for a teacher vacancy as kind of said before or looking for your energy performance certificate at MHCLG [Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government], these are all services that run really well on GOV.UK PaaS and take that stress or drama away from Developers and Web Ops Engineers so they can concentrate on other things.

Clare Barnett:

I was just going to add to that - that's something that kind of stood out for me was when Himal talked about wanting to use GOV.UK PaaS for other applications that they're looking to standup on GOV.UK as well. Because we hear that from a lot of users of the platform that once they've used it once, quite often they become advocates for GOV.UK PaaS.

You know they are selling it within their own organisations and wanting to use GOV.UK PaaS for as many things as they can and as many services suitable for. And basically end up with a really strong community of users who are really good at sharing with each other and, and, and sharing the patterns that they use and the way that they do things with, with other users to help them understand how they might be able to use the platform for their specific needs, which is, which is really great. And yeah, and it's nice for us to know that, you know, once someone used us once, actually they want to use us again.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, I'm, I'm really enjoying hearing all the positive news about it, and it must be really nice to have that sort of unintended consequence of people becoming these evangelists essentially and also supporting each other when it comes to the use of it.

So next we’ll be hearing from Colin Saliceti and his experience using GOV.UK PaaS at Department for Education.

[VOX POP STARTS]

Colin Saliceti:

Hi, my name is Colin Saliceti and I work for the Department for Education in the Teacher Services area. Teacher Services is a big area in the Department of Education [DfE], and our goal is to get excellent teachers for every child. My job title is actually Lead Infrastructure Engineer and me and my colleague, we take care of the cloud infrastructure for all the services that are developed in Teacher Services.

Vanessa Schneider:

So Colin, thanks for introducing yourself. You work in Teacher Services, I was wondering, how does that relate to PaaS?

Colin Saliceti:

In Teacher Services, we create and develop a number of services for, mainly for teachers and their careers. So we have a number of service teams which do a lot of development. So we need to provide them with the best tools to deploy their services and make it available for the, the public. And PaaS is a very good tool for that. We have different options. But we have experimented with one service which was teaching vacancies earlier, and this proved a massive success. And then next, we expanded to more and more services.

For example, Get Into Teaching, which is our main information website for teachers. That's where they can get information about the career, they can get in touch with an advisor, they can subscribe to events, and they can actually start the process to get them to-to become a teacher.

And it ties well with another service that's also on PaaS, called Find Teacher Training. So the future candidates can find a-a teacher training. So this is a very important website that the providers of training all across England advertise their courses and the candidates can apply for them through the website.

And we also have another one, which is Register Trainee Teacher - which is also on PaaS; it's not live yet, but it's almost there - where we can actually track all the, the trainees and see at which stage they are in-in their training and follow them in the beginning of their career. So there's quite a number of different services and it's just growing.

Vanessa Schneider:

So our next question is what the advantage is of hosting on PaaS versus other solutions, would you mind explaining what the benefit of it is?

Colin Saliceti:

The first thing is because it's easy compared to different platforms.

It's not easy because it's simple. It's easy because t-the platform packages a lot of features, but the way to use it, the interface to use it is, it's-it's quite easy for us. So we don't actually need a highly skilled specialist, at least in the beginning, to get on board with PaaS. So a Service Team with developers, they can manage themselves to deploy to-to PaaS without any assistance, at least in the first stages.

It's very important that it's a very flexible platform. And we can deploy the production website, but we can deploy many test websites if we need to, and we can deploy a new one for, to test something in particular, and then we can destroy it because we don't need it again and we don't need to pay for it again. So that, this flexibility is very important. And it also makes it very cost effective because we only pay for what we use and when we don't need it, we can scale down or just delete it.

Vanessa Schneider:

I was wondering if you have a user story that relates to the service that shows why it was a good idea to go with PaaS.

Colin Saliceti:

I got a very good example in the, actually, in the other part of the department.

After Teaching Vacancies, which was the-the first, it became obvious that PaaS was a good choice and some of other teams adopted it as well in, in DfE. So you may have heard of the laptops that we delivered to all the schools and for the disadvantaged kids who, to help them do the homeschooling. And so this was done thanks to a programme called Get Help with Tech. This was built very quickly and it was built on PaaS from day one. And PaaS proved that there was very important because we were able to build very quickly and iterate very quickly until we got the service right and we're able to deliver to all the schools in England.

Vanessa Schneider:

So I was wondering if I was a member of a different government department or a different team, how would you convince me to use GOV.UK PaaS?

Colin Saliceti:

First of all, the reasons I already explained: that it's easy to use and the, the learning curve is very easy. This flexibility is amazing as well, and that's really cost effective.

It's also very important that it's provided by government, it's not a separate commercial platform, it is actually provided by GDS. So all the security assurance has already been done and it's assured up to different levels of confidentiality. So you don't actually, in your department, you don't actually need to do that work again because it was already done by GDS.

And another thing is that because it's supported by GDS and we have an amazing relationship with them and we get an excellent support for them, from them, from the people who build and actually run the platform, and we have direct contact with them. And they're also here 24/7 in case of an issue. Which, so it's a great experience to run things on PaaS.

[VOX POP ENDS]

Vanessa Schneider:

So that was Colin. I also want to hasten to add, he was very concerned with appearing impartial because he did work at GDS previously on PaaS. Just wanted to make sure that he was completely representing DfE only.

Mark Buckley:

And that's the impartial version? Well, that's, that's good to hear. [chair squeaks]

Vanessa Schneider:

I think your chair just laughed.

Mark Buckley:

Yeah, potentially.

No, we've been working with DfE and Colin for, for a long time, but it's, it's great that Colin is still enjoying the benefits of our platform.

Vanessa Schneider:

Anything stand out otherwise? I was wondering, he mentioned, for instance, the really good support that you provide and I think, Clare, you mentioned that as well, coming out in your user research interviews.

Clare Barnett:

Yeah, that comes up a-alot when we talk to our users, because it's part of what makes PaaS so cost-effective for people, but it's also it-it means that people feel reassured that they're going to get the help and support. They get you know, responses. There's a really quick turnaround time for, for responses.

And we offer it not just through our support platform, called Zendesk, but we'll say through Slack. So there-there's multiple channels that people can use to get that support. And they will always be speaking to somebody from the team, as Colin said, who is well-versed in the platform, very experienced. And often the team will pair on them if they're trying to troubleshoot or problem-solve something and-and often help them fix problems that are not actually a PaaS problem. It might be that there's a problem with their, their code their end and quite often the PaaS team help identify that. So there's a lot of added value in that support package for our users.

Vanessa Schneider:

That seems to chime a lot as well with what Colin is talking about in terms of it being a really good test environment, in terms of being able to try things out, see if they work or not. Is that a common kind of use case across government?

Mark Buckley:

Yeah it's, but...we-we support services and applications running from everything from discoveries and alphas. As Colin was kind of mentioning, sort quick prototypes to check the viability. As Clare mentioned earlier, designers using it to test out and iterate sort of content and things like that. So you've got that at, at the start of the journey, but also all the way up to running mature products and services that teams do iterate on and improve those as well after going live, as it were.

It’s, in a sort of roundabout, roundabout way both Colin and Himal mentioned that things like Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS, and requiring real expertise and specialists. And quite often in government and early on in those services when they're getting up and running, will rely on suppliers and external parties to come in, maybe contractors, to come in and build things. And if they're built with incredibly specialist skills, then that becomes really difficult to maintain in the long term when the build team might have moved on to other projects for instance.

Having a platform like GOV.UK PaaS enables services to only need to recruit and employ Developers that they need and not the additional specialists and some, that kind of thing so that they can quickly iterate and test things out and not be at risk of not being able to support what they're doing over the long term. So, yeah, it's, what Colin said kind of brings a tear to the eye, right, in terms of being able to quickly build those things on a supported platform that can then enable support to folks in lockdown that really need help with education and homeschool.

Vanessa Schneider:

We always love it when our services have that direct impact, I think it's a lot more relatable to people to say I've got my kid a refurbished laptop, rather than saying that now you can get your document checked, because obviously Document Checking Service is much more a business-to-business kind of environment, isn't it?

So we've heard from some of the people who are using GOV.UK PaaS about why they like it, and about how your team develops it, but I think it's time now to share some GOV.UK PaaS fast facts with our listeners. As a starter for 10, can you tell me whether there's maybe a record for how fast a service was stood up via GOV.UK PaaS?

Mark Buckley:

You know, even though we are, from a development point of view, you can do a cf push and your application is running in minutes, in terms of actual real life bonafide services, the Shielded Vulnerable People Service as part of the support for people shielding and to get them support during coronavirus, the, there was a first kind of pull request on that service at 4pm on a Thursday, and the service itself went live when the Prime Minister a-announced it on, on the Monday.

So you know, within the space of 4 days, you've got something stood up and running on PaaS that, and the first care packages, or support packages, delivered to people within a week kind of thing. Which, yeah, at-at the beginning when, you know it seems like a long time ago now, was this was almost, almost almost a year ago, it was like indispensable to have GOV.UK PaaS and the other common platforms as well, GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay as ways to very quickly, cheaply and easily stand up new services. So 4 days to support the Vulnerable People Service was a really nice thing to do. I don't know if it's a record, but it's a good, good story.

Vanessa Schneider:

If you want to hear more about how this service was stood up, you can listen to our February episode of the podcast.

Clearly GOV.UK PaaS has had an important part to play in the UK government response to coronavirus but what other services do you host that you think listeners might be surprised by?

Mark Buckley:

It's not only GOV.UK designed system services and things like that, as, as mentioned, NHS, local authorities, various kinds of things are hosted. I think the probably most unusual service that is hosted on GOV.UK PaaS is called Cosmic Bazaar - and not bizarre as in unusual, although it is unusual, Bazaar as is in markets or souk [laughs] I suppose - which is a forecasting platform for economists to hone their, yeah forecasting and evaluation skills as part of the Cabinet Office. So that was an unusual one to be posed with.

Vanessa Schneider:

Clare, I'm thinking that across all of these various services that are being set up on PaaS, the user research element of it is probably still going to remain consistent even as the applications vary across the 'bazaar' to the mundane. Is that right?

Clare Barnett:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yes, we have a really wide variety of services, but within that we have a kind of core set of different types of users - they fit into you know, a certain user type that we see. Which means that we can build the product around those user types rather than building and designing the product around very kind of specific niche services.

Vanessa Schneider:

So my final question is just about whether you've known about any other governments taking advantage of our research here. For instance Notify, we've been quite grateful and flattered where the Australian government, the Canadian government, the Department for Veteran Affairs in America, they've used the GitHub basically forked it and made their own variations of it. I was wondering, have you heard about that being the case maybe for PaaS?

Mark Buckley:

We actually have a bit of a kind of community ourselves with other, other 'PaaS's' from around the world. So our PaaS, GOV.UK PaaS, is built upon a technology called Cloud Foundry, which is the abstraction layer I suppose away from the raw infrastructure that Colin and others have talked about. And as well as ourselves, also the Australian government and the American government, Cloud.Gov, use Cloud Foundry as well. So there's been quite a lot of sharing between our teams. So 18F was the kind of equivalent of GDS in America. We have quite frequent contact with them. We have shared our repos, we've used some of their repos. So yeah, that's a lovely global community of Cloud Foundry and PaaS users.

Vanessa Schneider:

That’s so great. Like I know we do a lot of international work but it’s, it’s really quite heartening to see that what, you know that we’re collaborating internationally in something that’s so important. What a lovely note to end on right?

So yeah, thank you so much to all of our guests for coming on today. You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. The transcripts are available on PodBean.

Goodbye.

Mark Buckley:

Bye.

Clare Barnett:

Bye.

GDS Podcast #27: Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service Feb 24, 2021

We hear from DWP, Defra, and MHCLG about their role in the cross-government response to help clinically vulnerable people during coronavirus.

The transcript for the episode follows:

-------------

Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today we will be talking about the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service and we will be joined by several guests.

You'll be hearing from Sally Benson from the Department of Work and Pensions [DWP], Martin Woolhead from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs [DEFRA], Kate Nicholls from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government [MHCLG], and Nick Tait from GDS. As you can tell by this long list of participants, the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service involved a lot of people working for a lot of departments - it was truly a cross-government effort.

But you might not be clear on what it is. In March 2020 as a critical response to the developing COVID-19 pandemic, GDS rapidly built the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service, also known as VPS, to provide support for clinically extremely vulnerable people in England, who had been advised to shield. The service was stood up over one weekend and then continuously iterated to support emerging policy and user needs.

The service enables clinically extremely vulnerable people to register their personal details and support needs, which are securely stored, validated against NHS shielded patient lists for eligibility and securely transferred to frontline service providers. During the period of national shielding from 23 March to 30 July, that is wave one of shielding, the Vulnerable People Service facilitated more than 4.2 million deliveries of essential supplies, support with basic health and care needs, as well as providing priority supermarket deliveries.

Joining me now are Kate Nicholls and Nick Tait. Thank you for being here. Would you mind introducing yourselves to the listeners? Let's start with Kate.

Kate Nicholls:

Sure. Hi, I'm Kate Nicholls. I've been working in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government as part of the shielding programme, particularly on the Data Policy Team. So we work really closely with GDS on the kind of ongoing development of the Vulnerable People Service.

Vanessa Schneider:

Amazing. Thanks for joining us Kate. Nick, would you mind introducing yourself?

Nick Tait:

Absolutely. Hello everybody. My name is Nick Tait. I'm the Service Owner for the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service here in GDS. And I've been with the programme since 5 May 2020.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you. So both of you work for parts of government that have been instrumental in the development of the service. I was wondering how you came to join the teams that were working on this?

Nick Tait:

It was pretty much born of necessity really and, and practicality. As you said in your introduction Vanessa, there were a, and there remain, a lot of interested parties, a lot of stakeholders, too much for any one department to do, given the, the nature of our response to the emergency that we found, we find ourselves in. And the 2, as far as GDS and MHCLG were concerned or are concerned, we're the 2 main players: we represent the policy and the delivery of said policy as far as the digital service goes. And furthermore, as the project has progressed, it's become expedient for us to get closer to both policy makers and, and people they know - so relationships with local authorities, for example, are best facilitated by colleagues at MHCLG.

Vanessa Schneider:

Kate, I know that you joined the MHCLG team working on this a little while into the VPS [Vulnerable People Service] being set up. How did you experience that?

Kate Nicholls:

It was actually a really great time to join because all of those kind of key relationships between GDS and MHCLG had already been established. And when I joined the team, it already really had that kind of “one team” feel. So I-I'd come from a completely different job elsewhere in government policy. And I came here and it was just, yeah, this kind of efficient machine [laughs] that was just like achieving things every single day. So, yeah, it was, it was a great kind of feeling joining in with that.

Vanessa Schneider:

Amazing. Both of you touch on relationships being established, being really valuable. Do you think you've experienced anything on this scale where you've had to tap in so many departments working on the same project before? Or do you reckon that this is, and I dare use the dreaded word, unprecedented?

Nick Tait:

M-my experience of a civil servant, there has been nothing quite like this. And for me, the fact--sure, I've worked on other programmes where there are perhaps as many stakeholders, but not at this pace. We have excellent governance practises in, processes in place. But they happen at 2 weekly cycles. But you know, at-at the working level of getting the job done then to really hone in on where those key relationships are, that's something that we have had to do in order to respond at scale. And, and I should add that because there are so many stakeholders, we have Engagement Leads on the project whose main job is to consult with local authorities or with DWP or with the food and medicine supplies and so on and so forth. So it-it multiplies out. But yeah, nothing quite like this before. I think it's fair to say.

Kate Nicholls:

Completely agree with Nick. So I've worked on teams in the Civil Service before where there's been, you know, a degree of close working with departments. But I don't think the kind of level that we've got to where, you know, you could just pick up the phone and speak to anyone on the GDS side if you're in MHCLG and, and vice versa. And it's just kind of, it's just right there at your fingertips. I think that's something I've never quite experienced before.

Vanessa Schneider:

I'm, I'm really glad to hear that went [laughs] well then.What was it like working with colleagues in departments like Department for Health and Social Care [DHSC] and external organisations like the NHS, who may be structured differently because of their work being so focused directly on the public?

Kate Nicholls:

Sure. Yeah, so we've, we've worked really closely with NHS Digital (NHS D) because they sort of provide the shielded patient list, the SPL, which is basically the kind of the heart of the whole project.

So while GDS have built this wonderful registration system, the people that that's targeted at are the people who are identified clinically by doctors and other clinicians to be extremely vulnerable. So we've had to kind of, similarly to how we've done with GDS, we had to build up really good working relationships with them, have sort of regular meetings, joint governance, and really kind of create that kind of “one team” feel to make sure that, that the right sort of data on those who are clinically extremely vulnerable is flowing through our system, is flowing to local authorities, you know, whilst also keeping patient records safe, secure and, and sort of operating legally. So that's kind of the challenge of what we've have to do with NHS D. And I think by building up really good working relationships with them that's how we've managed to kind of overcome that and, and use that data in a way that hasn't, you know, really happened with patient data ever before in the past.

Vanessa Schneider:

Nick, was there anything that you could add about either the working relationship with DHSC or NHS Digital?

Nick Tait:

So my, my experience around DHSC, the one that I'd sort of pinpoint is, is their involvement at the overall, overall programme steering board - where we have had regular contact with the Deputy Chief Medical Officer [DCMO]. And having, having senior stakeholders as, as embodied in DCMO to go, and there is all of this happening helps frame our work a little bit more, and then that comes down to, to working level, where it is the nuts and bolts of the all, all important shielded persons list, which, as Kate says, is, without which we'd be scrabbling about.

Vanessa Schneider:

So we actually talked to Martin Woolhead from DEFRA, which is the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, regarding the Vulnerable People Service. And he also shared with us a little bit about the working relationships between the departments.

[CLIP STARTS]

Martin Woolhead:

I'm Martin Woolhead. I'm Deputy Director for Food for the Vulnerable in DEFRA, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. My role essentially is overseeing policy and work on food for vulnerable people. So that ranges from work with food charities and local authorities to essentially get and look after food needs for vulnerable people.

One of the things I think constantly cropped up throughout the process was that, for example, on what we did on food supply, MHCLG could also have done that, you know MHCLG as programme owners, and working on this across government and leading it, could also have essentially contracted with food suppliers to deliver the, the packages of essential supplies that were delivered. The reason it wasn't done in that way was simply because of those relationships and the urgency that we had. So because we had the existing relationships, DEFRA was able to kind of work specifically on that bit and get it done quickly.

So, so where DEFRA worked on food supply because of its existing relationships, other departments had relationships with others. So in regard to the supply of medical supplies so medicines and things, DHSC led on that element because they had the relationships. And so with MHCLG convening, they were able to kind of use the relationships that other departments had and kind of, you know, outsource those bits. And for me that's part of the reason why it was done so quickly. So with all of the urgency, we used existing relationships to get things done.

From, I think, the first ask for, you know, essential supplies to help shielded people, to boxes of essential supplies starting to appear on doorsteps, took around 10 days. And from the announcement of shielding, so when shielding was first announced publicly, to people first receiving their essential supplies was 5 days. And you know, in the context of panic buying across the country, in the context of the global pandemic, the fact that we were able to organise direct doorstep, essential packages to any doorstep in England, and, and most services don't offer that. You know, most supermarkets won't offer doorstep delivery to every address in England, in just 5 days, I think was an incredible achievement.

[CLIP ENDS]

Kate Nicholls:

Yeah, we already had people that were experts in food supplies that knew the supermarkets. We already had a Government Digital Service with like expert content providers, people who are experts in, in data protection. We already had MHCLG, who have, like, links into councils and a really good understanding of what councils do on the ground and deliver. And also everybody in each of those departments already knew that we already have those people in the other departments. And you know I've missed people: DWP, who, you know, know everything about [laughs] how to set up an outbound call centre. So I guess it's kind of, it's a really positive story about the kind of existing connectivity between departments and different levels of quite, sort of deep expertise in different areas that we were able to draw upon pretty quickly.

Nick Tait:

Yeah, I think, I think I'd echo that. I mean no individual department needed to reinvent any wheels really. The, the programme trusted each department to, to focus on its, its domain area and to do that well. Which, which happened. The, the challenge wasn't sort of reinventing the wheel, it was to build the new one. And the new one was around the data sharing, was around actually gluing a, a relatively disparate bunch of people within, within government to work together. And once people sort of trusted that ‘Department X’ would take care of their stuff and ‘Department Y’ would do theirs, then it was just the governance and the working that needed to be worked out. Which sounds dismissive. It isn't at all. There was, there was hard work to do there. But we didn't sort of go, “'oh, well I've, I've done food policy' says non-food policy department, 'so I'll get involved with that.'” There was, there was no time for that sort of shenanigans, and people were focussed on what they knew best. And that was the, the real strength.

Vanessa Schneider:

I was going to say, in a very cheesy way, everybody brought their own wheels, and it turns out they were cogs that all worked together, and it made a very smooth machine. [laughs]

Nick Tait:

Indeed. Indeed. [laughs]

Vanessa Schneider:

So clearly relationships are a key part to this having worked so well, but are there, are there other drivers that you can think of that supported the development of the service?

Nick Tait:

I guess..so like the-the key driver, as in everything we do, is meeting the needs of our users. That's you know, primary directive: users first. And I think what we've learnt over the project is like, when everything was stood up in April, May 2020, the primary needs to be met were those of the clinically extremely vulnerable population. And, and as we became one team, we, we began to expand or, or more fully understand who our users were, how best are we serving service providers, whether it was wholesalers delivering food boxes, whether it was local authority, civil servants at the front line, who are in fact proxies, or can act as proxies, for CEV [clinically extremely vulnerable] users and use the system themselves and have their own requirements in their own local authorities.

And then sort of a, a third section of, of our users would be our stakeholders in terms of those who consume and then act upon the data that is presented via the dashboards that, that the Management, Information and Data Analytics teams provide. So I think, you know, the key driver has, has always been and will remain our users and that's sort of enshrined in how the service has been built. But what has changed, and, and continues to be iterated upon, is, is how we understand who our user population is and, and how best to serve that.

Vanessa Schneider:

Do you think that the service benefited from products such as GOV.UK Notify already being in place? But also, for instance, the data lists for the shielded people - because that data already existed, was that something that made your lives easier?

Nick Tait:

Notify, yes, I can't, I don't, I don't want to entertain thinking about how things might have been had we not had a readily accessible solution to communicate in as many channels as possible, whether it's a physical letter, whether it was an email or a text message, which would have happened via Notify. And, and don't forget that, either t-that DWP colleagues had o-outward bound call centres. We also had our interactive voice recognition system that was part of the initial wave one service that allowed people to, to register - that was inbound only, but, but nonetheless. So having, having access to tools and technology that, that we could trust because they've been tried and tested before us, made, made our lives easier.

Vanessa Schneider:

I was wondering as well: because the user was required to submit their details that were checked against that list provided by the NHS and DEFRA provided details to retailers under specific and secure conditions, I was wondering how the safety and security of user data was ensured and how was the data joined up to make sure the right people were giving the appropriate support?

Kate Nicholls:

That was something that again is kind of, to use the, the much used word, unprecedented. So that was an area where we had to get all of the right people with the right legal expertise and data protection expertise - so with you know, the data protection leads across DEFRA, DWP, MHCLG, GDS, the Data Protection Officers - all together. They formed a kind of data governance oversight board. Whilst we you know, we were kind of under a lot of pressure to work really quickly and get data to, to you know supermarkets, to councils, et cetera as quickly as we could, we had a really kind of rigorous group of experts holding us [laughs] to account to make sure that we had the right data sharing agreements in place, the right MoUs [Memorandum of Understanding] and, and all of that kind of information governance documentation. So that was really appreciated, and it sort of goes back to the running theme of that cross-government working - if we hadn't been able to get all of those people in place and we just couldn't have made it work.

Vanessa Schneider:

I believe there was a transfer tool as well. Could you tell me more about that perhaps? I believe it meant that you could select how people or which people could access what data if I got that right.

Nick Tait:

So we-we use...for the cloud hosting service that we use for our data storage, ben-benefits from its own internal security reviews that they perform on the overall system. And then their secure storage solutions are compliant with our strict regulatory requirements. So in our case what this means, and this is where the, the data transfer tool comes in, is that all of our data is encrypted, both when we store it in the database and when we share it with whosoever we are sharing it with, whether it is a local authority or another government department.

And then at the same time, and talking of regulations, we've, we've established a sort of our own processes around the database. So if you think about GDPR and the principle of the 'right to be forgotten', that's, we have our own processes for this. And if, if our listener is interested, then they can, they can go to our service page and our, all of our privacy documentation is open and, and available there.

So like even for our teams or members of the engineering teams who have access to production, only those with security clearance can access them. It's not available to Tom, Dick or Harriet, so to speak. And we, we log and audit everything. So at any given time, who accessed which piece of data at one point, that information is always available to us. So, you know, we, we take personally identifiable information very, very seriously on this.

Vanessa Schneider:

It sounds like you're doing your due diligence, I hope the listeners are heartened by that.

Nick Tait:

Yeah. [laughs]

Vanessa Schneider:

So next I was wondering, obviously we hope that something like this never happens again. That's the whole point behind the unprecedented language of course. But I was wondering if at the very least, there are learnings that you can take away from this project and the collaboration that you've carried out as well as maybe what not to do?

Kate Nicholls:

I guess the main, the main thing I've learnt as somebody who's a-a policy official, who's never worked on a digital project before, I think I've learnt something very valuable from colleagues in GDS about, about that user base development and continuous improvement, particularly in an environment where you're setting something up very, very quickly as an emergency response.

And I think the more, as we've gone along, the more we've consulted our users - and I'm particularly, from an MHCLG perspective, thinking about councils - and ask them you know, what they think and take in their feedback and expose ourselves to kind of their, their comments and their perspectives, the better the system has become. And I think that's definitely, I guess, a general learning for me. But also if, if I, if, you know, we were ever in a position to be doing something like this again, doing that kind of immediate, constant almost consultation with users would be my main learning from kind of a policy person from the digital world, because I know user base, [laughs] user base development is already a kind of a thing that, that is common across the development of digital platforms.

Vanessa Schneider:

You're sounding like an ambassador for Agile and user-based research there. That's amazing. But I was also really keen on you identifying, sort of, users outside of the clinically extremely vulnerable people and the local authorities. Because obviously the, the service has now changed because it's a much more local approach to providing these services, isn't it?

Kate Nicholls:

Yeah, definitely. I think there are, so both in wave one and wave two, on the ground in councils, the picture is a lot more complex. You know, our service talks about kind of basic support needs, but the kind of detailed assessment of each individual is happening at that council level, and, and the delivery of that support is happening across all sorts of organisations, voluntary organisations, NHS volunteer responders, charities, et cetera. And I think a-another kind of key, I guess key groups that we've tried to listen to are you know, groups like Age UK, all those voluntary groups that are actually on the ground doing these things. They're not direct users of our service, but kind of by proxy of, of being connected to the council, they are linked to the eventual kind of frontline service that our platform leads to.

Nick Tait:

To echo Kate: having policy at a sort of a, a high level, have, having policy and delivery in the same room a-a-around the same virtual whiteboard makes for better service delivery. And I-I think that's the, you know, p-personally and then sort of to, to share more widely within GDS that that, for me, it feels like the only way that this can work. Because otherwise it, it will be a far more protracted process. So, I mean, we, we talk about closer working and collaboration and the tools that sort of facilitate all of this, but we, in my experience, we do that because it's true. And this, and this project is, is proof to me at least, and I, and I hope to our users that, that is the case.

So I think the other thing I, I'd reflect on over the time of the project was: at, at the very beginning, our, our, our overall governance was, was weighty. There was a lot of it. And over, over time as the working relationships have developed and the collaboration has developed and some of that governance has been more focussed on the bits that we're actually working on.So I think that's another reflection from me.

And I, yeah, again we say it very sort of readily now, and, and we took it quite lightly to start with, but the whole “hashtag one team”. Again, i-it's not a joke, it really is, it's the real deal for us and wi-without that, we, we wouldn't be, I think, having a happy conversation like this. And as you say, I hope we don't have to respond on this level before, but there is enough learning here to, well to make an, a really active and considered response quickly, rather than as fast as you can, which is kind of where we were to, to start with, back in 2020.

Vanessa Schneider:

Of course. At the time, you know it was just about getting it stood up, wasn't it?

So we did talk to a couple of your colleagues in other departments. And one of them was Sally Benson from the DWP, that’s the Department for Work and Pensions. So we’re just going to listen to something that Sally shared with us.

[CLIP STARTS]

Sally Benson:

My name is Sally Benson, and my day job before being involved on the National Shielding Helpline as part of the critically extremely vulnerable service is working for the Department for Work and Pensions. More specifically, I'm a Senior Operational Leader in the Child Maintenance Group.

I think when we actually bring it home, 2 people stick out in my mind in terms of people that we phoned. Samantha, a blind lady that had no, no friends or family, immediate support around her, wasn't on a, you know, a mobile telephone. But the National Shielding Helpline were able to get in contact with her and, and put her in touch with those people that were able to help her.

Another lady that we also spoke to was a lady called Carol. And it became apparent from the outset of the call that, that Carol was, was experiencing some, some health difficulties on the phone and was talking to us about how she was having trouble breathing. And actually, we had a process in place that enabled us to call the emergency services. Our call centre agents remained on the call talking to Carol, making sure that she was ok and staying with her until the emergency services actually arrived.

It turns out that Carol was actually suffering a heart attack whilst on the phone to us. And unfortunately, there were 1,400 people throughout the whole of the, of the shielding contact centre process that, that actually needed us to refer to the emergency services. And I think, you know, w-wherever you are and whatever part you played in the, in the national shielding service, whether it be, you know, the data side of it and, and enabling us to actually contact people like Carol in the first place, whether it be decision makers and policy makers that, that actually decided that people like Carol needed, needed our help and our attention, or whether or not you were part of the actual contact centre that, for Department of Work and Pensions.

Everybody played a part in, in making sure that we genuinely supported and protected those most vulnerable. And I think we've got to keep Samantha and Carol at the forefront of our mind when, when we are truly understanding the difference that, that we made. And, and it's those, those things that really give that sense of pride, real sense of purpose, and, and how together working across government, we, we really do look after those most vulnerable in our society. And the National Shielding Service was a perfect example of, of that.

[CLIP ENDS]

Nick Tait:

For the GDS teams, we are intimately connected on the user research level because our user research involves speaking directly with the clinically extremely vulnerable as well as our other user groups. And this is on one hand, very, very stressful for people; especially in the earlier days of the service when people were in dire straits for the need of basic care supplies. And that, that has an impact and an effect on, on the people who are conducting that research. And we have to take care to support and, and look after our own team members who are open to this.

It's a very present now-now validation of the work that you're doing. I think as civil servants we are all contributing to the enhancement, I hope, of the society within which we live, but to have that [finger snap] instant feedback or relatively instant feedback is very, very powerful indeed.

Kate Nicholls:

Yeah, I'd agree with Nick on that point. I think you always, you know, as a civil servant, working on, kind of, policies that you hope will have an impact on the public. But often you might be waiting months or years to actually see that manifest - just because of, you know, how long policy development in normal times takes. But yeah, to be able to, kind of, immediately see how what you're doing is actually helping people in, in some small or big way is, is a really great thing about working on this. Even though it definitely comes with some of it's, kind of, pressure and stresses.

Vanessa Schneider:

I was wondering if you had any achievements that you wanted to call out specifically, any milestones, any, maybe shoutouts to colleagues that you wanted to praise publicly?

Nick Tait:

So I think it's, it's...whilst I'm not a huge fan of milestones, there are certainly achievements that, that it serves us well to remember. So the service itself was stood up over a weekend, 4 days or thereabouts. And then for those registered users, essential supplies were arriving on doorsteps 10 days later. That's pretty amazing. And then over time in, in, in, from the March to the end of July 2020, just over 4 million deliveries of essential supplies were made. So you know this is real stuff happening. So I'm, I'm quietly proud of those things. And I think all of the teams genuinely have done the, the best they could with the tools they had at hand a-and with the information they had at the time, and we've taken time throughout the, the project, or the programme, to pause and to reflect and to ask ourselves: 'what can we do better?'

And some, and some of that has been sort of like recognised formally. So in terms of shout outs, then I-I guess we'd give a shout out to David Dilley from GDS, who was very surprised on a personal level and nonetheless very, very happy to receive an excellence and leadership award at the, the Cabbies last week. So, these things are all good to have. And, and to work on a service that, that impacts people's lives pretty quickly is often enough.

Kate Nicholls:

Yeah, again, I-I feel like specific milestones maybe aren't quite what the thing that makes me kind of the proudest of the, of working on the project. I think the kind of continuous professionalism and kind of, I guess thirst for improvement is what impresses me about working on this project. So obviously the beginning, you know there was a very clear emergency response and, and a lot of momentum [laughs] that kind of comes with that. But I think it's really impressive that even though that kind of initial phase is, you know, of emergency is, is past us now, there's still kind of that appetite to constantly, to constantly test [laughs] with the users, to constantly improve. We just, just last week, we kind of implemented some improvements to the data feeds based on local authority feedback. And I think it's really inspiring to see people who are so enthusiastic about, sort of, delivering not just something that's good enough and does the job, but something that is constantly getting better.

Nick Tait:

A-a really like serious achievement in terms of like the overall, sort of, easing of some of the pressure has been the overall relationship with, with local authorities. So we, we meet regularly, fortnightly at the moment. It used to be weekly with our, our local authority working group, which is made up of, unsurprisingly, members of local authorities from different parts of the country who have different experiences and, sort of, maturity of, of, of digital. And when we started there were a lot of, sort of, folded arms and like, 'what, what are we all doing here then?'

But that group of people has stayed relatively constant, has put the hours in, has, sort of, really risen to the challenge of collective working and collaborative working. And, and now, as Kate has just, sort of, evidenced, that group of people is co-designing the service. And, and that for me is an, is an achievement. But there's no, sort of, milestone because it's been continually being, being worked at and worked t-towards by, by everybody in that group. And, and again, like so many things, it, it hasn't been a particularly smooth ride, it's been a bit bumpy in places. And that's totally fine. But because, again as Kate said, everybody was kind and humble and professional about it and, and felt free to, to air any concerns that they had. And, and collectively that group is delivering, and that's just wonderful.

Kate Nicholls:

Yeah, I definitely think we owe a lot to the kind of openness and, and I guess willingness to give us their time of local authorities. Obviously I would say that being from MHCLG. But you know, in, in so many different fora we have across the shielding directorate, the stakeholder engagement forum, where we get lots of valid feedback, we run kind of weekly surgery sessions with councils where we get so much kind of valuable insight into what it's actually like to use our service on the ground to deliver real stuff [laughs] to people.

Yeah, as Nick said, we've got our invaluable local authority, working group. So, yeah, I think that's a really, really big part of any of the success that we can, we can claim to have had from the system comes from that, for sure.

Vanessa Schneider:

Amazing. Yeah, it's, it's not always easy for these external parties who might not have been there from the beginning to work on this in a way that they might not be familiar with. Obviously, it's a very Agile approach with GDS, and that's been something that's been spreading around government. But it's not necessarily something that local government has had to work with yet. So it's, it's great that they're signing on and that they're really engaged with it as well.

Well [laughs] on that positive note - thank you so much to all of our guests for coming on today. You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on Podbean. Goodbye.

Nick Tait:

Goodbye.

Kate Nicholls:

Goodbye.

GDS Podcast #26: GDS Quiz 2020 Dec 30, 2020

We look back at what happened over the past 12 months at GDS, highlighting work on accessibility, the coronavirus response and more.

The transcript for the episode follows:

-------------

Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Today, we are looking back as fondly as we can on 2020. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this was a momentous year and we have many reasons to be proud of what our organisation and our colleagues have achieved.

What better way to reflect on the year than to ask a couple of my colleagues to put their knowledge to the test? We're going to see who has been paying attention to GDS happenings in 2020. Please welcome my guests Louise Harris and Kit Clark.

Louise Harris:

Hey, Vanessa, good to be here.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great to have you on, Lou. Do you mind telling us what you do at GDS and to spice things up a little bit for the end of the year, maybe a fun fact about yourself?

Louise Harris:

Sure. Well, of course, we know each other very well, Vanessa, because I have the pleasure of working with you in the Creative Team. But for everybody else, I'm Lou and I head up the Channels and Creative Team at GDS. I'm a relatively new starter - I'm one of our lockdown joiners because I joined in May 2020. In terms of a fun fact, it may surprise some of you given my accent to know that I'm a fluent Welsh speaker.

Vanessa Schneider:

You sou-I-do you sound very Welsh? You know what? We've got to put it to the test. Can you tell me what the team is called that you work for in Welsh?

Louise Harris:

Ok, this is something I think I can do. So I'll give you my intro again in Welsh. Louise Harris dw’ i, a rwy’n gweithio yn y Tim Creadigol a Sianeli yng Ngwasanaeth Digidol y Llywodraeth.

Vanessa Schneider:

Ok, anybody who knows Welsh, you've got to contact us and tell us if she got it right or not.Kit, would you mind introducing yourself?

Kit Clark:

Sure. My name's Kit, I'm an Engagement Manager within the Strategic Engagement Function. An interesting fact I suppose about myself, is that my uncle composed the Eastenders theme tune. So that's something I always, always bring out in introductions.

Vanessa Schneider:

I was warned that your interesting fact would be amazing. And I think it does live up to that disclaimer. I think that is a very, very fun fact indeed.

Louise Harris:

I was not warned that your fun fact was going to be as good Kit, I'm so impressed by that. What a claim to fame.

Vanessa Schneider:

I think I might just start with the quiz. Of course, if you're at home, you can play along if you like. Just make sure to keep score as you go, as I'll be sharing the answer after each question.

So let's start with the first question of the quiz.

Here it is: what was the most popular GDS podcast episode in 2020? So what topic do you think was in the most popular episode? I'll take that as an answer.

[horn noise]

Louise Harris:

I'm presuming that we're excluding this episode from the list of most popular ones, so it's the most popular one before this one, right?

Vanessa Schneider:

Yes. I'm afraid we don't have any foresight, so it'll have to be one from January to November.

Louise Harris:

OK, well I think we've had some really great guests and different people from across government this year. The big one has got to be the GOV.UK response to Coronavirus and setting up the Coronavirus landing page - I think that was such a big achievement, both in terms of the work that was done to get that product up and out, but also for you folks over here on the podcast, because I believe that was the first remote recorded podcast that we did.

Vanessa Schneider:

Hmm. Any thoughts, Kit? Any competing offers?

Kit Clark:

Not too sure. I know that accessibility's been quite a theme this year, and I believe that was in January. But I also know there was a couple of celebration ones - there was one looking at two years of Local Digital Declaration. So I think I might I go, I think COVID's a great shot but I'm going to go different and go accessibility.

Vanessa Schneider:

Alright. So there are some pretty solid guesses with both of you. Well done. I can reveal that the third most popular episode was in fact our accessibility episode. Good hunch there Kit. Second most popular was about the GOV.UK Design System. But indeed in first place, most popular episode this year was on the GOV.UK response to COVID-19.

Louise Harris:

Wahoo!

Vanessa Schneider:

Points go to Lou on that.

Vanessa Schneider:

Alright. So GDS has run a lot of stories this year. My second question is about the blog and which post attracted the most attention?

[horn noise]

Louise Harris:

This is a really tricky one because I think we've had so many good stories go out this year about the work that GDS has been doing across government. And of course, so much of what we do is used by our colleagues in the public sector. So there's often a lot of interest in what we have to say, which is great.

I mean, a big moment for me this year was our Global Accessibility Awareness Day celebrations where we were joined by thousands of people who came together to talk about digital accessibility and the work that we needed to do. So I feel like maybe the wrap up blog that we did about that, which had all of the links to the training webinars, I feel like that might be pretty popular. And even if it wasn't the most popular, it was definitely my favourite.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, I, I can reveal to you that the third most popular post this year introduced GOV.UK Accounts.

Louise Harris:

How could we forget? That was such a big story.

Vanessa Schneider:

Well, you might want to hold onto that thought. It could just help you later in the quiz. Our second most popular post described the launch of our online Introduction to Content Design course. Content Design, hugely popular. I think we might have done a podcast episode about that.Finally, I can reveal our most popular post in 2020 explained how GOV.UK Notify reliably sends text messages to users.

Let's go on to our next question. As a bit of a preamble GDS leads the Digital, Data and Technology Function in government, which is also known as the DDaT Function. And we believe firmly in user-centred design, hint hint - keywords. So there are several job families in DDaT, but can you tell me how many job roles feature in the user-centred design family?

[buzzer noise]

Kit Clark:

There's seven.

Vanessa Schneider:

You seem pretty sure about that. On a dare, could you name all of them?

Kit Clark:

I hope so because I've had some training on it relatively recently. So in the user centred design family, there's the user researcher, content strategist, the technical writer, and then there's the content design, graphic design, service design, and the interaction design.

Louise Harris:

Wow, hats off Kit. I had a feeling it was like about seven roles, but I don't think I could have named them.

Vanessa Schneider:

I am, I am very impressed. You gotta make sure that that team doesn't poach you away from us now. For those of you following along at home, you can find out more in the DDaT Capability Framework which is hosted on GOV.UK.

And as it happens, we actually spoke to some content designers earlier in the year. So we're going to play a clip.

----------

[clip begins]

Laura Stevens:

So GDS is actually the home of content design in the government too as the term and the discipline originated here under GDS’s first Head of Content Design, Sarah Richards. And why do you think it came out of the early days of GDS?

Amanda Diamond:

So really good question. And I think it is really useful for us to pause and reflect and look back sometimes upon this, because it's not, you know, content design, as you said, it came from, as a discipline it came from GDS.

So really, it only started to emerge around 2010, so 2010, 2014. So in the grand scheme of things, as a discipline, it is very young. And so it's still evolving and it's still growing. And so back in the early 2000s, before we had GOV.UK, we had DirectGov. And alongside that, we had like hundreds of other government websites. So it was, it was a mess really because users had to really understand and know what government department governed the thing that they were looking for.

So what GOV.UK did was we brought websites together into a single domain that we now know of as GOV.UK. And that was a massive undertaking. And the reason for doing that was was simple. It was, it was to make things easier for users to access and understand, make things clearer and crucially to remove the burden on people to have to navigate and understand all of the structures of government.

So back in the early days, GOV.UK, GDS picked I think it was around, I think it was the top 25 services in what was known as the Exemplar Programme. I think things like that included things that Register to Vote, Lasting Power of Attorney, Carer's Allowance. And so I think through that process, we, we, we discovered that it actually wasn't really about website redesign, it was more about service design.

[clip ends]

----------

Vanessa Schneider:

Alright on to our next quiz question. So at GDS, we like to talk about “build it once, use it often”, and are responsible for a number of amazing products and services as part of our Government as a Platform or GaaP offer. Many of our products have been put through their paces during the coronavirus response and have hit some impressive milestones in the last 12 months.

I'm going to award 2 points in total. It's a 2-part question, so I'll ask the first part first. So how many messages had GOV.UK Notify sent as of the beginning of December?

[buzzer noise]

Kit Clark:

Is it two billion?

Vanessa Schneider:

Oooh, ok.

Yes, Notify has sent more than 2 billion messages as of the beginning of this month. As you buzzed in first, I will give you first right of refusal. How long did it take Notify to send its first and second billion messages?

Kit Clark:

I'm going to pass it over to Lou and see, see what she knows about Notify?

Vanessa Schneider:

Very gentlemanly.

Louise Harris:

I'm really glad that Kit kicked this over to me because I remember seeing one of our colleagues, Pete Herlihy's tweet, which said that it took them a full 4 years to send the first one billion messages, but it only took them 6 months to send the second billion, which is an absolutely incredible achievement for Notify, and has shown just the kind of pace that that team's been working at.

Vanessa Schneider:

Truly is an incredible number. But Notify has really had a big year. And Pete Herlihy actually shared some of Notify's story in our May episode of the podcast. Let's have a listen.

----------

[clip begins]

Laura Stevens:

But to talk specifically about Notify, they, in the blog post it’s talking about this huge increase in numbers, like 2 million SMS messages were sent using Notify on a single day in March compared to the daily average of 150,000. I’ve also got a figure here of daily messages up as much as 600%, as high as 8.6 million a day.

So what services are using Notify to help with the government’s coronavirus response?

Pete Herlihy:

And those alerts are, you know, again potentially protecting people, life and property - they’re like really important. And there’s been a huge amount of travel advice and alerts being given, as, as you can imagine. So that’s been one of the biggest users.

And then I think, from, from the health perspective there’s, I’ll just say NHS because there’s like various bits of the NHS that are working like ridiculously hard and fast to spin out new services really quickly, and these services are like just incredibly crucial right now.

So the extremely vulnerable service, this is one where the government said if you are you know, in this extreme risk category you should stay at home for 12 weeks, and they’ve been texting this group of people.

There’s all the stuff around testing and results for testing, ordering home test kits, all these sorts of things. So there’s the very specific COVID response type stuff and that is, there is a significant volume of that that’s still ongoing.

It all came very quickly as well. You know this wasn’t a gradual ramp up over weeks and weeks to 5,6,700%, it was, it was almost overnight.

[clip ends]

----------

Vanessa Schneider:

Ok, I feel like this has been a bit too easy. So I thought about making the next 2 tricky and then I thought I was being too mean. So they are again connected questions, but they will be multiple choice this time. So again, if you buzz in for the first one, you get first dibs at the second question as well. So on 20 March, the GOV.UK Team shipped the Coronavirus landing page, which established a critical central source of guidance and information for people across the UK. But do you know how many days it took to go from concept to live?

Was it A, less than 5 days, B, less than 12 days or C, less than 15 days?

[horn noise]

Vanessa Schneider:

Lou.

Louise Harris:

I think it was less than five days.

Vanessa Schneider:

Alright. That is correct.

Louise Harris:

Wahoo.

Vanessa Schneider:

In fact it was only 4 and a half days. We had Markland Starkie and Leanne Cummings join us on the podcast in April to explain how we did this and what effect it had.

----------

[clip begins]

Markland Starkie:

The thing that the landing page I suppose was able to do over and above the standard solution was really to bring together, in a more consolidated fashion, wider signposts to existing and new content across government. It also allows us the flexibility to redesign or extend or iterate on that landing page at pace, which we’ve been able to do in the, in the week since. So that’s based on ongoing research into the landing page and insights to move certain content around, add certain content that was missing in the first instance, and remove content that’s not working, all of those things.

Laura Stevens:

And was also, one of the reasons why it’s been able to be built quickly and iterated quickly, is we’re using other GDS tools that already exist, for example the GOV.UK Design System. Is that, was that, has been part of it as well?

Markland Starkie:

Oh absolutely, yes. So without those things in place, like the Design System that you’ve mentioned, this would take weeks and weeks. So we’ve been able to take existing patterns, modify them where needed to. So being able to bring in elements whilst using existing patterns to really like kind of push it through at pace.

[clip ends]

----------

Kit Clark:

I mean, I personally still find it incredible that things went from conception to actually delivering in such a short span of time. It’s incredible I personally think. And also when you're talking with such high stake products as well. You know, this is a time when the nation was looking for trusted sources of information about what they could do to keep themselves and their families safe. So it's just an incredible body of work to have done. And not only that, but also in true GDS style, they were keeping the user at the centre throughout the whole process. So I believe the Coronavirus landing page was the first landing page that we designed to be mobile first because we recognised that was where our users were going to be accessing that information. So in addition to delivering some incredible services and information at a pace we’ve probably never had to do before, we’re also continually iterating and innovating to give people the best possible experience on the site. I think there's so much to be proud of. And just really hats off to GOV.UK.

Vanessa Schneider:

So you've earned yourself the right to answer the next question first. GOV.UK receives thousands upon thousands of visits every day, but in a week in March, it experienced a peak of how many visits? Was it A, 2 million, was it B, 67 million or was it C, 132 million?

Louise Harris:

Ok, so it was back in March, so that is kind of peak COVID times. I think it's got to be 132 million. It must be.

Vanessa Schneider:

You are officially on a roll.

Louise Harris:

Wooo.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yes, the answer to the second question is 132 million. Although that is probably an underestimate as our analytics only count users who accept cookies that measure the website use. So the true figures are likely even higher, as Jen Allum explained in a blog post on the topic. So visit gds.blog.gov.uk to check that nugget out.

Onto our next question. GOV.UK Pay has also had a busy year and last month we celebrated some recent milestones with them on this podcast. What were they?

[horn noise]

Vanessa Schneider:

All right, Lou.

Louise Harris:

I think it's been a really exciting time for Pay over the last couple of months. And I know that we spoke to them on a recent podcast, so I think that the milestone you're looking for is that they've onboarded their 400th service.

Vanessa Schneider:

Well, I'm sorry, Lou, but that was only half the answer I was looking for.

Louise Harris:

Oh no.

Vanessa Schneider:

Kit, it's your chance. Do you want to score another half point maybe?

Kit Clark:

I believe they processed half a billion pounds since their inception.

Vanessa Schneider:

Well done. That is spot on. And together, those two factoids make a pretty sweet nugget - that was so cheesy. But yeah, it's, it's incredible. And they only started in 2015. So that's an amazing number of services and sum of payments to process.

So my next question for you both is that we were also very busy on the GOV.UK Twitter account this year and saw a huge spike in users coming to us with queries and looking for support. That is something that I actually blogged about back in May. But can you tell me as a percentage how much our engagement increased on our posts? Was it 12,500%? Was it 150% or was it 700%? And for a bonus, can you tell me to the nearest 100,000 how many people are following the GOV.UK Twitter account right now?

[buzzer noise]

Kit Clark:

I want to go with the 12, 12 and a half.

Vanessa Schneider:

All right, Kit, I can confirm that you are right. Do you want to, do you want to try and punt for the bonus point? Do you reckon you've got that?

Kit Clark:

Yeah, I’ll go for it. I think the GOV.UK Twitter account has got around 1.2 million people following it.

Vanessa Schneider:

Oh, you are so close. I'm going to give you a half point. It's 1.8 million. And I have to say, it's been a real whirlwind of a year because of that. So we completely changed the way that we approach community management, responding to people. Lou I think you oversaw the project, what did you think?

Louise Harris:

Well, I think it certainly felt like we experienced a 12,000% increase in engagement, and I know that you, Vanessa, and so many of our colleagues over in Comms have been working really, really hard to make sure that we get back to the, frankly, thousands of people who come via the GOV.UK Twitter account every day looking for advice and signposting to guidance on the GOV.UK website. So it's been a phenomenal year. You've all done a phenomenal job and I think you've got lots to be proud of.

Vanessa Schneider:

That's very kind of you to say. I wasn't really fishing for compliments, but I'll take them anyway.

You can actually find out a little bit about how we tackle that, as I mentioned in the blog post I wrote. But we've also put out our Social Media Playbook earlier this year. We've made an update and it just talks about the kind of things that we've been considering over the course of the year. It includes updates on accessibility, security and very important in this time of year, mental health.

Louise Harris:

I think that's a really important point, Vanessa, because so often in digital comms, people think about the technology, but not the people behind that technology who are using it day in, day out. So I was really pleased when we were able to include that section on wellbeing in our GDS Social Media Playbook. And it's just another example of that GDS mentality of build once, use many. So we created that as a resource to share how we do things and what we're learning and what's working for us. And we just hope that that's a useful tool that our colleagues across government can put into practise as well.

Vanessa Schneider:

All right. I think we've got some points to pick up on this next question. Earlier this year, we launched the Data Standards Authority with our friends and counterparts over at ONS, which is the Office for National Statistics and DCMS, which is the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. You’ll hear from our former Director General Alison Pritchard now who explains a little bit more about the DSA.

----------

[clip begins]

Alison Pritchard:

Government holds considerable volumes of data in a myriad of places. But often this data is inconsistent, incomplete or just unusable. If the government is going to realise the benefits data can bring, we'll need to fix the foundations. And one way of doing this is by focussing on data standards.

GDS is leading a new authority, the Data Standards Authority (DSA), that focuses on making data shareable and accessible across government services. The metadata standards and guidance we published in August were our first deliverable. They cover what information should be recorded when sharing data across government - for example in spreadsheets - to assure it's standardised and easy to use. It's a step in quality assuring how government data is shared. Our focus on standards is one part of the bigger picture around better managing data to assure better policy outcomes and deliver more joined-up services to citizens.

[clip ends]

----------

Vanessa Schneider:

So now, you know what the DSA is. Have your pens at the ready. I'm going to read out a series of letters that relate to the DSA that I would like you to unscramble.

Louise Harris:

Oooh, ok.

Vanessa Schneider:

Alright.

So it's T-E-M-A-T-A-A-D. Those are the letters, 8 of them.

Louise Harris:

I find these so difficult. I'm so rubbish at these.

[buzzer noise]

Kit Clark:

I think I've got the letters written down right in my dyslexia mind might not be playing in my favour here but is it Data Team?

Vanessa Schneider:

Oh, I would love that. That is a great one. And it makes use of the right letters. It's not the answer I'm looking for unfortunately. It has to be about the Data Standards Authority.

Louise Harris:

Oh, ok. I don't think I would have got this had Kit not unscrambled half of it. But if it's not Data Team, is it metadata?

Vanessa Schneider:

We've got a winner here. That's right. I'm not going to repeat the letters. It definitely spells out, if you get them in the right order, metadata.

So Kit do you mind sharing with our listeners what metadata is?

Kit Clark:

I realised that I was going for speed over quality in that answer and Data Team is a bit of an overly simplistic answer. Metadata is correct me if I'm wrong, but actually data that provides insight into other data, it's a little bit inception.

Louise Harris:

Other Leo films are available.

Vanessa Schneider:

Spot on. Yep, that's right.

Last month, so that's November, we blogged about the Document Checking Service pilot that is running until next summer. And there's still a number of points up for grabs here.

So let's see who's been paying attention. What does the Document Checking Service let you do?

[buzzer noise]

Kit Clark:

So the Document Checking Service is a project to see whether organisations outside government can use real time passport checks to build useful digital services.

Vanessa Schneider:

Oh, I will score that as right. So it is great that we've got this pilot underway, especially considering that a lot of people are working remotely right now, given that individuals can provide their details without needing to go any place in person to prove their identity.

All right. So now we're onto a topic that both of you've already broached. So I'm confident we're going to get some points to some people here. In May 2020, we celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day by running a series of webinars and talks to help prepare public sector organisations for a forthcoming accessibility regulations deadline. Can you tell me what deadline we were building up to?

[horn noise]

Vanessa Schneider:

All right, Lou, point, a potential point for you.

Louise Harris:

So the most recent deadline, and particularly the one that we were working to for Global Accessibility Awareness Day, or GAAD, would have been the 23rd September 2020, which was the date by which all existing public sector websites and intranets needed to be accessible.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yep, that’s right.

To hear more about that, we are going to go back in time cheekily to January where we had Chris and Rianna on the podcast telling us a little bit more about public sector duty to accessibility.

----------

[clip begins]

Laura Stevens:

I guess part of this is also thinking like why is it particularly important that government is a leader in accessible services. Like what, why is that so important?

Chris Heathcote:

I mean as you said at the beginning, you know you don’t choose to use government, you have to use government. So you can’t go anywhere else. So it’s, it’s our obligation to make sure that, that everything is accessible to everyone. And it does have to be everyone, and especially those with disabilities, or needing to use assistive technology, tend to have to interact with government more. So we do have an obligation for that.

Rianna Fry:

And I think if you think about it, these are public services. They’re online public services so they need to be able to use, be used by the public not exclusive groups. And I think that’s what it's all about.

[clip ends]

----------

Vanessa Schneider:

So looking ahead, there is another accessibility regulations deadline coming up. When is it and what is it for? One point to award here.

[buzzer noise]

Kit Clark:

Is it the 23rd of June next year, so 2021?

Vanessa Schneider:

That's right. Yes. And what is the deadline for?

Kit Clark:

And I think it's all mobile apps to become compliant as well. So not just websites.

Vanessa Schneider:

That is right. If you are worried about those deadlines, we have some great resources. You can find them on accessibility.campaign.gov.uk. That's not just restricted to the public sector. Accessibility is important to everyone. So please visit. We've got everything you need there.

All right. So we are slowly but surely coming towards the last few questions. GOV.UK is built on the principle that you shouldn't need to know how the government works to use government services. Very prescient. But the way people interact online has changed a lot over the 8 years since GOV.UK launched. Services like shopping, banking or entertainment are increasingly personalised, and that is something that GDS wants to explore for citizens too.

In September, we were excited to share our future strategy for GOV.UK Accounts. We think this is important and exciting work that will make it simpler for citizens to interact with government to do the things they need to do. But can either of you tell me how many times will the average individual in the UK visit GOV.UK in a year? Just guess away please, folks, guess away.

[buzzer noise]

Kit Clark:

Is it 400?

Vanessa Schneider:

I like the optimism, but also in a weird way, that's pessimistic, isn't it? I'd say it's a, it's a 2- digit number.

Kit Clark:

I doubted myself halfway through that.

Vanessa Schneider:

No worries. No worries. Try again. Like cut a zero.

Kit Clark:

Is it around 40 times a year?

Louise Harris:

I think this is a really difficult question because on the one hand, GOV.UK is such an important part of our national infrastructure. I mean, you can do so many things on GOV.UK, you know, you want to renew your car tax, you do it there. You want to check when the next bank holiday is, you do it there. But on the other hand, it's so easy to use that it's almost you're in, you're out. You got what you need. So often, like, I'm trying to think how often I maybe visit it. It's got to be at least like 4 or 5 times a month. So yeah, I think I would maybe land some where where Kit is.

Vanessa Schneider:

That's a really good point, Lou. I think you've just overestimated it a little bit. We’ve done rough calculations and it looks like it’s more like 2 interactions with GOV.UK a month. So according to our rough calculations - it's something like 22 times a year. If you head over to the GDS blog you can see how we reached those numbers.

But yeah, it's really hard because obviously there's no competitor to government to provide the services that people need. It's not like you can register your car somewhere else. So we, we have to just try and make this kind of interface, the service, as easy as it can be. So it is painless, you know, that people aren't frustrated with that experience.

And we've come to our final questions of the quiz and we're ending by testing your knowledge of some common words and phrases you’ll hear used in digital government. So a lot of people refer to us as GDS, which stands for the Government Digital Service. But how well do you know other acronyms that we've been throwing around all year long?

Louise Harris:

Oh, I think Kit is going to have the edge on me here because he does so much cross-government engagement. I think this is where I'm going to really fall down.

Kit Clark:

Fingers crossed.

Vanessa Schneider:

All right. So fingers on buzzers.

What is DDaT?

[horn noise]

Louise Harris:

I'm going to get in there with this and an easy, early one. So DDaT is Digital, Data and Technology. And I know that because during my round of welcome coffees on day one, that was the acronym that kept coming up. And people said, if you just get one acronym under your belt today, make it DDaT, because it's so important to the work that GDS does as the Head of the DDaT Profession.

Vanessa Schneider:

That is correct.

All right. Our next term that we're looking for is Retros.

Kit Clark:

Does it stand for retrospective?

Vanessa Schneider:

It's as simple as that. Indeed. So what happens at a retrospective, if you don't mind sharing?

Kit Clark:

So a retro is I think it kind of does what it says on the tin really, where the group that's been working on a project will come together and essentially evaluate the good, the bad and the ugly of the work that's just being done to see what could be applied in the future, both in terms of positives as well, and things that could be improved in future, future pieces of work.

Vanessa Schneider:

Nice. An iterative process.

So obviously there's been a lot of change this year, but I think most of it has maybe been unanticipated. However, what we had been planning for this year is recruiting two leadership positions and I know everyone at GDS is excited about welcoming them in due course. One of them is for CEO of GDS and the other is GCDO. No pressure, given that they'll be your bosses and you don't know, they might even be listening.

But can you tell me for one more point what GCDO stands for?

[buzzer noise]

Kit Clark:

GCDO stands for the Government Chief Digital Officer.

Vanessa Schneider:

That is correct. Sorry Lou.

Louise Harris:

Missed out, too slow.

Vanessa Schneider:

The quiz has come to an end. So let me quickly tot up the scores.

I hope everyone listening did well and I hope we don't have to go to a tiebreaker.

Louise Harris:

Oh, do you have a tiebreaker?

Vanessa Schneider:

Well, fact is, I won't need a tiebreaker because the winner is Kit. Well done. Congratulations to Kit and commiserations to Lou. You almost had it.

Louise Harris:

Kit, a worthy opponent. Very well played.

Vanessa Schneider:

So, Kit, finish us off. Why don't you share with us what your highlight of this year has been? Might be tough. It's been a crazy year, but I'm sure you've got something.

Kit Clark:

Yeah, it's been a bit of a funny one starting a role completely remotely. I think the the people that I work with have been a definite highlight, but also with this being my first role within the Civil Service and within the public sector, just the kind of confidence of standing on my own two feet and being more confident in the work that I'm doing and getting more responsibility with each passing month is, is a really good feeling.

Vanessa Schneider:

That is such a lovely thing to say. I'll make sure to pass that on to your colleagues, because, yeah, I really enjoyed that. How about yourself Lou?

Louise Harris:

Well, I think similar to Kit it's all about the people, so I'm lucky enough to lead the team that's responsible for recording the podcast that you're listening to. And what you folks don't get to see or rather hear is just how much work goes into this each and every month. And of course, earlier this year, the team had to pivot, as so many of us did, to do things differently because recording in the way that we once did would not be safe or within the guidance. So I wanted to say a big shout out to Emily and to Vanessa. So Emily is our Producer, you never hear her here, but she's a big part of the podcast. And also to Laura Stevens, who's one of our old hosts and is now in another part of GDS. And to everybody else that's been involved, because it really is a huge challenge to do this. And I think they do a phenomenal job. So we hope you enjoyed listening and we hope to see you again in the New Year.

Vanessa Schneider:

I don't want to sound like I'm gloating, but actually it's been a really good year for me. I've had a lot of great opportunities come up this year, maybe because of what's changed, you know, and working remotely. But I don't think it's a bad idea to not acknowledge it. I got to write for the blog for the first time at GDS. I presented to the entire organisation, which was simultaneously nerve wracking and thrilling. And I've been able to share my expertise among members of the devolved nations thanks to our National, International and Research Team. So there's a lot to reflect on really positively. I think all of that could not have been done without having a really good team backing me. So I think that's probably my highlight.

Louise Harris:

Oh, my God. So cute.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you so much to our guests Lou Harris and Kit Clark for coming on today. We wish all of our listeners a happy New Year and look forward to sharing new episodes with you in 2021. You can listen to all of the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on Podbean. Goodbye.

Louise Harris:

Bye folks.

Kit Clark:

Bye.

GDS Podcast #25: GOV.UK Pay Nov 30, 2020

The GOV.UK Pay Team explain how the government’s payment service works, and hear from those who use it across the public sector.

The transcript for the episode follows:

-------------

Laura Stevens:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I'm a Creative Content Producer here at GDS.

For this month's episode, we're going to be taking a look at GOV.UK Pay. GOV.UK Pay is the government's payment platform, letting service teams across the public sector take payments quickly and securely.

It's hit a few milestones this year as it's now used in more than 400 services in around 150 organisations. These services include applying for a Blue Badge, sending money to someone in prison and further afield in many British embassies around the world as part of the apply for an emergency travel document service.

And since it started in 2015, GOV.UK Pay has processed more than 10 million payments to the total value of more than £537 million. And today, we're going to hear from users of GOV.UK Pay from central and local government, and we're also talking to Miriam and Steve from the GOV.UK Pay Team to hear about the product, its features and where it's going next.

So welcome, Miriam and Steve. Please could you both introduce yourselves and what you do on GOV.UK Pay. Miriam, first, please.

Miriam Raines:

Hi, I'm Miriam Raines. I am a Product Manager on GOV.UK Pay.

Steve Messer:

And hello, I'm Steve Messer. I'm also a Product Manager on GOV.UK Pay.

Laura Stevens:

I gave a brief introduction to GOV.UK Pay at the start, but I was hoping that you could both maybe explain a bit more about what it is and how it helps service teams across the public sector. So could you describe a bit more about the product, please?

Steve Messer:

So the GOV.UK Pay is like a part of the Government as a Platform programme. And the basic idea behind that is that service teams across government and local government have to do a bunch of the same stuff in order to move users through transactional services. So loads of people have to pay for things inside of a service, people have to apply for things, they have to receive emails - that kind of stuff.

And there was an idea a while ago to turn those common problems and solve them with like components, common components. And that's where the products from Government as a Platform come from.

Miriam Raines:

And there's sort of 2 parts to Pay: there's the bit that the paying user would see and they're one of our key groups of users. So these are the payment pages that will ask for your card details and give you sort of helpful guidance and helpful error messages, make it really easy to pay, they're really accessible, they're designed in line with the Service Standard and Design System and they're intended to be really easy to use and we're really regularly user testing those to give a sort of consistent, trusted, experienced for users who are paying online across the public sector.

And then there's the other part of Pay, which is for our other group of users, which is sort of public sector workers. So that is civil servants in central government and arm’s length bodies, it is police teams, it's finance people or digital teams in local government or the NHS. And this allows you to set up and manage your services, to take payments to really easily see what money you've had come in and make, issue refunds and track cases and applications and transactions.

Again, very much designed to be as simple to use as possible. We don't want to make this something that needs like a whole lot of training. We want to be really intuitive.

Laura Stevens:

Ok, so how does GOV.UK Pay work with a service?

Miriam Raines:

So you can plug Pay into your service. So if you've already got an existing online service, you-your users are on that service, they're paying for their licence, they're paying for, they're, they're making their application. At the point in which they're ready to pay, they're transferred over to Pay, it should look really seamless for that user, and it doesn't feel like jolting that they're going somewhere unexpected. That user can then really easily pay and is redirected back to that service. So that's when we do it in a sort of fully automated, integrated way.

And we've also got options for teams that don't have digital services to really be able to take payments online instead of taking payments via a cheque or expecting someone to call up and pay over the phone, which we know can be time consuming, it could be quite expensive to handle those, you're much more restricted on the hours that you're able to manage those payments. So we've got those 2, those 2 options for different users.

Laura Stevens:

And can you describe some of the services it's been used in?

Miriam Raines:

Yeah, we've got sort of a whole range of services. We've got some really big central government services right through to, so you mentioned, ours, we're open to local government, to NHS and police forces as well. So at sort of big central government level, we work with DVLA, we work with the Passport Office, so if you're making a digital application for passport, you'd be paying on GOV.UK Pay. We work some national services like Blue Badge. So we support a, lots of local authorities to handle Blue Badge payments. Right down to some really like small services that don't see a lot of transactions: we can have like yacht racing certificates. If you want to pay for an image of Field Marshal Montgomery at the National Archives, you can pay for that using Pay. It's quite, quite a variety. It's absolutely fascinating seeing all the things that government handles money for.

Laura Stevens:

So you mentioned there how some of the people who use it are from health and also from local government and central government, and I’ve got here as a brief history, we started off in 2015 with central government departments, then opened up to local government in 2017 and then in 2018 the health sector started using GOV.UK Pay.

But I also wanted to talk about some of the successes that have happened this year, 'cause this year has been a big year for GOV.UK Pay. I see from Steve's weeknotes - every week there seems to be a new headline. So I just wondered if you could just take me through some of the highlights from this year in GOV.UK Pay.

Steve Messer:

Yep. So I think it was a couple of weeks ago, so maybe mid-October when we had our 400th service go live, which was a good milestone. I think compared to last year, there were, I think there was something around about 100 live services. So we've seen a massive increase over the last 12 months, which is fantastic. It's good to see that the product is being used and talked about, but you know, it does mean that we have to work a bit harder now. So many more needs coming up, but that's fine, that's what we're here for.

I think we've also just before then, so I think it was around about September, we passed a milestone in the value of payments that we've taken and we've now taken well over £500 million from users and passed that on to government departments. So you know half a billion pounds moving through the product is quite a big milestone because you know, a lot of people on the team remember when the first quid went through.

But it's also it's, it's, it's exciting to see the benefits that it can generate as well. So in our economic model, we know that it can save service teams, tens of thousands of pounds in procurement costs and the time that's associated with that.

Miriam Raines:

I think we've also seen, we've able to sort of respond quickly when teams have needed to get set up with services that related to sort of COVID support. You know we are one small part of that massive thing that those services are handling, but if we can make just even the payments bit of it that bit easier and take that burden off the team when they've got all these other things to work on and get people set up really quickly, that's felt really valuable.

Steve Messer:

There was another episode just after the lockdown got lifted as well where like, no-one was applying for fishing licences because everyone was inside obviously. And then all of a sudden the, the, the break of the stay at home order was announced and people could go fishing again. And the number of fishing licence applications went from 0 to up to something like 2,000 per minute or something like that, within an hour. And it was just, it was fascinating to watch the dashboard just go, 'bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep' and you know things start happening. It was, it was a very cool.

Laura Stevens:

And yes Steve, you actually set that up very nicely as well, because we're now going to hear from the Environment Agency and they are talking about fishing, so you've clearly got some friends over there.

-----

Haroon Tariq:

I’m Haroon Tariq. I'm the Delivery Manager for the I Want to Fish Team, who are responsible for digital service that enables anglers to purchase fishing licences and submit catch returns.

Laura Stevens:

Can you tell me a bit more about what the service provides?

Haroon Tariq:

So the I Want to Fish Team looks after the service, which allows anglers to buy fishing licences which are legally required by law and also to submit catch returns, which basically means that if you go fishing for salmon and sea trout fishing, then we need to know where you fished, where you've caught, et cetera. So that's what I help look after.

Laura Stevens:

And so I wanted to just give our listeners some context for this service for anyone who doesn't regularly fish, and because the numbers involved are quite big, aren't they? I've got here a million licences are purchased a year.

Haroon Tariq:

That's right, yeah, so so about kind of a million licences get purchased a year. I mean, just to give some context, in England alone, angling is worth 1.4 billion and supports at least 27,000 jobs. Angling is increasingly being used to address mental and physical health, social inclusion, which are key issues in society, especially pertinent in recent times with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Laura Stevens:

And can you describe what the licence is? Is it something that's on your phone? Is it a physical licence or how does that work?

Haroon Tariq:

So the licence is basically provided via you get an email confirmation and you will typically get a paper card with that licence as well. And that is something that we're looking to review going forward, so watch this space! But at the moment, it's a legal requirement. If you get caught fishing in England or Wales and you don't have a fishing licence, then it is a prosecutable offence. So it is very important that anglers do have a fishing licence.

Laura Stevens:

And how does GOV.UK Pay work with this service?

Haroon Tariq:

So GOV.UK Pay is our kind of payment services platform. So we use it to process online card payments for fishing licences. We are one of the larger volume services that use Pay. So we process between 2 to 5000 transactions per day.

Laura Stevens:

And you mentioned it earlier, and also from my research you mentioned about how more people are fishing now with coronavirus with the lockdown when it lifted over summer.

So from my research, I’ve seen that when lockdown lifted in summer, there was a huge increase in people who wanted to fish, 6x in fact an increase with a peak of 1,575 applications per hour after the ease of restrictions, when there had been no higher than 252 applications per hour in the previous 30 days. So how did GOV.UK Pay help you process these?

Haroon Tariq:

So when lockdown restrictions eased, licences sales are shot through the roof and the service suitably with the additional load of anglers purchasing licences over a short period of time. This is made really easy due to the close collaboration between our internal teams at I Want to Fish and the GOV.UK Pay teams, making enhancements to service to cope with the surge in demand for fishing licences.

GOV.UK Pay was very good in working with us to understand in terms of the potential spike in peak of kind of people buying fishing licences. So effectively, we made the systems even more resilient than they already were. So they are very resilient anyway, just to kind of try and support that additional surge in demand.

And I'm pleased to report that it did work really well. As you've quoted in some of your figures there, sales figures for fishing licences kind of hit the roof when Boris did kinda ease exercise restrictions back at the beginning of the summer. So, yes, it was very well kind of work together and it worked well for us.

Laura Stevens:

And so what features does the Environment Agency make use of GOV.UK Pay in both now with coronavirus, but also all the time?

Haroon Tariq:

So I think one of the key benefits of working with GOV.UK Pay as a kind of payment services provider is that it allows us to benefit from platform enhancement. So what I mean by that is as the platform evolves and iterates, then we can kind of gain benefit from that.

So one of those examples is the recent card masking feature, which basically masks the card payment details when they’re entered. One of the other features that kind of is out of the box that we use is the transaction reporting, so we can review kind of transaction volumes and look to kind of forecast any potential peaks, such as you've mentioned, in light of Covid and exercise restrictions being eased.

One of the other features that I quite like is that if there are any production instances that occur on the service, we have the access to a live issue monitoring alert system, which allows us to track what those are, keep abreast of any updates and help us kind of predict any volumes going forward.

Laura Stevens:

And looking forward with the future of your service, how can GOV.UK Pay help you with that?

Haroon Tariq:

So we've got lots of exciting stuff coming up on the service for us, on I Want to Fish, which you'll have to wait and see. But GOV.UK Pay is our kind of payment platform provider as it kind of continues to try and add enhancements on the service. We will look to kind of gain the benefit from those as we move forward.

So I've already mentioned about the card masking feature. I'm sure there will be other benefits such as this that will look to glean and take forward. So I think that's one of the key things for us, is having a payment service provider that can iterate and move forward and kind of give us the benefit without us having to kind of spend time and research and money in that area. So with the GOV.UK Pay Team, it's very good. We've worked well together and look forward to working for in the future.

Laura Stevens:

And I'll be playing this back to the GOV.UK Pay Team during the podcast, is there anything you'd want to say to them? Anything, any requests you want to put in for any of these new features?

Haroon Tariq:

Firstly to say thank you, we've kind of created a really good partnership with all the people that we work with, with the team and very much going to continue the good work. We've got some exciting stuff coming up. We're looking at different payment methods, which we're going to be working with GOV.UK Pay going forward on. So watch this space, but for now thank you.

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Steve Messer:

That's just really nice - it's so lov-lovely to hear. That was wonderful.

Miriam Raines:

One, one thing I thought was really good and really interesting to hear about that sort of idea of partnership. I think we really do try and work very closely in partnership with our services. We sort of regularly talking to services about how they're finding it, you know what's working well, what's not working well, and really involve all of our users in shaping that future roadmap. So when we're talking about releasing new features and make sure that functionality is available, and really just sort of like upgrades that get sort of passed through to the teams without them having to do any sort of additional work - all of those things that we build in our roadmap are really based on these conversations with users that come out of the, the feedback we get from them and trying to understand their needs and expand the way that Pay can support that.

Steve Messer:

Yeah, that's, that's the cool thing, really, and that's, I think that's one of the reasons I get up in the morning as a Product Manager, is that the job is never done. There's always more to be doing. So whilst we've created a product which allows government to take card payments pretty easily and simply and then manage those, there's always going to be some other problem around the corner that people need solved. And as you hear from Haroon there, they're sort of looking at other payment methods in the future. Things that were interesting to explore with people and looking at the moment.

Laura Stevens:

And Miriam, to quote your words back at you, you along with Mark Buckley, blogged about the use of GaaP products with Coronavirus, and in there you said “some services needed to stop taking cheques or reduce reliance on call centres as offices close and call centres have fewer staff. GOV.UK Pay has been able to help these services start taking payments within a day and keep important services running.” So what I wanted to do is I want to play a clip from Home Office who, like the Environment Agency, are a long established user of GOV.UK Pay to hear about their journey with GOV.UK Pay.

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Lisa Lowton:

Yeah, so it's Lisa Lowton. I'm from the Home Office and I am the Head Functional Lead for our ERP solution - and the ERP solution being the Enterprise Resource Planning Tool that we, we look after all of our HR and finance activities.

Laura Stevens:

Lisa, I know you've worked in the Civil Service for quite a long time, particularly in finance and project work, could you just give us a brief description of your career?

Lisa Lowton:

Yeah, sure. So my career started, I was an accountant in the private sector and decided I wanted to change. And an advert came up to work in the Home Office as an Immigration Caseworker - so that's where I started.

Done a number of years as an Operational Caseworker and then moved into the project space. And that slowly moved me then back into finance and looking at ERP [Enterprise resource planning] systems again.

Laura Stevens:

And as well as obviously being in the Civil Service for while, you've also been involved with GOV.UK Pay for a while I believe since its inception back in 2015 with, under Till Wirth at the time, the then Product Manager. So can you tell me how you used the GOV.UK Pay over the years?

Lisa Lowton:

Yeah sure. So, yeah, I met Till 5 years ago it was, at a Civil Service conference down in London, when we were allowed to travel at that point. So, so Till and I met when he was doing a stall and he was talking through payments and, and how things were going to be done in one place for government, and, and I kind of really enjoyed speaking with Till and I was quite interested.

It was literally by chance that about 4 or 5 months later, where I was working at the time, the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), decided to look at developing a product in-house and that would mean an element of payments that would be taken - so straightaway Till came to mind. So that literally was the-the start of the journey really.

So that was the DBS Basic Disclosure Service and they use all 3 of the GDS products - so Verify, Notify and Pay. So we were the first ones to go live with that. And it took around 2 years and it went live in January ‘18. And Gov.Pay was obviously a key element of that. So it was really nice to see from inception, them conversations in Civil Service Live to then actually it rolling out into that service - so that was where it started.

Laura Stevens:

And more recently, I know coronavirus has, like for many of us, pretty much all of us, have forced you to change some of the way you take payments on services. So can you explain a bit more about this service and how GOV.UK Pay has helped you with that shift?

Lisa Lowton:

So we were looking at the, the pay portal to move all our invoice payments to. So, so currently our card payments were, are taken through another provider, and they're kind of a shared service centre as such, and, and card payments are actually took through manual card terminals, which was, obviously means the-the agents having to obviously be in the office at the time, and also the number of issues that the guys faced with their manual card terminals including lack of, lack of Wi-Fi, that type of thing was-was also an issue.

So we were already looking to move the service to Pay. It was just by chance that COVID came along and meant that there was a real risk that the, the guys in Wales potentially might not be able to be in the office, which meant that we would, we would then have a bit of a gap as to how we would take payments for invoices that needed to be paid over that period, and who, who, people prefer to pay by card as well. So so that was the opportunity that we had.

And therefore we-we had a conversation with your development team as to look how we could use a payment link in that situation. We put it through our internal governance - our DDaT [Digital, Data and Technology] governance - who were really supportive of us in-in getting this up and running. And it took around about 5 weeks and we managed to, to get it up and running to be able to provide that as, as a backup service should, should the team in Newport not be able to be in the office.

Laura Stevens:

And you mentioned payment links there, and I know this is a feature that's been really helpful to you. Could you explain a bit more about what a payment link is and how it helped you?

Lisa Lowton:

Yes, sure. So as I spoke about before the, the COVID response was how, how are we able to give customers the way to make a payment without having to, to call the call centre for example, or where the call centre can't take that payment.

So the payment link was,was really handy so that we were able to put on, counter the IVR - so the telephone solution, where we can say, you know, we can't take a payment right now so if you go to this GOV.UK and, and provide that information, and also we've put it on a number of, or we are about to put it on a number of potentially e-ma, at the bottom of emails that, that go out from the shared service centre, as well as the, the kind of the longer term view of putting it on the back of an invoice, and also on some of the, the penalties, which is also where we need to add that payment linked to as well.

So just on the payment linked functionality - really easy to set up, very quick. Obviously the, we had some thinking internally as to how we make sure people provide the right information, because at this point, weren't quite sure how, how the data would come in. And so, so that was really easy to set up. And there was, you know, we did some internal reviews and to be able to make the changes like we did so quickly, I think there was absolutely astonishment because normally when you make changes on any type of, of portal, it normally takes a number of weeks, a number of months, and normal has a pound sign on it.

And that wasn't the case. It was all, it was all at our fingertips and we were able to change it there and then in the sessions that we were having with the internal business colleagues as well. So that, that was really good.

So we've been going for 5 months now, and again, this is not been advertised anywhere specific, this was only set-up for the, for people who weren't able to make a payment when they called up - to date we've had just under £200,000 of, kind of, revenue coming in. So which is great, which, which has come through a portal that would never existed 5 months ago.

So, so we've got to remember kind of you know, some of our customers you know don't want to, don't want to pay, you know some of these are penalties, and, you know, like any, anything like that, you, you potentially do struggle to, to get the income in. But it does show either how easy the solution is and how people are, the usability of it is really good. Because therefore, you know, we've got that promise to pay and you know, over 90%, which is, which is superb.

Laura Stevens:

And what other features have you used?

Lisa Lowton:

I guess one of the advantages of going to GOV.Pay was that obviously as the payments industry develops, GOV.Pay are absolutely there at, at the frontend of this. And a recent example, well maybe not that recent but you know, 12 months ago when Apple and Google Pay we're, we're very much kind of hot on the heels of, of how people want to pay. That was something that, as part of where I spoke about before the Disclosure and Barring Service, Basic Service, that's something that we wanted to use. Again it gives people the opportunity to you know, more, more opportunity to pay through however they want to pay.

I was really surprised, I don’t know why I was surprised, it was just a really good example of the where you guys had built the technology, and all I did was click a switch and that was it. And then my customers were then able to pay by Apple and Google Pay. And, and that for me was a real key benefit because it was something similar that we were looking at in another area of the service, which potentially would have cost that organisation quite a lot of money. So that is, that is something that I'll always remember that first kind of, I suppose it's an enhancement as such, of how that work was done you know, in GDS and we were all able to benefit from it. And that's something that I want to kind of make sure that people are aware of these types of things and the benefits of moving to GOV.UK Pay.

Laura Stevens:

And when I'm playing this clip back to the GOV.UK Pay Team, is there anything you'd want to say to them, or any requests you have or anything else?

Lisa Lowton:

Ooh..so, so firstly it is a massive thank you. And I guess it's, it's just what I suppose, you know, when I think about how, how can we make this service better, we've got to get the word out there. So things like this podcast, you know other, other advertisements that we can do, that I can do as a department to try and sell this service will only help longer term, and will also mean that you know the guys back in the GDS office, or in the, or in their living room or wherever they are now, understand that the important job that they do for central government.

It's very easy for people in the back office not to understand the impact of, of the front line. And I can give you an example really, a quite recent example of conversations that we're having with our colleagues at the border who want to be able to make sure they've got access to see information 24 hours a day, you know, our operation does not close down in the Home Office, it absolutely stays open 24 hours a day.

And we are now working with them and using the Pay, using the Pay portal to provide them some information to which they, they're over the moon with. We're still early days. But just, you know, just for me to hear these guys tell me the impact of having this information 24 hours a day was, was quite emotional if, if I'm being honest, and sometimes people like ourselves and people in GDS might not see that front end impact, but it absolutely does, it does make a difference. And we need to make sure that we always keep that in mind - is that why we're doing it.

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Miriam Raines:

I'm pretty happy to hear Lisa's happy. Lisa's been such a great advocate for Pay, and you know, as she said we've been working with her you know, for the last 5 years through various, through her various jobs that have taken her to different parts of central government. As Pay has grown and changed and been thinking about the new things that we can offer, and hopefully you know, sounds like she's had some benefits from, from using us and from the things we've been able to add, but we've also gained hugely from like getting her insight into what it is like to be a finance person in central government. Like how, how can that work better, what are the problems they've got, what are the things that we can help with to make that easier. So she's been really great with her time sort of sharing that information with us.

Steve Messer:

So that's one of the things that really excites me, is thinking about these different scenarios that people are in when they do need to pay government. So they might be on their way to work, on the bus using their phone, and they don't really want to like have the hassle of sort of going through a government service really. They have to do it. But knowing that they can just like coming along to GOV.UK, go to a service, fill in a form, use Pay to pay us, and then get on with the rest of their life quickly, simply and easily, I think is the value of what we do.

I sort of did actually wonder what are the different devices you can use to pay government on? Because not everyone has access to the latest smartphone or a laptop or a computer or that sort of thing. So I had a bit of a play using some devices that might be more common that are a bit easier to get hold of, like a really old Kindle. So it's nice to know that you know anyone, no matter their digital access or requirements, they should be able to just pay government and get on with their life.

Laura Stevens:

Any other devices or just the Kindle? I know we've had, we've heard before that GOV.UK's been accessed by a PlayStation, services have been used on that as well.

Steve Messer:

Yeah, PlayStations, games consoles, I've used it on a TV as well, that's like quite common. People have smart TVs but might not have a smartphone. So you can use it on that. I don't know what else I've tried it on. That's it - I need to try it on the very first Web browser and see if it works on there, I'm hoping it does. That's a bit of time travelling if you do that, it's quite fun.

Laura Stevens:

And yes, and before we hear from our final clip, which is from Surrey County Council, I wanted to talk about local government. And I wanted to talk about the collaborative project with local authorities and the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government or MHCLG. Could you tell me a bit more about that, what it was and what you found out about it?

Miriam Raines:

So, yeah, MHCLG had set up the Local Digital Collaboration Unit and GDS has been working very closely with them to support that. They had a fund that local authorities could apply for to help solve common problems. And so local authorities could form groups, partnerships with other local authorities looking at the same problem, apply for money to investigate that either at sort of a discovery level or sort of alpha level if they'd already done some work on this in the past.

And there were a group of local authorities led by North East Lincolnshire that included a few other local authorities of different sizes and different sort of geographic places around the country, who wanted to look at how they could make GOV.UK Pay easier to use and make it more sort of widespread within local government. They saw there was an opportunity there, but they wanted to understand you know, why wasn’t it necessarily being used more, how could they check that it was meeting the needs of local government as well as central government and sort of understanding the case for using Pay. So we worked with them January 2019. And it was really, really interesting.

We travelled round to lots of different local authorities. We watched finance teams and caseworkers sort of doing their jobs, what the tools they were using at the moment. Try to understand what the current payment platforms that they use, what were sort of good things about that, what were the pain points around that, how Pay might be able to address it now with the functionality we had at the time and what things you might need to do to enhance Pay. So again, basing our future roadmap entirely on the feedback that we've got from users, making it much easier to use and thinking about some specific issues for local, for local government as well. And I think it's been really beneficial so we've been able to do some of the changes that we looked at.

Steve Messer:

Yeah, that would be great actually, if everyone could go to our website and look at the roadmap and just let us know if something's not on there or definitely let us know if something's on there and you're excited about it. This kind of feedback is what helps us make Pay and make it work for people.

Laura Stevens:

And now we're going to hear from a local government user from Surrey County Council.

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David Farquharson:

So my name's David Farqharson and I work at Surrey County Council and I'm a Developer who works in our integration team, which is a team that is specifically concerned with system integration. And part of that integration is the online payment solution.

Laura Stevens:

Could you tell me how you came across GOV.UK Pay?

David Farquharson:

Yes. So my first exposure to GOV.UK Pay was when we implemented our Blue Badge scheme. And as part of that, there's a payment that has to be made.

We implemented a government solution as part of the end-to-end system, incorporated the GOV.UK Pay platform for online payments and the GOV.UK Notify for the messages and notifications. So that was my first exposure to it.

And as we implemented it, I was quite impressed by what it was offering. And so decided to do an assessment of whether it would be a solution that we could look at for the whole council online payment strategy.

Laura Stevens:

So yes, Surrey came across GOV.UK Pay through the Blue Badge. I also wanted to ask about how GOV.UK Pay helped Surrey County Council during coronavirus. On a blog post on the GDS Blog there was a quote from Surrey County Council talking about a service that was set up in one day using GOV.UK Pay.

David Farquharson:

Yes. I mean, we had a particular example where we needed to take for COVID-19, we needed to take payments for a crisis fund.So it was a sort of fund set up where people could donate money to help people that were in immediate problems due to the COVID-19 issue. And as a result, we needed to get something up as quick as possible, to start taking that money. And so we used the payment links function that is provided by GOV.UK Pay, which is extremely quick way of getting up a payment page and taking those payments online. So that was the particular one that we were probably talking about.

But since COVID-19, we've already set up a number of additional live services, some using the payment links and some using more sort of in-depth integration.

Laura Stevens:

And so what features does GOV.UK Pay have that make it helpful to you as somebody working in local government?

David Farquharson:

The GOV.UK Pay platform underpinned fully by the accessible rest APIs [application programming interfaces], which enable developers and local authorities like ourselves to build custom add-ons and to access data and information from the system and embed it in some of our external applications. And also allows us to do things like journaling for our ledger, by accessing the APIs. And the documentation of support for developers is excellent - it's accessible on the website so if anyone went to your website and looked, there's a documentation section and it's excellent on the APIs and how to use them. In fact, on the whole on the whole admin site and how to integrate it, it's very good for that. And the support both online from the call logging system and telephone supports has also been very good and responsive to our needs.

We've also actually been in personal discussion with some developers from your team, and they're very willing to speak to us and listen to our requirements. And we've actually, in conjunction with them, requested some additions and amendments that they have actually now developed and put live.

Another major advantage is how quickly it is to set up a test service on the admin site, it literally takes minutes. You can start, your developers can start carrying out some initial developments and proof of concepts very quickly. So we were able to do that. And it fits in with an agile development approach as well. So you can quickly get something out very quickly, show your, your customers so they immediately get an idea of what it is they're going to be getting.

We've touched on the payment feature, but again, that's a very nice feature. If you are looking at taking online payments that you don't need to integrate with another system and are fairly simple in their nature, you can set that up literally in a day, you could have something up and have a new URL that you can put out for people to take to make online payments.

We also found that each service set up, so we at Surrey, we've got 50 plus payment services that take online payments and that's growing all the time as well. So each one of these we call a different service. So they could be completely different things from highways to education to music tuition. So a lot of different services involved. And each of those is set up as a separate service in the GOV.UK Pay admin site. And you can then control the security and the access to those services. If you will use the admin site and using the admin site for your users, you can control the use of security so that they only see the service they're responsible for. And so in the council where we've got a very disparate level of services and of users, that's was very useful to us.

So, I mean, that's just an example of the advantages. But that’s why we’ve changed our whole strategy, which is to move over to the GOV.UK Pay platform.

Laura Stevens:

If GOV.UK Pay didn't exist, how would that have impacted your work at Surrey?

David Farquharson:

We possibly would have had to have built a similar thing ourselves.

So it's probably saved us a lot of our own in-house development work, but would also have been specific to Surrey County Council and one of the things we're looking at with this is the hope that this might lead to more of a standardised local government approach as well. We've been in talks to local authorities because then we can share our experiences. We can look for joint improvements rather than working independently and developing separate solutions. And I think there is a benefit in terms of costs going forward for local authorities to do that.

Laura Stevens:

If any of our listeners are from local government and want to know a bit more, how would they get in touch with you?

David Farquharson:

If anyone wanted to follow up on any of the comments I've made or ask us how at Surrey we've approached some of these issues, I'll be more than happy to talk about that. I think the easiest would be to contact me on my work email address, which is david.farquharson, which I better spell F for Freddie a r q u h a r s o n. S for sugar, s o n. At Surreycc.gov.uk [david.farquharson@surreycc.gov.uk]

So just drop me an email and I'll either get back in the email or I can contact the person that's I’d be more than happy to do it.

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Miriam Raines:

Surrey have been such good supporters of, of Pay and we've, it's good to hear they were saying we've worked really closely with them: we've done like a couple of really useful research sessions with them. And yes, as you mentioned, we were able to release some changes pretty recently based on feedback that they'd given us. And yeah, that's really, it's just really positive.

Laura Stevens:

And would you say there, where, what David was talking about the sort of experience of GOV.UK Pay - is that typical for a local government user of GOV.UK Pay?

Miriam Raines:

Yeah. So it's actually interesting, we've got some local government users who do sort of split everything out so they've got a different service in Pay for every different type of transaction and then they can really carefully manage the nuances sort of each of those services and who's got access to it - and in some ways that can make sort of, if it works for their process, it can make finance and reconciliation easier. And that was one of the things that we were doing research with Surrey about.

There are other teams where they just have one service in Pay, and they run absolutely every single thing through it. They've got other ways of handling reconciliation and they like to sort of just, keep, keep it quite simple with their sort of interaction with with Pay. So it will depend on how teams use it.

Laura Stevens:

I was thinking about how GOV.UK Pay will develop next. So we've talked a lot about the various features since it's launched and there seems like there's been lots of things added and has adapted with different users, different features. So what are you thinking about looking forward in the, in your roadmap? What's, what's on the horizon?

Steve Messer:

So there's quite a few things, because the payments industry has changed quite a lot since the internet came along. You know it's not only online payments that have been enabled. Some exciting - if I can say that, regulation, exciting regulation, does it exist? Yes - exciting regulation went through in 2017 I think, which is open banking regulation. And this, what this does is it sort of opens up the way that you can transact with services by using your bank account.

Previously it would have been like quite expensive to build these kinds of things, but now there is a way for any kind of online service to integrate with an open banking solution and then provide information from your bank account to that service. And also to, to send money as well. So there’s quite exciting opportunities there where for people who don't have access to a card maybe could pay by bank account, which in most scenarios is quicker and might be simpler for them.

I think we also want to be looking at how we can make it cheaper for government services to use GOV.UK Pay. We are pretty competitive and we work with the market rather than against the market, which means that you know services can save a lot of money. But again, there are ways that we can really reduce these transaction costs and make it quicker and easier for service teams to convince their governance to start using Pay.

Miriam Raines:

And sort of related to that, we've also been working very closely with Government Finance Function and Government Shared Services. So we're looking at what their aims and ambitions are for sort of better efficiency or sort of automation in those processes in government. And then we looking at how Pay can sort of support that, how we can be the vehicle to enable them to roll out these new sort of finance standards or data standards and make it easier to have that sort of that same technology used and reused across, across government. So that's really, that's really interesting - and Lisa has been very helpful in that. She's been very involved from Home Office as well.

Laura Stevens:

And I guess out of all those plans, what excites you both the most coming up in the next few months to work on GOV.UK Pay?

Steve Messer:

I'm quite excited about so, we do offer a Welsh language service for our services. And so if you're a Welsh language speaker, you can go from start to finish with a completely Welsh journey until Pay sends you an email confirming your payment - that's the only bit we haven't done yet. So I'm quite excited to work on that because it means I get to use the people I live with as a test group because they all speak Welsh. It might make the Christmas dinner quite interesting.

Miriam Raines:

Steve's learning Welsh, so Steve can practice too.

Steve Messer:

Yeah, I can show myself up in how poor I am at my Welsh.

Miriam Raines:

I think we've been thinking about, I don't know if I'm allowed to get excited about invoicing, but I think I might be excited about invoicing. One of the things that Lisa was talking about in her service was they're using Pay for invoices. And definitely we have teams that are using Pay in that way, they might be using our API integration, more likely they're using that payment links functionality. But there's a lot of ways that we could probably make that better and tailor it a bit more to how people share invoices, receive invoices, want to check the invoices have been paid.

So I think there's some work there that we can do because that can be quite expensive to handle in government, it can be quite manual, it can be a bit awkward for users: lot of time they might have to make, you know call up and pay over the phone or something. So we're looking at how we could do that. So that's pretty something we might look at in the, in the New Year.

Laura Stevens:

Fab. And if I've been listening and I want to find out more or I want to get in touch with you, how is best to do so?

Steve Messer:

So probably go to our website, which is payments.service.gov.uk. There you'll be able to find information on what Pay is, how to get started, our roadmap that shows you what we're working on now, next and things that we're exploring. It also has a page that can allow you to get in touch with us. You can contact the support team or get in touch with us to tell us about anything you're excited about.

Laura Stevens:

So yes, thank you both and thank you to all our guests for coming on the podcast today. This is actually my last episode as I'm moving onto a new role in GDS so it's been great to leave on a, such a great product. And you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on PodBean. So thank you again both.

Miriam Raines:

Thanks, Laura.

Steve Messer:

Thank you. That was great.

GDS Podcast #24:Celebrating Black Excellence in Tech Oct 27, 2020

GDS colleagues and the BBC’s Matthew Card discuss Black excellence, offer advice to young Black people interested in a career in tech and share how allies can help.

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Vanessa Schneider and I'm Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Like previous episodes, this one will also be recorded via Hangouts as we're all working remotely now.

Today's podcast topic is Black Excellence in Tech as part of the GDS celebrations to commemorate Black History Month. The GDS Black Asian Minority Ethnic Staff Network at GDS have planned a calendar of events for the third year running. This year, many of the events are themed around Black excellence. To learn more about this, particularly in the tech sector, I'm joined by 3 guests: Samantha Bryant, Matthew Card and Chuck Iwuagwu. Sam, could you please introduce yourself to our listeners?

Sam Bryant:

Hi, everybody. I am Samantha Bryant, or just Sam, and I am an Associate Delivery Manager on the GovTech Catalyst Team, and also one of the co-founders and co-chairs of the GDS BAME Network.

Vanessa Schneider:

Awesome. Thank you, Sam. Chucks. Do you mind introducing yourself?

Chucks Iwuagwu:

Thanks Vanessa. Hi everyone. My name is Chucks Iwuagwu. I'm Head of Delivery in GOV.UK. And before becoming Head of Delivery on GOV.UK, I was Head of Delivery on the Verify programme.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great. Thank you, Chucks. Finally Matthew, could you please introduce yourself?

Matt Card:

Hi, I'm Matthew Card. I'm a Software Engineer, also a Senior Leadership Team Advisor at the BBC. I also run a motivational platform called Release D Reality, and I've started a Black tech network group as well.

Vanessa Schneider:

Fantastic. Thank you, Matthew. So from what it sounds like, you all carry out important roles in digital, data and technology areas of your organisations. Would you mind sharing how you've gotten to the positions in your careers that you are in currently? Let's kick off with Sam, maybe.

Sam Bryant:

Ok, so I didn't come into the Civil Service thinking that I would land a tech role. And my initial idea, plan wasn't to be in the Civil Service for ages, but having found a tech role that is a non-techie tech role, I literally like found my niche, and that really encouraged me to stay in the Civil Service for longer. So I moved from the Cabinet Office to Government Digital Service, where I developed and progressed to being an Associate Delivery Manager. And I absolutely love the role. And also because I'm super passionate about D&I [diversity and inclusion], I formed the BAME Network here at GDS.

I would say the most important thing about my role was just like being surrounded by like-minded people. So at GDS, there are a lot of people who are in the tech organisation but not necessarily holding tech roles. And so before I became a DM, I was able to liaise with different managers in GDS, get an understanding for the work that they do, and it really aligns with my natural skill sets. And because I had a natural love for technology anyway, it, those two things aligned. So that's how I became an Associate Delivery Manager.

Vanessa Schneider:

That's really cool to hear. Do you mind sharing if you've had any experience outside of the public sector, outside of the Civil Service maybe?

Sam Bryant:

I have, but not in a technical role. So I've worked for, I would call them like e-commerce tech companies like Groupon. And prior to that, I did some teaching, like all of my other jobs prior to this were very diverse and not necessarily aligned with what I do right now. But I also did a degree in English, which is really helpful when you're in a tech role, because communication is key, whether we're thinking about how we make our communications accessible, and when when we think about how we communicate with all stakeholders or how we communicate tech things to non-techies.

Vanessa Schneider:

That's really great to hear, yeah. It's, I think it's probably really important to hear also that you can do a variety of things before you come into the tech sector and that it's not, you know, a waste of time, perhaps. Chucks, do you mind perhaps sharing with us how you came to GDS and to the position that you are in now?

Chucks Iwuagwu:

I'm a bit like Samantha in, in the sense that I didn't set out in my career to work in, in tech and certainly to work in IT project management and in delivery leadership. This might surprise you, but my background is in biochemistry. I-I did a Master's in pharmacology and subsequent degrees in, in, in chemistry and, and making, manufacturing drugs, and got involved in clinical research. But it was actually my work in clinical research that led me to tech. I was involved in a clinical research project, and was particularly involved in writing specifications for the development of the application, the IT system, that we used in clinical research. And that was what sort of introduced me into business analysis and working with developers and those who write codes. I just made that transition from working in that sector into - I really enjoyed, you know, creating, you know, applications, IT systems. From then on, I moved to work initially for the health department in Scotland for NHS National Services Scotland. And then through that to several local authority. And, you know, ended up in GDS exactly about a year.

I-I became an agile enthusiast about 11 years ago, became a scrum master 10 years ago, and started working in agile scrum and have been working in agile delivery, scrum, kanban, different flavours of agile, for about 10 years. I was, just so people know, I'm an independent consultant, and working as an independent consultant in an agile space have enabled me to meet some of the cleverest people I've ever met in my life.

Vanessa Schneider:

That sounds like a really wonderful experience. Well, finally, we turn to Matt, obviously we've heard from perspectives from people who work in the Civil Service, but the BBC is obviously also a very big institution in British lives - so it'd be really cool to hear how you wound up working there as you do now.

Matt Card:

So what, I, so I did the traditional route. I started out not knowing what I wanted to do. So I took a like a gap year and I was just working in retail for a while, and then I decided to go back to university and I picked, I wanted to do comp-something in computers. I found myself on a computer all the time trying to work things out. So I thought let me go and learn how to work, to do stuff. I did a sandwich course - so one year was out in, in the real world. And then I came back, completed the degree, and then I found a job in London at a, a small company. And then I got made redundant out of my first job, cried my eyes out, you know, because, you know when you get your first job and you're like, 'oh, this is amazing'. Because I didn't know what to do before I found out what I wanted to do. And, you know, so I thought, I thought this was it. And then I got made redundant.

And then I was looking for another job, and then I found the BBC - it was really interesting because I didn't actually want to work at the BBC because I, of the perception of what I thought it was going to be like. So I went for the interview and it blew my mind - it was like 'wow' - because it was so different, it was like all open plan, like loads of floors and you could look out on the, on the whole building and everything is like, 'wow, this is amazing'. And then the second interview that I had the, the person who interviewed me just said, 'oh, so tell me, what's your favourite site?' And I was like, 'wow, this is a really interesting question'. So I was like YouTube - ‘cause it was 2009 so it's like YouTube was massive - and I was like just everybody can share their content, it's just amazing, you know? And he was like, 'right. It's a really good answer'. He asked me some other questions, and then I got the job, and I've been at the BBC ever since. I went, I started in London and I moved up to Manchester with the BBC, and I'm here now.

Vanessa Schneider:

That sounds like it was a really positive experience. Do you think that doing your degree was something that made you more successful in your career?

Matt Card:

Yes and no. I think that my skills outside of, of the computer science field has really helped me. Like because, as I said, I worked in retail for a very long time, so my customer service skills really helped me because, at the end of the day, the users are customers, right? You just have to explain and you have to have difficult conversations with people to say, 'you can't have that right now'. You know that's got nothing to do with tech - that's just you can't have that right now. So, so it's, it's more about conversations and, and learning to talk to people and dealing with, dealing with personalities as well. That's, that's was really important.

Vanessa Schneider:

Brilliant, thank you so much for sharing. So a question to both Chucks and Sam, do you think there are any kinds of supports that you've had in your life that were a factor in you being successful in your current jobs?

Sam Bryant:

So is there anyone who has supported me in my life and helped me to be successful? I would say well, initially my parents in terms of installing values into me that have made me want to be the best version of myself, who have, they've made me feel like nothings impossible to achieve.

They helped to install values in me, make me bold, confident and just positive. And they made me a nice young lady who's good at communicating. And then along my career journey, I would say there have been a few people in GDS who have really encouraged me, especially along my journey to becoming a Delivery Manager - so I'm always thankful to them. And I feel like some of it's really internal and kind of spiritual, like, yeah, I feel that my connection, my religious connections helped to install lots of confidence and self-belief in me that helped me to naturally just push forward for myself as well. So, yeah.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, that's actually a really interesting fact, you're talking about religion, because I think support can come not just from people, but also from networks for instance. So, yeah, Chucks, if you've got any reflections on that, I'd be really interested.

Chucks Iwuagwu:

Again, very similar to Sams. I'm a person of faith and, a person of Christian faith, have very strong connections with with the church. And, you know, people might some people know this, but I'm a first generation immigrant. So family network has always been at the heart of everything. I'm the youngest of seven - and my brothers and sisters have just sort of spurred me on to to to strive for excellence. One of the things I have experienced being a first generation immigrant is that I am conscious that I have been given an opportunity, and being in this country for me is, I am, you know, eternally grateful, you know, that that those who were here before me have built a platform that has enabled me to-to flourish. And I have this sense that I have to contribute to making that, making this place a better, a better place, not just for myself, but for all people, you know, all people irrespective of their backgrounds and irrespective of, of, of where they've come from.

But on GDS particularly I have found the support of the Deputy Director for Delivery absolutely of great value. I-I you know, this person has become somebody who has inspired confidence in me, has enabled me to understand the Civil Service. And I think everyone, BAME or not, need to have people who inspire confidence in you. You know, the director of GOV.UK has some great ambitious plans for GOV.UK - and each time I talk to her about these things, I feel, wow, you know, you've got these ambitions, which means I can have ambitions for for things, for people, I can do this, you're doing it, I can do it

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, it sounds like mentorship is a through line. So obviously, I hope you are happy where you are, even if it's a way station on what's next, but if you could change one thing about your career, would you? And what would it be? I think Chucks, you've got something on your mind on that front, don't you?

Chucks Iwuagwu:

Yes. I actually set out to becoming a doctor. If I can change something in my career now, I'll tell you what it is: I-I would not leave, you know, delivery, I would not change career at all. What I would like is to have had, or to still have the opportunity to gain a bit more learning that would enable me to do a bit more teaching, you know, and coaching. That is the bit of my job that I love so much - is that, is that bit of helping people, supporting individuals or teams in-in realising their potential. I-If I could change anything, it would probably spend some time learning how to be a better teacher.

Matt Card:

Sometimes I think everything happens for a reason, you know? And I struggled in a part of my career for, for a big part of my career. Some of that was because I moved up to Manchester by myself. I moved away from my support network. I learnt about resilience at the BBC and went on a course and it was really good. And what I realised is that I had lost a lot of confidence. And, you can break resilience down into many different parts, but there are four components, main components of resilience, and that is: confidence, adaptability, purposefulness and social support. And we all have a different varying range of all of these things. So I can safely say that most, most of my social support - and that's a lot in like our community, right? You know, it's our parents, Christian Faith, used to go church all the time, and that, we're centred around family, very centred around family. Other cultures too, not saying we're the only one. But I moved away from that. So then when things got a little bit tough, they got really tough, you know, so struggled for a bit.

But I would say if I could change anything, but I don't know if I would, it would be learning and realising my strengths earlier, because I've got a lot of strengths, and learning that failure isn't a bad thing. I took me a very long time to learn that failure isn't a bad thing.

And also, actually, Chucks mentioned it I think: the, the mentors. I didn't believe in mentors before I went on this resilience course, I thought I was fine. And then I was, when I went, I was like 'whoa. I'm not fine'. So it's like mentors - I work with a gentleman now called Phil Robinson. We just delivered a talk on Tuesday called 'Decommissioning: an engineering guide to decommissioning systemic racism', and it went down really well. The-the first person, Mark Kay, was the first person who I spoke to and explained to him exactly how I felt. You know, the pressures, the, the extra cognitive load that we go through, you know, the running things through a filter just to make sure that we're saying something quite right, wondering what if we're saying something quite right, wondering if someone in the room is shutting us down because of the colour of our skin or something like that - all of these things were rolling round. He was the first person that said, 'you know what? That's not right, you know. And I think we, we definitely need to do something about that'.

Some people don't think it's like their place to get involved - Like 'oh, who am I to do this?' When I was like, no, no, no, no, help, we need your help, right? We need allies.

Obviously my dad. He's, he's the reason why I'm who, how I am right now, you know. He always used to talk about fellowship and all of this, and I'd be sitting 'oh no dad. What you doing that?' But now I'm talking about fellowship because you know what he used to do: he always used to ring up and talk about, and, and find out how people are doing. What do I do now: everyday when I wake up, I go on WhatsApp:' how are you doing? How you doing? How you doing?' And I just c-continue my day. So dad's very, very strong influence to me.

Vanessa Schneider:

There are a lot of nods in this conversation through what you've been saying, so I can see everybody's relating to it. And it sounds like you have a really great network of people supporting you, rooting for you - I'm, I'm very happy to hear that. Sam, any reflections from you? If you could change anything, would you?

Sam Bryant:

So I think Chucks and both Matthew have reflected on things that I would agree on and things that have resonated with me. In addition, I probably would have changed how quickly I took my career seriously. Initially when I joined the Civil Service until I found my niche which was delivery management, I nat-I didn't like necessarily see all of the opportunities that were directly in front of me. So even though I was doing my job amazingly, I wish, I wish, I would like to say I wish other people like saw it and was like, 'you know you're, like you could do way more than this. And someone did eventually, but it was like years later. But taken the onus on myself, like, I wish I was just like, like, 'let me see what else GDS has to offer'. And like, you're definitely interested in technology, and there are probably some non-technical roles that would suit to the T. So to, I wish I just did that kind of investigation piece a lot quicker.

I also don't feel like, I feel like everything happens in time and everything happens for a reason. So I'm sure my energies were invested elsewhere that it needed to be at that time. So, yeah, now I'm super focussed and I know exactly what my position is, where my skills lie and what I can offer to the tech industry as a Black female. So, yeah, that would be mine.

But like Matthew said, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. So failing fast was hard for me to learn because I want everything to be perfect before I try out. So yeah, learning about that has literally revolutionised my life inside and outside of work.

Vanessa Schneider:

Just a quick dive into it before I go on to the next question, but you mentioned being a perfectionist and I think Chuck's had a similar sort of conversation earlier. Do you think that is to do with your cultural background as well, that you feel like you've got to meet expectations and surpass them maybe?

Chucks Iwuagwu:

Yeah, I-I mentioned one of seven children, and the least qualification amongst us is Masters degree. My mother was a headteacher, my father was a Nigerian government permanent secretary. So, yeah, there, there is this thing about the drive to achieve excellence. My mother would say, you know, whatever you become, you would have to become by yourself. Nobody would give it to you. Go out there and get it. You know, don't wait for opportunities to be given to you - create them, take them, demand them, you know.

It's, it's unacceptable, you know, in my cultural background to, to sit on your hands. It's completely unacceptable. I cannot even conceive it. I really can't.

Vanessa Schneider:

Those are really motivational things to say. I could see a lot of nodding with that again. I think that, yeah, Matt and Sam might have related to being raised like that maybe - I'm speculating. Let's hear from you both.

Sam Bryant:

Yeah, for me, my perfectionism definitely comes from my parents and my upbringing. My dad would always be like, if you get 99% on a test, like maybe other families would be like that’s an A, that's amazing, my parents would be like, where, what happened to the 1%? But I still, I-I don't necessarily wish I was brought up any different because I love who I am today. But I definitely know how to amend the things I was taught and implement them maybe in like a different, more creative way to get the same or better outcomes. So, yeah.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, it sounds like you've taken the best lessons from what you were raised like and the best lessons of what you know now and fused them together. That sounds really nice. So, Matt, any reflections on your family?

Matt Card:

Yeah. So, so I would come from a different angle. It's very interesting. So you get very different variations, and this is really good because I find that with stereotyping, everybody thinks that all Black people are kind like the same and we're not - we're very, very different you know. There's so many different cultures, you know, so many different countries involved in this thing. But one of the things I've always said to people is that, I can speak for a lot of people that I know who look like me - that they've always heard, you have to work ten times harder than your counterparts. And it's like one of the things that it's, it's confusing, and, and I know my parents were trying to put me in a good position so that I would succeed, but then what that actually does that actually starts to set you apart from your counterparts. And it can have a damaging effect because then you go to school and you're like 'right, ok I am different. Why am I different?' And then you're getting confirmation bias by, you know, so like your teachers who don't understand your culture. And unfortunately, that's where a lot of people don't know who they are yet, and they're learning who they are. So, you know, then these confirmation biases are happening, you know on both sides.

So it's, it's kind of like, like what, what Sam said: y-y-you take what the good things and then apply it. Do, do agile with it right - put out some, get some feedback on it and then come back and then say, 'no, no, no. Let's change that here. What's the requirements? What, what was the user feedback? You know, I mean, was the stakeholders one?' And then then go forward again, you know? So that's what I would say.

Vanessa Schneider:

That was really cool. So our next question, we've had a bit of a look into your past just now, but I was wondering if you've got any idea about your future. Where do you see yourself in 5, 10, 20 years? I don’t want to make any guesses about how old people are so I'm keeping it open for you so you can pick how far into the future you're going to look and what you think you'll be doing at that point. How about we start with Sam?

Sam Bryant:

Yeah, so professionally I will be some sort of delivery manager head somewhere. I would love to work for a company that has a product that naturally is a part of my everyday life. And then using my experience in private sector come back to public sector, because I do feel like there's a lot we can learn in government from private sector organisations. But again, in turn, there's a lot that private sector companies can learn from government. So I'd love to like bring my expertise externally and then learn some stuff there and bring them back to government.

I also see myself just being more of a head in the D&I [diversity and inclusion] space, especially where it comes to like being influential in terms of Black women in tech, Black people in tech in general. I'm going to be, or I already am a part of Mathew's network. So it's amazing that he's bringing together Black techs, so Black people in tech, so I am absolutely loving that and I'd love to do a lot more. I'm also really into working with organisations and schools, help them to be more diverse and inclusive. And I've done like, this summer, I did, did a session with some teachers with an organisation called Success through Soca, and we ran some sessions to give them ideas on how they can incorporate Black history into the curriculum. So that's really exciting, and I hope like, in the next 5 years we've really established a solid programme that can impact and revolutionise how we do stuff as businesses, organisations, schools, just like Matthew said, like we really can unpick a lot of the stuff if it really is just systemic. So, yeah, those are two highlights of where I see myself in 5 years.

Vanessa Schneider:

I love it. You're already manifesting your future. That's great. So, yeah, Matt obviously your network was mentioned. What do you see in your future?

Matt Card:

All right, I'll try to keep this quick. So more of the same. Straight up, more of the same. So I'm a software engineer right now. I'm applying for tech role, tech lead roles right now, I'm going to jump because I've realised my power, realised my strength. So engineering manager next, don't know how long that's going to take, probably 2 years on the trajectory that I'm on. And then probably moving up to CTO, Chief Technical Officer, stuff like that. Continue my public speaking and do more of that.

And then beyond there, I'm want to create more networks - I'm, I seem to be really good at creating networks and motivating people, so I just want to do more of that, and, and bringing out the culture. So as I said, I've got a motivational platform, I'm doing work on D&I inside and outside of the, of the BBC. Then I'm running a think tank called Future Spective, where we think about the future. We think about what's going-because a lot people are thinking about the past - which we have to we have to understand where you're coming from, right, and for the present, because there's a lot stuff going on now - but I want people to think about the future as well: what's going to happen in 25 years, 30 years time? How is that going to translate? We, we all need to link up and talk to allies as well, talk to majority groups - just start that conversation. So it's all about that conversation.

Oh, this might sound corny, but I'm going to change the world.

Vanessa Schneider:

I love it, you got to aim high, you gotta aim high. All right. Round to you Chucks.

Chucks Iwuagwu:

I'm conscious there'll be a lot of people who listen to this who think, 'oh my goodness, you know what's in it for me in the next 5, 10 years?' You know, Black people. And I'm not you know, I'm not embarrassed to say that I'm not quite sure.

You know, I-I hold this role as Head of Delivery for an organisation that has over 200 people in it. I know that I enjoy teaching. There is a lot that can be done in terms of education and and raising awareness. I, you know, when I said I'm very religious, I'm actually in my spare time a Church of England Vicar. So I do a lot of preaching on Sundays. And, and, and I have become this person who wants to bring people to a place where you realise that there isn't actually a need for discrimination. You know, there isn't actually a need for that. There isn't you know, there's no need to feel threatened by somebody who's slightly different from you. So I know what world I want to be in in the next 5, 10 years, I'm not quite sure my role in that. I'm also very ambitious. I know I'm qualified to be a director of a programme but I'm not quite sure how I'm going to navigate all of this.

I have a vision of the world I want to be in - it's an inclusive world, is an open world, is a world where, you know, government services can be accessed easily. I want to educate people about diversity and educate people about how to run good projects, good projects and good programmes. How all of that shapes in the next 5 to 10 years, I really don't know. And, and it will work itself out. But one thing I have to say and I want to say to any Black person, particularly up and coming people who are not sure of what the future holds, is don't do nothing. You know, you may not be sure of what what it is you're going to do and how you're going to get there or your role in all of this, you may not be sure of that. One thing you cannot do is just sit back and feel sorry for yourself. Ask questions, come out and say, these are the things I enjoy, how does this progress? How does this, how do I make a difference? Don't shy away. I don't know what I'm going to be doing in the next 5 years, but I'm not going to not explore what is out there.

Vanessa Schneider:

Great. Wise words. Matt anything to add for the future in Black excellence in tech?

Matt Card:

Yeah, I just want to echo everything that Chuck just said actually - just keep moving. If you don't know what you want to do, do something big and perfect that because then you've got the transferable skills. You see how we all spoke about what we used to do and now we just do this, and it was just a, it's just a iteration - there we go again - an iteration on what we used to do in a different form, right. So I've got them laughing.

So I'll just roll into my like what I would tell kids is: learn how you learn. That's the simplest thing I can say - just learn how you learn. Don't let other people tell you how you learn because the school system can only teach you in a certain way, they've only got a certain capacity. So you need to learn how you learn what works best for you. Don't discredit the other ways. Keep them there as well and use those as well, because you have to learn, you have to pick up the knowledge from different people, and people then communicate in different ways to you, so you have to understand how they communicating to you, but learn how you learn best.

Vanessa Schneider:

Very simple. I like it, very straightforward. Yes, Sam, anything from you that you want to pass on to the future stars?

Sam Bryant:

I would say just work on having self belief. I feel like a lot of things come from within, and I feel like it's really good to work on yourself. You can be around the right people and still not feel great within yourself. You really need to build up your self-confidence so that you don't feel intimidated in any room that you step into, even if you lack knowledge, because having the self-confidence will give you the power and the confidence to ask the questions, the silly question, the question that no one wants to asks, but to be fair half the people in the room want to know the answer to that question. When you just have that natural energy about you, you will naturally just go on that website and look for that networking event or go on YouTube and type in 'learn more about agile' or go on YouTube and find the video about how to get involved in tech or anything that your, you, your heart desires.

So you really work on yourself.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you all for your amazing advice for any Black people who are interested in working in tech, data, digital, all that space. Do you have any advice for allies? What can we do to support Black colleagues in the workplace? Do you have any examples of exceptional ally action that listeners can take on and think about how they can put it into action maybe.

Matt Card:

It's roughly the same thing. Have self-confidence because what happens on the other side is that people are like, 'oh I don't want to make a mistake'. Take the same approach that we do here - fail fast. You're going to get things wrong as long as it comes in the right energy, you're going to be able to move on and people who are BAME are going to be able to understand where you're coming from, if it comes in the right energy and, and with the right intent.

You know, do your homework, do your reading - there's loads of resources out there now. Talk to people. But there's, here's one: be slow to speak and quick to listen. Learn from other cultures because you can't manage people from other cultures if you don't know their culture - it's, it's it's almost impossible. Right. Sorry, sorry you can't lead people. You can manage them, but you can't lead, and leadership is different, right. There's a big gap in the middle, so someone has to lean forward first right. You know, some of the peers might be behind the curve and might not understand. Just talk to them as well, you know. Do things, just get yourself in the right frame of mind, practising gratitude is is is number one and just being confident as well. Chucks was confident to say that he didn't know - it's the self belief, he's just like, 'I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I'm going to something.' And that's amazing. If you hear it's slightly different to saying, 'oh, I don't know. I'm not going to do anything'.

Sam Bryant:

For me I would say the first thing is accept that you are an ally. Within this context of race, if you are not Black or BAME, you are an ally, and you should treat that like really seriously. Like I don't have a choice that I'm Black. You actually don't have a choice that you're an ally. And I just feel like everyone in the workplace should take that really seriously. So just start taking action from today. If you are not BAME and you really want to help out, I just feel like everyone should feel like this: everyone, it's everyone's problem to resolve. That, I think that's my main message like, as long as you're in a workplace, you should just be trying to ensure that it's a great place for everyone to work. Whether your BAME or whether you're not.

So yeah, like Matthew said, just reiterate the fact that there loads of re-resources out there. Go to your BAME network in the first instance. If you are an organisation that doesn't have an ally network, like GDS is really good at the moment, we literally have an allies network, but if you don't go to your BAME network and see how you can help out or just be, the be the bold person to start an allies network at your own organisation and bring your peers along the journey too. There's so much you can do, especially do you know what, in line, line management. I know Matthew said there's a difference between leadership and managing and there is, but really take your role as a line manager seriously. Literally, like all of my line managers in my career have not been BAME, and that always like I'm, I'm really always nervous about it because I really want my manager to be a champion for me naturally and take the role really seriously. So if you are a line manager, particularly for, for someone from a BAME background, really do you take that role seriously. Because in a lot of organisations, when it comes to like performance awards and performance ratings BAME people do tend to score the lowest. So we really need to work on how we are line managing BAME colleagues, encourage them, help them to recognise their skills. A lot of us want to be perfect, help us to work on the fact that we can fall fast, encourage us to just go and do random things in the organisation that naturally white colleagues are like naturally, more like risk averse - we're not. We, we don't want to like take risks because we feel that we might get in trouble. Or, yeah, just make sure the environment for your line reportee is one where they can just like flourish. Yeah, that would be my advice.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you, Sam. Finally, Chucks, any sage words for you to allies in the workplace?

Chucks Iwuagwu:

Yes, absolutely. I'll start from some, something my father used to say: there are two types of people in the world. Those who listen to hear what you're saying and those who listen to respond. Unfortunately, I think that a lot of people who are not a minority in this country, listen to respond. They're not listening to hear what I'm saying, they're listening to, to give me the script, the answer as per the script. You know, there isn't active listening to hear what, what I'm saying. And when you're not listening to hear what I'm saying, you miss you know, the things that I say that I never say. So you miss you know, hearing what I'm saying, that I don't have the words to express.

A lot of, a lot of our white colleagues don't know how to listen to us. I had to learn how to listen too, I lived in Scotland for 14 years. I had to learn how to listen to my Scottish friends, not because of the accent, that's nothing to do with the accent, it's, it's, it's to learn expressions, colloquialism - all of that, what people say and what they mean. And then I moved down south. And as a-a-a-a Glaswegian friend of mine gave me a thing that has what English people say and what they mean. You know, when I was go-Chucks this is not Scotland, you're going down south and people are going to say one thing and mean another thing. And I had to learn how to listen.

The other thing I want to say is, as an ally, please don't make assumptions. Assumptions, very bad things. You know unless you're making it in the context of project delivery and you can make assumptions and you come back it up and you can, you know, have your plans in place to respond to the assumptions. Don't make assumptions. Don't assume that because I am you know, I am Black, I-I-I don't have sunburn for instance. You know, that was one had to deal with today with somebody. You know, 'Do you burn? Do you get sunburn?' Assumptions, very bad things. If you don't understand the cultural manifestation of a behaviour, do ask. You know, Matthew's just said it all: read, ask, ask Google.

Vanessa Schneider:

That's a lot of material for us to go through as allies for you in the workplace. You've given us plenty to work with. Thank you so much for sharing. I can see that it did take a bit of a toll on you as well. And I want to acknowledge that, that we shouldn't be putting this burden on you. But thank you for sharing these resources and tips nonetheless.

Hopefully less draining and more exciting for you, this is more about sharing the resources for fellow Black people working in tech. I was wondering if there is anything that, any events or organisations, that you wanted to give a shout out to that listeners can look at, and we can include the details in the show notes and the blog post that accompanies the episode.

Matt Card:

So I just wanted to say, you know, I've got my motivational platform - Release D Reality. The Future Spective is, is brand new - so just watch out for, for that. So that Black tech network group: you can contact me on info@ReleaseDReality.com or MatthewCard@gmail.com.

Chucks Iwuagwu:

I would encourage an eye out for several agile meetups - I’m not sure in the current circumstance with Coronavirus. They’re usually advertised on key major network websites and Twitter, on Twitter as well. So people will do well to look out for such, and where possible, please a-attend. ‘Cause it’s, it’s a really good way to network and to learn and to hear what’s, what’s happening in the industry, what other people are doing, some of the ideas that are coming through.

Sam Bryant:

Firstly I’d like to shout out GDS BAME Network, because I think we're doing some amazing things as a community and the anti-racism network as well that has formed this year - I would just like to shout them out because their work has literally been amazing and has changed, changed the culture in GDS essentially, and that has been extremely positive.

I'd also like to shout out Success through Soca. I work alongside them doing, using Black British history to help to build leadership skills within schools, colleges, and we also work with organisations to help them transform the organisations and allow them to be more diverse and inclusive.

Another organisation I'd like to share, or give a shout out to is Pink Dynasty. They're doing some amazing work in the tech space. They have events with people who are not specifically techies, but want to get into a career in technology. And as I’ve said, I am a Delivery Manager and typically that’s not like a super techie role but definitely is a way to encourage people who have a passion for technology to not be dissuaded into getting involved.

Vanessa Schneider:

Amazing, these sound like really worthwhile organisations and I really hope that our listeners take a look at them and get involved with them as well.

Thank you so much for sharing those and also for coming on today. You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major pad-you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on PodBean.

Goodbye.

Chucks Iwuagwu:

Bye.

Sam Bryant:

Bye.

Matt Card:

Bye bye.

GDS Podcast #23: The Data Standards Authority Sep 30, 2020

We invited experts from GDS and the ONS to explain the importance of data standards as part of the Data Standards Authority launch.

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Alison Pritchard:

Hello and welcome to this month's episode of the Government Digital Service Podcast. I'm Alison Pritchard, the Director General at GDS - before taking up appointment at the ONS [Office for National Statistics] as its Deputy National Statistician and Director General for Data Capability.

So I'm delighted that, although I'm moving, I'll still be part of the wider digital and data transformation agenda through ONS’s digital and data services, and our work on data governance boards.

GDS is responsible for the digital transformation of government. As part of that, we’ve set a vision for digital government to be joined up, trusted and responsive to user needs. We're focussing on 5 pillars to get that done, one of which is data - the focus of this podcast.

That's all from me. I'll now hand over to Vanessa Schneider, the podcast host, who will be speaking to technical leads from GDS and ONS about how we take this work forward. Enjoy the discussion.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you Alison. As Alison said, I’m Vanessa Schneider, Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS and your host today. Joining me are Rosalie Marshall and Tomas Sanchez. Rosalie, let's start with you. Can you please introduce yourself and what you do?

Rosalie Marshall:

I'm Rosalie. I'm the Technical Lead for the Government Data Standards Authority. That involves a lot of recruitment, looking and getting work streams off the ground relating to data standards, and just looking at the data standards landscape in detail.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you, Rosalie. Tomas, could you please introduce yourself?

Tomas Sanchez:

Yes. So I'm Tomas. I'm the Chief Data Architect for ONS [Office for National Statistics]. And I'm responsible for a bunch of things related to data architecture and data management. So one of those things is the ONS Data Strategy. And amongst the various things that my division in ONS does is best practices around data.

One of the things that we work on is data standardisation. So apart from that, I'm also quite keen, and responsible to talking to various departments across government about all the things that we do with the aim of, you know, being on the same page of best practises and so on. And this is how we got in touch with the Data Standards Authority and other streams in central government.

Vanessa Schneider:

You mentioned that your area covers data standards in government. What does that entail?

Tomas Sanchez:

So basically, the whole point of standardisation is to make sure that everybody uses the same things, particularly related to data. And it is, it is good that ONS is trying to do this. But we cannot do this by ourselves. Doing this in a coordinated way through, sort of, central authority like the DSA is very helpful.

While ONS has its own standards, to do what we need to do in ONS, there is, we need to agree amongst the different departments of what it is that we are trying to standardise, and the scoping of this and what things we’re doing first and we are doing second and so on is part of what the DSA is about.

Vanessa Schneider:

Rosalie, so you work as part of the DSA. How do you work together with Tomas on this issue?

Rosalie Marshall:

So, yes. So this is a joint actually endeavour between the Government Digital Service and ONS. So we're actually partnering up on the Data Standards Authority. So while we are at the central point in GDS, we are working very closely with ONS and actually a number of our team members will sit within ONS.

The good thing about being virtual is that we've really been able to work very tightly together and department lines haven't played much of a part.

Vanessa Schneider:

So, as Rosalie mentioned, the Data Standards Authority is very new. Would you mind sharing with the listeners how it came about? What kicked it all off?

Rosalie Marshall:

So the Data Standards Authority was kicked off about roughly at what was probably just over a year ago now in terms of idea. So that was done by DCMS, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sports, who at that point looked after data policy for government and they worked with a number of departments on this bid, including, it was mainly actually GDS and ONS. So we've been working together now for a while on what this should look like. And since March, it's become a reality.

Tomas Sanchez

So when I joined ONS in 2017, apart from looking internally at the office to see what we should do internally for better practices in terms of data management, we also thought that it was very important to look across government and see what other people are doing so we can learn from others and hopefully maybe others can learn from us eventually.

One of the things that we did is setting up the Cross-government Data Architecture Community, which was just a community of practitioners around data architecture and data management, which of course included data standardisation, amongst other things. Apart from this community, we also got involved in a number of forums in central government, looking at data and data usage and data infrastructure and other things, such as, for example, the Data Leaders Network. And it was within these conversations within central government that we got in touch with DCMS and GDS, who were also thinking about how to work on data foundations and data infrastructure for government to enhance data sharing, data interoperability, and just how to use data better in government.

And it was that way that the idea of creating a central authority in charge of fixing one of the fundamental problems of data, which data standardisation tends to be. So as Rosalie mentioned, we worked quite a long time with them for various reasons. Listeners might remember that there was supposed to be a spending review in 2019, which never happened. So that gave us a lot of time to think about how to go, how to, how to do this. And eventually we did put a bid for the budget this year, earlier this year.

And then that's how the Data Standards Authority got funded and the rest is history obviously.

Vanessa Schneider:

So looking to the future of the DSA, what are your immediate next goals? I know that you've put out pieces of guidance, for instance.

Rosalie Marshall:

So the big ones are, we've got an API catalogue that is trying to, it's not a workstream that is actually setting a standard in data, but it's helping us with our journey on standards because we need transparency of where data exchange is taking place.

I think it's important that we mention that, you know, we are looking at data flow as a priority. There's a lot that you can do within departments in terms of governance. But really, we're looking at that boundary and the data exchange that is happening between departments and how we can improve that.

So as a first off, you know, we are getting the API catalogue into a service or product that is really worthwhile for departments to use. We want to make sure that there's a lot more uptake of that catalogue on there to increase transparency of development taking place, but also so we can understand the standards that are being used by APIs. So that's one workstream.

So one of the big work streams that we got off the ground is relating to metadata standards. And that was a very entry level piece of, very entry level standard, in some ways. We're recommending that we follow schema.org and Dublin Core and also csv on the web. So that's a recommendation that we are now working with departments further along on their metadata journeys. We got a workshop coming up on the 2nd October that we'd like as many people to join as possible to understand where everyone's at.

We're also looking at standards in relation to file formats and doing some work there. And then I think there's 2 areas which probably Tomas is best placed to talk about and that’s around what we're thinking about at least. So it's it's probably too early days, but at least we can share some of the thinking that we're doing around some of the identifiers and also data types as well.

Tomas Sanchez:

So Rosalie, mentioned about identifiers, I think the overall concept is that something that we call reference data that people might know with different names, like master data or code list or typologies etc. So there are multiple names of, for those.

But essentially the idea from this is that there are lists of items or entities that people refer to all the time. So we think there are datasets, for example, many datasets contain address information. So the idea is, so there is only one valid list of all the addresses in the country. So if we will have a reference set of addresses that everybody can refer to, then it will be easier to link datasets amongst themselves that are talking about those addresses, right?

And you can make the same case for other types of things, like the standard classifications or lists of businesses or things like that, which government departments refer to all the time to do their work, but that there is not one version of the truth for the whole government just because we didn't get to do that yet together.

And I think that is basically the foundations of making sure that we can link data sets across government more easily. And of course, part of that as Rosalie was mentioning is that you need to have a unique identifier for each one of these addresses or these entities. Right. So this is definitely something that we need to look at as part of the standardising data, but reference data as a whole is, as I said, a key piece of the puzzle to standardise data across government.

The other thing that Rosalie mentioned there is data types. So obviously if we are sharing data across departments, which is of a specific type, for example, a date. So if we maintain different standards for dates, so we record the data for different ways for dates, then when we get data from other departments, then we have to transform that into a format that we can use internally. And that transformation, maybe dates doesn't sound very complex, but you have to do this for more complex data - types of data. Then it becomes quite time consuming.

So if we get to manage to standardise data types and then departments are able to adopt this. Again, we are not only helping them on their work, they have to do for themselves so they don't have to think about what to use. So we provide guidance of what data type standards they can use. But also when we get to share data, then we already have the same format that we are using internally. So it's much easier to process.

Vanessa Schneider:

The term metadata has cropped a few times now. Can you explain what kind of data that is please?

Tomas Sanchez:

So when people ask me, what metadata is, I always think about, you know, everybody knows libraries. People have used libraries. You go to the library, you have a lot of books in a lot of shelves, and you have to find the book that you are looking for. So the books themselves are the content, are the data. Right. But we need to find a way of finding things efficiently. If we had every book indexed in a different way and we stored different type of information for each book, it would be very difficult to do it.

But as we all have been in libraries, we know that you have a catalogue where you go and then you have the title of the book and the author of the book you can search for either you can search for date or you can search for other thing. So that information that we are storing about the book, which is the content, that's what is metadata, so it’s information about the data itself. Right. So. So all the data centre are not books is exactly the same thing. We have to find a consistent way of describing the data so that we can catalogue it better.

Vanessa Schneider:

Rosalie, would you mind explaining to the listeners what an API is? I hear that's a challenging question.

Rosalie Marshall:

It is a challenging question just because everyone has a different answer. So an API is just another one of our lovely acronyms that we have in government. It stands for application programming interface, so, and that kinda tells you what it is, it’s the interface for your application. APIs come up in talking about data exchange.

The way I guess you can kind of start to understand it, I think I started to understand it when someone talked to me about an API being like a restaurant menu. It tells you what’s on, what you can have, from an application. So, you know, if your, an API will talk about all the different features within an application that you need to be aware of in order to interact with that.

Vanessa Schneider:
I understand that you're also expecting to set standards for memorandums of understandings, also known as MoUs. Can you please explain a bit more about what that means?

Rosalie Marshall:

So in terms of the MoUs, so they are, you know, those and data-sharing agreements are formed within the public sector when data exchange is being passed from one entity to another. And the difficulty with the landscape at the moment is that the MoUs and data-sharing agreements take lots of different forms, cover lots of different areas.

And it's quite a big undertaking when forming these because legal teams often need to be involved. And there's obviously a lot to think about when we're working on a data-sharing agreement.

So it's just really bringing standards to this area so that we can improve efficiency in data-sharing and make it easier for those who want to consume data, particularly on local authorities I think. You know there’s, local authorities are not a big API developers at the moment, but they consume a huge amount of government data from all, all over government and loads of departments. So for them, it's a big undertaking when it comes to MoUs. So actually kind of simplifying the process and all, all conforming to a certain standard and template is a good way forward. So that's something that we're starting to look at.

Vanessa Schneider:

So, you've touched on a couple of topics, such as the identifiers and transparency, and it seems like ethics are quite an important component of that. I know that in 2018 there was a Data Ethics Framework that was published.

Rosalie Marshall:

The Data Ethics Framework is not a piece that’s happening in the Data Standards Authority. But it's obviously something that we need to be aware of and tapped into.

We are updating a number of different pieces of guidance, for example, at the moment, we're redrafting Point 10 of the Technology Code of Practice, which relates to data. And, you know, we're also updating the government API standards. And so we're working on new guidance and standards as part of the DSA.

And obviously something that we need to be aware of when doing that is the Data Ethics Framework, which is a framework that sets out principles for how data should be shared in the public sector and really builds on the Civil Service Code in some ways, so it builds on the idea of managing data with integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. So it's just, I mean, there's probably other people who can give you better summaries. But, yeah, it's important to be aware of when writing any guidance on data.

Vanessa Schneider:

I was just wondering, Rosalie, if you knew of a success that government has had where we've started standardising data.

Rosalie Marshall:

Yes. So there are a number of different successes that we could point to. I mean, there's I think, the API standards were one area that has been very successful in terms of setting central government standards and having other departments follow them. So the API standards were launched in 2018 and have been iterated with the API and data exchange community. But we know that a lot of departments are following these standards and are building their API strategies around them.

The reason why it's important to follow the API standards are for consistency in terms of API development, but also in terms of better data flow because of following the data standards that exist. You know, we refer to the ISO date standard, for example, in the API standards.

It also ensures that APIs are developed securely, that transfer can happen in the right way. And that versioning again, is clear. So, as I said, there are benefits.

There's also benefits in terms of findability for following these standards, in terms of people moving around development teams and having the right skills, knowing what skills you need for API development.

So that's one example of where we've been successful in setting government standards relating to data centrally.

There's also examples of government using data where it's a positive experience. And I think that's really around moving to the delivery of whole services. So rather than a citizen having to interact with one department for a particular service, they can just think about interacting with the service and you know, the numbers of departments that help support that service isn't something they need to know about.

So, for example, one of the services that has been on the transformation towards being a whole service is that of the Blue Badge scheme, which is managed by the Department for Transport [DfT] and is a scheme that gives those with disabilities access to restricted parking areas.

So, you know, previously local authorities had to kind of manage the eligibility for this scheme. And, you know, they would have many applications, some that wouldn't be successful. I think they received kind of, around 2,500 applications a month that they had to deal with. But, and then there were obviously lots of different data exchanges that happened with the Department for Transport and local councils, before a Blue Badge could be given to the applicant.

But now a Blue Badge user goes to GOV.UK to have their eligibility confirmed. And then an API seamlessly links the customer back to the local council’s case management system for the application process. Once approved, another API links back to the central system, to store the record, and then at this point, the Blue Badge is produced and sent to the customer centrally by DfT. So it's a lot of a smoother system.

And I guess what's next is integration through APIs with some of the other departments that are involved in Blue Badges like DWP [Department for Work and Pensions], which has to produce the letter of eligibility. A citizen needs that to upload onto GOV.UK and like the Passport Office, where you need to provide a picture of you and proof of your identity. So, you know, there's still a way to go on a service like that, but it shows the direction in which, you know, where government services are heading.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you, Rosalie. Tomas, I was wondering what kind of challenges do you foresee in establishing data standards across government? I assume with the ONS you interface with a lot of departments providing data. Do you have any idea?

Tomas Sanchez:

So indeed, we do interface with a lot of departments. Obviously doing this at ONS’s scale, and doing this at a government scale is quite a different thing.

But I think definitely the area that's probably going to be a challenge is the governance in the sense that we put guidelines of how people, how other departments can approach standardisation, but making sure that people actually or departments actually follow the system, that is is, it is a different thing. Right?

So obviously, how to approach this is a delicate thing. Obviously, departments want to continue doing their job without having interference in terms of how they have to do their job.

But we in central government believe that doing this, following certain standards is in the end more beneficial for the government as a whole. And we need to try to put something in there to make sure that these guidelines are adopted. So how exactly to do that? How to incentivise departments to actually do this? I think it's going to be quite a tough challenge.

Vanessa Schneider:

Would that kind of enforcement lie with the DSA or is it something that can be incentivised in another way do you think?

Tomas Sanchez:

I wouldn't like to call it enforcement, incentivising is, is a better word. I think there are different ways of doing it. You think about GDS is already doing this with the IT and digital in different ways. Probably the best way of approaching it is using the existing mechanisms and include the data standardisation within those. So hopefully we can exist, we can reuse existing things without having to add new layers of complexity to how certain things are incentivised.

Vanessa Schneider:

I can tell that you're both very passionate about data and making sure that government has usable data and is able to share data with each other to make it services better for citizens. I was wondering, where does that come from?

Rosalie Marshall:

Personally, like, you know, you'd have lots of circumstances in your life. And I guess some people have more interactions with the state than others. You know, depending on your health, you know, whether you have kids.

And I guess, like, I've probably had a fair amount. So it comes from just understanding that frustration of another organisation having data about me that might not be accurate or that, or them not having it at all. And I'm wondering why that is. You know, I've had 2 kids on the NHS system. It was frustrating to me, for example, that the hospital didn't have any of the records that I’d had my first child with. And there was no way to get those records. So I then started creating my own records and holding all the data myself.

And there's so many examples that I've gone through. And I'm sure you know, there's so many people in this boat and it's just wanting to fix things and wanting to make data work for the end user.

But also, as a civil servant, I see silos and it's sometimes frustrating when you realise that, you know, through no fault of an individual, because this is just as we know, this is the system that needs improving, it's not one organisation or individual. We just need to fix this. So, so if we can create standards that everyone can use and that's why we're focusing on international, on open standards, because those are the ones that can cross boundaries and that, you know, it's not just going to be working in one department, but it will help join up both central and local and the wider public sector.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you. Tomas, is there maybe a service that you hope you are able to change through the standardisation of data?

Tomas Sanchez:

So I think data is such at the core of everything that not only government, but every organisation in this country does, that having a right way of standardising the data and making the data clear so everybody can understand it better will basically, virtually benefit, not just the organisations themselves that are doing the services, but also the users of those services.

And if we think about government and we see government as an organisation which provides services to the users based on data that actually government collects from the users themselves. Then you need to have some opportunity to enhance that service. And that's exactly what we want to do.

Vanessa Schneider:

Rosalie, any thoughts?

Rosalie Marshall:

I think, you know, yeah, I would agree with Tomas. I think there’s a lot of priority areas that that need improvement, for example, social care. You know, I talked about delivering whole services for users and things like the Blue Badge scheme, which is, which I see as very important.

But there's also, you know, bringing, you know, the social care, those departments that are involved there and allowing them to share data to help those who are vulnerable. There's also a lot, you know, in terms of the environment where, you know, sharing data between the energy sector and you know Ofgem and some of the big energy companies, there's a huge amount there that we could do with improved data standards as well.

So I think there's so many things that we can make better in public life with data if it's done right. And so, yeah, just I mean, I can’t pick one area really.

Vanessa Schneider:

That was unfair of me. I'll give you that. You mentioned it earlier, there was a way for listeners to get involved, if I'm not mistaken. Could you please remind us what that opportunity was?

Rosalie Marshall:

There’s quite a lot of ways people can get in touch. There's a number of workshops that are coming up that we'd really like cross-government engagement on and attendance.

So we've got an API catalogue workshop for the API community. We also have a metadata workshop coming up on the 2nd October for those who are working in metadata and we're planning to blog a lot more about the work that we're doing. So we invite people to comment on those blogs and get in touch if they want to talk to us. We're also looking at having an open repo on GitHub to help share some of our work and invite feedback on that as well. So, yeah, we're hoping to make it really easy to contact us. And we do have an email address as well that people can write to, which is data-standards-authority@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk. So that’s also open to everyone to use.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thanks, Rosalie. It's not the easiest one to spell out, but we'll make sure to include it in our show notes.

I really appreciate you giving me your time so that we could record this episode. Thank you so much to all of our guests for coming on today. You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. The transcripts are available on Podbean.

Goodbye.

Tomas Sanchez:

Thank you, bye.

Rosalie Marshall

Thanks so much for having us. Bye.

GDS Podcast #22: Content Design Aug 27, 2020

In this episode, we talk about content design, its origins at GDS and how it’s helped government to better meet user needs.

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Laura Stevens:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I'm a Creative Content Producer here at GDS. And for this month's episode, we're talking about Content Design. We're going to find out what it is, how it helps government and where you can learn more. And to tell me the answer to these questions are Amanda Diamond and Ben Hazell. So welcome both to the GDS Podcast. Please could you introduce yourselves and your job roles here at GDS. Amanda first.

Amanda Diamond:

Yeah, hi, Laura. I'm Amanda Diamond and I'm Head of GDS Content Design and Head of the Cross-government Content Community. I joined GDS in 2016, so August 2016, in fact. So it is 4 years exactly that I've been at GDS. Last year I went on loan to Acas as their Head of Content to help with their digital transformation. And prior to that I have worked in journalism. So I started out as a journalist. Prior to GDS, I worked at Which?, the consumer association, as their Deputy Editor for Which? magazine, Deputy Editor for their travel magazin, and I helped launch and run their consumer rights website as their Consumer Rights Editor.

Ben Hazell:

Hello, I'm Ben Hazell. I'm a Content Product Lead here at GDS on the GOV.UK programme. I currently work on a team dealing with Coronavirus Public Information Campaign. In the recent past, 5 months ago, I was working on the EU Exit Public Information Campaign. And prior to that, I've been working on the means of publishing and production for content on GOV.UK, looking at workflows and providing the tools and data that help people manage the content on GOV.UK. Prior to that, like Amanda, I was actually in journalism. I worked on a big newspaper website for about 9 years.

Laura Stevens:

So thank you both for introducing yourselves. And I want to start with the first of my questions which is, what is content design?

Amanda Diamond:

I don't mind starting, and that is a great question, Laura, and one that I love to answer. So basically and I'll tell you for why, people often confuse content design with different things, mainly comms. They also think that content design is just about the words. And of course, words are really important and content design is you know concerned with words. But it's not the only thing when you're talking about content design.

So content design could be a map, it could be text on a button or a sign. It also includes things like charts or graphs. Content design is about packaging up the right information in a way that makes it easy for people to understand at the point that they most need it.

So for me, I often tell people that content design is at its core: problem solving. And what do I mean about that? Well, I mean that it's about asking the right questions to get to the best solution for your audience. So the best solution for your users. So asking questions like, well, what do our users need to know? What do they need to do? And what evidence? - it's all about the evidence - what evidence do we have to support what we think our users need to know or need to do? Because there’s a big difference between what we think our users need, and what they actually need. And that can often confuse things. And we also ask things like, how can we make the overall experience better for our users? So before Content Designers even put like a single word to a page, what they need to do is like dedicate a lot of time, a lot of effort to understanding the problem in the first place so that we can give people what they need.

Ben Hazell:

Yeah, and I definitely, I agree with all of that. There's no doubt that there's a fair chunk of writing in what we do. But it's also about use of evidence, about research and about iteration, about constant improvement. And I think a lot of it comes back to being humble about understanding that it's not about what we want to say, it's about finding out what people actually need from us.

We're trying to make things simple. In my teams, we often talk about making information easy to find and making sure information is easy to understand. And making things simple - that's not dumbing down. That's actually opening up and being able to process complexity and distill it down to what other people actually need to know and can act upon. That is both important and rewarding. And it's often the kind of fun puzzle and it can be as much about what you're getting rid of and pruning down to find the shape. So perhaps I could compare it to sculpting. You know, the thing exists in the centre of the marble and you just keep chipping away to get to the beautiful thing that people need.

Laura Stevens:

I did enjoy the sculpture one as well because Amanda you're coming to us from an artist's studio as well. So clearly there's something in this recording.

Amanda Diamond:

And interestingly, my other half, he -it's not my studio, my artist studio, I’ll hasten to add, if only! It’s my partner’s and he is a sculptor by trade. So yeah, full circle.

Laura Stevens:

So now we know what is. Let's go back in time a bit. So GDS is actually the home of content design in the government too as the term and the discipline originated here under GDS’s first Head of Content Design, Sarah Richards. And why do you think it came out of the early days of GDS?

Amanda Diamond:

And that's where content design and service design, interaction design and user research kind of came together under this banner of user centred design because you can't have good services without content design essentially. All services contain words or images or artefacts, content artefacts, workflows, journeys, and so you need a content designer to help build these. So I think that's kind of where it, where it sort of emerged from.

But really, fundamentally, with a relentless focus on putting the user at the heart, heart of everything, rather than always relying on what government wants to tell people and what government wants to, to push out to folks. It was a sort of like a reversal of that and a relentless focus on what folks needed of government and what folks needed to, to understand and learn to do the things they need to do as a citizen.

Ben Hazell:

I felt what I could add to that is perhaps my journey into content design and how I came to understand what GDS was doing, because in the late 2000s, kind of 2008, 2009, a lot of my work in newspapers was around search optimisation. And that was quite a big change for that industry, because instead of everything being based upon some kind of monthly reports of sales figures and editors who had a kind of supernatural knowledge of their reader base, suddenly you actually were presented with almost real time data about what people were looking for and interested in.

And sure, there were all the criticisms about tons of stories about Britney Spears all of a sudden, but what it actually came back to was you could see what people wanted to find out from us and we could start to model our online content around what people's expectations were. And it opened up a really interesting era of kind of experimenting with formats, experimenting with the ways in which news content was produced.

And from there, I started to kind of get quite interested in what I could see GDS was doing and they were winning awards at that time for user centred design because it was taking that evidence base about what people actually need for a variety of digital mechanisms and applying it to create not just pieces of content, but structures of content that better serve people. And of course, it was wonderful to move from the media over to somewhere like GOV.UK, which is not beholden to advertising.

So it was that combination of the availability of digital data and being able to more effectively get to what government wanted to happen, because this is also all about not just about making things simpler for users, but making things simpler for users has great benefits for government. If you make things easy for people to do, you reduce any burden on support services, you increase the level of compliance, they're happier. It's more cost effective for government.

Amanda Diamond:

I don't have exact figures, but I, I do know that savings in the millions have been made because of, as Ben rightly describes, our reduce on support services, calls to contact centres and enabling people to do the things they need to do more easily and to self-serve. And so, I mean, that's a huge, that's a huge benefit not just to government, but to the taxpayer, to the public purse.

Laura Stevens:

And I think one example of content design that has also got a bit of attention recently was the Sara Wilcox NHS blog on the language of health and why they need to be searched and found using pee and poo, people understood that and that is a huge benefit that people will search that and that will help their health. So I think as well as saving time or money, it's also directly making sure people get the information they need when they need it at those urgent points.

Amanda Diamond:

Exactly. If you think about the history of language and the history, sort of professional or sort of authoritative language - it’s, it's lofty and it is full of jargon and it is full of often if you think of legal, the legal profession is full of Latin terms and even science as well it’s full of, you know, the medical profession is full of Latin phrases.

Now, that doesn't do anybody any justice because it is just putting up barriers for people to be able to understand and act on. And so what we do as content designers is we and, and that blog that you talked about, Laura, is about reducing those barriers and really sort of democratising language - like language is for everyone. And we shouldn't be, we shouldn't be sort of putting those barriers in place. We should be trying to break them down.

Ben Hazell:

Yes. And I'd say we have to also we do think about the audience for any given piece of content. So it's not that there's a general fight against technical language. Sometimes something has a precise term and a precise name, and that is the efficient way of communicating it that's right for the audience in question.

But on the other hand, what we also know and we have evidence to show this, is that there's this assumption that as people pick up more professional skill, they like more and more verbose language, which seems exclusive. Whereas actually the opposite is true. People in high skilled professions, highly qualified professions, often want things to be simple because they don't want to have to spend their time unpicking complex documents. They need to get on with their job. So, yes, we use technical language where it's appropriate to do so. But we're also always looking to make things simple whilst also keeping them precise.

Laura Stevens:

Picking up on what you’re both just saying, and I just want to talk about the link between content design and accessibility. We should always think about accessibility with everything GDS does because people don’t have a choice when they interact with government, they have to use our services. They can't shop around. So would you would you talk about how the language being used helps with making sure that we don't create any barriers unnecessarily to services?

Amanda Diamond:

Yeah, absolutely, Laura. I mean, like accessibility is, I think really is at the heart of content design as a discipline. If you make things clear and simple, that means writing things clearly and simply in plain language and in language that users use themselves.

Also, I think people, people make a mistake and often kind of confuse what we mean by accessibility. Accessibility is not something that is just for a certain group or subset of people. Accessibility is about catering to everyone and all of the time. So there is a difference between, you know, there might be people who have permanent accessibility needs, there might be people who have some temporary accessibility needs and there might be people who have situational accessibility needs.

And the great example that I can point to is, you know, somebody who has got - who’s had an arm amputated. That is one that that is a permanent, that is a person with a permanent need, accessibility need. Somebody that might have sprained their wrist or broken their wrist. And so their need is temporary, but they still need, they might still need to access and access our services. And then there's a sort of a situational need as well. So, you know, if you're a parent and you have to hold a child, well, you have to do something quickly, then you are impaired because you are holding a child and that’s situational, that's not going to last, but you still may need to you know, do something in that time.

And the same thing goes, I think, for sort of cognitive access needs as well. If we are, you know, if, if we are writing in language that is convoluted and verbose and lofty, we are unintentionally creating barriers to people who might have cognitive challenges or who might have dyslexia or people who who are just reading at speed and need to do something really, really quickly and access and sort of comprehend something really, really quickly.

So, yeah, I think like accessibility for me, beyond the legal requirements that we have, we know that there are new accessibility requirements coming into force on the 23 September this year. It's beyond for me, beyond a legal duty and it's also a moral duty as well. And I think that should be at the heart of everything that we're that we're doing as government.

As you said, Laura, people don't have a choice other than to interact with government. People are not looking at the GOV.UK website and hanging out in their lunch break and just browsing and having a good old read. People are coming to our site because they need to do something because government has mandated that it's a legal requirement to do a thing or to get, you know, get document to do a thing or whatever it might be. And so it really is our duty then if we're making people do these things that we have to make the information in the ways in which they need to do these things as simple and as clear as possible.

Ben Hazell:

I would agree with all of that, I’m reminded of that phrase, ‘this is for everyone’. I specifically work for GOV.UK, which is always worth mentioning is just one highly visible part of what GDS does. But GOV.UK as a platform is designed to be very, very adaptable. So all the information that is published should be in a clean HTML form, which can then be picked up and experienced in different ways. Now, some of that is going to be about assistive technologies, but actually it also speaks to the need for people to come by information from GOV.UK in a variety of different ways now.

So by having properly structured clean text, we can work with voice interfaces. We can make sure that Amazon, Alexa or Google Home can interpret our information. We make sure that a Google search results page can quickly deliver a quick answer to a person. We make sure that content can be syndicated out through API so it can be republished by other organisations who might have closer contact with people who need it. So we can syndicate things very efficiently in a structured way over to organisations like Shelter or Citizens Advice if they were able to make use of it. There's a lot to be said for the platform itself being quite an open platform which can easily be adapted upon.

One interesting thing about coronavirus content has been the accelerated shift in the mobile audience, as you might imagine, with everybody staying at home, they're not actually accessing the internet quite as much on work computers. And we saw at the peak up to 90% of all traffic to coronavirus information was coming from smartphones. Now, we've long on GOV.UK practiced mobile-first design, but something like that really draws attention to needing to communicate clearly and put things in a logical order for people viewing it in a single narrow screen. So when we talk about accessibility, another thing to think about is just the sheer movement to a mobile audience. And what that actually means for how we produce things. We simply can't get away with big charts or diagrams that are only designed to be read on a work computer screen. People are using their mobiles at home and that's what we need to design for.

Laura Stevens:

And sort of I thinking about, Ben, what you're saying about your SEO, your search engine optimisation experience earlier, also content design surely helps like how, where to find all this information on GOV.UK.

Ben Hazell:

We're in a time with coronavirus and the EU Exit when lots of things are changing quite rapidly. I think some of the most exciting things we've been playing with on GOV.UK is around adaptive content, about the fact that there are many variables. So the guidance for any one person needs to follow could vary quite a lot based on their individual circumstances. And we've been doing more and more with experimenting with content, which actually asks the user some questions so that we can understand exactly what their needs are and then modifies and adapts the guidance to give them just the elements which are relevant to them.

So one of the most interesting examples of that has been the Get Ready for Brexit campaign or which we refer to as the EU Exit Checker. The Brexit Checker is about, is about asking people to help us understand exactly what they need and only showing them the information which is relevant to their circumstances. So it makes - it drills the information down to just what they can act upon without needing them to wade through lots of supporting material. And it also can join up quite effectively lots of related documents that relate to the task they have in mind. So they're not having to look up one list over here to see if they are included in the category and another list over there. That's a challenge across government. And I think adaptive content is a really exciting opportunity. And we've been trying lots of things and we've been making mistakes and we've been learning a lot of things.

Laura Stevens:

Well, that's led me nicely on because I was going to ask actually what are some of the challenges you've both faced in your career as content designers. Is, is it something to do with the, perhaps it's an emerging discipline, so you're working with people who are unfamiliar with what you do or what you're trying to do? Or is it something broader than that? Or yeah, what challenges have you come across when working in content design?

Ben Hazell:

An interesting challenge I'm aware of at the moment is recruitment. Is how do we expand the pool of people we're bringing in as content designers? Because I did a lot of work, that was probably content design adjacent in various roles, often job titles I got to make up because professions didn't exist. And it was very late in my career in newspapers that I’ve ever heard of the term content design. And I think we can do a better job. And we're definitely doing a lot at the moment with running events. But we're trying to widen access to content design to help people who have things to offer, map what they already can do and their skills to the sorts of things we're looking for.

There's quite a wide variety of skills which can blur into it, and we have colleagues with a wide variety of backgrounds, because these are overlapping skill sets, they are thinking about an audience or user need and how things can be communicated and how you can better understand people. So that's a really interesting challenge for me. How do we widen the pool from which we are drawing people in to both increase our diversity and also make sure we're getting the most skilled people we can get because it's really important work and we need we need people who are going to really thrive on it.

Amanda Diamond:

Yeah, that's a really great point Ben. And as Ben said, we are we're doing quite a lot at the moment in this in this area, both, as Ben said, to bring in diverse voices, but also to bring in people from underrepresented groups into the profession.

There are lots of different routes into content design and the skillset is varied. And so I think, again, in the way that I think it's incumbent upon us to educate, you know, within government about the value of content design, I think we also need to think beyond government and talk to sort of a wider pool of people, wider audiences, about what content design is and how, you know, what transferable skills, skills are useful.

To that end, we've been running with our UCD, user centred design colleagues, careers events and we're actually going to run a content design careers event so dedicated for content design.

And it's also probably worth saying as well that the actual profession, the discipline as itself, is changing. As Ben mentioned, this idea of structured content, of serving up content to people that is configured to their specific circumstances - there’s quite a big technical element to that as well. And so I think content designers of the future, I would certainly encourage them to to be more technically minded and also to look across different disciplines.

So, yeah, it's an exciting profession. And it's exciting time, I think, to be in content design. But it's changing as the world is around us. And so I think we need to be adapting to that and looking ahead to what the profession needs so that we can be equipped as government to continue providing, you know, excellent digital services to our citizens.

Laura Stevens:

And talking about new ways in which you're reaching out to people to speak about content design. I also wanted to talk about The introduction to content design course. And I've got it a clip now from our colleague, Agnieszka so I'll just play this.

Agnieszka Murdoch:

So my name is Agnieszka Murdoch and I'm a Content Learning Designer at Government Digital Service and I'm part of the content community team.

Laura Stevens:

And what are some of the things you've been working on during your time over the past 8 months or so you've been in the Content Community Team?

Agnieszka Murdoch:

Yes, I started in January this year and basically I sort of jumped straight into working on the introduction to content design course scheduled to go live in May.

Laura Stevens:

And so what is the course?

Agnieszka Murdoch:

Yes, Introduction to content design is basically a course hosted on FutureLearn, which is a social learning platform with approximately 12 million registered users. The introduction to content design open course that we launched in May actually had just over 11,000 learners register, which was fantastic.

And it's basically an introductory course for anyone who's interested in user centred content design. We teach people about things like how to think about your users, how to do user research a little bit, how to design and kind of clearly structured easy to read accessible content, how to write in plain English. We also cover topics like evaluating the success of your content and managing the content lifecycle. So a wide range of topics. And it's basically a self-paced course, it’s divided into 4 weeks and learners can kind of do it in their own time.

Laura Stevens:

And you mentioned there that 11,000 people did the course when it was launched in May. So who were these people? Who can do the course?

Agnieszka Murdoch:

The original pilot of the course was just for those working in government, whereas the open course that we launched in May and that we're now launching the second run of is open to anyone who's interested in content design.

So this will be obviously colleagues from different government departments. There will be people working in local government as well. Other public sector organisations as well as the private sector. And we had people from lots of different places in the UK, all different nations, lots of different countries around the world.

The pilot of the course was intended just for content designers, but this open course actually attracted more people than just content designers and people who have ‘content designer’ in their job title. So it's obviously for those starting out in the role. But it's also for those working in related disciplines.

What was also interesting was that was the range of experience among the learners on the course. So even though the course is called an Introduction to content design, we had people who were completely new to the field, but also people who are very experienced. And what we found was that it was sort of equally beneficial for those different groups, regardless of the level of experience they had.

So like I said at the start, FutureLearn is a social learning platform, which means you're not just following the content of the course, but you're also expected to get involved in conversations, to complete tasks, to answer questions and to interact with other learners. And that's part of the learning.

Laura Stevens:

And I also saw on FutureLearn you received a 4.5* review from the learners. And so can you talk a bit more through about people's response to the course? Was there anything particularly that went well or anything that needed improvement? And perhaps has that changed as the course has gone from pilot to first opening and now to the second one?

Agnieszka Murdoch:

Yes. So we got, we got quite a lot of feedback actually from that first open run, which we did in May. And the second iteration of that we’re working on at the moment is going to be addressing some of those feedback points. So what people really enjoyed were the interactions with other learners, so being able to kind of share experiences, but also read about other people's context. Yeah, the social interactions between learners was something that we got a lot of positive feedback on.

Also, the fact that we conveyed the content through stories rather than just telling people the rules or sharing the theory of content design. I think that was a very important aspect of why people, why learners potentially benefited from the course. Also, the variety of content so FutureLearn is a platform that allows you to add different types of content to it, such as video, audio, articles, polls, quizzes. So I think the variety of content really was a great thing because sometimes it can be quite tedious if you're just going through a self-paced course that just has video or just has articles.

And in terms of improvements, we had some feedback on actually accessibility. There was one task that we included that wasn't accessible because it involved highlighting things in green and red. And if you know anything about the basics of accessibility, you will know that that's not very helpful for people with kind of accessibility, certain types of accessibility needs. So that was, that was a mistake that we're correcting.

Laura Stevens:

I also wanted to talk about it being an online learning course, which has always been the case since it’s development back in 2019. Of course given the developments of 2020 with coronavirus and a move of lots of things to remote working or remote learning, but why were you thinking about online back in 2019?

Agnieszka Murdoch:

So the main reason, so that kind of if we go back to the pilot, the reason why the pilot was designed was to address some of the kind of practical challenges with running face-to-face training.

So things like obviously the cost. The fact that the trainers would have to go, travel around the country and go to each face-to-face session, kind of separately, train the people there. It costs a lot to travel. It costs, it takes up a lot of time. But also, I think another challenge of face-to-face learning is that you only have access to those people who are in the room at the time the training is happening. Which means that you're not really able to share ideas or generate new ideas as effectively as as you are if you're doing things online and opening it up to thousands of people. The practical kind of challenges and the challenge of sharing were the 2 main reasons.

So just to give you some numbers, like I said, we had about 11,500 people enrolled and we were actually only expecting 2,400 because that was the mean number of sign ups in that specific course category on FutureLearn. We had 18,500 comments. So as you can see, this is quite an overwhelming number for a moderator or somebody who's even reading those comments as a participant. But it shows the kind of how active the discussions were and how active the learners were and how much knowledge was shared.

Sixty-seven per cent of those learners were active learners, which means they completed a step and 26% were social learners, which means they commented at least once. So, again, you know, if you're running face-to-face training, you can't expect every single person to contribute. There isn't enough time for that. And also, the different kind of learning styles that people have don't always allow for that.

Laura Stevens:

So yeah, I want to talk about this - the September opening of the course, which starts on the 21 September. And so if I'm hearing you speak about it, and I’m really excited to hear more. How do I sign up?

Agnieszka Murdoch:

Yeah so if you want to join the course, you can keep an eye on the GDS Blog. We will be blogging about how we built the course and how we sort of iterated it. And there will be a link there to sign up. But if you're too impatient and you don’t want to wait for the blog posts, then you can go on FutureLearn and you can search for it there, it's called Introduction to content design.

The course is perfect for anyone who is starting out in content design or who is thinking about moving into content design or anyone who kind of already works with content and feels that their work could benefit from learning more about content design.

Ben Hazell:

Yeah, so the thing that put me in mind of was the content design is a set of job titles and a role within the government digital jobs framework. So there's a nice clear job track that you can join. But it is also a set of practises. It's a set of methodologies and a mindset so I think it's a really valuable skill set even if you don't intend to become a titled ‘content designer’. I think you can apply it in lots of ways and this is a great opportunity to dip your toe into those waters.

Amanda Diamond:

And for me, I am just astonished at the number of people who signed up and who are interested and also the number of folks who completed the course as well. And just the level of social interaction that Agnieszka spoke about there. I mean, that is fantastic.

And I think for me as well, it's just about the reach. You know, an online course like this that can scale to this extent would, is, is, is, is the only way we can reach all of those people from different backgrounds, different, you know, different skill sets. And we would never be able to reach that number of people and that volume of people around the world as well if we were just doing face-to-face training.

Ben Hazell:

And most importantly, it can be taken at the user’s own pace and in their own time - they can go back over things, they can expand in particular areas of interest. And I think when you have engaged and willing learners, that becomes a very effective opportunity. And I used to do a lot of in-person training for GDS on content design, but obviously with a reach of more like 12 people a day rather than 10,000. It was always hard with a classroom full of people to meet each of their individual needs and to find a pace that wasn't leaving people behind. And it was also not kind of losing the engagement of the people who were running ahead. And that's where this adaptive content in these online courses can really excel. And I think are really interesting examples of that sort of personalisation of content to people's minute by minute needs and requirements.

Laura Stevens:

Yes, for sure. And as Agnieszka said, there will be a link to the course on the GDS Blog if you’re interested. And so that's all for today, so thank you both so much for joining me, and to Agnieszka too.

And you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on Podbean.

So yeah, thank you both again.

Ben Hazell:

Thank you.

Amanda Diamond:

Thanks Laura, thanks for having me having us.

GDS Podcast #21: The DDaT Fast Stream at GDS Jul 30, 2020

The Digital, Data and Technology Fast Stream is one of 15 Civil Service Fast Stream schemes. Hear from current and former participants reflecting on their experiences.

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Vanessa Schneider:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast.

My name is Vanessa Schneider and I am Senior Channels and Community Manager at GDS. Like last month's episode, this one will also be recorded via Hangouts as we're all remote working right now. We're going to be talking about the Digital, Data and Technology Fast Stream experience at GDS. The Digital, Data and Technology Fast Stream, also known as the DDaT Fast Stream for short, is one of 15 different schemes on the Civil Service Fast Stream. Applicants can choose up to 4 scheme preferences when they apply. As a DDaT Fast Streamer you're participating in a four year scheme with both six month long and year-long placements.

GDS is one of the organisations in which Fast Streamers are placed. So we will be hearing from colleagues across GDS with experience of being on the DDaT scheme.

Clare Robinson:

I'm Clare Robinson. I'm a Fast Stream Performance Analyst working on GOV.UK. So that means that I look at the performance data that we have available and try to understand what it is that users are trying to do on GOV.UK, where they're going and what it is we need to do to make their journeys better.

Vanessa Schneider:

Do you think that the Fast Stream has lived up to what your expectation was before you applied?

Clare Robinson:

What I've really loved about working for government is the fact that people don't have another option, like there is no, there's nobody else that can give you a passport. We have to do it. And that confers on us a really different expectation because we can't ever decide that something is too hard. We have to do the best we can for everybody. And that was probably the thing that really defied my expectations. I came in thinking that it would be all about implementing government policy. And actually some of that is true. But most of it is about providing citizens with things that they need from government. And that's really a different mindset, perhaps, than I really expected to have.

Vanessa Schneider:

Do you mind going a little bit into detail about the different placements that you've had before arriving at GDS?

Clare Robinson:

So I started as a delivery manager in Bristol working on licencing and permitting services. My role was to make sure that we were delivering those projects on time when we needed to. So I learnt a lot from that, I learnt a lot about agile, so how to manage people in a really productive and sort of continuously improving way. And I learnt a lot about myself, like what I how I work, what I like, what I find more challenging. That led me to my next placement where I went to the Department of Transport to be a User Researcher. And that was really great 'cause I was working on a whole just a massive range of projects.

And then I got to go on a secondment. So this is sort of an interesting feature of the Fast Stream is that you can go out to, often to charities or other partners. But I actually chose to go out to industry 'cause that was like I really wanted to take that opportunity just to see how digital services work from kind of a more commercial side. And so I got to go and be a Co-creationion Consultant at Fujitsu. And the kind of work I was doing that was really interesting because I was running what are called design-thinking workshops, which are very much, very much in some ways follow some of the user-centred principles that we have in government, and in GDS - it's all about starting like what do users need?

It was really interesting to see how a sort of commercial enterprise used user-centred thinking and design-thinking to sort of challenge both themselves, and the customers that they working with to kind of co-create like solutions to complicated business problems. So that was that was really interesting.

Vanessa Schneider:

We often hear that GDS has that perception of being different to the other sort of areas of Whitehall. Have you found that to bear out?

Clare Robinson:

I think the biggest difference, I think, is how how much acceptance people have of kind of agile methodologies, and sort of uncertainty. I think we have to embrace the unknowns and we have to embrace the idea that we're not going to get things perfect the first time round.

Vanessa Schneider:

I was wondering, is there anything that you would change about your experience so far?

Clare Robinson:

There’s quite an emphasis on leadership and leading teams, but I think that that can sometimes, people who are perhaps more introverted, who perhaps have more technical skills, I think that can leave them behind or leave them with a sense that they're not doing the right thing. I think that I've been really lucky that I've had two really fantastic managers on the Fast Stream who have really helped me understand that that's not the case, and actually that leadership looks really, really different in different places. But I think that sometimes the Fast Stream can put quite a lot of emphasis on showing rather than doing, and I think there are people that are working to change that.

And I think particularly I've been thinking about like what, when we talk about leadership, we often have a model in our mind. And that model is often, often white, it's often male, it's often went to a Russell Group university. And I think that that is a model that we all need to challenge.

Jordan Testo:

Hi. I'm Jordan Testo. I'm a DDaT Fast Streamer currently placed at GDS, working in the EU Transition and Future Relationships Team as the Digital Portfolio Coordination Advisor. Previously I've worked as a, a Product Owner on the tax platform at HMRC. I've worked as a Service Manager at the Home Office and I've been a Programme Delivery Manager at the Ministry of Defence working in Cyber Defence.

Vanessa Schneider:

And what caused you to apply to be on the Fast Stream?

Jordan Testo:

Finishing university, I fancied a challenge. I previously did an industrial placement in the Home Office whilst at university, and I thought, I want to go into the Civil Service. So why not give the Fast Stream a go and develop my leadership skills and see what I can do?

So I'm currently coming towards the end of my second year. Currently the DDaT scheme is four years. So I've got another two placements - so the first two years are six month roles, switching every six months, and then the final two years are two year-long posts. So come October, I will be leaving GDS to another department, which as of yet is unknown to me. We find out in about three weeks, four weeks’ time where we'll be moving on to.

Vanessa Schneider: Do you get any choice in that matter or is it very much predetermined?

Jordan Testo:

We get preference forms, so we put in the departments which we want to go to work for, job roles around the DDaT Framework and other areas that we want to develop personally as well. And all those developmental points are looked into as well as what previous job roles I've done. And the matching team then put, match me to a place in which they think benefits me the most in what I want to get out.

Vanessa Schneider:

Is it different working at GDS compared to other departments?

Jordan Testo:

GDS, it is a total different way of working. It's a lot more accessible, there's a lot more openness in terms of the software we can use, the types of communication methods. But GDS is just, it's such a different place. And what I quite like about it is there's less of a hierarchy as such. Everyone works together to get the job done rather than some of the departments I've been in where it's quite hierarchical. But yeah, I quite enjoy this.

Vanessa Schneider:

Yeah, so obviously it's great to hear that you're having a positive experience at GDS, and with the fast stream. But are there things that you've sort of found a bit more challenging?

Jordan Testo:

The challenging element of the Fast Stream is moving around every six months. It's been hard for me to let go of some departments, mainly because of the work I've been working on, and I start, I get to the midpoint where we've got a really important milestone or got to important sprint and then I have to go, and I never see the result and not seeing the fruits of their labour as such. Hence why I’m looking forward to having the year-long posts.

And I think if someone asked me, what do you think of the Fast Stream, I say, just do it. Apply. See how it goes, because it's just totally worth it. I think that even if you don't get onto it, the application process is really interesting and a really good experience to do. If you get onto it, the Civil Service and the public sector world is open to you. You have a chance to go around different departments, work on different programmes, work with different people in different subject areas, and you build up such a knowledge of overall government - it's, it's priceless, really.

Maxwell Reiss:

My name is Maxwell Reiss. I'm a Product Manager on the GOV.UK programme, and I'm on the Civil Service Digital Fast Stream.

Vanessa Schneider:

So you are currently a Fast Streamer or have you finished the Fast Stream?

Maxwell Riess:

I am still currently a Fast Streamer. But I am, I am very much an outgoing Fast Streamer. I'm in my third year of the programme and I've just recently, within the last couple of weeks, been offered a permanent role at GDS.

Vanessa Schneider: Well, congratulations to the job offer. Is it normal for a Fast Streamer to be offered a job before the scheme finishes?

Maxwell Riess:

It does happen. It is, it is very, it is normal. Yeah, I'll go as far as to say it's normal. I think of my cohort, there were about 60 of us that started in year one, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed digital Fast Streamers. And I think of that there are probably less than half that are still on the scheme.

Vanessa Schneider: Would you mind telling us a little bit about the placements that you had previously?

Maxwell Riess:

So way back in September of 2000, was it 17, I started my very first placement on the Fast Stream in DWP Digital in the Portfolio Team. And this was a quite surprising placement to get. It actually wasn't what I was expecting at all because I was working in a private office role supporting a Deputy Director of the digital portfolio. I have had roles in HMRC working on digital services for collecting environmental taxes. I had a role working at the Department for International Trade, working in content on their Brexit transition. So, so I worked on, on policies and content for the public at DIT. And I previously had a role at GDS even before this one. I worked at GDS in GOV.UK in a, in another kind of content capacity, working on what we call mainstream, which is the kind of most popular content on GOV.UK itself and then I came back, I came back to GOV.UK after my last one at DIT.

Vanessa Schneider: Were you aware of GDS before you joined the DDaT Fast Stream?

Maxwell Riess:

I, I was, actually. Yeah, I am. I tragically was a bit of a fan of.

Vanessa Schneider:

Oh! Don't apologise.

Maxwell Riess:

GOV.UK and of, of, of GDS. I just, you know, kind of struck me as a great a great thing, a good website, a place - and I worked, I did work in digital before joining the Civil Service in the private sector. And it always struck me, guess partly call it good storytelling, branding, propaganda, that that GDS was somewhere that was doing digital and agile well, you know, that it was, that this is where one could go to actually experience these techniques put into action in an effective way.

Vanessa Schneider:

Do you mind telling me a little bit about what led you to applying to the DDaT Fast Stream?

Maxwell Riess:

For me, it was very, very directly about wanting to work in the public sector for the public good. I got into technology because I was interested in, I guess, the power of new tools to like shape society and and create the modern world. So I knew I wanted to work in that area. And having had time in the private sector, I became more and more interested in devoting my efforts to something that was going to be for everyone's benefit. And because of the, because of the good that I think can be done there, but also because of the risk as well. I think you know government services still in so many places have a reputation for not being as good. And I think in order to build public trust in our society, we need to have services that people feel like are really high quality. And yeah, I wanted to, to lend my effort to do that.

Vanessa Schneider:

So you've obviously had a really good experience in the Fast Stream and at GDS, but were there some challenges that you faced?

Maxwell Riess:

I've said this to other people who are thinking about the Fast Stream and people who are in it who are struggling, by far, the best thing about the Fast Stream is its variability. The amount of different roles you can kind of gain experience in the different interactions you can get, the different circumstances and problems, spaces you'll get exposed to. That's all incredibly beneficial. But also it comes with a huge amount of variance and risk. And so I think that the challenges are all around whether or not you can deal with a slightly, ultimately, you can do you can do anything for six months. I think. And and really, it's about it's temporary. So it's about what you're going to get out of it. And if you think you can get something really valuable out of it, then it's worth sticking with. If not, then you need to be able to be a squeaky wheel and complain and kick up a fuss.

Vanessa Schneider:

That sounds like a lot of food for thought, then would you change anything if you had the opportunity to do what you wanted?

Maxwell Riess:

I mean, the Fast Stream itself is constantly changing like it is, it is really, you know because Fast Streamers are young and, and they've got ideas. They’re constantly giving feedback on the programme. And I think it can and should change.

Daniel Owens:

My name is Daniel Owens and I work as a Corporate Insight Lead at GDS.

Vanessa Schneider:

Did you always know you wanted to apply to the DDaT Fast Stream, or where did that decision come from for you?

Daniel Owens:

Well, I think I think I'm quite an unusual case in the sense that I'm probably a fair bit older than a lot of the other Fast Streamers. I know that the Fast Stream is becoming, it was originally created as a graduate scheme but increasingly it's becoming more of a developmental scheme. I decided to change careers and I was particularly interested in the tech sector. I thought that that is the most exciting and innovative area going forward. But also, I wanted to have meaningful and purposeful for work and feel that I was contributing to something rather than just the bottom line. And I've been particularly happy that I've been placed at GDS, the Government Digital Service, because of their excellent reputation. I have friends in the private sector and they all know about GDS. They know GOV.UK has a very good reputation around the world and in the private sector in terms of producing quality products. So I was quite excited to get this placement.

Vanessa Schneider:

So knowing what you know now, what kind of advice do you have to somebody who's considering applying to the DDaT Scheme?

Daniel Owens:

It's a tough question. In answering that, I would say, I think that my trajectory as an older, older starter is I would give different advice for an older person compared to a younger person. Because I think if you're straight out of uni or, you know, got just a couple of years of work experience, you're you're still sort of learning the world of work and like learning how to interact in that in that environment and what works for you and what doesn't. So, your sort of, your approach, I think, would be a bit different.

For the son-if, for someone who's older, starting on the DDaT scheme, I would say first things first would be to work out what the key trajectories are, where the key roles are that you could go into, and from day one start thinking about to what extent they fit what you want to do and testing it all the time, like kind of, almost kind of like an agile approach, like a prototype, like going and meeting people.

Vanessa Schneider:

And is there anything you would change about your experience?

Daniel Owens:

I think, one thing that and this is advice I've got from a lot of Fast Streamers who are further along, is if the postings not working for you or you don't feel like you're doing the kind of work that is going to develop you, then you should push back and you should you should try and own the role and make the role. I mean, you know, there's going to be some mundane work that you're gonna have to do. It's inevitable. But you should also try and search for opportunities to do innovative, interesting things. And don't be afraid to approach people about that.

James Lovatt:

Hi, I'm James Lovatt. I'm one of the Assistant Private Secretaries in the Director General's Private Office at GDS. And I'm on the Fast Stream.

Vanessa Schneider:

To start us off. It'd be great to learn from you why you thought you wanted to apply to the DDaT Fast Stream.

James Lovatt:

So I applied for Fast Stream. I think ultimately for my own personal development. I found the previously I spent eight years working in the NGO sector. But I was really struggling to break through those digital marketing roles into more leadership positions. So I wanted to see how the Digital, Data and Technology Fast Stream could open up that world a bit wider for me, to, to see how the other ways of using digital technology to make an impact in the world.

Vanessa Schneider:

So your placement at GDS, what stage are you at in your placements?

James Lovatt:

So I've been on the Fast Stream for two years now. I've been in London for the last 12 months and with GDS for the last six months specifically. This is my fourth posting.

Vanessa Schneider:

Do you mind sharing what you've been doing in the Fast Stream so far, what your previous placements were about?

James Lovatt:

Yes, sure. So I joined two years ago. I started off with HMRC in a very technical team as a DevOps Product Team Lead. It's one of those where you kind of just get thrown in the deep end and you figure it out as you go along. But there was some really good people around me who helped in that journey. And then I moved up to Edinburgh to work in Scottish government as a Business Analyst where we were trying to onboard, or starting the process of onboarding, Office 365 to that 15,000 odd users. And then I moved down to London to work with DEFRA in a more data focussed role.

Vanessa Schneider:

And your role right now is as Assistant Private Secretary, you mentioned, right?

James Lovatt:

Correct. Yes. So I'm an APS in a team of about four people for Alison Pritchard. There's two APS's and then there's a private secretary and the head of private office. For me, this is has been the posting which has been most well suited to my career aspirations. I think I came in March just as the budget was being considered. And then within a couple of weeks, COVID also hit. So it also was a very insightful way to see how rapidly government can respond to a crisis, and how many services that GDS personally stood up as well to to make that an effective response. I'm fortunate that I've just found out that it's being extended. So I will be staying here for probably another 12 months as my third year posting as well. So it should hopefully give me some depth into what Private Offices can do. I enjoy seeing how senior leaders make their decisions and the influence and the end result of of that. So within six months, I've started to see the start of that process. But hopefully now I'll start to see the middle and end of some of those processes which I've been privy to so far.

Vanessa Schneider:

I'm so pleased to hear that that got extended. I was wondering if there was anything you would change about your Fast Stream experience or about the Fast Stream in general if there’s something you've noticed that could be improved?

James Lovatt:

I have had a good experience, but a lot of it's been in hindsight. At the time, it never necessarily felt that every posting was enjoyable for different reasons. But I think that's, because they were challenging me. So it meant that I was going through that growth, which was what I was initially seeking when I came on to the Fast Stream. I would poss-possibly change just how big sometimes the leap is between those and particularly with a six month postings, they don't let you get too grounded.

I think the thing that I would change about it is, is some of the changes are already happening around diversity and inclusion. So I think my scheme intake in 2018 is reported on in media as not being very diverse. And that's something which I'm not particularly proud to be a part of that statistic. But it is something that drives the work that I do. So even working with Alison in Private Office, it, it's, it's been interesting to see how we can influence the future of the Fast Stream. And particularly in the last couple of years, a lot of those areas have been improving anyway, but I think there's always a lot further to go in there. There'll be unknowns as well in the future that we're not even thinking about right now. So trying to be ahead of a curve in that respect, in terms of inclusion and diversity rather than just catching up is what I'd like to change about the scheme.

Jenny Sleeman:

Hi, I'm Jenny Sleeman and I'm a Delivery Manager for the GOV.UK PaaS Team in GDS. So PaaS is Platform as a Service. So we are part of TechOps and Reliability Engineering. So our, our team has a platform that then other government services can host their services on our platform. And we look after kind of the security and the management of that platform, kind of providing backend services for all of our tenants.

Vanessa Schneider:

As this is our Fast Stream episode, are you doing this role as part of a Fast Stream placement or are you now a graduate of this Fast Stream?

Jenny Sleeman:

I'm a graduate of the Fast Stream. So I graduated from the Fast Stream a couple of years ago. My my last Fast Stream posting was actually at GDS. So I have been a Fast Streamer at GDS as well. But I'm now back at GDS. So yeah, seen it from both sides really.

Vanessa Schneider:

Do you mind telling us about your choice to apply for the DDaT Fast Stream?

Jenny Sleeman:

So I applied because I, I suppose I thought it was the most kind of interesting Fast Stream scheme. I was quite keen to pursue a career in the civil service. And I was I was interested in the digital side of things. I was working at Department for Education at the time and kind of we were having a think about some digital projects. So I was I was quite keen to sort of learn more really and try all the different postings.

Vanessa Schneider:

Do you mind taking us through the postings that you went through?

Jenny Sleeman:

So my first posting was with Ministry of Defence and I worked for the Navy in Portsmouth. So that was that was very, very different from kind of any of the jobs I'd had before that point. So I started my Fast Stream journey in MOD. And then I also had a posting in HMRC, a secondment out to the NHS, which was brilliant. And then also a six month posting at the Home Office. And then for the one year long postings, I worked for BEIS for one year and then GDS for my final year on the scheme.

Vanessa Schneider:

So you've been on a secondment. Do you mind telling me what that was like, whether there was a discernible difference to working for a civil service organisation compared to the NHS?

Jenny Sleeman:

Yeah, it was brilliant. In some ways, it was, it was probably the most interesting posting I had because it was so different to what I'd known in the civil service.

It, it, I suppose it felt a lot more operational to some of the civil service postings I'd had because we were literally based in, in some offices in a hospital in London. So, you know, you were I felt so much closer to that kind of frontline, frontline workers, and your day to day activities could vary so much from kind of things that would be more similar to my role now kind of, you know, reporting in business cases, but then you could also find yourself actually going into one of the wards in the hospital and speaking to the family of patient, for example, if their surgery had had to be cancelled at short notice and kind of really trying to kind of reassure that that patient's family and the patient themselves. I have the utmost respect for people that work for the NHS because, yeah, it is it is a tough job, I think. Very tough.

Vanessa Schneider:

Are you still in touch with other members of your cohort?

Jenny Sleeman:

Yes, I am. Again, that's one that's one of the really, really nice things about the Fast Stream that you you start it with this cohort. And you're obviously always at the same point as them. So kind of when you rotate from one posting to another, you kind of have, you know, all of the chat about how has your first week gone? How are you finding things? Yeah, kind of that support was really important throughout the Fast Stream. And it's just really nice to see that the direction that different people have gone off in and kind of obviously some have stayed in government, some work outside government now. But yeah, it's really nice to have that group of people.

Vanessa Schneider:

And do you think that you had a different experience going into the Fast Stream because you were already an employee of the civil service?

Jenny Sleeman:

Possibly. I think I suppose the benefit to me was that I had a year of I suppose understanding how government worked a little bit from working for Department for Education. So I had some kind of prior experience. But as I say, because some of the postings are just so different, you kind of you know, you can work in one department and and working for another department is very, very different. So, yeah, I think if you already work for the civil service, there can be some benefits. But yeah, there's, there's, there's also no problem going in when you haven't worked for the civil service before.

Lewis Dunne:

Hi everyone. So my name is Lewis Dunne. I'm a Senior Technology Policy Adviser here at GDS. I sit within the Technology Policy Team and my role is focussed on researching, advising, briefing and producing guidance on ways to improve cross-government use of tech. And on top of that, I'm also a former DDaT Fast Streamer. I’m a bit fresh off the scheme, so I left and starting work at GDS in mid-March of this year - I was in the third year of the scheme when I left.

Vanessa Schneider:

So if you don't mind us casting back your mind to the beginnings of the GDS Fast Stream. I know it's not as long ago as some people who've completed the scheme, but I was wondering if you could share with us why you considered applying.

Lewis Dunne:

Yeah. So that there were a couple of different reasons. I applied in October 2016. At the time I was studying for a diploma in legal practise up in Scotland. I'd most enjoyed working on things that were linked to like public and administrative law, and I think I saw the Fast Stream as a better way of offering a route to be able to work in that broader area of public services a lot more. And certainly the idea of being able to contribute to improving public services felt far more real and more interesting to me than a lot of the more dry stuff that I was studying at the time.

Vanessa Schneider:

The law to data, digital and technology, that seems like a bit of a jump. Was there anything that had prepared you for that?

Lewis Dunne:

Yeah. No, it's a good point. So bit of context as well - I do come from a bit of a techie background: as a child, I was very into building websites, continued that at uni. My dad is a telecoms engineer. His dad helped build planes. And just before applying really in the year before my studies, I'd also been working on a research project that was trying to build a database of sort of peace agreements to allow them to be compared. And that was a really interesting use of what was a really interesting ability to actually see a digital system in a different way, helping to analyse a real world problem. So, so my head was very much still in that space.

Vanessa Schneider:

Do you mind telling me about your first placements?

Lewis Dunne:

So I've worked in a number of different places. So five placements in total. They've all actually had a bit of an international flavour, I suppose. I started off at Department for International Trade, working as a content designer on an export licencing programme. I then moved over to the Foreign Office where I was a product owner for their telecom system. I worked at the Department for Transport as a cyber security policy analyst, then back to GDS as a tech policy analyst. And then finally, just before this, I was working at the Department for International Development up in East Kilbride as a product owner, helping with their development data publishing. To some extent of a lot of my roles have been because I've been quite willing just to get my hands dirty and get involved in a lot of different things and also being willing just to be moved around a bit.

Vanessa Schneider:

You brought the scheme to an early end by accepting a job offer. Was there anything that you sort of feel like you've missed out on because you've exited the scheme early?

Lewis Dunne:

I mean, the whole thing about the scheme is that it is designed to get people to a stage of feeling like they are empowered and that they can go and make decisions and and lead, because I guess primarily as a leadership scheme, it's about getting, building us up as people. And when I compare where I am now and how I feel and how I act, everything like that to the to the timid, shy guy that walks into DIT back in I guess, like mid 2017, I have I had developed a lot as a person by the time I applied for this role at GDS, so I felt ready in that regard.

Vanessa Schneider: Do you wish that you'd changed anything about your experience in the Fast Stream? I know, for instance, some people have gone on secondments to other public sector organisations or charities or even private sector companies.

Lewis Dunne:

I don't think there's any of my experiences on the Fast Stream that I'd want to give up or trade in for something else. I don't feel like any of the things was like a needless waste of time or anything or like not a waste of time, but, you know, was could be swapped out. So it's difficult to look back. And I think in terms of thinking about how we change things over the course of the Fast Stream, there's just a big angle about, you know, you develop so much as a person over those several years of being put into all of these different positions that if I was in different roles, I probably would have handled problems differently, and people acted with people differently in some areas. But I guess that's just part of, you know, learning and growing as a person more generally.

Vanessa Schneider:

Gosh, that got very philosophical.

Lewis Dunne:

I remember my cohort leader asking me about that. And she had suggested that I go on a secondment and that would have been, I guess, in place of my time at GDS, and I think actually my time I spent GDS helped me identify an organisation that I really I really liked, I really liked the culture and that I wanted to work in more. So if I've had lost that, I guess I would have gained something different. But I think it's, it's helped me get to where I am now.

Vanessa Schneider:

Do you think that it was good coming into the Fast Stream out of academia, or do you think that it makes a difference? Or is it just such a scheme that it doesn't matter what your previous knowledge is, you kind of start from ground zero?

Lewis Dunne:

It's, it's is a really interesting point, because I guess one of the things that I've developed a lot over the last couple years, but I think part of that has just been all these like different experiences, because it's it's kind of like how you imagined the people in Love Island must feel, you know. For you looking in, it looks like it's only a week but I think for them it feels like a year kind of thing. And I think a lot of postings feel a bit like that. You're only there for several months, but it can feel like a very long period of time for you.

And so it does help you build up a lot of experiences and to help me build up a lot of experiences and get a lot of different. It's almost equivalent of doing, you know, like five different mini jobs in the space of, like a couple of years. And I think all of those contributions helped me develop. So I guess if maybe if I'd come into a bit like older and stuff than I might have had a bit more of like a solid base to start with. So, yeah, I, I think it is one of these things where by just so it can be both useful coming from academia and you know, it's also very useful to come in with a broader knowledge of it. I'm sure that will give you a huge leg up. And if people are thinking about like a change of role or a change of like career and things, I think, you know, in terms of getting like a crash course in digital in government, the Fast Stream is a great way of getting that.

Vanessa Schneider:

Thank you so much to all of our guests for coming on today. You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on Podbean. Goodbye.

GDS Podcast #20: Celebrating 2 years of the Local Digital Declaration Jun 29, 2020

We discuss the Local Digital Declaration, how it started, how it connects people and helps local government organisations build digital services and platforms.

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Laura Stevens:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I’m a Creative Content Producer at GDS. And today we’re going to be talking about the Local Digital Declaration. This is a set of guiding principles that help support local authorities, of all sizes and capabilities, to deliver great digital services and platforms that meet the needs of their users. And since it launched 2 years ago, 223 public sector organisations have signed up to it.

And to tell me more about the work the declaration has done is Lisa Jeffrey and May-N Leow. So welcome both to the podcast, please could you tell me who you are, where you work and how you’re involved with the Local Digital Declaration.

Lisa Jeffery:

So yeah, I'm Lisa Jeffery. I'm a Regional Relationship Manager for Government Digital Service, GDS, I'm based in Leeds. And we're here to help open doors and raise awareness of the support that's available from GDS and to connect people where it's beneficial to do so to support digital transformation. I started working at GDS in May 2018, and that's just a couple months before the Local Digital Declaration launched in July 2018, and I've been involved ever since then really over the last 2 years.

May-N Leow:

Hi everyone. I’m May-N Leow, and Head of the Local Digital Collaboration Unit. So almost a year now at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government [MHCLG], and yeah, Lisa is a fantastic champion of, of the declaration and we love working with her and GDS.

So I’ve actually seen it from both sides. So when I was working in the council in Southwark, we were co-signatories of the declaration, we also applied for the funds - so I have that perspective of what it feels like to be in the council. So yeah, it’s been really fantastic seeing it from both sides of, of the pond.

Laura Stevens:

So I described the Local Digital Declaration briefly in the introduction. But I’d like to hear a bit more about it. It’s a set of 5 principles - could we talk through them?

May-N Leow:

So it's, it’s, as you say kind of Laura, it’s, we’ve got 5 principles in the declaration, and it's based around the GDS Service Manual as well as the Technology Code of Practice.

But the key things for us is that obviously we want users and citizens need to be first when you know, designing a system and offering good local services. And the second one is around fixing the plumbing - so we want to fix the hard, complex problems. It's not very sexy but it's completely vital for delivering good services. And then we want to design safe, secure and useful ways of sharing information and data and that's even more critical from COVID and what we've learned in the crisis response. And then the fourth one is to kind of demonstrate leadership in creating the conditions for genuine organisational transformation, making sure that it can actually happen. And then lastly, working in the open whenever we can so as many people can learn from, from each other.

So those are kind of, the 5 principles we have in the declaration.

Laura Stevens:

So the Local Digital Declaration is a joint initiative from GDS and MHCLG. And can you describe for me who is it for?

Lisa Jeffery:

So it's aimed primarily at local authorities and other public sector organisations that meet the requirements of signing the Local Digital Declaration.

I think the Local Digital Declaration is a, is a great example of what can be achieved if, if we all work together. It's co-written by 45 different organisations, so it's really about shared ambition for the future of public services in the internet age. And it's now been signed by 223 different organisations.

Laura Stevens:

And can you describe some of the councils who have signed it? Sort of, are they big councils, are they small councils, who’s signed up?

May-N Leow:

I think it's all across the board. So we have obviously your big city, metropolitan kind of councils right through to your county and district councils. Obviously there are other organisations, other than councils, that have signed up to the declaration, so we're pretty much approaching that three quarter mark of, of all councils in England, which is you know, great and shows the level of ambition that, that councils are, are showcasing in terms of wanting to deliver like modern, amazing services to, to their citizens and community.

Laura Stevens:

And I know you, both of you referenced this in the introduction, I wanted to go back in time a bit, looking back to 2018 because it's obviously its 2 year birthday coming up very shortly. So could you tell me, perhaps Lisa from the GDS point of view and May-N from when you were working Southwark Council point of view, why was the Local Digital Declaration created?

May-N Leow:

Yeah. And, and I would say certainly being on the other side when the Declaration was being created, it was, it was, the need born out from it's kind of like a place, one place can state what does good look like for local services and what the ambition looks like for local services? And certainly in, again, in, in Southwark, I used it as a mechanism to drive forward a lot of things that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise - so saying here's the declaration, we’ve committed to it, you know other organisations have committed to it and this is the bar that we should try to kind of meet. So using that to say you know, we need to have user research, we need to do-build services in that user-centered way.

Again I could not have done without the Declaration, without kind of the Local Digital Fund. So certainly being a council officer, having something like that, it's just such a powerful mechanism to not only showcase what's possible, what we should be doing but then, but then also sort of say to senior management, this is what we're committing to so let's do it.

Lisa Jeffery:

And at the beginning as well, we did, we did some roadshows. I think it was really important that we got out and about around the country when, when we could, and that we could understand each other and work together across local and national government.

Laura Stevens:

You mentioned there about the roadshows, and you mentioned there about how you, it showed you what good looked like specifically for local councils, how important was that creation and collaboration between local and central government?

May-N Leow:

I mean, I-I think it was crucial to make something like this actually work, because you, you need both perspectives of organisations from a council side, what central government is trying to achieve, and other organisations like LGA [Local Government Association] as well, that kind of fed into the, the declaration.

So it's, it’s not really that MHCLG kind of holds the declaration or is responsible for it, we're just kind of like keeping it for, for the sector at this point in time. And it's very much like a shared commitment and an ownership of, of the declaration. So I think it was really crucial that it was co-written and co-published.

Lisa Jeffery:

Yeah I-I think I'd agree. As in there's, there's, it's more like a movement of course, than a mandate. So I think we're all on a journey to improve public services and to make things better for people fundamentally - so collaboration and building capability and community and being human centered and understanding how we are connected, are all enablers to that goal really.

Laura Stevens:

And Lisa, so can you explain a bit about your role as a Regional Relationship Manager? Because I know since you've been here for 2 years, you’ve made about, over 40 visits in person to councils?

Lisa Jeffery:

Yep. So as a Regional Relationship Manager for the Government Digital Service, GDS, based in Leeds, we’re here to sort of open doors to GDS, raise awareness of the support that's available from GDS and to connect people where it's beneficial to support digital transformation. And since the launch of the Local Digital Declaration, I’ve made 40 visits in person to local authorities and I've also met with many more local authorities through communities and events like LocalGovCamp, where the Local Digital Declaration had a launch.

It's been really helpful to connect with local authorities and to learn with them and to visit them in their own context. And I've seen the value of that and joining up services, people and places to act as an enabler for collaboration.

Laura Stevens:

May-N, I know your team is the Local Digital Collaboration Unit. Can you talk about your work there and also how you saw it from the other side at Southwark?

May-N Leow:

Yeah. So currently we've got a number of projects that we're funding via the Local Digital Fund.

So we’re funding basically projects to solve common challenges that councils have. So we're currently in round 4 of our funding, so we do it in a stage kind of way, and some of the rounds are open so councils can apply with completely new challenges or new ideas, and some of our rounds are closed - those ones, those rounds are to allow our funded projects to kind of progress to, to the next stage.

So we've actually funded 23 projects so far and 100 distinct councils have actually worked collaboratively together on those projects - so we've, we've definitely shown via the fund that you know councils can actually come together and work on common challenges. And like to be completely frank, I, when, when I was still there, I was a bit dubious about this myself, ‘cause everyone knows it's hard - like yeah, everyone wants to kind of share and collaborate together but you know, everyone's got their own day jobs, it takes time, it takes you know resources to actually do collaborative working.

So with, with the fund, it actually managed to bring councils together that we wouldn't have necessarily work together before. So for example, when we were running the housing repairs project in Southwark, we had Lincoln, Gravesham and Lewisham working with Southwark. And we didn't have a relationship from a housing repair side before, but because that was a priority problem for those councils, we actually came together and it worked!

So I think it kind of demonstrates that when those problems are you know, unique but a priority to certain councils, councils will come together to, to solve those common challenges. So I think that's the great thing we've actually seen and proven is that, that is possible as long as we remove and de-risk a lot of those barriers to collaborative working. So obviously that's why we offer the funds so that you know councils with really stretched budgets are not using kind of like their own money and, and resources to actually solve those challenges. And some of these problems are really big for, for just one council to solve.

Lisa Jeffery:

It's been super helpful I think to connect and to learn alongside with local authorities and going to visit them in their context through my visits, and I've seen the value in cross-organisational sort of connections and to join up services, people and places to, to enable the collaboration.

I think it's really helpful what the, what the Local Digital Declaration is doing to sort of highlight the good work that councils are doing, and finding those assets that we can build on together and it's also helping create that space for the people and organisations to create their own value within, within that space.

Laura Stevens:

And this has sort of preempted my next bit of question, because I was gonna ask about what has it allowed to happen over the 2 years.

May-N Leow:

Yeah. I guess that, that bit about demonstrating the willingness and the ambition in council. So when the Local Digital Fund was first announced and we'd launched the first round, we had 389 expressions of interest which was amazing, and the majority of the ideas were all really sound.

And I think that, that bit about, what Lisa was saying, on the amplifying the great work that is happening - most councils just don't have the time to kind of blog and write about the amazing things that they're doing, and a lot of the times they don't think it's amazing.

So I think the, the sharing and the learning from each other can't, can’t be underrated - it's, it's so important, whether they're funded projects or not funded projects, I think it's really important to get all these different approaches out so people can say, ‘yeah that works, that will work for me’, or ‘no I can actually just tweak this kind of approach’, so they're not starting from zero.

Laura Stevens:

And I think one thing as well, in terms of not starting from zero, we've seen the increased use of common components across local government. Pete Herlihy, in last month's podcast, said we do have nearly as many service teams in local government using GOV.UK Notify as we do in central government. And so, and things like GOV.UK Pay as well, that local government able to pick up and use in their service. And Lisa, I know you've spoken at design calls about, about this as well.

Lisa Jeffery:

Yeah, absolutely. I think local authorities, they're delivering complex services, there's, there’s limited resources and it's often done at pace in, in these super challenging times - so there's real potential for platforms to improve outcomes.

So for example, yeah Lisa Trickey, at Dorset Council, ran a great session with us the other week about how they are using GOV.UK Notify and Pay within their services. We announced GOV.UK Notify and Pay local authority pilots back in 2017, and then we opened a lot more alongside the launch of the Local Digital Declaration. And since then uptake of these platforms, especially Notify, has grown a lot as you say, in local government. And there does seem to be a universal willingness as May-N said, among Local Digital Declaration projects to be using government platforms - so that's just fantastic to see.

Laura Stevens:

And you've teed that up very nicely, because we now have a clip from Lisa Trickey.

Lisa Trickey:

So I am Lisa Trickey. I was appointed last summer as the Service Manager for Digital Strategy and Design at Dorset Council. So we're a relatively new council. We were only formed on the 1 April last year, and prior to that I worked in the County Council and I was, I've always pretty much been involved in technology and digital work.

Laura Stevens:

So as you said Dorset is a new council, and in a blog post you wrote, by signing the Local Digital Declaration in the summer of 2018, “it was great timing for us because it aligned with our digital aspirations, work we were already doing and has enabled digital to be at the heart of the new Dorset Council that is being formed”. So can you talk a bit more about that, how it's helped you?

Lisa Trickey:

We, we were really keen. we wanted to create this brand new council you know taking the best of the bits of the work from previous councils but we wanted to create something new and different. But obviously on day one we didn't have all the policies and strategies that you would normally have in place for a new council. So the declaration for me in particular has been that mandate that I can reference, I can hook the work onto and I can talk about to the organisation.

We were able to create dedicated capacity for digital and change. So we've got that dedicated capacity to help the organisation to adopt digital but what was really important is we didn't want it to be seen as technology - we wanted it to be seen as something different to that. And from my perspective for digital to be a success it has to permeate through everything in the organisation.

But there is this really fine balance all the time between technology and then bringing it back to people and designing services. So the other thing that we've done is celebrated Services Week. So that's been a brilliant initiative from GDS because actually when we started to celebrate Services Week, which we've done for 2 years, we actually had a different set of

people coming to the room and suddenly realised that actually digital isn't just about technology it's about yeah, doing things really differently and making sure that we meet the needs of our customers.

Laura Stevens:

What do you think by signing the Local Digital Declaration, it’s allowed Dorset to do that it would have been able to do otherwise?

Lisa Trickey:

So I think in, in local government there are always lots of competing agendas, lots of competing priorities and unless you have legislation or some sort of government policy or guidance to hook your work on to it can be really hard to drive that work forward. Unless you've got a Chief Executive that really gets it you know and we're actually quite fortunate in Dorset that we do have a really fantastic Chief Executive when it comes to digital. But what the declaration does then is gives you a clear mandate to have those conversations, you can reference what is happening elsewhere and that's really helpful. And it's really clear it's really clear about what we should be doing and so you can start to think about the plans and priorities you know for your particular council as a result of that.

Laura Stevens:

And I just wanted to ask about the common components because I know Dorset uses GOV.UK Pay for lots of your services including things like abandoned vehicle charges, highway licenses. And you also use GOV.UK Notify for other public sector services like blood online reporting tool and services to support young people. How in particular has Dorset used GOV.UK Notify?

Lisa Trickey:

So we've used Notify to both integrated with our systems and just using the backend of Notify to to send information. And we've used Notify for text messaging information, emailing but also probably the biggest through posting letters. So our waste partnership for example, have used it to notify residents of changes to rounds or recycling schemes. We've

used it during COVID to respond to residents, keep residents informed and even a group of staff that don't have access to the IT network informed. It's so quick and easy to set up and in terms of trying to save money, using GOV Notify over the last year we've saved £55,000. Which I know is not massive in the scale of things but actually every penny counts at the moment for local government. So if you can quickly replace posting a letter with Notify or even better doing it by email or by text then that's that's really, really helpful.

We've also used it to think about how we improve our communication with customers and particularly around parents who have children with special educational needs and we had this concept of the educational health and care plan process takes 20 weeks so it's quite a long time. So how do we keep them better up-to-date? And that's changed the experience of that service completely for parents. It's improved the relationship between the service and parents so these components have a really you have a really big impact really positive impact for relatively, for relatively low time investment.

Laura Stevens:

So how has being part of the Local Digital Declaration community, how, how have you been able to connect with others? Have you spoken to other councils, perhaps in other areas of the country that you maybe might not connected with before?

Lisa Trickey:

Definitely. One of the best things for me that, that came out of the declaration is now we're able to connect with people through the Slack channel that has been put in place for this. And that's just brilliant - you can reach out to anybody and just ask ‘are you doing this?’, you know or ‘we're doing this’ and that's just been brilliant.

In particular we've been working with Barnsley on a Local Digital Funded project around income. So it's enabled us to get involved in that. But you know before it was just really difficult. You didn't know, especially I think being down in the south west, you know it's not like when you're in the London boroughs and you've got those connections quite close by.

So to, to be able to be part of that network and to be able to reach out to people. And I have to say it's one of the the best communities in terms of people are always so helpful to share information, prior to COVID, meet you, show you what they've been doing, you know it's absolutely fantastic to have that, that network, and to be able to use that.

Laura Stevens:

And you mentioned COVID and I saw this month you tweeted: ‘the declaration and fund has been so positive for local government in raising the digital agenda locally, sharing and learning from each other across the country, it’s definitely positioned us better to respond to COVID-19’. Could you talk a bit more how the declaration has helped you?

Lisa Trickey:

Definitely. I mean because we've been in a place where we've been doing our own sort of low code and development, we’ve stood up over 10 online services. They've taken over 20,000 sort of applications so, we were able to move at pace for those things which was, which was really helpful.

In terms of the department, MHCLG, having the Friday calls and you know quickly putting those in place so we were able to connect into those and hear what other people were doing. And you know learn from others continually so they were brilliant - you didn’t feel so alone in what you were doing. And we, you, what we often find in the world of digital we find that information then you can share across the rest of the organisation and push into different areas so that's really helpful.

Laura Stevens:

Part of the declaration is committing to a project and Dorset's was about developing the digital skills with Dorset Council Partnership. I don't if you could tell me a bit more about that?

Lisa Trickey:

Yeah, so we've done, so, so our declaration project was around digital skills and we've come at that from sort of multiple different angles and actually we've just been nominated in Digital Leaders for it so quite excited about that.

So one of the strands is around developing champions within the community. So we have about 75 digital champions within the community, helping with that digital inclusion gap that we see. And when COVID hit that was, and that enabled us to be in a position where we could move that offer into a digital hotline and people were able to ring and get that support. So people who'd never even thought about going online pre-COVID suddenly were interested in order to keep in contact with their families. So we've had over 220 calls to that and I think that's just that will remain as a lasting legacy I think of COVID and will continue to grow.

Laura Stevens:

Well congratulations. I wish you luck with all the nominations.

And so if there's somebody from a council or local government who's listening, and they maybe haven't signed it, is there anything you'd like to say to sort of, to them about why or how it's helped you or they're like address anything you think they might be concerned about?

Lisa Trickey:

I, I get quite a lot of contact about people, how you get started? And I think just being part of that bigger network, hearing what other people are doing, learning you know from people like Hackney are, are doing fantastic work - I might not have had sight of that before this. So you know, having that ability to learn from others. And you know I hope we get to a point with the Local Digital Fund alpha projects that, you know they will be able to be shared and you will be able to take those and you know implement them here in Dorset.

You know what the declaration has done is just, it's opened up those networks. You can see what other people are doing. When you're starting out on digital in a local authority, quite often you're the only one trying to champion the cause and having people that you can talk to and see, actually the end, you know the end, well not necessarily the end results, but there's, there's good progress being made and it’s worth, it's worth the effort - that's really helpful. It kind of keeps you going and until you can build that coalition inside your own organisation to help with that messaging, those networks are really valuable.

May-N Leow:

I think for me that, what, what Lisa says right at the end about that you're not alone. Certainly again, in a similar kind of feelings when you're, you’re in a council and you're thinking: ‘am I just a mad digital person in the entire council?’ So that definitely resonates with me when I was working in council, is like I said, being a part of that community, being able to say here's what good looks like and here's what we should be doing, is, is so powerful. So it's great to hear that you know, we're supporting Lisa in that kind of way and also giving her a place to call home - that she's, she's not the odd one out, there's lots of people in this space and, and everyone's willing to kind of share and help each other out - so that was really heartwarming for me.

Lisa Jeffery:

Yeah. I think it just really struck me that, that local authorities are on the frontline of public service provision, and really helping people to do the things that they need to do within their communities and delivering such a lot, really.

I thought the, the comments around leadership, we're really interesting and getting that buy-in. And the focus on user-centered design as well, is really interesting.

I think that's kind of opened up - when we, when we held the Local, the first Local #GovDesign Day as well, in partnership with Birmingham City Council as well, that's kind of something that's kind of opened up as a, as, as, as something that's kind of come out of us all working together I think, with MHCLG - and that was something the user-centered design community did and that was attended by around 200 people.

Laura Stevens:

Also part of the Digital Declaration is building digital capability, we’re now going to hear from Paul Fleming, who’s organisation has gone on GDS Academy training.

Paul Fleming:

So, so my name is Paul Fleming. I’m the Director of Digital and Business Change in Blackburn with Darwen Council, which is a unitary authority in the north west of England.

Laura Stevens:

And am I right in saying you've been at the council for about 2 years now? And it's been quite a busy time for the digital team over that period - there's a new digital directorate that’s been formed, and you’ve had a new website published.

Paul Fleming:

Yeah it's been a bit of a rollercoaster couple of years. So I came over from the NHS, I'd, I’d worked sort of locally and nationally in the NHS. And decided to make the leap into local government and that was, that was - I think that’s 2 years this week. So it's been a really exciting couple of years. It was a new directorate that was formed, quite a large team - just under 150 staff. And it was really the dawn of a new era with, with digital and, and trying to take things further for our local population.

Laura Stevens:

And you signed the Local Digital Declaration in February 2019, how has it helped you?

Paul Fleming:

It’s helped us in many ways I think.

So first of all, it was a real visible commitment for us, signing the declaration. It was something that was really exciting for me. I've always been around collaboration, around learning. And I think it, it provided this, this brilliant framework for us. But, but first and foremost, it was a visible commitment for us - we, we got our exec member - our, our elected member - you know stood up in front of the press with me, talking about, about that locally. It was a sign to, to the public - it was a real sign to our organisation of, of a path of travel for us.

And it really it gave us a framework from, from there on in that I've been able to, to work with my teams and wider teams on to, to... I suppose beyond that create, create a bit of a culture with the organisation. I think you know, a lot of that would have been achievable without, without a sort of national and local collaboration like, like the declaration, but it, it definitely helped me. It definitely legitimised a lot of the thinking that we were doing.

And I suppose since then what, what it's opened up - you know some of the learning and some of the collaboration has definitely been able to take us, enabled us to go further than what we could have done I think, without it.

Laura Stevens:

And you mentioned there about the collaboration and learning. Could you give me some examples of that?

Paul Fleming:

Yeah, I think one of the major things the declaration has brought is the blogs, to me. I find this really interesting that there’s this open way of working. As a council, we launched our blog - I had my eye on many of the blogs, like learning from others, and, and I just found, found them so open and, and, and so much learning in there, that was a really refreshing change for me.

I think you know wider than that, collaborating on bids has been interesting. We've not, I don't think we've, we've been successful with a bid yet through, through the sort of collaborative funding over the last whatever, 18 months it's been. But what we have got from working on those bids is collaborating with others. So I know we were working with Lincolnshire Council around waste and we've talked to a number of others, Leeds Council amongst other local authorities.

I think important for me - I came from a different sector, a different part the public sector in the NHS, and it's helped me speed up those connections with, with people you know, through social media off the back of the blogs, off the back of the collaborations and, and I just think that would have took me a longer time, it would have took me more, more than this couple of years to really build some decent conversations up with people.

Laura Stevens:

You’ve preempted my, my next question which was, if you, ‘cause you're talking there about how the Local Digital Declaration like really massively sped up things for you. I was gonna ask if you hadn't signed it, what do you think would have been different?

Paul Fleming:

I think the pace of change might, might have been different, I think it would have been slower. And maybe you know, if I hadn't have signed it, I'd have been looking from the outside in. So I would have been picking up all of this but without being a signatory, and we wouldn't have then made that commitment to the wider cause and that's important.

And since signing the declaration and picking up all those different connections, I just have a much better network. And it's really important that I commit to that network and, and you know our counsellors are full signatory to that, so that I, I share that learning so other people don't go through maybe the pain I went through before in, in trying work some of these things out. So, so really really progress and transformation can work faster by this sort of you know, super learning network that, that is built up.

And you know when I looked into everything, there was some really good networks going on. And, and this is kind of, this brings together a bit of, a bit of a family of, of those networks. So it just opened, opened up my eyes to the sector, opened up a lot of connections, and yeah, definitely, definitely speeded up both pace for me, and hopefully pace for others learning from us now.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah for sure. I think the community aspect of it is something, that when I've been researching, has come up a lot. So what shared challenges do councils have?

Paul Fleming:

We're all trying to do the same things - we've got the same challenges, the same requirements for people. And it's up to us then to land those solutions, working with people locally, co-designing what we're doing to get that right for people. And the more we share those designs and those approaches, I think the faster we can get to the right conversation with, with people and residents locally.

We've shared challenges around, certainly COVID-19 and the pandemic and the challenges that’s thrown up. Massive amount of collaboration and good open working on that, that’s helped us. I think the website, when we released the website last year, we went open source and was doing a lot of learning from others on that.

Laura Stevens:

And talking about the coronavirus response, and that is a challenge faced by everybody, I was reading a blog post you’d written where you said: ‘last summer we had undergone Government Digital Service training in Agile ways of working including rapid development of solutions, multidisciplinary development and user research - and we’re using this learning in dealing with the pandemic’.

And this learning was provided through the digital declaration, wasn’t it?

Paul Fleming:

It was yeah. I mean this has been, this has been, I don't know if it's luck - it's definitely part design, part luck at around timing. But we, we went through the GDS Agile teams training last summer, summer 2019. That, that was perfect timing going into such a huge crisis because everything we've learned and, and, and expanded on since then, has, has been used. And I don't think we would have handle this pandemic as well without that training.

We, we really went on a journey after doing the agile teams training. A lot of the team started to get really interested in the agenda obviously, and get interested in, in the individual lines of learning you know, customer research or, or service design or, or other sections. So that started to break out, we developed our own internal learning track off the back of that, and we've expanded that across the council. And so we started with my directorate and probably, probably trained 100 people in the directorate on, on the GDS team’s approach, Agile teams approach.

But then we started to break that out into different departments. So we had people from social care, we had people from environmental health, we had people from environment and waste - all doing the same sort of training that we had through, through GDS. So it, I can't, I can't stress how valuable that, that has been going through that. And the fact that it was you know, it was complimentary, it was free training for us at that time through signing the declaration, was just, was just great and massive for us. I don't know if we could have invested as much as we did. So, so we created this movement off the back of that. And you know, it's part declaration, but the big part of signing up was, was, was the input we got from the training.

And the movement kind of started, the first thing we did, the first agile project we did was to redesign the space that the digital team worked in. And this engaged the whole team, they ran it on sprints, they ran it with kanbans in this one corner of the office that, that they had, you know. So the office then you know, a couple of months later looked completely different. I think that then grew, other people saw that, HR then saw that and they started looking at the, the department and changing their layouts, and this was all based on the learning that we picked up in those courses from, from GDS through the declaration.

So yeah I can't stress how important it's been. It’s, it's kind of really changed the game culturally for us, and importantly it's give us those strong methods, that methodology, because you do need that, you do need that real learning and those real strong methods and approaches to create something good.

Laura Stevens:

So it seems like there's been a big ripple effect from it?

Paul Fleming:

Yeah, and you know that's exactly what we want. We want, we want a movement, we want a movement around digital and, and design and Agile and the best things for our residents, and, and you know these approaches help us, help us to achieve that.

So, so it, it has created a ripple effect, and it's really heartening to see people taking on board the, the thinking. I see things now just happening in the organisation that you know, I suppose many, many years ago you, you would have controlled that from an IT section and it would have gone a lot slower, and people would have been you know against IT sometimes, the technology teams for slowing things down. We, we've now created a movement where things, things are happening.

Laura Stevens:

It's clear this has had a big effect in your organisation. And I guess is there one thing you'd say to somebody who was looking to sign up to the Local Digital Declaration?

Paul Fleming:

So I-I think it's multifaceted, I don't think I could say one thing why you should. You know if I was to say one thing, it would be you know come and join, join this collaboration. but really it's multifaceted in, in the fact that, you need to commit - you need to make a visible commitment. And I think you know, as, as a local authority, you’re getting the buy-in from the politicians, ‘cause really you can't sign that declaration without getting executive membership buy-in to that. And by getting that, you're raising the profile of digital. So, so I think commitment, visible commitment and political commitment is important.

And then the other things are, and I think 2 more things - one is the framework and the skills you get out of it. And then the third, third part would be around the learning and the collaboration. And I've not even talked, I suppose when I first looked at it you know, I saw there was opportunities around funding. And, and when I was talking to politicians, I said you know if, if we sign this declaration, there is training, there is funding available, it opens up more doors. But the funding has, has not been; I mean we, we’ve not been successful in the funding rounds, but, but that hasn't mattered. We've actually got more out of those other aspects than you know, I can't put a price on some of that stuff because it's going to be taking hundreds of thousands of pounds off our cost lines by working in this way.

So yeah I suppose my, my eyes have been opened the more I've been part of, of what, what the declaration has opened up really is a whole new world for us.

Laura Stevens:

So, what about next things you’d like to see the declaration offering?

Paul Fleming:

Yeah, I think something I-I kind of called out very early on around, because I come from the NHS and they had like an academy for basically the CIOs [Chief Information Officers] that would go through you know a training, and that was basically like looking at the leadership issues we’ve gotten digital in the NHS. So I came out of that world and when I came into the council, I was looking for the equivalent. And I know the GDS Academy does certain things. I think the, the Digital Declaration could probably go a step further and look at like how we develop that leadership a little bit more in depth. I think that would be an area I’d be really interested in.

But what I did think was can we post more people out, can we either have short secondments, can we expose people. I would love to expose some of my people to GDS teams, and you know some of these central team were, I think you know sometimes you're at the really sharp end. So I think more, taking that collaboration a step further and actually exposing people - so whether that's across different local authorities, whether that's working between central and local. I think that's, that's an area I'd love to see developed up. You know I'd love to personally sit in another team for a few days and see how things work and invite others to come in and do the same in our team, and, and you know ditto for all, all of my staff who have got the interest on, on that side.

May-N Leow:

Just fantastic to hear from, from Paul and the feedback that he's had in his council. It kind of mirrors the experience I had in Southwark as well as that. You know when you're initially trying to sell why you should sign the Declaration, you obviously use the funding and the free training as that kind of carrot to get your senior management and politicians interested, but then seeing the wider benefits of like the, the results of the training as well as that kind of organisational transformation and that ingraining of digital and user-centeredness approach is, is always fantastic to, to hear. And Paul's like a great example to showcase what, what is possible when you've got that someone who believes that and drives it and use the declaration, as well as all the benefits, to kind of spearhead the movement in his council. So I think that, that again, stuck with me.

And other, in terms of training, obviously it’s partner-partnership with GDS Academy. We've put through 1,183 Council Officers and leaders to date, on free training. And yeah, we've just had amazing feedback in response on, on that - especially the Agile for Teams, that kind Paul references. And because we go to the councils when we run that training - I think that's the great thing about that particular course, where it's in the council, it's with other people in your council rather than you in isolation doing that training.

So because of COVID-19, a lot of our training is on pause at the moment. But we are going to be looking with GDS Academy to start the training back up again. Obviously following government regulations.

Lisa Jeffery:

Yeah,I mean wow, what, what, what a great story of, of change and, and overcoming challenges.

I really like how Paul is involving everyone on, on this journey and including people, and thinking about the enablers to change, even down to redesigning the space in which people work. So yeah, there was, as May-N said, there's MHCLG and GDS Academy run, run training to build this capability. And courses, some of them were delivered at the time at the GDS Academy venues, and then the Agile for Teams was delivered at the local authorities’s own location, and it kind of enables the teams to get this really hands-on experience about how to apply Agile methodologies within their own environment, within their own context. And I thought it was great how Paul's kind of really embedded the learning that he took from the, from the training and he's embedded it and really been able to, to use it.

Laura Stevens:

Paul spoke about how the training has helped his organisation during coronavirus. And how else has the declaration helping during this pandemic?

May-N Leow:

Yeah. So initially at the beginning of COVID, we had weekly calls specifically around the crisis response that local authorities are facing obviously, on the sharp end of the stick on supporting the communities.

And then now we're kind of moving to bi-weekly calls on that kind of phase recovery, as again councils start to kind of think of reopening services like libraries, community centres. But as well as that, that blend of face-to-face interaction versus remote interaction.

And there's a real willingness and thing of momentum now from not, to not go back to the way it was. So councils have seen that you know we can do things fast, we can share data, we can do things securely, but do it in a way that actually meets resident needs. So I think there's a real ambition and a real, the right time really to kind of look at all organisational transformation and seeing how digital can actually make service delivery even better and get in, engage more, more residents.

And so we’re, we're also looking at launching a special COVID round, which hopefully will be live once this podcast goes out, so that's in recognition of all that you know, the moving from crisis response now to phase recovery. So again, councils are coming up with similar challenges that we would like to help support councils with.

Laura Stevens:

And sort of on that, if somebody is listening from local government, how do they get in touch, how do they stay connected, how do they sign up to the declaration?

Lisa Jeffery:

Now I just say, the Slack channels are absolutely fantastic, and the Local Digital Community’s brilliant. And you've got GDS folks on there from all different teams wanting to support you, and answer any questions about any of the kind of support wrap that we had around the Local Digital Declaration, whether that's common platforms, GDS Academy training, we kind of raised a bit of awareness around the Digital Marketplace or the Crown Commercial Service and you know, the Service Standards.

May-N Leow:

Sure, so our website, localdigital.gov.uk, has all the information on how to sign up as a signatory. You can also follow us on Twitter at LDgovUK, and we're all there. And yeah by all means, DM directly to us or to the channel, and we'd love to hear from you.

And because we're obviously coming up to our 2 year anniversary in July, not only the podcast, which again thank you for the opportunity to speak about the declaration, we're going to be launching a, a, a whole campaign in celebration, which is going to last a month. So there's going to be lots of activities that will amplify all the amazing work that the local councils are doing at the moment, but also kind of get people to think about how, what does it means to kind of recommit to the declaration, to like properly bring in more of the principles of the declaration, and what, what’s that kind of journey that councils, not just Lisa and Paul, but other people have had.

So we'll be showcasing a lot of those great stories more as well.

Laura Stevens:

So thank you both so much for coming on the podcast today, it's been great having you. And you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms, and the transcripts are available on PodBean.

May-N Leow:

Thanks Lisa and Laura. It’s been good fun.

Lisa Jeffery:

Thanks very much. It’s been brilliant. Thank you.

GDS Podcast #19: A spotlight on GOV.UK Notify May 27, 2020

We take a deep-dive into GOV.UK Notify and hear from teams at Defra, the Canadian Digital Service and NHS Business Services Authority about how they use it.

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Laura Stevens:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I’m a Creative Content Producer at GDS. And like last month’s episode, this one will also be recorded via Hangouts as we’re all remote working now.

So today we’re going to be talking about GOV.UK Notify. This is the government’s messaging tool which allows teams across the public sector to send out text messages, letters and emails to their users - cheaply and easily.

It sent its first notification in May 2016, and this month GOV.UK Notify reached a milestone and has sent out one billion messages.

Notify gets critical information to people that need it. It’s used by local councils, health organisations, central government departments, fire services and many other public sector bodies. And it’s used for a diverse range of services including flood alerts, blue badge notifications, doctor appointment reminders and informing prison wardens of their rotas, to name a few.

So to tell me more is Pete Herlihy, so please could you introduce yourself, what you do here at GDS and your role on Notify.

Pete Herlihy:

Yes, I can Laura. So yeah, I’m Pete, I work on the Notify Team, I help them out. I’m a Product Manager. I’ve been at GDS since the beginning, I haven’t, I haven’t made parole just yet.

I’ve worked a lot on a number of platforms in GDS, so publishing platform, GOV.UK, register to vote, petitions and more recently, when I say more recently, my, my latest gig is on Notify, which we’ve been doing now for just over 4 years. And we started with literally 2 people and we’re now 11, and yeah my role on that is just to help and support that team to deliver what is GOV.UK Notify.

Laura Stevens

And why was Notify set up 4 years ago?

Pete Herlihy:

Well there’s a story there. So Notify was one of the solutions that came out of something called the ‘Enabling Strategy’, which was a piece of work GDS did. The, the reality behind that piece of work was we needed to figure out as an organisation what we could do to help the rest of government do what they do.

And so there was a bunch of stuff going on, we looked at various different kind of common problems across government that we wanted to solve, and, and that was kind of where the whole Government as a Platform programme emerged during that time. And one of the problems we wanted to solve was keeping people informed.

And we, we learned very quickly that we probably didn’t need a status tracking application, but what we needed was a notifications platform. And the reckon was, which we did soon validate very quickly, was that if we could kind of just tell people what we knew as soon as we knew it, we didn’t have to wait for them to get anxious enough to jump on a website and look and you know, sign in and see where the thing was at. So it might have saved, or it would have solved our problems with regards to you know the cost of running contact centres and all that avoidable contact, but it wouldn’t really have helped our citizens or end users as much. And so we, we fairly early on validated that and pivoted from a status tracking application to a notifications application.

Laura Stevens:

And can you talk about some of the service teams that use it, like who uses it and what do they use it for?

Pete Herlihy:

Well we have now, what’s the number, around 2 and a half thousand service teams now using it, which is a lot. I think - when we started, someone, there was an external consultancy that did a little bit of work for us and they thought there might be 80 services that would use it. And, we were like OK cool, that’s a good number to aim at. But, it’s a completely different profile actually from what we’ve envisaged.

We thought at the start they’ll be a bunch of really big services using it and that will be like where the bulk comes from and then we kind of quickly learned that there was a really really long tail of smaller service teams that, and many we didn’t recognise as being a service, necessarily when we started who are really going to get the most benefit out of it. So the big teams might save money, and they’ll get a better product but they probably would have done something anyway. Whereas the rest of them just maybe wouldn’t enter the space of digital comms in this way - so they benefit massively from Notify.

So the types of teams, you list, you ran through a bunch at the start there. So, we do have nearly as many service teams in local government using it, as we do in central government. And an increasing number in the NHS as well. Obviously events of this year have seen massive surges in uptake from all of those sectors.

For example of things we’re doing a bunch of messaging for the COVID services, all the support and advice the NHS is providing to the extremely vulnerable, that’s all going through Notify. All your test results are going through Notify as well. We’ve got a huge amount of business continuity messaging, so accounts all telling the staff where and when they need to go to do work or changes-changes to opening hours or that sort of thing.

We do passport applications, progress updates, flood alerts, global travel alerts, I mean there are, every service is slightly different and that’s kind of the point. So yeah 2 and half thousand of them, 650 organisations I think across the public sector and there’s still a lot more out there who hopefully one day will be using Notify.

Laura Stevens:

And also was reading on GOV.UK, there was a press release put out which said that Notify is on track to save taxpayers an average of £35 million a year over the next 5 years. When you, it started, did you think you’d be making those sort of savings, yeah, to the taxpayer?

Pete Herlihy:

We were hopeful. We knew that the return on investment for something like Notify was massive because you know, a text message that cost you 1 and a half pence versus a phone call that costs you £5. That doesn’t take many many phone calls to be avoided to make a good case.

And, I remember doing a presentation at GDS Sprint 16, Sprint 16, the orange one. It was very orange. And one of the slides on that was 1 in 4 calls to government is someone just asking for an update. It costs a lot of money to run a contact centre and the government deals with literally tens of millions of phone calls a year. So if we can knock out a quarter of those by investing in a small team doing notifications, then there’s going to be some massive savings.

Laura Stevens:

And I thought as well as hearing from you about, from the sort of product point of view, we also wanted to hear from one of the users. So we interviewed Silvia Grant who’s the Lead User Researcher at the Environment Agency, who works on the flood warning service which uses Notify.

Silvia Grant:

So my name is Silvia Grant, I’m a Senior User Researcher for DEFRA [Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs]. And I work on an Environment Agency project called ‘The Flood Warning System’. We’re replacing that currently and the new project name is called ‘The Next Warning System’, so we’ve deliberately dropped the flood from that.

Laura Stevens:

And what, can you explain a bit more about that service? What does it do?

Silvia Grant:

Yes, so the Environment Agency has been sending out flood warnings since 1996. It’s a category 1 responder and has the responsibility for issuing these messages to the citizens and people who are at risk of flooding. So what the system does is we send out these texts, these emails, we have this information on GOV.UK, and it’s all about warning people that flooding in the area is likely or is happening.

Laura Stevens:

And how does that system use GOV.UK Notify?

Silvia Grant:

So at the moment we have over 500,000 user accounts registered to our service, and we use Notify to send letters and texts. And we send them letters to tell them when they’ve first registered that we update their account details, changes to the service, that sort of thing. And obviously also for our texts.

Laura Stevens:

And how does that translate into the amount of notifications being sent to the people? And obviously this must change year on year depending on the flooding and depending on the weather and everything.

Silvia Grant:

Yeah. Well so since we’ve moved across to Notify in December 2018, we’ve sent over 4 and a half million texts and close to 10,000 letters. So those are big numbers for us.

Laura Stevens:

How does having Notify help you get the information to the people that need to hear it?

Silvia Grant:

Well first of all it’s it’s quicker - so it’s simpler and quicker and cheaper for us to use Notify. So we can send, in in terms of letters for instance, we can send them daily rather than weekly. We have much more freedom around content changes, we can test those changes. So it’s it’s saving us a lot of that admin time, and cost as well.

And because it’s a very stressful scenario for our users, it’s quite again, high emotion, high stress, high impact scenario that we send these letters and these texts in, it, it’s, it’s very important for us to get it right and to, you know for the process to be as slick as possible. And I think Notify really helps us do that.

Laura Stevens:

So this is a really important service because there are, there’s 2.6 million properties at risk of flooding. So what sort of information is being sent out through Notify?

Silvia Grant:

Yeah, that’s right. So in England the estimate is between 1 in 5, 1 in 6 homes in England are at risk of flooding. And obviously that figure is growing because of climate change and a number of other factors.

So it’s, in some cases when we issue severe flood warnings, those are warnings where there is danger to life. So those can be very serious. But overall the flood warning service aims to save lives and livelihoods. So yes overall quite a high impact service.

Laura Stevens:

And how much would this, do you have an estimate on how much it’s saving money-wise for the Environment Agency?

Silvia Grant:

Yeah so just got the figure off the team and it’s saved, in the last 2 years that we’ve been using it, approximately saved the taxpayer at least £150,000. So that’s letters, texts, running costs, everything.

Laura Stevens:

But as you’re saying you’re working on like a high impact service that has to get out messages quickly and which has a, yeah an impact, a big impact on people’s lives. Does having something like Notify in place sort of allow you to then have the space to do other things? Because you know that that’s there, that’s just gonna work, and you can then focus on other thi-parts of this quite emotional and high impact service.

Silvia Grant:

Yeah definitely. So it’s, it’s quite a long, for our users it’s quite a stressful time receiving those alerts or those warnings, and when they pick those up we, we need to make sure that they arrive instantly, that they say the right things and using a central government platform makes sure that we have that extra accountability that we really need for sending these out.

And yes as well that that has given us a lot more space for actually focussing on things like the content of the message.

So it’s been overall a positive under all spheres. So it’s easy to use, it’s intuitive, it’s reliable, it’s transparent. So if ever there is an issue with it, we are notified instantly. And again the Notify Team has been really responsive with feedback, so whenever we have had requests or issues, there’s been a fantastic service on their part.

Laura Stevens:

How do you plan to use Notify in the future, in your product?

Silvia Grant:

So as our system gets replaced, the Flood Warning System into what we call the ‘Next Warning System’, we anticipate to use Notify even more. So we’re planning to send confirmation codes to users who sign up to the service on their mobiles. So that is, is a step forward in terms of security for us and it’s again, a cheaper journey and for the user, it’s it’s a 2-step journey rather than a 4- or 5-step. We’ve been testing that with the user and it’s, it’s a very positive response.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah, is that, is that how you imagined Notify would be being used?

Pete Herlihy:

I don’t think we clocked Notify being used to protect life necessarily when we started out.

But we did get, or start working with the Environment Agency fairly early on, so, so, which was great, because what that meant was we had this use case that we could point out internally to say that look this is really crucial. This, this isn’t just about getting a passport update quicker or these kinds of things. This, this is literally a life-saving message and that, that allowed us to focus the right kind of energies on our resilience and make sure we got what we needed. Because we can’t not be there right like if we’re sending these-this kind of message. We have been working with them for a while, they’re a great team, they blog a lot about what they’re doing which is fantastic and very cool.

Laura Stevens:

Was there anything else in the clip that particularly stood out to you?

Pete Herlihy:

Yeah I think there’s 2 things. So one is letters. Because I think people think of text messages and emails and forget letters is a thing for Notify. Don’t forget but it’s less well understood. And when we started, back in 2016, when we started out, we were letters is probably a thing just because we need to offer a full palette of comms option and for some people they need a letter, or they prefer a letter, or digitally excluded, whatever it might be, they have legitimate reasons, some of them are legally required for example.

And we only, and we kind of stumbled over letters, well not stumbled over, we confirmed our letters when we were doing our, these tours of the application processing. Tours sounds really grand doesn’t it? But we’d sit with a team and one of the things they would do is they would finish preparing an application receipt or confirmation of decision or whatever it was going to be. And then they’d press print and they’d select the printer and they’d walk over, join a queue and someone would yell out ‘stop printing I need to put in the letterhead paper’ you know and they’d, and we were like oh this must be very expensive, and then goes from a printer, they’re folding it up into an envelope, the envelope goes into a tray, someone comes round in the afternoon with a trolley and picks them all up and we thought ‘woah there’s got to be a better way of doing letters’.

And that was real early confirmation that if we could make it easy for teams to do letters we could save, help them save, huge amounts of money and time. The amount of time people were just standing around waiting for the printers and things like this, so if that could just be a click it’s like great. And they could do lots more good things with their time.

So that was one thing that was really interesting.

The second is around the real time content changes. So one of the problems I guess we were trying to solve was often these things are like hard-coded and you need a developer and you need to pay a change request fee to your external supplier to update a typo even in a letter or change a URL in an email or something like that.

And we really wanted, not only make it easier to do that in real time but also to allow the interface to be used by like a content designer or a comms person, so they could be involved in shaping the messages themselves in real time. Not just preparing it in a word doc that goes round for sign off by committee, and then is handed over to a development team to implement.

So we, we really tried to bring those roles into the team. And you know we were hearing horror stories of people paying tens of thousands just to change a few letters, or including extra things because they couldn’t change a letter saying so please ignore this section, these kind of horror stories you hear about. So that was one of the important bits for us to get real time content changes in an accessible way into Notify and I’m glad to hear they’re using it well as well.

Laura Stevens:

We also have a clip from the Canadian Digital Service which is Canada’s version of GDS. Notify is obviously used across the UK in the public sector but how has Notify also been used around the world?

Pete Herlihy:

So we’ve worked with a number of teams actually around the world - some we’ve shared patterns with, others we’ve shared our open source code with. And we, as of today I think there are 2 Notify’s being used in anger, one in Australia through the DTA, the Digital Transformation Agency, it’s basically the, the Aussie version of GDS. They were the first, they forked the Notify code maybe about a year and a half, 2 years ago now. And they’re now running that for the Australian government. They’ve you know, taken the code, they then iterate on top of it to add things that are unique and special to them.

The Canadian Digital Service are also running a version of Notify. And that’s growing quickly, it’s grown quicker than we did when we started, so yay for them. But those are the 2 that are being used at government level.

Have to say there’s a lot of people who just pick stuff up from blogs or from Twitter or whatever, rather than any kind of formal introductions to the product. Yeah so it’s a great product, very proud that others have picked up the codebase and are running with it, we continue to work with those teams. Speak to teams like Code for America who are doing great stuff in the States. We’ve had a few all team web catch ups with the Canadian Team, and the Americans to show and tell really about what they’re doing, enhancements they’ve made, things they’d like to contribute back. So we’ve got a good little community going on, which is fantastic.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah, a very nice international community. And we’re going to hear from Bryan Willey, who’s a Product Manager of Notify at the Canadian Digital Service.

Bryan Willey:

So my name is Bryan Willey, I’m a Product Manager here at CDS, the Canadian Digital Service. And I am the Product Manager for Notify, a piece of software, an open source software, we took from GOV.UK.

Sorry is that my cat or your cat?

Laura Stevens:

I don’t have a cat, so it’s not my cat.

Bryan Willey:

She’s miaowing outside the door. Sorry about that.

Laura Stevens:

And yeah would it be fair to say for UK listeners, the Canadian Digital Service is Canada’s version or the equivalent of GDS over there?

Bryan Willey:

Yes absolutely. I mean it basically has similar initials. Yeah, so the Canadian Digital Service was made with both GDS and the American 18F Group in mind.

Laura Stevens:

And could you describe what the product you manage is, Notify?

Bryan Willey:

So Notify is a email platform. Well we’re using predominantly as an email platform, it also does SMS. I know that yours does letters but we’re not there yet. We’re predominantly using it for email and it helps the Canadian government sort of send email messages from a centralised location to the public. Something that the Canadian government’s only been able to do with Outlook servers and traditional email servers before.

Notify allows us to have this cloud-at-cost system that can deploy emails very quickly to anyone who wants to use the service, whether that’s an API integration to connect up to automatically reply when somebody submits an application, or if it’s a newsletter that goes out that people sign up for. And it’s been very helpful in sort of building any of those systems because in the past, we’ve had to go procure an individual cloud email vendor for each solution we built.

Notify allows us to centralise all that, procure, secure and say yeah, this one thing is now what we use for email. And so we don’t have to go through the process of procuring it every time, and that’s been exceedingly helpful.

Laura Stevens:

And how’s it going? Because I see, I looked on your dashboard and now 22 services are using Notify and more than 740,000 notifications have been sent.

Bryan Willey:

Yeah. Well we think it’s going pretty well. The growth has been faster than we had expected. The current crisis has something to do with that. It’s definitely upped our volume more than it would have been.

Out of the 22 live services, it’s a mix of how much they’re getting used; some are small, more prototype-y services that do things like password reset emails. Whereas some of our more recent ones include a subscription newsletter for Health Canada to combat COVID-19 misinformation.

Laura Stevens:

So I saw your blog post on the CDS blog from November 2019, and in it you said ‘this, meaning your Notify tool, isn’t something we built entirely from scratch. Using open source code from the hugely successful GOV.UK Notify service, created by the GDS in the UK, our team is adapting it to fit within our context, in English and French - both of Canada’s official languages’.

So I wanted to talk about like, what were the user needs for Canada and how was that similar to the user need over here, and yeah how were you able to adapt, what had been done over here?

Bryan Willey:

Yeah. So much in the same way I imagine GDS discovered this problem, we had a lot of government services that were communicating with people by mail and phone and the people would rather just get an email, you know. Then they don’t have to sit around and wait for a phone call. And when we were building services early in CDS, we discovered this and we’d be setting up email for each of these services. So after doing this 2, 3 times, CDS said ‘we should really just make this so we can have it every time’.

Because we’re not, also not the only ones looking for this. The government of Canada is moving towards more cloud-first strategy and as such they’ve identified the needs for email notifications in a bunch of services. So we forked not just GOV.UK Notify, the DTA [Digital Transformation Agency] in Australia also had a copy of Notify that they had modified a bit from yours. And we looked at both of those and evaluated them, and we forked GDS Notify because we wanted to be able to get your upstream security changes and stuff and pull them down into our repo [repository]. And the Australian one was merged into a big mono-repo which gave us less flexibility with the code.

So forking the GDS one was a great idea to sort of prototype it and see what we had to work with because this was already a solution to the problem we’d found. And we then had to, we liked it so we modified it to Canada. Some of the first things we did was of course update SMS to Canadian phone numbers, add timezone support in, so that the logs and stuff functions across more than one timezone. We had to pull apart the whole UI [user interface] and translate it into French because Canada has 2 official languages. And so it’s been a bit of an overhaul for that, and that’s been a lot of our major work.

And we also had to sort of modify the branding system bit. Because again, 2 official languages means 2 official government brands, one in English and one in en français. So we’ve had to sort of modify the templating system. We’re working on that a bit more now to expand it for both official language use cases.

And so it’s, it’s just been a lot of tweaks here and there to the system and and re-you know changing the UI to look more like Canada.ca than GOV.UK.

Laura Stevens:

And by having this already in place, what has it allowed you to do? Has it allowed you to move quicker, has it saved you hassle? How has it affected your work and your plan with the product?

Bryan Willey:

It definitely saved us hassle because we’d have to set that all up from scratch on our own. The email problem, the notification problem, wasn’t going to go away. And these Canadian departments were going to solve it and were solving it by their own means - they were building up their own Outlooks servers and using email stuff. You know that wasn’t taking advantage of cloud-at-cost like Notify did.

So having the software that you’d spent 3 years building and already putting a lot of the settings and permissions and access and security and tech in place, really saved us the time having to go through that on our own.

Laura Stevens:

And also I wanted to ask, so when I’ll be playing this, this edited clip back, I’ll be with Pete. And I wondered if you had anything you wanted to say to him, any questions or any requests as the Lead Product Manager for Notify?

Bryan Willey:

Thanks for all your help, I guess. You know. I..it’s working great for us so I don’t know if there’s anything we need or any help specifically from Pete. The software is pretty complete in its solution for email and SMS, and so thanks for all your hard work Pete.

Laura Stevens:

So was there anything in there that you were surprised by or that you hadn’t realised?

Pete Herlihy:

So I’d knew, I’d seen actually most of that we’ve shared with the team so. The one that I didn’t clock was the branding, and the dual language branding - I hadn’t even thought about that one. So we, we may, we may steal that back. Obviously there’s more than one official language in the UK as well so.

That’s really great to hear that.

There was an interesting point though around the use of Notify, either by an API or not, so again that was one of our really early reckons when we started Notify, was that not everyone’s got a development team or development capacity or is high enough a priority in their organisation to get the focus. And so we couldn’t just make something that only worked, worked for API and so everything you can do in Notify, you can do via the web interface as well.

And the other bit I guess that is maybe even overlooked a bit, is that you get like 3 years worth of software development or whatever, but you also get 3 years worth of research. And we’ve, we’ve done a lot. You know we’ve always had a dedicated user researcher in the team, we’ve always done a huge amount of user research, which you have to d-, for something you’re aspiring to make completely self-service, you have to do the user research, otherwise it’s just never going to be.

And so we’ve done loads with like developers, with finance people, with product teams - all the different types of people we see wanting to use Notify. I think what you get when you fork code or, or you know even just take the patterns that another team has, has, derived is you just save yourself years of user research. And again, at that point you can then focus on what are the, the like the niche research requirements around working en francais as he says or whatever else it might be. So that, along with kind of the blogging that goes along the way that shows some of the thinking that goes into the product and some of the decisions that are taken, I mean all of it just shows how, how sensible it is to be doing this stuff in the open.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah, for sure. And I think that, talking about doing stuff in the open and blogging, leads me on quite nicely to my next part, because I wanted to talk about Notify’s most recent work on coronavirus, which you referenced at the top of the podcast. And 2 of our colleagues, Miriam Raynes and Mark Buckley wrote a blog post about how Government as a Platform, or GaaP services, as a whole are helping with the COVID-19 response.

So what services are using Notify to help with the government’s coronavirus response?

Pete Herlihy:

Yeah, there, so the, the increase in communication is obviously massive and needs to be. And one of the biggest users of Notify is the GOV.UK email service, and they, they do all of the email for people who subscribe to any content that the government publishes - so travel alerts for example, if you want to know can I take a flight to Namibia, here’s the guidance, or if there’s hurricanes coming through the Caribbean and these countries are affected, then I need to like push out information to say don’t go to these places, or whatever it might be. And those alerts are, you know, again potentially protecting people, life and property - they’re like really important. And there’s been a huge amount of travel advice and alerts being given, as, as you can imagine. So that’s been one of the biggest users.

We’ve also seen, I mentioned earlier, like a huge amount of business continuity stuff. And we put a blog post out recently as well, just reminding I guess more than anything, that all of the public sector could use Notify to provide emergency staff updates for changes to working patterns et cetera. as a result of COVID-19. So there’s definitely been a big uptick there.

There is business as usual to some degree actually still going on. So people are you know, people are still having to renew passports or whatever it might be. Whilst the volumes are down, they’re still happening. So we don’t stop all the other messaging and just focus on this, we’ve, we’ve got all that to do as well, and this is, this is all additional, it’s all on top.

It all came very quickly as well. You know this wasn’t a gradual ramp up over weeks and weeks to 5,6,700%, it was, it was almost overnight. And yeah, it’s been a huge task to, to keep the platform stable. We had one outage as a result of this on St Patrick’s Day. Which obviously we were massively disappointed at, like our resilience is like one of our, you know, one of the things we pride ourselves most on but we just couldn’t prepare for that kind of instantaneous ramp up. So we, we fixed that very quickly and you know Notify itself has been very stable since.

But we’re still continuing on the basis of what we’re seeing now, we’re going to call that the new normal and then we need to add again capacity, 2 or 3 times that again. So there’s still a lot of work to be done, the team still working incredibly hard as they have been ever since, well always, but particularly since, since lock-in began.

Laura Stevens:

And I believe I’m right in saying as well the 1 billionth message was also a coronavirus one - that was for a notification sent by the coronavirus home testing service.

Pete Herlihy:

Yes, it was, that was quite opportune. It’s a good example of the type, the primary type of messaging that’s going on with Notify at the moment.

And you know those levels are still high, I think we had like 7 and a half million again on Friday, so we’re not getting any quieter. We’re, and we have to plan that we’re not going to. And if we do get quieter then ok, that’s fine but we, we can’t sort of take our foot off at the moment.

Laura Stevens:

As you mentioned one of the organisations using Notify a lot at the moment is the NHS and the various teams within the NHS. And we’ve got a clip from Darren Curry, who’s the Chief Digital Officer at the NHS Business Services Authority, about how and why his team are using Notify.

Darren Curry:

Hello I’m Darren Curry, the Chief Digital Officer for the NHS Business Services Authority [NHSBSA], which is an organisation which processes a lot of nationwide transactions on behalf of the NHS, so both public-facing and towards other clinical-facing services.

Laura Stevens:

And you’re quite a long standing member of NHSBSA, aren’t you?

Darren Curry:

Yes, I am. So I’ve been at NHS Business Services Authority for roughly 17 years, 17, 18 years now. Believe it or not, I joined originally as a Data Entry Officer back in the day, whilst I was doing my university degree, for pocket money effectively, or beer money. And it paid for me through, through university and I have enjoyed it so much and progressed in the organisation to now be Chief Digital Officer so it’s, it’s been a good place to work.

Laura Stevens:

And I know that the NHS Business Services Authority has been doing lots of things in response to coronavirus but what I’d like to talk to you about today is what you’ve used GOV.UK Notify for.

Darren Curry:

Yeah. So we use GOV.UK Notify on a number of our live services as we stand now. So we, we issue exemption certificates, so prepayment certificates for prescription forms, maternity exemptions, which we now issue digitally - so, so we already use Notify for those services in our, our normal processing.

We, we first started around coronavirus with Notify on a, what was a relatively small service, for informing individuals who were returning into the UK or who were being advised to isolate, so to provide advice during the 7 days isolation period.

And since then our support has grown in the services. So we then utilised the Notify service to support provisioning information to patients who were identified as high risk should they contract coronavirus. So there, there’s individuals who have been asked to shield during the outbreak in order to reduce the chances of them contracting the virus. So we, we text messaged all of those individuals over a 7-so we issued them with 7 texts messages, so one per day, providing advice and guidance on, on what to do during their shielding period.

That, that service has grown as, as more people who’ve been identified as being vulnerable, so working with GP practices and NHS England and NHS Digital to identify more individuals who, who may be vulnerable should they contract coronavirus. That, that has grown and we’ve issued more text messages and information to those individuals.

We’ve used Notify to provide test results for coronavirus, working with NHS Digital and other partners. We’ve used Notify to also provide advice and information for individuals who go through the 111 service in providing text messages and also emails for those services.

Adding it all together, over the last 4 weeks, we’ve issued around about 17 million text messages via Notify through the services that we are, we are delivering, so.

It’s, it’s scaling and it’s growing very quickly.

Laura Stevens:

And so this is, the, the information you’re getting out there is obviously like, it’s really important it’s right, it’s really important that it gets to the right people, it’s an emotional service like, people are scared, like your users are concerned. So-why did you pick Notify to use this on, on these particular services?

Darren Curry:

Yeah. So, So I mean Notify brings a lot of benefits. I, I think should also say that we, we, in terms of building those messages as well, we worked with colleagues in behavioural insights teams within government, Public Health England, NHSX, content designers, on all of those, and getting the content right was, was critical for these services.

But you’re absolutely right, the infrastructure to send those services, those, those messages needed to be kind of stable and dependable. And, Notify does that, so it’s, it is national infrastructure that we can, can leverage all of the benefits of that having already been built as a government platform that we can consume, to, to use as a service really quickly, securely and safely and knowing that, that those messages will, will be passed. There’s lots of benefits that the Notify service has, has brought us.

So if, frankly if we were having to do this without the Notify service, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. So that we, we would have been dependent upon trad-more traditional legacy contact methods, such as post, to individuals to inform them on, on this scale. We would had to build a, a technology solution to meet this need - we clearly didn’t have to do that, we could leverage something that was already built for this purpose.

And, and this is the benefit of government as a platform that we can consume, you know, the first service we set up with Peter was done within an hour. We, we were able to from, from the request to us being then able to actually push text messages, it took less than an hour to, to go from A to B on that. And you know, without Notify we would have been looking at days, and, and in this situation of a, of a national pandemic, then time’s obviously absolutely critical you know, for people to be able to act upon the advice which has been provided - it’s, it’s, it’s genuinely critical.

Yeah, so, so Notify brings all of those benefits - secure, platform, scalable, to be able to deliver those messages. Yeah.

Laura Stevens:

Can you tell me about some of the responses to these SMSs?

Darren Curry:

Yeah. For the shielded patients list and the text messages we sent the first cohort when we sent those, we enabled individuals to reply. And some, and we did some analysis on the replies to, to those messages and some of, some of the messages indicated, well some of the replies that we received indicated the difference that the service was really having.

So you know the, the replies from people thanking, just saying thank you for informing us and like, they, they would follow the guidance and the maybe hadn't realised that they were in that high risk category beforehand. In this instance you know, we sent it out and we were able to see some of the replies and know that as a result of that action that was taken by sending that message out to an individual, there was an action that that individual was then going to take. And that action potentially, more than potentially, more than likely will result in a reduced risk of that individual being taken ill, and consequences of that.

So yeah, it, it really does bring home that and highlight the importance of some of these services and how they all join together.

Laura Stevens:

So, NHS Business Services Authority is obviously doing a lot of work, you’re working also with other organisations across government as well, aren’t you?

Darren Curry:

Yeah, so we, we are working alongside our partner organisations including so NHS England, NHS Improvement, NHSX, Department of Health and Social Care directly, Public Health England, the Behavioural Insights Team, GDS also and NHS Digital, have all, we’ve all collaborated and come together across on multiple different services that we are doing. So it’s been a real collaborative effort across the whole of the government family to get these services up and running.

Laura Stevens:

And had you, did you find you had to, ‘cause obviously it’s for use in like health services but it’s also used like in central government departments, it’s used by local authorities, it’s used in prison services, used by fire services. Like did you find you had to adapt it at all to the health context or was it all sort of ready to go for you?

Darren Curry:

The great, one of the many great things about Notify is it works just out of the box. So from my development teams in the [NHS] Business Service Authority, it’s a, it’s a really easy integration point. So whether we’re integrating using an API to push the, the messaging or whether we're doing batch uploads of CSVs [comma-separated values files] or spreadsheets or whatever, it works for, for all of those things.

I think the, the other thing as well to mention is, is that you know Notify, it’s a trusted service. So we were able to work with the National Cyber Security Centre [NCSC] as well to, to ensure working with the Notify Team and NCSC, to ensure that the messages we were sending were protected numbers. So it was you know again, just adding that, that security to the whole service when you’re doing critical services for people, that we can make sure that they’re trusted and they are known and protected.

Laura Stevens:

If I’m playing this clip back to Pete, is there anything you want to ask him or anything you want the team to develop next?

Darren Curry:

I, you know what, it’s a, it’s a really tough question because the, the Notify Team, it’s, it’s a fantastic service. And I think rather than asking Pete to develop anything else, I think my encouragement to Pete and the team is to take that time to reflect on the things that this service has enabled in a time of a national crisis and the things that him and the team have been able to enable, are awesome. And it’s easy to forget that. And 17 million messages to people who needed support, that would not have been achieved, will have genuinely saved lives and protected people.

Pete Herlihy:

Wow. That’s awesome. Seeing the value that has to them and understanding that you know, without Notify being in place, that stuff just could not happen or you know wouldn’t have been remotely as effective as, you know I maybe hadn’t quite appreciated the, the extent of that.

So yeah, that’s pretty mind blowing.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah. Yeah I think what Darren says well is articulate how this technology tool but how it translates to in people’s lives.

Pete Herhily:

Yeah, makes it, it makes it very real, for sure. I, I think, I think, you know we’ve talked a bit in the past about how we can’t afford not to have these platforms in place, and, and that was before a global pandemic right? But, and it’s not you know, Notify’s not the only platform in town - we’ve got publishing, you know identity, payments - so but we need them, we can’t afford to not have them. Yeah, now more than ever I guess.

I just want my team to hear that.

Laura Stevens:

So thank you so much for Pete for coming on today.

Pete Herlihy:

Welcome.

Laura Stevens:

And you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms, and the transcript’s available on PodBean.

GDS Podcast #18: GOV.UK‘s initial response to Coronavirus Apr 28, 2020

We take a look at how our teams created products and services at pace to support people through the coronavirus pandemic.

The transcript for the episode follows:

-------------

Laura Stevens:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I’m a Creative Content Producer at GDS. And today’s episode is recorded a little bit differently, as we’re all remote now, this will be our first podcast done via hangouts.

We’re going to be talking about GOV.UK’s initial response to the coronavirus. GOV.UK is the online home for the UK government, and it’s where millions of people access government services everyday. Of course COVID-19 does not need an introduction as the pandemic has affected all aspects of our lives.

In the first few weeks since lockdown began, GOV.UK has created products and services to help people understand what to do in these uncertain times. GDS has set up a landing page, built new services and now streams the press conferences live from GOV.UK. All of this work has helped people. It’s helped make sure food parcels are delivered to extremely vulnerable people, it’s helped businesses offer essential support, and it’s helped give people answers to important questions - like how to attend a funeral or manage a payroll.

All this high-profile and important work is being delivered remotely, under intense scrutiny and at pace. To tell me more about this work is Leanne Cummings and Markland Starkie, both of the GOV.UK Team. So welcome both to our first remote podcast. Please can you tell me who you are and what your role on GOV.UK is.

Leanne Cummings:

Hello everyone. This is wildly exciting. This is my first ever podcast, so that’s great. I am Leanne Cummings, and I’m the Head of Product for GOV.UK.

Markland Starkie:

Hi, hello, hello. My name is Markland Starkie, and I am Head of Content for GOV.UK.

Laura Stevens:

And you’ve both been about, at GDS for about one and a half years, is that right?

Markland Starkie:

Yeah, that’s right. We both started around the same time roughly. So yeah, about a year and a half now.

Leanne Cummings:

And this is my first job in government. So I’ve joined at an, an exceptionally busy time, and I’m loving every minute of it so far.

Markland Starkie:

Yeah mine too actually. People, I think they’ve stopped saying that it’s not normally like this now.

Leanne Cummings:

Yeah.

Markland Starkie:

But I definitely heard that a lot for the first year, maybe up till last week pretty much.

Laura Stevens:

I thought a timeline might be helpful, because things are moving so quickly. So I’m sure by the time this is published, there’ll be lots more things that the GOV.UK Team has done so we’re just going to be focussed on that initial response.

So some dates. GDS started remote working fully on 17 March. The coronavirus landing page on GOV.UK was published Friday 20 March at midday. Three days later, on Monday 23, the extremely vulnerable people service was launched. And that evening Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the nation in a special broadcast. And then that Friday, on 27 March, the business support service was launched. And, on Tuesday 31 March, the first press conference was streamed live from GOV.UK.

So that is an intense period of delivery over a fortnight. And there’s lots of firsts in there - first time working with 100% remote workforce, record numbers visiting the site and the first time a broadcast has happened from GOV.UK. And of course this work continues, it’s not just made live, it’s, it’s always being iterated and scaling up happens.

But let's talk about that first product, the coronavirus landing page. So what, what is the coronavirus landing page, perhaps Markland, you’ll be able to answer that.

Markland Starkie:

Yeah, yeah sure. So yeah GOV.UK/coronavirus, it is essentially the, the campaign landing page for all the government content for coronavirus support and information.

We first started working on coronavirus information back in probably January actually. As part of our kind of business as usual stuff, we’re monitoring feedback that the public leaves on the website, and we noticed probably from about mid-January onwards, that we were getting an increasing number of comments and questions from the public around specific areas to do with coronavirus. And it was a real trickle at that stage but it was definitely, we could see it increasing.

And we started working with mainly the Department of Health and Social Care [DHSC] and Public Health England [PHE] on kind of how to bring together some of the content that was being written around that time, and it was mainly in the healthcare space then.

What we came up with was a, what we call, a topical events page, which is a kind of out of the box solution that we have. We could quickly see like throughout the beginning of February, as content was being generated across departments in government and Number 10 is thinking about this from a central point of view, and we could see public feedback and response to the content increasing as well. And we knew at a fairly early stage then that as the crisis escalated, it was going to become not just a healthcare issue but actually incorporating much wider things across government.

As the crisis continued to escalate we knew that we would need something more bespoke to pull things together. And that’s where the conversation around a new bespoke landing page that would replace the kind of ‘out the box’ solution came into being. Once we had made that decision things moved very quickly. Obviously the government was responding extremely quickly to, to the escalation of the, of the crisis. And we knew we needed to get something out ahead of any further government announcement and action for, for UK citizens on coronavirus.

Laura Stevens:

So for, when I was researching this podcast I spoke to Sam Dub, a former guest of this podcast but also a GOV.UK Product Manager, and he said he was yeah, given the brief on Monday and then it went from zero to live in 4.5 days.

Markland Starkie:

And from there like it, we obviously took an MVP [minimal viable product] approach but actually the MVP covered quite a, a large range of user needs to the point where we, we’ve continued to iterate but we haven’t, we haven’t had to drastically change the designs or the functionality of it.

So on that Friday yes, the new landing page went live. We worked with the Department of Health [and Social Care] and Public Health England to take down the original topical event page and redirect that stuff through, and that was then in time for the, the Prime Minister announcements that happened in the following days to the public.

Laura Stevens:

This landing page received heavy traffic, so in the first 24 hours, there were more than 750,000 page views. And, in the first 7 days, there were 18 million page views. And as I was talking about record numbers earlier, there was a huge peak on the 24 March of 9.2 million, which is a record for the biggest ever spike in GOV.UK traffic.

Markland Starkie:

Laura Stevens:

Markland Starkie:

Laura Stevens:

And maybe this is a question more towards Leanne as well. This was the first ‘mobile first’ product is that right to say? Why was that important and why did you decide to do it like that?

Leanne Cummings:

Yeah, I believe it is. I believe it is the first one designed specifically on a mobile with the desktop being the alternative. We decided that, 2 reasons really.

One the data showed us that mobile was increasingly the mechanism by which users are picking up government content, advice and services. And what felt more critical in this particular situation was it felt, there’s a reason for that being, that the coverage of mobile phones was much more prolific across a much wider set of people across the country than, than access to a laptop or access to an iPad could be.

So this one felt absolutely critical that we nailed that experience on a mobile first. And I couldn’t be prouder of a team that turned this around in 4 and a half days with that as a new requirement. And honestly it was completely pushing on an open door, the team were really excited to make sure that in people’s hands, would be this critical information.

Markland Starkie:

Yeah.

Leanne Cummings:

So we did, we did a great job of that. And the data that we got, even immediately afterwards, was just absolutely underlined. I think it was something like, in the early days, it was something like 90% plus people were accessing through that mechanism.

Laura Stevens:

OK, shall we talk about these 2 new services? In the first week of launch, the extremely vulnerable service received more than 1.4 million page views. And for the second one, business support service, there were more than 40,000 page views in its first 7 days.

But I think we first want to talk about the extremely vulnerable people service. Perhaps Leanne, could you explain what this service does and how it was set up?

Leanne Cummings:

Yeah. It was, it was a request that came from another, other departments actually. They, the NHS teams had acknowledged that there were a group of people that were, that had illnesses, critical illnesses often, that meant they were extremely vulnerable to coronavirus. So that meant that they had needs that had to be met, probably more isolated at home, and that included access to food.

So there was a list compiled of people that were likely impacted here, and that we needed to find a mechanism by which they could, they could let us know, let government know whether they needed help or not. So they were going to be contacted directly by the NHS teams via letter initially, and invited to, to go to a service that we built around answering, answering a series of, of simple questions around what their needs were in this situation. And that is the extremely vulnerable people service.

So again we had some experience of building this kind of triage journey, and so that was kind of a, a pattern that we were familiar with, and again a really simple journey flow of what, finding out from you what the need is and how we could help you and then that feeds into a, a database and is, is actioned.

Laura Stevens:

And was this able to be stood up quickly because of other GDS work? We mentioned the Design System already but there’s also the GOV.UK Platform as a Service or PaaS.

Leanne Cummings:

Yes for sure. I mean the shoulders of giants right?

We have a lot of experience of, across GDS, of working at this kind of intense pace and response. So we’re prepared for certain spikes in behaviour that could be led by, obvious examples of that could be led by an election or whatever but we have experience of this kind of service deployment and so could forecast a bit what could happen and be very prepared for that.

So there’s some things we won’t compromise on and stability is, stability and security are 2 of them. And again that, both of those things involve working with a wide range of genius teams across GDS, and wider but definitely across GDS.

Markland Starkie:

I do think it’s important to say like, while we have these services available to, across GDS. This is an, the unusualness of this particular situation in bringing all teams together across GDS, so not just GOV.UK as a programme like working on this, but as you say Platform as a Ser--like right across GDS, teams are working together has been a really amazing experience for, for me, myself, Leanne and others. To see that we’ve, we’ve all come together to, to sort this out. It, it’s just, yeah it’s great.

Leanne Cummings:

I couldn’t agree with Markland more on that. And our team is absolutely not the only team that has been under a significant amount of intensity, I could wax lyrical about all the teams. I don’t think we’ve got enough time for that.

But Pete [Herlihy] and the Notify Team have worked incredibly hard on an intense period of, the thing that we featured on the landing page is around getting people who are overseas back into the UK and lots of emails going out and, and lots of message and and just such an, a massive amount of work across the group that we should definitely spend future podcasts describing in a massive amount of detail.

Laura Stevens:

I like that plug in there as well.

Leanne Cummings:

I’m really really available for future podcasts everyone.

Laura Stevens:

And then can we also talk about the business support service.

Leanne Cummings:

Sure.

Laura Stevens:

Leanne, are you best to speak to that?

Leanne Cummings:

I think, I think we both can but this one is, this one is brilliant for its demonstration of how not only we at GDS are in it together but sort of the country is too. This was stood up to reflect a need for government, and for local authorities and for NHS to, they need a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff ranging from testing equipment, warehousing to keep things and, and lorries and lorry drivers to take things places. And so we stood up a service which allowed businesses to say, ‘yeah I’ve got some time and some people and, and some resources to enable us to pitch in here’. And we stood that up again really quickly, another really dedicated team across GOV.UK and wider GDS.

And within, within I want to say hours but I’ve lost track of time, but within a really short time, 2,000 businesses had offered support across a huge range of, of different services. And honestly we’ve been a little bit emotional some of us across GOV.UK about many things - the, the, the type of work that is going on, the commitment from the teams, the commitment from GDS, the type of work going on across government but this was a real demonstration of, of the commitment of everybody being in this together so we did get a bit emotional, and I can still can so I might take a minute now and have a little moment.

Markland Starkie:

And I would also say just that the way we worked, or GDS worked, with departments like the wider Cabinet Office.

Leanne Cummings:

Yeah.

Markland Starkie:

Crown Commercial Service.

Leanne Cummings:

Yeah.

Markland Starkie:

The teams right across government who we really needed input on, to make this work at pace. It’s been, it’s been a real, eye, eye opener for me. I think working in government at this time, to see when it comes down to it we really can make a difference quite quickly.

Leanne Cummings:

Yeah. And you don’t need to talk anyone into that, and that’s, and, and probably that is what you’d expect but you, you really don’t. It really is just a, a an exercise in everybody working together to try move things forward and get help to people that need it.

Laura Stevens:

This is the first time that we’ve done a live broadcast from GOV.UK. So these are the daily press conferences, you can watch them from the coronavirus landing page, which is streaming this. And what was sort of the user need behind that, how did that come about being created?

Markland Starkie:

Yeah it, it was a discussion with us and Cabinet Office Comms Hub and Number 10 around really having a central source for the press conference to be broad-broadcast, and obviously it makes sense that GOV.UK is, is the home for that. We, we provide the platform on which they can, we can stream. So that was built into an iterative, an iteration of the landing page.

Leanne Cummings:

I feel like and, if we sit as we do between, digitally between government and the user, it kind of makes sense for us to be showing that. And also reinforces that if you’ve got any queries, online queries about anything that is impactful to you around coronavirus, then this is the place to come and see if you can find that. So that just sort of reinforces that message too.

Laura Stevens:

I, I also wanted to ask now, now we’ve spoken about the landing page and the 2 new services and the live broadcast that was set up, what sort of challenges did you face, and is there anything that you sort of wish you knew before you’d started this process, that would have helped you? And yeah, how have you, how have you sort of tackled that? ‘Cause obviously you’ve been working at such pace, is there sort of, have you had to reflect on those more challenging aspects of it?

Markland Starkie:

I, I think that is, it’s an ongoing conversation that we’re having at the moment. And yes, there have been challenges right throughout that. From, I guess from my point of view as Head of Content, it it’s trying to get ahead of and help departments coordinate having user-centred content, so clearly written, accessible content, going up on GOV.UK by yesterday.

And we, we realise, I certainly realised, that there is an element of we just need to get information out. And as policy is being decided across government, that information needs to get into the hands of citizens and businesses as quickly as possible and that, that means as we’ve been standing up new processes and new teams across government that have not worked with each other before, that it’s not going to be perfect. And it’s trying to kind of try and build in the processes that make the content better over time and more useful, useful over time.

But that’s been a, that’s been a sort of, real thing on my mind over the most couple of weeks is, is how we, we can continue helping government; because this, this is not just a, obviously, this is not just a GDS thing to tackle. There are countless teams across departments right across government who are all working to produce services, who are all working to produce content and define policy as quickly as possible using GOV.UK as the platform to surface these things through. And it’s our job to try and support them as best we can to make sure that those services are accessible, are usable, are clear etc. etc.

Leanne Cummings:

I think it’s that, I think it’s exactly as Markland describes. I think this is unique, an unique challenge that we’re all facing. I guess it’s a lived experience as well as well as a worked experience so you, you’re experiencing it as a person as also as someone who’s trying to help navigate through it. So that gives you a little bit of insight into how you can really cut to the nub of what you know people might need to understand.

But the pace of change on that is, is, is, is rapid. So we have to react to that in, in new ways and put in processes whereby we can reflect on the landing page you know, the most recently announced policy or guidance that means that users who are seeing that are getting the most recent and up to date advice and guidance. So that is, it’s just a pace question really here then, then I’ve known it ever in, in government before.

I think there’s something, to answer the question in a slightly different way, there’s some things that I thought would be a bit more challenging; working remotely from teams of people that are used to bouncing ideas off each other, I was a little worried about that initially. When you’re building landing pages or services at pace, then often the best way to do that is get in a room. We’ll probably supply, supply pizza, there’ll definitely be a lot of Haribo. And I thought that was, was gonna be a really big problem. And in some ways it is a problem but not in anywhere near as big as we thought. And the products and services we’ve got out, I think haven't reflected the fact that we’re in 30 different houses across London and the south, it’s reflected a group of people who know what they’re doing, are committed to it, and are used to working in a certain way and they can do that in separate houses. And I think the only thing that I could say is we’re possibly a little bit healthier because of the lack of Haribo.

Markland Starkie:

Agree with that.

Laura Stevens:

And I also wanted to touch on how this work is tying in with the GOV.UK future strategy. I saw, I watched Jen Allum, the Head of GOV.UK, present her virtual talk at Code for America on Twitter, about how GOV.UK is moving to a place where it helps people with complex interactions by being personalised, low friction and data informed. And how does this work tie into that and, or does it just confirm your initial, your thinking with that?

Leanne Cummings:

I think it ties in directly when we’re thinking about - so the landing page collates information together around certain themes but some of our tooling starts to ask a, a, hopefully a simple set of questions but then enables a real doubling down for the user on the thing that impacts them the most in their particular set of circumstances. And that’s definitely a thing that we’re moving towards because that also acknowledges that, that people that are using these products and services aren’t sort of one dimensional, you’re not just a person with a business, you’re a person with a business and a family.

And so it sort of addresses both those complexities in simple ways, and just tries to make that a bit more personalised to you and your set of circumstances where possible. So I think we’re reflecting the strategy in that way and, and is data driven.

Markland Starkie:

Yeah, I’d, I’d really agree with that. Obviously, a lot of the work that we were doing around Brexit over the past year and a half, was kind of like moving towards the early explorations of this set of scenarios you were just suggesting around personalised by consent, device agnostic, all of those things. And that, and that worked helped inform the future strategy that Jen was then talking about, and has been talking about recently.

And this is the way that GOV.UK is going. The, the complex user journeys and complex user needs that Leanne was just talking about, they’re not going away. Like the more we understand about our users, the more individual those users become and the more we need to provide solutions that cater for that.

Laura Stevens:

And I wanted to talk about something that’s been alluded to throughout this recording, and it’s about the sort of the coping with the stress and the demands of working in this situation. The work being done is under intense scrutiny, it’s high profile and it’s important that it’s right. So how are you both and how are the team, sort of, are there ways of working with this pressure? How, how are you faring with that?

Markland Starkie:

I think there’s a lot of swearing.

Leanne Cummings:

There is, there is quite a lot of swearing for sure. I think we’re finding some time to do some regular things. I think we all understand the purpose of all this work, and in a funny way you’re in a luxurious position right? So, I’m telling myself this very much late at night and at the weekends, that you’re in a luxurious position where you can really put your shoulder in and help in a crisis. And a lot of people don’t get to say that, a lot of people this is just sort of happening to and so we are quite lucky, and that is felt across the programme. So, at the best of times, that is the best of times right, in terms of OK you get it, you’re on it.

Markland’s right though. We are also finding time to hang out together a bit. And that’s with you know my peer group but the also the, the product teams where you just get to let off a bit of steam.

Markland Starkie:

Yeah. The teams on GOV.UK have been just incredible in this regard.

Leanne Cummings:

Yeah.

Markland Starkie:

The self organisation, just the pragmatic adult approach to this.

Leanne Cummings:

Yeah.

Markland Starkie:

Everybody recognises the importance of the work that needs to be done, and this is not your normal you know, 9 to 5 whatever situation, and, and people have, where needed, really put in the hours to support the work and get it through. And then worked with each other to, to make sure that they’re getting time off and they can recuperate.

And this, this is obviously happening you know, right across government and beyond. Like all businesses are having to kind of reconfigure their working practices. But just seeing, from a personal point of view, just seeing the, however many people we have on the programme, just seeing them kind of self-organise around this and then allow us as kind of senior managers to try and bolster in support and kind of pull in extra people where necessary and where possible, has just been great to see.

Leanne Cummings:

And we’ve kept some of the rigour so we have, Jen does, Jen Allum the Head of GOV.UK does a regular weekly programme check in, which is what it says really. ‘Cause I guess that’s another thing, we’re all in this situation where we’re at home, so you definitely see the thing that you’re working on a lot, but you don’t necessarily get to see in the way that you would in a, in regular working office environment. But it’s another way we’re getting, everybody gets to celebrate the successes and help out when there’s a challenge. So there’s, we’ve, we’ve definitely kept to the rigour of how we work in the office a bit, and maybe just upped some of that because to, to cater for the fact that we’re all online.

Markland Starkie:

Definitely quite a lot of cats as well.

Leanne Cummings:

Yeah, there’s cats. So there’s themes developing, and we definitely know a little bit more about each other than we did previously too. So that’s helping us cope because there’s quite a lot of teasing.

Laura Stevens:

And over these sort of, over the first few weeks where it really sort of ramped up, were there, was there any particular moments that stood out to either of you of being particularly like emotional or important or sad or just anything that just really stuck out to you?

Markland Starkie:

The first one to me was where we as the senior management team, got together and were like ‘essentially, right this is a thing. We now need to be pausing existing work, re-prioritising, talking to teams about what they need to do, making new teams out of existing teams and figuring out what’s next’. And, and it was that initial conversation that was like ‘right OK, it is time to, time to get on with it’.

Leanne Cummings:

I think for me, emotional about some of the delivery, which there’s usually a compromise, there’s a cost, there’s a compromise to delivering things rapidly. And I don’t think that the products that we have developed necessarily reflect that. I think that they’re the opposite of that, I think they’re brilliant products. The mobile first was an emotional moment for me on the landing page, for sure.

And then, so all of those things definitely but I think the moments that have really got me more than I thought they would, are when people who are really tired, have done really long days, on Slack channels saying ‘well OK I’ve finished my bit, so does anybody need a hand with anything else?’. And I just feel like that’s the stuff that gets me every time. ‘Cause you wanna say ‘no dude, you definitely need to go and get some sleep now’. But they just wanna roll their sleeves up and get you know, good stuff out the door and that for me, is a sight to see.

Laura Stevens:

For sure.

So thank you both so much for coming on today, I know you’re both extremely busy so thank you again.

Markland Starkie:

Thank you very much.

Leanne Cummings:

Thank you.

Laura Stevens:

And you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on PodBean.

So thank you both again

GDS Podcast #17: International Women‘s Day Mar 09, 2020

For International Women’s Day we interviewed 9 people from across the organisation based on the theme of "Each for Equal".

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Laura Stevens:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I'm a Creative Content Producer here at GDS. And for March's episode, we're going to be celebrating International Women's Day.

In 2020 the theme for International Women's Day is 'each for equal'. The worldwide event’s tagline reads, “an equal world is an enabled world. How will you help forge a gender equal world, celebrate women’s achievement, raise awareness against bias, take action for equality”. So from this theme we wrote 3 questions and asked 9 women from across GDS for their opinion.

Let’s hear what they had to say.

Which woman inspires you in digital government and why?

Charlotte Downs:

I’m Charlotte Downs, and I’m a Graphic Designer in the Communications Team.

So I love this question, but I am going to cop out. I think I find it difficult to find a specific female that inspires me because individually everyone has different aspects to who they are that are great. And I learn from each of those different bits.

So I’m inspired by lots of females, our team is mainly female. And I find that each of them, the resilience that they have and just the energy they bring to work, inspires me to be better in my work and in, and personally.

Liz Lutgendorff:

I’m Liz Lutgendorff, I’m the Senior Research Analyst for the International Team. And as a side gig, I’m also one of the co-chairs of the Women’s Network at GDS.

I think I’m going to cheat a little bit on this one, because it’s really hard to pick just one. And especially I, I guess I’d focus on GDS because I most you know, that’s my main source of knowledge. But I think if you pick any person at GDS who’s working here, you’re going to find something really inspirational about them.

Even just about you know, trying something that’s really frustrating to them, but might be easy to someone else, but just like putting yourself out there; if you’re scared of public speaking, people are doing speaker training so they can tell their stories about what they’re doing in digital, even though they’re kind of scared to death of it.

So yeah, I’m just going to have a total cop out and say every single woman at GDS, from our HR people, to our Estates people, to our developers, everyone. Everyone is doing amazing things everyday.

Joanna Blackburn:

I’m Joanna Blackburn, I’m Deputy Director for Communications and Engagement here in GDS.

There actually, when I was asked this question, there are a lot of women out there who are quite inspirational in terms of breaking barriers, but the first person that really came to mind for me is a lady called Rachel Neaman. Rachael Neaman was, at the time that I met her, the first digital leader in the Department for Health. And at the time I was working at an ALB [arm's length bodies] where I was responsible primarily to move out existing websites onto GOV.UK.

And the reason why Rachel comes to mind for me is because I met her while attending a meeting of very senior people across the Department for Health. And so it was quite an intimidating environment where everybody was of quite senior stature, and here I am in middle management sort of like feeling like an imposter. But I was so inspired by the way she challenged that group of people, and how she said it is their responsibility to drive digital transformation in their work and to role model leadership behaviours so that their teams will do the same.

So for me, she’s one of the, one of those people that I really believe is transformational in digital transformation for government.

Laura Stevens:

Can you tell me a story about gender equality in the workplace?

Sanwar Bopari:

I’m Sanwar Bopari, and I’m an Executive Assistant.

I’m really interested in the work that the Women’s Network are doing around the gender pay gap. I think it’s really important because it’s never quite transparent and it’s good to make it obvious to everyone.

Jen Allum:

I’m Jen Allum, and I’m the Head of GOV.UK.

We have diverse panels for recruitment at GDS. And one moment that really struck me recently was interviewing for a role in the GOV.UK programme. And the person we were interviewing referred throughout the interview only to men. So it was all references to he and him. To such a degree that I needed to ask if all of the people that he’d worked with were men. And of course he hadn’t.

But the thing that really struck me about that was not so much that maybe that had happened, but that the colleagues I had on the panel, who happened to be male, hadn’t noticed it until I’d asked the question.

And of course I’ve heard the argument about you know, when you hear ‘he’ what we mean is everyone, but I don’t buy that and language matters. So it was a really underlying moment for me in why we have diversity in our recruitment panels.

Leena Taha:

My name is Leena Taha, and I’m a Senior Content Designer on the Brexit Journeys Team.

One of the people who I used to work with before, he would amplify the voices of other women in the room if they were ever ignored. For example, if we were ever in a meeting then, and somebody made a point that was later ignored, he would circle back to it and, ‘say so and so mentioned this earlier which was a good point’. Which really helped to make everybody's voices heard.

Laura Stevens:

What will you do this year to make GDS a better workplace for women?

Laura Flannery:

Hello I’m Laura Flannery, I’m a Senior Product Manager, I work on GOV.UK.

So I have the privilege of being the co-chair of the Women’s Network, I lead and co-ordinate the Women’s Network and the working groups within it. And we have a lot of things planned over the next year to make GDS a better place for women but also for everyone, because the knock on effects of what we do make GDS better for everyone. That’s an important point.

We’re working on the gender pay gap. We have a working group and we have an action plan. So we’re using data to understand what interventions are working to make the gender pay gap smaller. We have some training on career progression coming up so we’ll be teaching participants how to define milestones that they need to achieve their goals, helping them to gain clarity and direction and the confidence to pursue their aspirations. We’re also planning some public speaking training so helping people to build confidence, find their voice.

We have a mentoring scheme that we set up a couple of years ago, and we’re going to operationalise that. So we’re handing it over to the People Team, so there is someone who will be looking after it and that is there, that’s part of their job. Because the Women’s Network is a network of volunteers so the fact that we’re able to do that is actually a really great sign and it’s you know, should have good impact across GDS.

We’ve also recently done a survey on period products in the bathrooms. So GDS provides free period products for women, and reviewing that process so we can make it better to meet the needs of women here. And we’re running, we’re going to run lots of campaigns to raise awareness on certain topics, for example the gender pay gap, women's health, lots of other things.

Jennifer Marks:

Hi my name is Jennifer Marks and I’m a Digital Delivery Advisor at the Future Relationships and Expert Services Team at GDS.

So I’ve been in GDS coming up to a year, it’ll be my first year anniversary in April, and the one thing I’ve really noticed is the Women’s Network do amazing work but there is one area which I think should really be on the agenda. And that is about women returners; that’s women who have for some reason or other, it’s usually motherhood, sometimes it could be care of relative, have taken career breaks. And they struggle to get back into the workplace, and these are women who, they have immense skill sets and yet because they’ve taken 2 maybe 3 years out of the workplace, or more, the workplace is suddenly closed to them.

And it’s something I really would like to put on the agenda. I think it’s important. These are women who could have so much to offer, they have the skills, the ability and I think that they would be a great addition to GDS, and I’d like to look at how we can bring these women back into the workplace, what we can offer them. And I have had the benefit of working and volunteering with the Women’s Returner Network. Because I was one of those women, and I think it’s important to help promote other women, help other women make sure they have access to work and what they need to really shine through.

Eliška Copland:

My name is Eliška Copland and I work as a Cyber Security Analyst.

So I think that we all know that there is a shortage of women in technology. And it’s one thing to kind of hire more women, and there’s a big push to high more women in technology, but it’s also a completely different method to make them feel like they’re included and a valued addition to the team, and motivate them and drive them to their best. And I think that there are ways that this can be improved. And I think that some teams and some managers do it better than others, and I would like to just understand and learn more about how that, how that can be done. And again I would like to find male allies in this.

So that was, that, that’s one thing. I suppose then I also, just because one of the mottos of GDS is to be kind and be generous, I think generally us women in this male dominated field kind of need to be more generously speaking up when some kind of injustice is happening, either to ourselves or to others, but should do it in a kind way.

But I think GDS is a wonderful place to, to work and I can’t stress enough that there isn’t that much injustice happening, and most of the time it’s, you meet absolutely wonderful people in this sector.

Laura Stevens:

So thank you to everybody from across GDS who came in to talk today about International Women’s Day.

And you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And you can read a transcript on PodBean.

So thank you once again to everyone and goodbye.

GDS Podcast #16: GOV.UK Design System Feb 28, 2020

We discuss how the GOV.UK Design System works, who uses it, how to measure its value, and other design systems across government.

The transcript for the episode follows:

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Laura Stevens:

Hello, and welcome to the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I’m a Creative Content Producer here at GDS. And today’s podcast is going to be on the GOV.UK Design System.

The GOV.UK Design System is a collection of tools and resources for designing and building products and services. It provides styles, components and patterns that are accessible. This helps hundreds of teams across the public sector design and build services that are of high quality and can be used by anyone.

The impact of the design system, created and managed by a team of 10 here at GDS, is significant. It’s used in central government, local government and has also been used by the NHS and international governments to develop their own design systems. It saves teams time and money and helps give people a consistent and accessible experience when interacting with government.

To tell us more is Tim Paul, who is on the team who launched the GOV.UK Design System. Tim has also been at GDS for a long time, he was on the team that launched GOV.UK in fact as well. We’re also going to be hearing from people from central and local government about how the GOV.UK Design System has helped their work.

So yeah, welcome Tim to the podcast.

Tim Paul:

Hi there, how are you doing?

Laura Stevens:
Thanks for coming on today. And could you tell us what your job is here at GDS and how you work with the GOV.UK Design System?

Tim Paul:

Yeah so I guess my official job title is Head of Interaction Design. But for the last couple of years, I’ve mainly been kind of doing that as a Product Manager really for the Design System. So that’s a thing that we kind of kicked off a couple of years ago and we’ve managed to build a team around that, and develop a suite of products. We launched those back in summer of 2018 and yeah, I’ve been product managing that and working with the team closely ever since.

Laura Stevens:

So the Design System was launched back in July 2018. But what is the Design System made up of?

Tim Paul:

So it’s essentially a suite of 3 different products. So you’ve got the Design System itself, which is basically a website with guidance and coded examples for designers and frontend developers to use to design and prototype and build public services. So that’s the first thing.

And then there’s a thing we call the GOV.UK Prototype Kit, and that’s a piece of software that designers in particular can download and install, and they can use it to rapidly create very high fidelity prototypes that they can take into user research. And they can test out ideas before their, their team commits to building anything. So they can find out what the right thing to build is.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Tim Paul:

And then the third thing, which underpins both of those, is a thing we call GOV.UK Frontend. And that’s essentially a frontend framework, so it’s all the Javascript and the CSS [Cascading Style Sheets] wrapped up into a nice package that developers can install into their projects. And so the Prototype Kit and the Design System both use GOV.UK Frontend and that means that designers and developers are both drawing from the same kind of library of components and patterns.

Laura Stevens:

I heard you say before that you think of the Design System also as a service as well, what do you mean by that?

Tim Paul:

Yes. So as well as the 3 products that we provide, we also offer support and training. We’ve helped facilitate contributions to the design system and we’ve run community events and we have regular hangouts with our community of users and contributors. So we really think of the whole thing together as being an actual service, and we have you know, a multidisciplinary team to support both the products and that service.

Laura Stevens:

And when you were talking about the different parts of the GOV.UK Design System, for people who are listening and don’t know what a component is or a pattern or a style. Could you explain what those things are please?

Tim Paul:

Yeah, ok, I’ll have a go.

So when we first started out - figuring out how to make this thing, we did a lot of thinking about what were the things that were going to be inside the Design System. There’s no really established language for talking about this stuff. Although design systems as an idea are fairly well established now.

So in the end we settled on 3 definitions. And so we have what we call styles. And they’re the really low level building blocks that everything else is made out of. So it’s things like colour palettes and how your typography works and how your page layouts work and your grid system and so on. So those are the styles.

And then one level up from that if you like, we have things that we call components. And so components are chunks of user interface, UI. So they’re visible things that you can compose onto a webpage and that, and, and that makes your service. So it’s things like drop-down lists and tables and navigation and headers and footers. And all our components are built using code, the code that we provide in GOV.UK Frontend. And so that’s what a component is.

And finally one level up from that we have things that we call patterns, and patterns are a little bit more abstract. They’re centred around common needs that users of public services have. So for example, lots of public services require that people enter information about themselves like their name or their address and so on, and so we have design patterns which explain the best most usable way that we’ve found, to ask users for that kind of information.

And, we have even higher level design patterns so for example, it’s quite common that a public service has eligibility requirements that, that, that users must meet if they are able to use that service. And so we have a pattern for example, which explains how best to help users understand whether or not they can use your service, so that they don’t waste time trying to apply for a benefit or something that they don’t actually meet the requirements for.

Laura Stevens:

And so now I feel like I, I know what it’s made up of, I know what those words mean. But why are design systems good for government? And in a previous presentation I found in the Google Drive in my research, you said the national motto of design system teams is ‘efficiency, consistency and usability’

Tim Paul:

Oh yeah, I did say that didn’t I?

Laura Stevens:

Would, is that why they’re good or have you changed your mind?

Tim Paul:

I guess, no that’s almost been one of the most stable beliefs that we’ve held throughout the whole kind of time we’ve been developing these resources. There, there do seem to be 3 pretty stable fundamental user needs that things like design systems are good at meeting. And, and that’s that public services needs to be efficiently built, we don’t want our tax payers’ money to be wasted in people like reinventing the wheel up and down the country in different teams.

They need to be of a high quality. So they need to be really accessible and usable. And they need to be consistent with each other. So one of the big reasons that we made GOV.UK in the first place was to try and create a single unified consistent user experience for all government services because that helps people to be familiar with those services, which means that it makes them more usable. But it also kind of fosters trust because it’s much easier to recognise when you’re using a legitimate government service if they all look the same.

And the way that design systems help with those things is that you have this common suite of components and patterns that are ready made, pre-built, they’ve already been tested for things like usability and accessibility. And so that lifts up the quality because people are re-using existing things, it means that they’re not developing them themselves so that makes teams more efficient and productive. And again because they’re re-using the same suite of components and patterns, it means that different services made by different teams in different parts of the country in different departments, are all consistent with each other.

Laura Stevens:

And I think that’s a point that I wanted to pick up on, is because I think as a user coming to GOV.UK, it looks like it’s just one big website.

Tim Paul:

Yeah.

Laura Stevens:

But it’s actually being managed, and being delivered simultaneously, by different teams up and down the UK.

Tim Paul:

Yes. So like you say GOV.UK presents as this single, quite large website that’s full of different services and information and that’s entirely intentional, that was always the vision for GOV.UK. But we, anybody who’s worked on it knows that under the hood, it’s hundreds and hundreds of separate websites and they're owned and managed by different teams in different departments up and down the country. There is no single tech stack for the public sector or for government, there’s hundreds and hundreds of different ones and we don’t try to control what that stack should be.

And so the challenge that we’ve always faced is like how do we let all of those teams work pretty much independently of each other, but deliver something which is coherent and consistent and feels like a single user experience. And this is, this is what design systems are really good at because they, they provide this centralised resource that all teams can draw upon and contribute back to.

So not every organisation, or large organisation, requires a design system necessarily but I think government is maybe almost the best example of an organisation that can benefit from, from a tool and a service like this.

Laura Stevens:

So yeah, we’ve got GOV.UK as this, appearing as one site but actually being operated by lots and lots of different teams up and down the country. So is that who’s using the Design System, all these different service teams?

Tim Paul:

Yeah, so we think that most users of the Design System are probably designers or developers working in, on, in services teams in different departments up and down the country. And we’ve tried lots of different ways to measure usage, it’s important that we know who’s using our service and how and what problems they might be facing, so that we can improve the service for them.

So one thing we have looked at in the past is, is web traffic. That’s just visitors to the Design System website. And that’s quite useful for showing month on month growth. I think since we launched, we’ve grown the number of visitors to the site by about 250%.

Laura Stevens:

So impressive figures.

Tim Paul:

Yeah, yeah! It’s, we’re happy with that.

Laura Stevens:

I wanted to ask about the community element of the Design System. So people are able to contribute their own patterns and how, so in terms of the number of patterns or number of components now, are most of them done in GDS or do, are they generally done from people who have contributed? How does that work?

Tim Paul:

Yeah. So from the outset really, we wanted to make sure that what we built was owned by the community of designers and developers in government, and was easy to contribute back to. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that we’re, GDS is at the centre of government and that’s really helpful as a way to kind of propagate out best practice and so on, but it does mean that we’re kind of one step removed from the actual end users of citizen facing services and staff systems and so on. It’s really the teams in the other departments that are closest to those users. And so we really rely on them to feedback into the Design System about, about whether components or patterns are working or not. Maybe they’ve found ways to improve upon them, maybe they have ideas for brand new components and patterns that, that we don’t realise are needed. And so like I say, from the very beginning we were trying to figure out ways to, to kind of foster a community of collaboration and contributors.

And so we initially populated the Design System with maybe about 30 or 40 components and patterns that we already knew were needed by government. Some of those we brought in from our previous design tools.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Tim Paul:

But since then we’ve had about 18 new components and patterns published over the last year and a bit. And I think of those 18, about 13 of them have been external contributions. So things that have been built by people in service teams somewhere else in government, from MoJ [Ministry of Justice] or DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] or HMRC [HM Revenue and Customs] and so on, and then contributed back to the Design System.

And so we from kind of experience with our previous tools, our legacy products, that contribution is difficult and it certainly doesn't happen for free and it doesn't happen at all unless you do a lot of work to facilitate it and so on. So we put a lot of effort into developing the necessary processes and the governance and the assurance so that when people made a contribution, they knew what to expect and they knew the criteria that they needed to meet and that there were people available to support that contribution. And then other people who are available to kind of assure the quality.

So what we’re hoping is this, by this, by making this process really open, it kind of encourages trust in what we’re doing, and it means that the work that we’re publishing isn’t biased, in favour of any one department and so on. And that it, and that it actually reflects the needs of teams in government.

Laura Stevens:

So how does it make you feel having so many patterns and contr-and components now being able to be contributed? Because, this, this hard work of making it decentralised, making it open is working.

Tim Paul:

It, I think it is working, I think we’ve learnt a lot along the way. We’ve certainly learned that it’s harder than we thought it would be. I mean we thought it would be hard, but it’s even harder than we thought it would be. I think perhaps we were tempted to think in the early days that contribution was like a shortcut to scaling.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Tim Paul:

That like by opening our doors and letting people contribute, we could grow rapidly and it would like solve all our problems that way. And actually over the last year or so, I think what we’ve realised is that facilitating and assuring contributions is often as much work as doing the work yourself. We should probably have realised that at the time. And so I think it does let us scale but not to the extent that perhaps we thought it would.

So yeah, we think that aside from scaling, there are other real concrete benefits to, and I’m encouraging contribution on one of those, is that when people make successful contributions to the Design System, they tend to be pretty strong advocates so they almost act as like people doing engagement in departments on our behalf.

But also, and perhaps more importantly, the more people from service teams in other departments make contributions to the Design System, the more representative the Design System is of what those teams need. And so it just really helps us make sure that our product is actually genuinely meeting the needs of our users.

If we were doing all the work ourselves in the centre, then, then there’d be a really strong risk that what we were producing was only really meeting the needs of the teams that we were closest to.

Laura Stevens:

And I think that leads very nicely on. Because we’re now going to hear a clip from somebody who uses the Design System who isn’t from GDS.

Tim Paul:

Ah.

Laura Stevens:

It’s from Adam Silver, who previously worked at the Ministry for Justice, or MoJ Digital. So yeah and MoJ is the second largest of the 24 ministerial departments, so it’s a big department.

Tim Paul:

Yeah.

Laura Stevens:

And yeah, he’s going to talk about using the GOV.UK Design System and also about the MoJ specific Design System as well.

Adam Silver:

I’m Adam Silver, I’m an Interaction Designer working at the Department for Education, and previously I’ve worked at MoJ Digital and HMCTS [HM Courts & Tribunals Service] as well.

Laura Stevens:

Could I talk to you about your work with the GOV.UK Design System on the service claim for the cost of a child’s funeral, which is a highly emotional service and also one that had to be delivered at pace in 6 weeks in fact. So how did having this centralised system help you in that?

Adam Silver:

Yeah so we used the MoJ form builder, which is a tool that lets you create and deploy digital forms live, live to a URL without spinning up your own dev team. And under the hood, that form builder uses all of the components and patterns of from the GOV.UK design system. So that meant we didn’t have to spend a whole load of time thinking about text boxes, radio buttons and all of, all of the good stuff that’s already been solved brilliantly. And we could just focus on the specific needs of our service, and filling in the gaps where the GOV.UK Design System didn’t have a solution for that.

Laura Stevens:

And so in that way, was it saving you time, was it saving you hours of work, what was it helping you with?

Adam Silver:

Yeah, it saved, saved a lot of time. Because instead of focusing on all those things we could focus on just the needs of our service. So for example, we needed to think about how to ask users for their bank details because we needed to make a payment for them for their claim. And we also focused on things like how to upload files because they had to provide evidence for their claim by uploading copies of their receipts. And those, those 2 particular components and patterns aren’t covered really in the GOV.UK Design System. So that’s where we could really focus our attention.

And the other thing was that when we were doing an accessibility audit before we launched, we could focus most of our attention on the new patterns that we knew might not be up to the level of quality, or level of accessibility, that all of the other components that, like the text boxes and radio buttons in the GOV.UK Design System.

Just that it’s so, so real, it’s just so good. Just the quality of the guidance, the quality of the patterns, the components themselves is excellent. It plays really nicely into the prototype kit. And when I have worked on department specific design systems, it plays nicely with those ‘cause. So we’ve, we’ve... At HMCTS and MoJ Digital, we had our own department design systems and we had to extend and build on top of the GOV.UK Design System. So that was, that was another really good thing.

Laura Stevens:

Could you sort of speak then to how important having this centralised GOV.UK design system is to different departments across government?

Adam Silver:

Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean we have several services at MoJ that were asking people for their bank details. And during our research there are many many government departments that have many many services of their own that are also asking for their bank details. So there is a lot of duplication of effort there and a lot of inconsistency between them. Not, not major inconsistency but little inconsistencies and those can, those things can, can add up to creating a less than ideal, tricky user experience.

So having that centralised and standardised in GOV.UK Design System adds a tremendous amount of value along with everything else that is centralised in, in the system.

Laura Stevens:

How does the community behind the design system help you in your work?

Adam Silver:

Yeah, so well, that’s, it’s majorly helpful. It’s one of my favourite things about working in gov [government] actually, is, is the huge design community who are just willing to, to help. On, on Slack, there’s like thousands of people on there and they’ve, there’s always somebody that’s either come across your exact problem or they’ve come across something similar and can help out.

And then the backlog itself, or, or the more specific help around the design system, I mean the team are real-super friendly. You get to know them individually, they’re always there to, to help. And having someone dedicated on support each, each day on Slack is, is massively massively helpful, knowing that you can go to one place to get help is, yeah, I can’t, I can’t just, I can’t commend it enough really. It’s super valuable to me and it’s, I know that it’s been super valuable to other people I’ve worked with as well.

The community backlog is really good because if there isn’t something in the design system then you know that there’s going to be...well there’s a very very good chance that somebody has put their own designs into the backlog. Just some screenshots, just some explanation and then some discussion. And that, that will get you going so you don’t have to start, you’re never, you’re never really starting something from scratch because somebody has always done something. And somebody, sorry. Sometimes somebody has done more than something. There’s, there's a lot of contributions on some of the backlog tickets as well.

Laura Stevens:

So Kellie Matheson, who works at MoJ Digital, also spoke at Services Week 2020 about having two Design Systems and working with that. How do you, how, what’s been your experience of using two design systems at once?

Adam Silver:

So it’s not, it’s not the ideal situation. It’s because, the reason why I think design systems appear in departments is, is because, well for 2 reasons. One is that GOV.UK Design System just can’t go fast enough in accepting contributions which is kind of what I was talking about earlier. They’re just not resourced enough I don’t think. It takes a lot of effort to build out a component.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Silver:

So that, that’s one reason where a department could move a little bit faster. Quality might be a tad lower but they can move a bit faster. Because they’re not worrying about the needs of the whole of government, they’re just worrying about the needs of their department of the needs of a programme within a department, sometimes that’s the case. And the other reason is because there are literally department specific patterns. But I see it as a temporary solution while, until the GOV.UK Design System can pull those patterns in.

Laura Stevens:

And you, on your blog post, you also contributed a pattern along with your colleagues Amanda Kerry and Gemma Hutley, what was that pattern?

Adam Silver:

That was how to ask users for their bank details. So as part of the, as part of the Child Funeral Fund service that we were designing, the main, the main point was that the user is claiming back the costs. So to do that they need to provide their bank details and that way we can, during the claims process, make that payment to them.

Laura Stevens:

And what was it like to contribute your own pattern to that, or your team's pattern to that?

Adam Silver:

The reason why I wanted to contribute the bank details pattern was because while we were designing the service, there was no actual pattern existing for the bank details. And we looked in the backlog and we talked to people across government and in our own department as well, and there was no, there was no solid example of how to, how to ask for it. There was lots of different good examples but there was no one way. So that’s something that we had to tackle during the 6 week period.

And so it would have been a real, it would have saved us a lot of time if that did, if that pattern was part of the GOV.UK Design System. So we thought ok well look, we’ve learnt quite a bit about it by searching around what other people have done, and we made a decision ourselves for our service. So why don’t we use what we’ve learnt, work a little bit harder and contribute it back.

Laura Stevens:

So I’m sitting here with Tim Paul...And so you can ask him anything, what do you ask him?

Adam Silver:

Hi Tim, I would ask you how to quantify the value of a design system?

Laura Stevens:

So a nice easy question there.

Tim Paul:

Yeah, thanks Adam!

Laura Stevens:

But I did actually hear there was, I did actually see this was, this was your talk in Services Week 2020, wasn’t it?

Tim Paul:

Yeah. Yeah. So first of all, that was really good to hear from him. And yeah. One of the things we’ve always known that we need to do, and any team will need to do, is to somehow quantify the benefits of the thing that you’re delivering. Design systems are no exception. But it is quite hard to do that because of the nature of the service and the products I think. They’re not transactional services, you can’t watch people kind of go through them, people aren’t signed in when they use it and so measuring how many people are using your service and product is tricky enough.

And then quantifying the actual material benefits is also not that easy. It’s all about productivity and that’s quite a hard thing to measure. These aren’t small tasks that can be done in a few minutes where you can, can easily measure how much faster people get. These are tools which help people over the course of days and weeks and months in quite unpredictable and subtle ways.

So we’ve always struggled a little bit. Although I think this quarter we’ve gotten a little bit better at this stuff. And so we were joined by Roxy, who’s a Product Manager in GDS, and she’s really helped us deliver a kind of economic model and, and a business case for how, how much benefit the Design System is, is giving people. And so we did a fair amount of research, we did lots of analysis of things like repos on Github.

And we fed all of this information into an economic model, we worked with an economist called Parri. We, we, we had lots of other data points. Our user researcher Rosie did, at quite short notice, did some really good research where we interviewed around 10 designers and dev-developers from different departments, and we got them to talk about their experience of using our tools. We got them to do the very uncomfortable thing of like trying to, trying to tell us how much more or less productive they were using our tools and not using our tools.

Laura Stevens:
Yeah.

Tim Paul:

Which is a, it’s a really tough ask. But people did tell us and we got enough data points that we figured taking an average and going with a conservative version of that average was sufficient. And so feeding all of this stuff together, and thinking about how many teams are actually using our products and for how long and so on, we got to a kind of round figure of, we think we’re probably saving the government about £17 million pounds a year right now

And that’s based on the assumption that without the Design System, government would need to spend about that much money to deliver the same services of a similar quality. So yeah.

Laura Stevens:

And were you, did you think the figure would be about £17 million or did you...

Tim Paul:

Yeah..I don’t know. I guess it was higher than maybe I was expecting.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Tim Paul:

Yeah. Yeah. But one of the things we’re really keen to do is focus as much as we possibly can on, on the more qualitative benefits of Design Systems.

Laura Stevens:

Sure.

Tim Paul:

Rather than treating them as a kind of efficiency tool. They definitely do help teams work more productively but what we’re really hoping is those teams use their excess capacity to deliver better services. And so Adam kind of touched on that. Because they don’t have to worry about checkboxes, and radio buttons and headers and footers and making those all accessible and usable, they can spend that time that they’ve saved focusing on the actual service itself, and the content design, and the service design and the policy design and so on. And that’s really where the gains are to be had for individual service teams.

Laura Stevens:

Adam also referenced about how there are other individual organisations using their own design systems, they’ve made up their own design systems. Why do you think places have created their own versions?

Tim Paul:

There have always been other design resources made by other teams and departments in government, and that should come as no surprise. For the most part these are people with quite similar missions and goals to ourselves.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Tim Paul:

They’re trying to solve the same problems but at the level of their individual programme or department. And so a couple of years ago when we were initiating this work, we made a conscious decision to, to not treat them as rivals or competitors or in some way a symptom of failure. They’re really just people who are trying to solve the same problem.

And so we, r-rather than go around and try and s-shut them down or anything like that, we made friends with these people, these people are now contributors and we try and work closely together with them

Laura Stevens:

And not only is the GOV.UK Design System helping in central government, but it’s also being, helping across the public sector in local government and the NHS. And we’re now going to hear from Emma Lewis, from Hackney, about her experience of using the Design System in a local authority.

Emma Lewis:

I’m Emma Lewis, I am the Lead Frontend Developer at the London Borough of Hackney.

Laura Stevens:

What is the London Borough of Hackney doing with design systems?

Emma Lewis:

So we have our own Hackney Design System and Hackney Pattern Library, and both of those are based on top of GOV.UK Design System and GOV.UK frontend respoistry. So we have our pattern library is called LHB Frontend. Which is essentially a copy of GOV.UK frontend which also imports GOV.UK frontend and we build on top of that.

So we have a bunch of different components, some of which are basically identical to the GOV.UK components but they have sort Hackney, ‘Hacknified’ styles or small colour changes, spacing tweaks, things like that. We have some components that are actually identical to GOV.UK and some components that are completely new to Hackney because they're more local government focused.

Laura Stevens:

What have been the benefits to you working in local government, for using a central government design system?

Emma Lewis:

I mean it’s been huge. So having all of these things just out of the box sort of we can use, it’s such an enormous time saver. But also having things like we, you know, we know they are accessible. So it means the services that we’re providing to residents and staff are so much better than they would have been otherwise.

Laura Stevens:

And I think a lot of people respond to with the GOV.UK Design System is also that community element of it. Has that helped you as well at the council?

Emma Lewis:

Enormously. There’s no-one else really experienced at frontend development that I work with, and having that community of people who I can ask questions to, is such a positive thing. And likewise I am so grateful for the GOV.UK Design System that it means I want to contribute and I think other people feel like that.

So I’ve contributed a couple of pull requests that are like really really tiny minor changes but feels good to do that. And it’s something that I want to do. And I think you see that with other people in the community who aren’t necessarily working centrally at GDS but have benefited from it so want to contribute something.

Laura Stevens:

Why is having a design system a good thing for local government?

Emma Lewis:

It’s...there are lots of different reasons. The main, the first reason is consistency. So it means that you know, any of our products that use that design system are going to look the same and that means, that’s really good for lots of different reasons. It means we’re not duplicating code in lots of different places. So you know, if something changes we don’t need to update it in loads of different places, there’s just a central place where all of that stuff comes from. And that’s something that developers love.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Emma Lewis:

But also I think accessibility is a huge thing. The time and resourcing that goes into making a design system like GOV.UK, like I’ve never seen the amount of effort that goes into a component be put into that kind of thing outside of a design system.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Emma Lewis:

And so making sure that it is accessible means that it’s usable by all of our residents and that’s really important. And we, one of our missions at Hackney is to create digital services that are so good that people prefer to use them.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Emma Lewis:

And in order to do that, they need to be available to work for everyone and that’s like incredibly important.

Laura Stevens:

So this is a bit of a, like a retrospective question. What do you wish you knew, or to anybody who is listening from a local authority, from a local borough, before you started creating the Hackney Pattern Library?

Emma Lewis:

I think 2 things that spring to mind. One of which is how important your decisions are when you start doing something like that. So I think I hadn’t appreciated how difficult it can be to change things down the line. And this is something that...so Nick [Colley] and Hanna [Laasko] who work on GOV.UK frontend actually we’re really kind and came into Hackney to talk to us about the design system. And they were talking about how hard it is, or how bad it is to make breaking changes.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Emma Lewis:

So you know, changes to the design system or pattern library that are going to break things for users of the older versions. And that’s something that I wasn't, I hadn’t really thought about much until that conversation. And now, we’re sort of 6 months into our first version of our pattern library, and I’m starting to see, ‘oh I wish I’d done that differently’. And you know really feeling empowered to take the time at the beginning and think about those considerations about how you’re doing something and whether it is the right thing and what possible use cases there might be down the line, can be really helpful.

Laura Stevens:

So how, what are people using it, what sort of stage are you at?

Emma Lewis:

So I’m doing some work at the moment with our mapping team, who create all sorts of maps for residents and for staff to look at, from things like where water fountains are, are in the borough to planning applications and all sorts of different things. And we’re coming up with, I suppose sort, it’s sort of similar to a design system in a way, we’re trying to come up with this sort of map template that we can use to show all different kinds of data. And I was just showing them really quickly yesterday how to use the design system to put a header and footer on the page, and their faces were just like lit up. It was so exciting that this was suddenly all available to them.

Like using the GOV.UK design system has been an incredible time saver. Like I can’t, we wouldn’t have a pattern library now if we’d had to build everything from scratch. It just. We have so many different projects on and we don’t have the people to build something like that, and by having that, it’s mean that, not only that we can use it on projects going forward, but we’re also massively reducing the amount of time it takes to build all those individual projects as well. So it’s been, it’s just been enormous in terms of the time it saved and like I said, the community around it.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Emma Lewis:

The support that’s been provided with it.

Tim Paul:

That was really really nice to hear that. It’s so, so gratifying I think to all of us on the team when other people reuse our work.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Tim Paul:

It’s one of the best things about working in government and in the public sector is that we can be happy about the fact that people are stealing our work. In fact we kind of strongly encourage it. So yeah, that’s, that’s great. It’s, it’s doing exactly what we hoped it would do.

So we’ve known for quite a while there’s huge potential beyond central government for, for the work that we’re doing, not just ourselves but alongside our contributors, to, to benefit local government and even as far as international governments. We’ve, we’ve got I think we know about 5 different local authorities which are in some way using GOV.UK Frontend, and we’ve got a couple of other governments from other countries who are using our work as well. So this is really really good.

Laura Stevens:

And in both those clips, both Emma and Adam, they both spoke about accessibility and how having it tested to the level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG.

Tim Paul:

Yes.

Laura Stevens:

Is that right?

Tim Paul:

That’s correct, yeah.

So this is, this has turned out to be a huge driver I think for adoption of the Design System because there this standard called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, it’s been around for a while, it’s in version 2.1 now. But the thing that has changed recently is that meeting level double A of that standard has now become an actual requirement, not just of central government services but the whole of the public sector by this September.

And so suddenly there’s a real strong need by teams everywhere to make their services fully accessible. And that’s pretty difficult. There’s lots you can do it make it easier like building in accessibility from the very beginning is probably the best way you can make your life easier here. Retrofitting accessibility is, is always a terrible experience for everybody.

But it turns out that making even simple things like buttons fully accessible across the full range of assistive technologies, devices and browsers, is actually pretty involved, difficult work. You’ve got lots of testing to do, you’ve got, the state of assistive technologies at the moment is still probably not as mature as it could be, which means there are lots of weird little bugs and kinks.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Tim Paul:

Funny little idiosyncrasies across all the different technology stacks. And so the work that we do in the centre is to do all of that testing and iron out all of those bugs and figure out how to make these things work across all of the assistive techs that we know that people use. And that level of work, that depth of work is probably not a thing that an individual service team could or should be spending its time doing. They’ve got the full service to worry about and they really shouldn’t be spending the amount of time that we can spend on, on making low level components fully accessible.

So it’s one of the things I’m happiest about because it’s something that we can really contribute to.

Laura Stevens:

And in, you mentioned as well that we’re not only helping central government, local, NHS but we’re also going abroad as well. And in March 2019, the New Zealand Digital Service published a blog about how they used the GOV.UK Design System to help create their own. So, and they had a quote in there saying: “We decided not to reinvent the wheel so we’re building on the GOV.UK Design System, a system with years of development. It’s a mature and proven Design System with full rigour and accessibility and testing”. So what does having that sort of reach and international impact feel like for you and the team here at GDS?

Tim Paul:

It’s really nice, it’s kind of flattering. Yeah it also feels a little bit scary.

I think Emma alluded to the issue of having dependencies and breaking changes and things like design systems. And that’s a thing that we’ve experienced as well. So if you’re working on a service team in an agile environment, then the idea that you can iterate rapidly and fail fast and all of that, it’s great, it works really well. It doesn’t quite translate when you’re building a central code resource because if you’re iterating rapidly, if you’re failing fast, if you’re making lots of breaking changes, then you’re disrupting the work of everybody who’s relying on your code base. And so we end up being a lot more conservative, we end up moving slower and at a much measured kind of careful pace. And that’s because we are intensely aware that everybody using our tools is going to be disrupted by any breaking changes we make.

And so when we hear that you know, another country or local government authority is using our service, it’s really really good but it really hammers home to us how careful we have to be not to break things for them as well.

Laura Stevens:

Do you think there’s a way of fixing that? Or is that just an inherent problem with having a central design system?

Tim Paul:

I think probably the way to address that challenge is to not try to create some uber design system for the world, which would be the egotistical response to that challenge.

You know the internet is supposed to be made up of many parts loosely coupled, and that’s what we should be trying to do here. So making sure that people can use our tools as the foundation for the things they need, and that we have nice productive feedback mechanisms between, between those. That’s probably the right way to approach this.

Laura Stevens:

Is there anything where you’ve seen the Design System used in a way that you just never expected it to be used, or it popped up somewhere that you...

Tim Paul:

We’re, we’re sometimes asked about doesn’t, don’t, don’t these products make it really easy to make fake versions of GOV.UK, which is a really valid question. And the answer is yes, they do. They make it easy for anybody to make things look like GOV.UK. But to be honest if your motivations are to trick people, then it’s always been pretty easy to make fake versions of a website.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Tim Paul:

So we’re not making it that much easier for the scammers, but we’re making it a lot easier for the service teams who are building legitimate services. But yes, every now and then we see, we see a dodgy looking GOV.UK site and we see our own code in there, and that’s kind of weird but you know there’s a whole bit of GDS which is dedicated to spotting that stuff and getting it taken down so.

Laura Stevens:

So thank you so much to Tim to coming on today and also to Emma and to Adam for talking about the GOV.UK Design System. And you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And you can read the transcript of Podbean.

So thank you again and goodbye.

Tim Paul:

Thank you.

GDS Podcast #15: Accessibility Jan 30, 2020

We talk about the legal duty to make websites and apps accessible, and how accessibility regulations make services better for everyone.

The transcript for the episode follows:

------------

Laura Stevens:

Hello, and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast, and the first one of the decade. My name is Laura Stevens and for regular listeners of the podcast, I now have a new job title as Creative Content Producer here at GDS.

And for the first podcast of 2020 we’re going to be speaking about accessibility. Everybody has to interact with government, people cannot shop around and go to different providers so there’s an obligation for government to make its services as accessible as possible. At GDS accessibility is considered in everything we do. It’s one of our design principles, we publish accessibility guidance on GOV.UK and we want to make sure there are no barriers preventing someone from using something.

And to tell us more about accessibility at GDS, I have Rianna Fry and Chris Heathcote. Please can you both introduce yourselves and what you do here at GDS. So Rianna first.

Rianna Fry:

Yeah, so I’m Rianna and I am a Senior Campaign Manager here at GDS. So my job is helping to tell more people about all the great stuff that GDS does. And one of the main things at the moment is accessibility.

Laura Stevens:

And Chris?

Chris Heathcote:

Hi, I’m Chris Heathcote, I’m a Product Manager and Designer at GDS. So I’m running the team that will be monitoring websites for accessibility going forward.

Laura Stevens:

Yes, and there’ll be more on that later in the podcast.

So I just thought a good place to start, because as I mentioned GDS has to design for everyone, so to give a sort of sense of the needs of the population we’re designing for I have a few statements for you both. And I’m going to ask you whether they’re true or false.

So true or false, 12 million people in the UK have some kind of hearing loss.

Rianna Fry:

True.

Chris Heathcote:

That sounds true.

Laura Stevens:

It is true. Second statement. 6.4 million people in the UK have dyslexia.

Chris Heathcote:

That sounds true as well.

Rianna Fry:

Yeah, it does.

Laura Stevens:

It is true as well. And thirdly, 2 million people in the UK have significant sight loss.

Rianna Fry:

True.

Chris Heathcote:

At least 2 million I would have thought, yes.

Laura Stevens:

Yes. You are correct, they’re all true.

Rianna Fry:

Do we, do we win something?

Laura Stevens:

I’m afraid I didn’t bring a prize and now I’m being shamed, I’m sorry.

Rianna Fry:

Right, OK. Sorry.

Laura Stevens:

But all these stats are from the GDS accessibility empathy lab. And this is a space at GDS which helps raise awareness about accessibility, and also is an assistive technology testing space. And there’s another poster in the lab that says when you design services, you need to think about permanent, temporary and situational accessibility needs.

What does that mean?

Rianna Fry:

So I think I’ll touch on situational accessibility needs. So for me that was one of the most sort of light bulb moments when I came to work on this project with Chris and the rest of the team. So often when we talk about accessibility, I think a lot people naturally think about disabilities that people might have, like motor disabilities or sight impairments for example.

But obviously at some point, they’re, we’re in situations that prevent us from being able to use digital services, perhaps in the way that they’re initially intended. So if you just think about social media. So my background is in digital marketing so thinking about videos. Obviously captions are massive and subtitles for videos because when you’re on the tube, you can’t always hear what you’re listening to.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Rianna Fry:

So thinking about those kind of things was really sort of key for me, you know. When we build things or create content, we want as many people to see and use these things as possible. So considering all the factors that may prevent people from using something in one way, I think that’s what it’s about.

Chris Heathcote:

Yeah, I mean at GDS we’ve always considered that wherever there is a web browser people will try and use that to interact with government.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Chris Heathcote:

So right from the start, we saw people doing passport applications on their PlayStations. And we’ve seen…

Laura Stevens:

Really?

Chris Heathcote:

Yeah. So we’ve seen mobiles, you know are now more than 50% of traffic often. And so we, what we, you know accessibility is just one way to make sure that people can always use the services and the content that we provide.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah I think definitely what you’re saying about mobiles as well. Because I looked up Matt Hobbs, who’s the Head of Frontend Development at GDS, tweeted about the November 2019 GOV.UK stats, and mobile was over 50%. It was 52.86%.

Rianna Fry:

Absolutely, yeah.

Laura Stevens:

And I guess part of this is also thinking like why is it particularly important that government is a leader in accessible services. Like what, why is that so important?

Chris Heathcote:

So we do have an obligation for that.

Rianna Fry:

Laura Stevens:

And sort of on that, or leading on from that, I wanted us to talk about GDS as leaders in digital accessibility. So at GDS, we’ve, we set up the cross-government accessibility community, the Head of Accessibility for government sits at GDS and as mentioned, it’s one of our design principles. So we want to design for everyone.

And from your work here at GDS, do you have any sort of examples of where GDS has led in accessibility? So for instance you were talking there about assistive technology, and I know that GOV.UK, there’s a lot of work done on GOV.UK to make sure that it works with assistive technology.

Chris Heathcote:

Yes, I mean especially as sort of the standards for accessibility have changed over the last 7, 8 years that GDS has existed. We’ve always made sure that our code works on everything and for all assistive technology. And also we’ve made you know, now with the [GOV.UK] Design System made it possible for the, all services in government to take that and so they don’t have to do the work as well.

Laura Stevens:

So how can people use the Design System, if they’re listening and they don’t quite know what the Design System is. Can you explain it a bit please?

Chris Heathcote:

Yes. So I mean if you go to the GOV.UK Design System site, it provides basically all the code you need to make something look and feel like GOV.UK. You know we’ve always said that GOV.UK is a single domain for government, and that services in central government should look and feel like GOV.UK and be linked from GOV.UK.

And if you use our code, it means you get all the usability and accessibility benefits that we’ve spent a lot of time and effort to make sure work really well. And you get that basically for free.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah, and it’s also I guess you’re sharing the, as you were just talking about, you’re sharing the hard work. So if you’re a smaller organisation or you don’t have that sort of technical capability, you’re saying it’s already there. We can, you can just go to the...

Chris Heathcote:

Yes, we saw that every, basically every service in government was spending 6 months or more, you know writing code that’s basically the same.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Chris Heathcote:

That’s why the Design System exists, and is so popular.

Laura Stevens:

And have you seen any sort of examples of…

Rianna Fry:

Well I think, I think you mentioned this near the beginning as well, the accessibility empathy lab.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Rianna Fry:

So that’s sort of a space for people to really experience some of the impairments that people may have, and really put them in that space. And I think that really helps to bring things to life. Because it’s really easy to forget or not consider what some needs might be. And I’ve been along to some of the tours there and it’s, it’s great to see people in all different roles coming from all different kinds of organisations sort of using the different personas that are in that lab, to think differently about how web pages should be built.

And also even you know, the words that we use. And I think that sort of in line with what Chris was saying, there’s also the, the style guide. Because we often forget as a communicator, plain English is really important, that’s like a basic thing.

Laura Stevens:

Yes.

Rianna Fry:

That most people know about and practice, but don’t necessarily consider as part of accessibility. And I know when I worked at the council we used the GOV.UK Style Guide as like the basis because we knew that there was a lot of research and it’s ongoing.

And also like as Chris said, you know it’s not just people within GDS that inform this work. It’s across government and also some of the wider public sector. There’s great communities that are sharing really great work in this space, and that all feeds in.

Laura Stevens:

No I think that’s really interesting as well what you’re saying because you came from a local government background into central government.

Rianna Fry:

Yeah.

Laura Stevens:

And you were able to use some of those sort of GDS or cross-government tools, and you were able to pick them up and use them. That’s really good.

Rianna Fry:

Yeah, absolutely yeah.

Laura Stevens:

And, and you mentioned there that a lot of the work in accessibility it’s not, it’s not, even though a lot of it sits at GDS, it’s contributed to by people across the accessibility community across government.

We’ve got a cross-government accessibility community, which has more than 1,200 people in the Google group. And are you involved in the community Chris or?

Chris Heathcote:

Well I’m on the email..

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Chris Heathcote:

And I will, and I respond to questions about the accessibility monitoring. Yeah, I mean it’s I think, because accessibility cuts across so many different jobs in government, so it isn’t just the people that, that do accessibility auditing day in and day out and,but we now have those across government.

But you know, all frontend developers, all designers, all user researchers tend to need to know something about accessibility, and have questions and even though they’re not you know, full time professionals in this, the community’s there to help everyone understand what we’re looking for and how to consider accessibility in everything they do.

Laura Stevens:

And do you think that’s sort of been a shift because Rianna was mentioning like how in the lab, you get people of all different job titles in, and that’s sort of shift in making accessibility part of everyone’s job, not just people who have accessibility in their job title. Like neither of you 2 have accessibility in job title for instance.

Chris Heathcote:

Yeah. I mean I think that’s been a big change like it was with design before and user research. It isn’t just a separate specialist, even though we need the specialists to you know, do the work.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah yeah, of course.

Chris Heathcote:

It’s something that everyone has to consider as they do their job. So especially like frontend developers, we expect them to be testing their code for accessibility at, just as they are doing it. Which means that when they do do an audit and a specialist comes in and looks at the site, there shouldn’t be any surprises.

Rianna Fry:

And I think that’s one of the, so Richard Morton, who’s the Interim Head of Accessibility across government, that’s one of the things that he says, is that actually the ambition for his role is that there won’t, in the future, need to be specialists necessarily because everybody has a, a level of understanding about it.

Obviously that’s a long way off.

Laura Stevens:

And also I guess he doesn’t want to talk himself out of a job.

Rianna Fry:

Yeah! Exact--and that I mean, he does follow it up with that.

But I think, I think that’s what’s really nice about the community is that you have got people, so for example the designer that I’ve worked on, Charlotte, with the campaign for accessibility.

Laura Stevens:

Is this Charlotte Downs?

Rianna Fry:

Charlotte Downs, yeah. So since she’s been working that, she’s just sort of, her mind has been blown by all this information that’s out there.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Rianna Fry:

And she’s now a go to person with GDS for design - accessible design - particularly around PDFs. And I think that’s the thing, sort of as you sort of get into it, it’s really easy to become really passionate about accessibility because it’s all about doing the right thing. And I think particularly within GDS, and actually most digital based roles I would say, it’s all about users. And accessibility, that’s what it’s all about.

Laura Stevens:

I’ve heard people refer to the PDF mountain in government. What does that mean and why is that related to accessibility?

Chris Heathcote:

I mean right from the start of GOV.UK, we saw that central government alone was publishing pretty much everything as PDFs. And PDFs vary in quality and vary in accessibility as well. It is possible to make more accessible PDFs. But generally we’ve always said things should be webpages, content should be on webpages and in HTML. But, and in central government we’ve been moderately successful in that. There’s still a lot of PDFs being published but we’ve reduced that, and especially in services, they tend not to use PDFs anymore.

So I think legislation is a good time for, for all public sector organisations to reflect on that and see how they can change some of their processes and how they publish information.

Laura Stevens:

So changing a mountain into a molehill.

Chris Heathcote:

Yes. I mean we, I think you know there will always be some PDFs for certain reasons but the number of PDFs being published should go down.

Rianna Fry:

So just thinking about stuff like that, as Chris says, changing processes. Is there a reason why we have to have this as a PDF format, why can’t it be HTML? I mean it, the campaign, it, it was the same you know.

How do we make the supporter pack in HTML, it doesn’t look as pretty, which for creative people might be something, like a bone of contention, but ultimately we want people to be able to use it. So creating things and making things available in different formats if you have to have a PDF, is the right thing to do.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah and I think that’s sort of interesting as well with the creative side of things. Because obviously as government though you need to make it’s as accessible as possible and I think GOV.UK has won design awards so it shows that like, accessibility doesn’t mean that like design goes out the window, not at all. Like I think it was Fast Company put us at the top 10 designs of the decades in the 2010s. So..

Chris Heathcote:

Yeah I mean even when we won the Design Museum's Design of the Year award.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Chris Heathcote:

You know we were on, we were called boring.com the next day. But you know we have a lot of designers working here in GDS, and there is an awful lot of design built into it even though it may look a bit plainer than other websites. But that’s because we’re totally focussed on usability and accessibility.

Rianna Fry:

There’s no point having a beautiful website if no-one can use it

Laura Stevens:

I would just sort of, what I would like to sort of talk about is how accessible services help everyone.

For instance we have GOV.UK content that’s now accessible via voice assistance. So I think there’s now more than 13,000 pieces of GOV.UK content that’s available via Google Home or Amazon Alexa. And why is that good for people, like why, why is that good having these sort of pieces anyone can access via voice?

Chris Heathcote:

I mean there’s a lot of people that can’t use a standard computer and a standard web browser. I mean and that, that ranges from having disabilities through to just not understanding how a computer works and not wanting to understand how a computer works.

So being able to access government information if not services yet, just through voice I think is, is really important.

Rianna Fry:

I was just going to say, personally as well, so a, a relative of mine recently was unwell and lost his sight. And he has an Alexa and so although it was still a difficult transition for him, him still being able to access things as soon as he got home really helped.

Laura Stevens:
Yeah.

Rianna Fry:

And I think you know like Chris said, not everyone wants to use a computer as well.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah, yeah.

Rianna Fry:

Or if you’re sort of busy and out and about, sort of that situational side of things, it just makes things more accessible and more available for people, which is great. It’s easier right?

Laura Stevens:

Chris, you alluded to this earlier that the sort of regulations have changed since GDS begun. And while accessibility has always been part of GDS’ work, there are new regulations that have come in quite recently, and these regulations mean public sector organisations have a legal duty to make sure their websites and apps meet accessibility requirements.

And can you tell me a bit about them and sort of, what the key dates are with that and…

Chris Heathcote:

Yes. So this is a European-wide initiative that started in 2016. It’s now UK law. And any new websites that a public sector body makes, that's certainly in public, needs to be accessible now. And they should also publish something called an accessibility statement on their website that says how accessible they are and how to get in contact with them if you find any issues with them.

But then the big deadline is 23 September 2020, when all public sector websites, old and new, need to be accessible.

Laura Stevens:

And how is this related to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which I called WCAG, but is that the correct way of pronouncing…

Chris Heathcote:

Yeah.

Laura Stevens:

...that acronym? So yeah, the web--oh sorry.

Chris Heathcote:

So WCAG is a W3C [World Wide Web Consortium] standard about web content accessibility. And it’s been updated pretty recently to version 2.1. And the standard that the legislation and we require is something called double A. So there are 3, 3 levels of accessibility mentioned in the guidelines - A, double A and triple A.

And double A means that there should not be any major blockers to anyone being able to use the website.

Laura Stevens:

Will the regulations apply differently to different parts of the public sector, for instance central government or to schools or to healthcare?

Chris Heathcote:

There are some differences. The legislation makes some exemptions especially, there is partial exemptions for schools and nurseries.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Chris Heathcote:

Although the way it’s written, actually they’re not quite as exempt as you might think.

Laura Stevens:

Chris Heathcote:

Because a lot of people are doing stuff online, and if the online is the only route to them that has to be accessible.

Laura Stevens:

Yes.

Chris Heathcote:

But generally the exemptions are, are quite small.

Rianna Fry:

I think what’s really important as well is that, I mean it’s this is sort of easy, easier for me to say I guess because I work in an organisation that really cares about accessibility and already has accessibility built in to a lot of the ways of working. But I think for me it’s sort of helpful to think about this as an opportunity. So I think this creates a really good excuse to educate people about why that’s important and also now that there’s law behind this...

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Rianna Fry:

that feeds into the Equality Act, and I mean that’s really important. If you’re going to pay to build a website, or spend a load of your time creating content, then you want to make sure that people can access that content or access that, access that service.

Why, why would you want to try and get around that? Because all you’re doing is reducing the amount of people that can access it. So I think you know, although I understand that sometimes there are reasons for that like time. I think this is about behaviour change, and also education, helping people to understand that. If you’re, if you’re opening your service up, you’re reducing costs that may be elsewhere because you’re making your website more efficient and work for people so that they can self-serve.

Laura Stevens:

And so do you think that’s why having an accessibility statement is a really good thing? Because you know how you’re saying this is a way of creating behaviour change. By the process of going through and creating accessibility statement, which is this statement on the website that says, this is why our service is accessible. And it also has to say, if I’m right, this isn’t accessible but this is how we’re working.

Rianna Fry:

Absolutely.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah because GOV.UK has an accessibility statement, doesn’t it?

Chris Heathcote:

Yeah. What we are trying to do is make sites accessible so pub--, so you know getting the information together and publishing an accessibility statement is a really good start to making sure that the website is accessible and remains as accessible as it changes.

Rianna Fry:

I was just going to say you know, I think that shows a commitment to making a change.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Rianna Fry:

I think it’s unrealistic to expect all websites overnight to be completely accessible, because some of this stuff involves a lot of legacy things.

Laura Stevens:

Yes.

Rianna Fry:

And also PDFs, a lot of PDFs. But this, I, as I understand it, and I’m not an expert so Chris you might correct me on this, but that’s statements about saying you know, these areas aren’t right but this is our plan to fix them. And if you can’t access information here’s who you need to contact to get that.

Laura Stevens:

Yes. And that's an important part, you have that contact.

Rianna Fry:

Absolutely, yeah.

Laura Stevens:

A name or an email address that you can go forward to.

And this actually leads me nicely on, because this was, we chose accessibility in January because there was a loose news hook for the podcast that January is when enforcement and reporting will begin. And this is quite a big job to undertake so Chris could you kind of talk to me about this next bit of your role?

Chris Heathcote:

Yeah so to make sure that people are taking the legislation seriously, in each country in Europe, so it’s not just the UK, there is a monitoring body set up. In the UK it was decided that GDS would host that. And that’s the team I’m setting up at the moment.

So we have an obligation in, in the legislation as well. So we will be monitoring a number of public sector websites. It’s about...by 2023, it’ll be about 2,000 websites a year.

And what we do is most of that will be automated checking using automated accessibility checkers. But we know that that only covers 30 to 40% of accessibility issues and WCAG points. So we’ll be doing a bit of manual checking as well and, and for a certain amount of websites, we have to do a sort of fuller audit that’s more like a traditional accessibility audit.

Laura Stevens:

And this is done on behalf of the Minister for Cabinet Office isn’t it?

Chris Heathcote:

Yes. So yeah, they’re the person that's mentioned in the legislation. And yes, we’ll be reporting to them about what we find.

Laura Stevens:

And when you go through these websites, how do you get back in touch with them, do you create an accessibility report, how does that work?

Chris Heathcote:

So, so what we’re going to do is from the testing that we do, we’ll write a report. We’ll send that to the public sector organisation and start a conversation with them really about do they understand the report, do they see the same issues that we’re seeing, and what they’re going to do to fix them.

And hopefully that’s a constructive conversation and we can provide technical support where needed.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah, and would you also I guess point to some of the stuff on GOV.UK? There’s accessibility guidance there as well. Would you be using that?

Chris Heathcote:

Yeah absolutely. I mean, I mean both, both the stuff that we publish for central government like the Design System and the Service Manual. But also you know we are looking also for resources around the W3C publish and things like training that, that are starting to happen that we can point people to so that you know, they, they can fix the issues as quickly as possible.

Laura Stevens:

Say if a website has been found with accessibility issues, what would be a way of enforcing the findings of a report?

Chris Heathcote:

So we’re working with the Equality and Human Rights Commission in England, Wales and Scotland, and for Northern Ireland it’s the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland. They are actually doing the enforcing on accessibility because it, it, falls under the Equality Act, so they’ve been enforcing accessibility for, for a while. And so that’s their role.

However we will be enforcing whether they, the sites have accessibility statements or not because that’s an additional thing on top of the Equality Act.

Laura Stevens:

So you’re gonna be very busy over the next year and onwards from there.

Chris Heathcote:

Yes. I mean it’s never ending. Yes we’re recruiting at the moment - the Audit Team.

Laura Stevens:

Are you giving a plug on the podcast if anyone’s listening and they want to apply?

Chris Heathcote:

Well we will, we, we’ll certainly have some roles opening over the next year.

Laura Stevens:

And how will you find this sample of websites, or do we not know this yet?

Chris Heathcote:

We’ve spent quite a while coming up with a list of what is the public sector and what isn’t.

Laura Stevens:

Yes.

Chris Heathcote:

And also what websites they have. There’s another team in GDS called the Domain Management Team, who have also been trying to look at what websites government runs, and what the public sector runs. And they’re more tasked with making sure that the domains remain secure and are being used properly.

But you know this list hasn’t existed before. So we’ve also approached it, we’ve crea--we’ve gathered lots of open data that government publishes around public sector organisations. And we’re using that to create a sort of master list of the public sector that we will then sample against.

Laura Stevens:

Rianna you actually mentioned this earlier, and I know you’ve joined GDS relatively recently in the summer of last year. And sometimes I think accessibility can be landed on a person, one person in an organisation, and that it can feel quite overwhelming when suddenly there are regulations that people need to, and they need to learn a lot of knowledge quite quickly, how did you find that when you joined and you were given the accessibility campaign to manage? When you had to learn all this information, what did you find that was helpful or how did you find that process?

Rianna Fry:

Well I think I’ve been really lucky in that I was surrounded by experts at GDS.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Rianna Fry:

And also there is so much information on GOV.UK. And I mean, that’s not a plug, it’s true. And so like I said before, Charlotte Downs for example, she, when she, when we started working on this together she did a load of research on different things.

Because I mean, even once you know it, even once you’ve been through some training on how to create an accessible document. When you’re knocking together a document, it’s really easy to forget. Like I said, it’s behaviour change. So I think it’s about checking in with other people and asking other people to just check over content.

You know I remember when I first started working on this project and I sent out a survey and I made an assumption that it was accessible and it wasn’t. And that was..

Laura Stevens:

And it was a survey about accessibility?

Rianna Fry:

It was, yeah.

Laura Stevens:

Oh, yeah.

Rianna Fry:

I mean it was a steep learning curve. Thankfully it was only live for about 2 minutes before I noticed.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Rianna Fry:

And me and Richard [Morton] then worked together on some stuff, but I think that’s what it’s about, it’s about asking people to check in. And you know things aren’t always going to be perfect but that’s why it helps to be part of communities so that you’ve kind of got constructive friends

Laura Stevens:

Yes.

Rianna Fry:

that can give you constructive feedback on how you can improve what you're doing. So I think, yeah it’s about seeing what’s out there and speaking to people and asking people to, for feedback on what you’re doing.

Laura Stevens:

And I know we mentioned before the communities are very active, the blog posts are very active, but also so you’re running the campaign for accessibility, we’ve had 75,000 visits to the GOV.UK guidance since August 2019. And you’ve also created a campaigns pack, and is that for people, who who’s that for?

Rianna Fry:

So that’s for supporters. So for us, as Chris said this is a massive job, there are so many organisations that need to know about this. And the people that are potentially responsible for managing a public sector website aren’t necessarily in digital roles. They’re not necessarily people that GDS are talking to or aware of.

So if you think about things like GP surgeries for example, they fall into the remit of public sector. Now my GP surgery definitely doesn’t have a digital team. So the, the point of the supporter pack is to try and get especially central government teams onboard, their engagement and communications teams on board and talking to people about the regulations.

So we’re trying to make it easier by bringing that information into one place, which is all the point of the campaign page. So we’ve tried to break it down into 4 steps. So signposting people to guidance that will help them to understand whether or not they’re going to be impacted. Believe it or not, some people aren’t sure whether or not they’re classed as a public sector organisation.

Then secondly deciding how to check the accessibility of their websites. Then making a plan to fix any problems and lastly publishing an accessibility statement, which really summarises the findings and the plans to fix any issues.

Laura Stevens:

And you’re saying there that this is all in one place, where is that place?

Rianna Fry:

So it’s on GOV.UK/accessibility-regulations.

Laura Stevens:

So if, so if I’m from the public sector I can go there and just…

Rianna Fry:

Absolutely. Yeah, it’s an open web...

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Rianna Fry:

...webpage. And I’m, I mean my information’s on the supporter pack so if there are any campaign people out there that want to talk to me, then I’m more than happy to share any additional resources that we’ve got, that we’re using internally and whatever else.

Laura Stevens:

And do you have any sort of top tips, or from your work you’ve done in sort of starting this work on accessibility. Are there any sort of things where you’ve spoken to other organisations, you’ve been like oh that’s a good thing to share. Any best practice or anything like that?

Chris Heathcote:

I mean I think that, that it isn’t just all..it isn’t just a single thing that people need to do. You know we understand that people have websites and they might need to retrofit some accessibility onto that but it is really about changing processes.

So especially when we talk to people like local authorities, the number of people that publish on the website is quite large and it’s educating them to know how to make good PDFs, how to write well, how to, how generally how accessibility of content works. And making sure there’s a process to make sure that that happens. That needs to be in place as much as actually fixing the website and the technical aspects of accessibility.

Rianna Fry:

And I think education is really important. So I think what helps is to tell, help colleagues across organisations to understand why they need to do certain things.

And I think it helps that people, people have an awareness of the Equality Act, and understand when something is law. So I think that helps and I would say to try and use that to, yeah really educate people and try and get people on board internally.

Laura Stevens:

So as a closing segment I thought it might be nice to ask both of you if there’s something in particular that motivates you to work in accessibility, or if there’s something you’ve come across in your work that’s made a real impact on you, and sort of galvanised you to keep going on this.

Chris Heathcote:

I mean I think we, what we see is when we talk to users, and we talk to users all the time, is it gives people independence. People can do things for themselves, they can self-serve, they can see the content on GOV.UK. And it’s, it’s something that they’ve you know, moving digitally has actually changed people’s lives.

Rianna Fry:

Yeah, I think I’d echo that you know. And it’s important that organisations know about the regulations. So supporting those really hard working digital colleagues that spend a load of time researching what, what works for users, and a load of time trying to tell other people how to, you know why PDFs shouldn’t be used.

So I think for me, that’s really important. And also just you know that lightbulb, seeing that lightbulb moment of people going ‘oh god, yeah we really should be doing this and being able to signpost them to the tools to be able to kind of put it into action.

Laura Stevens:

So thank you to Rianna and thank you to Chris for coming on the podcast today. I hope you’ve enjoyed being on the GDS podcast, a first for both of you.

Chris Heathcote:

Yeah. Thanks for having us.

Rianna Fry:

Yeah. Thanks for having us. And thank you for choosing accessibility to be your first podcast of the decade.

Laura Stevens:

Well I do.

Rianna Fry:

Not just the year, the decade! I mean it feels like it’s really significant. This is going to be a podcast that people remember.

Laura Stevens:

And so yeah, you can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And the transcripts are available on Podbean.

So thank you both again, and goodbye!

Chris Heathcote:

Bye.

Rianna Fry:

Thanks!

GDS Podcast #14: GDS Quiz 2019 Dec 30, 2019

In the final podcast episode of the year, we look back at what has happened over the past 12 months at GDS in 2019.

The transcript of the episode follows:

------------

Sarah Stewart:

Hello and welcome to the GDS Podcast. I’m Sarah Stewart. Today’s podcast, the final one of 2019, is a special one, it’s GDS’s Year in Review. Last year, Angus and I went through the year very methodically picking out our highlights. It was quite fun. It’s my last podcast, so I wanted to do something better than quite fun. And what’s better than quite fun? A quiz! I’m going to host a quiz!

So I’m going to be asking 24 questions about GDS, 2 for each month. Obviously, the person with the most points will win. Producer Emily is going to keep score. So let’s meet our contestants.

Contestant number one, what’s your name, what do you do and where are you from?

Laura Stevens:

So my name is Laura Stevens. I’m a writer here at GDS. And I’m from a small village in Surrey called Tadworth.

Sarah Stewart:

What’s Tadworth known for?

Laura Stevens:

So it’s not known for very much, so I had to look this up before I came on the podcast. But it was referenced in the ‘Doomsday Book’ so it’s very old. In the ‘Doomsday Book’ it was known as having woodland worth 4 hogs. So you know, I don’t really know like what --

Sarah Stewart:

What a sum!

Laura Stevens:

Yeah, like I don’t really know what that equates to but I thought it was quite a fun fact.

Sarah Stewart:

You don’t see hogs very much anymore.

Angus Montgomery:

How many trees per hog?

Sarah Stewart:

And what kind of tree?

Laura Stevens:

Yeah, and what kind of hog? I mean...

Angus Montgomery:

All good questions.

Sarah Stewart:

And Laura, what is your specialist subject at GDS would you say?

Laura Stevens:

So I would say my specialist subject would be design here at GDS. But I am wary of saying that because I know that Angus is also very into design and I feel like he may you know, show me up in this quiz and take all the design answers.

Sarah Stewart:

Which is a good segue into asking contestant number two, what’s your name and where do you come from?

Angus Montgomery:

Hello. I’m Angus Montgomery. I’m a Strategy Advisor and I live in Woodbridge in Suffolk.

Sarah Stewart:

Woodbridge. Isn’t that where the celebrities live?

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah. Well, it depends on your definition of celebrity, I suppose. So Woodbridge’s most famous son was Thomas Seckford, who was an advisor to Elizabeth I. More contemporary famous sons include Brian Eno and Charlie from Busted.

Sarah Stewart:

Oh my gosh.

Laura Stevens:

Is Charlie the one with the eyebrows?

Angus Montgomery:

I think so, yeah. The handsome one. He did a solo career.

Sarah Stewart:

Yes. Fightstar.

Angus Montgomery:

That’s it, yeah.

Laura Stevens:

That’s excellent Busted knowledge.

Sarah Stewart:

So Angus, what’s your specialist subject at GDS?

Angus Montgomery:

I don’t know, it sounds a bit creepy if I’m going to say it out loud but the people at GDS. Like I think that’s the thing that I’m most interested in, is all the people who work here and the things that they do.

Sarah Stewart:

So it’s good to meet you contestants.

Angus Montgomery:

Good to be here.

Sarah Stewart:

I need you to press the buzzer when you have the correct answer.

Cue the tense intro music Emily, Producer Emily. Let’s do this.

In January, we recorded a podcast with the Global Digital Marketplace team. They are helping to tackle corruption – a $2.6 trillion problem. The team visited 5 countries, talking to people at state and local level. Can you name all 5 countries? Laura.

Laura Stevens:

Okay. I think I’ve got this: South Africa, Malaysia, Colombia, Indonesia… I’m going to fall down on the last one!

Angus Montgomery:

I think I know the last one.

Laura Stevens:

What’s the last one?

Sarah Stewart:

No no no no, we can’t do that.

Angus Montgomery:

Oh.

Laura Stevens:

Oh so do I just..?

Sarah Stewart:

You’re compromising the integrity of the quiz.

Laura Stevens:

Do I get a hint or do I just…?

Sarah Stewart:

Here’s your clue. Its name also features in the name of its capital city. Massive clue...

The answer was Mexico.

Laura Stevens:

That’s really annoying.

Sarah Stewart:

Mexico City. Okay. So, I’m afraid no one can take a point from that.

Okay, next question. The first ever Services Week took place from 28th January to 1st February. It was a nationwide, cross-government event that explored how people could work together to deliver end-to-end user-focused services. Now, one of the workshops during Services Week was designed to improve online forms. It was a sell-out workshop but what was the name of that workshop? Angus.

Angus Montgomery:

Was it called Formapalooza?

Sarah Stewart:

Correct! One point to Angus.

Angus Montgomery:

Boom.

Laura Stevens:

First one on the scoreboard, you know.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah.

Sarah Stewart:

Okay, moving onto February now. In February, the GDS Academy turned 5 and launched a new course – Introduction to Artificial Intelligence [AI] in Government. Can you name an example of where AI is already being used in government? Laura.

Laura Stevens:

Aren’t we using it here at GDS to do supervised machine learning on GOV.UK?

Sarah Stewart:

Excellent, Laura. One point.

Laura Stevens:

Yes! Back in the game.

Sarah Stewart:

Next question. GovWifi is a common component that we all know and love. It provides free, secure wifi in public sector buildings. It’s used 2 million times a month. We noticed that it was also being accessed through which surprising device?

Laura Stevens:

Is it a device you would find in a home?

Sarah Stewart:

Yes, perhaps in the home of a teenager.

Laura Stevens:

PlayStation.

Sarah Stewart:

Correct answer. And actually, there were 6 PlayStations that were recorded.

Angus Montgomery:

Who’s brought a PlayStation in?

Sarah Stewart:

I don’t know. It could be in any public sector building.

Next question. The 11th competition for the GovTech Catalyst opened in March. Technology firms were invited to apply to develop innovative solutions for a challenge submitted by Oxfordshire County Council but what was that challenge?

Laura Stevens:

Was it something to do with the traffic system?

Sarah Stewart:

Yes.

Laura Stevens:

And driverless cars..?

Sarah Stewart:

Yes! Yes! Well done. Next question.

A team, a new team was created for GOV.UK to maintain and operate the GOV.UK platform. What was the new team called? Laura.

Laura Stevens:

Is it the Platform Health team?

Sarah Stewart:

Correct.

Sprint is GDS’s flagship conference. In April, we announced the agenda and that we would travel to 5 locations across the UK to discuss the impact of digital transformation on public services. Name those cities. Angus.

Angus Montgomery:

In order: Edinburgh, Cardiff, Leeds, Belfast and London.

Sarah Stewart:

One point to Angus. I almost said Laura then.

Laura Stevens:

Give me all the points.

Angus Montgomery:

Shall we have a check in on the scores?

Sarah Stewart:

Yeah, let’s check in on the scores. Wow. Okay. Laura’s ahead.

In April, there was an Unconference at GDS. People were invited to pitch and present on topics of their choosing. Richard Towers held a discussion on making coding more accessible to people at GDS. Which of the following is a programming language that we do not use at GDS? Ruby, Python, Node.js, Go, Java, C#, Scala. Angus.

Angus Montgomery:

C#?

Sarah Stewart:

Correct!

Laura Stevens:

Did you know that?

Angus Montgomery:

I don’t know that much about programming languages. But I’ve heard people talking about the other ones.

Sarah Stewart:

Okay. Well just to say, there was a trick answer in there as well. So for those people who really know their programming, we don’t use Scala anymore but there is an old project that’s still is in Scala but it’s not maintained.

Laura Stevens:

Ooh I like that, a trick question.

Sarah Stewart:

Okay so this is May. GOV.UK Pay – a free and secure online payment service for government and public sector organisations – took its first payment for a service in a language other than English. For half a point, what was that language? And, for the full point, how do you say seamless integration in that language? Laura.

Laura Stevens:

Welsh. I’m just going for the half point. I don’t, I don’t have the other half of it.

Angus Montgomery:

Not confident?

Laura Stevens:

I’m not confident. I’ve never spoken Welsh so I wouldn’t want to offend anybody. Do you have, do you know it?

Angus Montgomery:

No.

Laura Stevens:

I don’t know. You knew about programming languages, so I thought you might also have-

Angus Montgomery:

Welsh knowledge?

Laura:

Yeah, Welsh knowledge..

Angus Montgomery:

The two don’t always go together.

Sarah Stewart:

Okay. Well, I’ve got it written down here and I don’t want to offend anyone either. It’s been quite a good year for common components, has it not?

Angus Montgomery:

It has. So, I mean, as well as GOV.UK Pay, you’ve got GOV.UK Notify, which is a great success and is used by more than half the local authorities across the UK.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah. It helps them do things like sending letters, which can be really time-consuming and where mistakes can be made.

Sarah Stewart:

Okay. With changing regulations affecting public sector accessibility requirements, we advised how to publish an accessibility statement but where can you find that? Angus.

Angus Montgomery:

GOV.UK.

Sarah Stewart:

Yes! In June, we’re halfway through.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah!

Sarah Stewart:

How fun.

In June, a strategy and a guide were published. What was the name of that strategy and what was the name of the guide? I need the official names, please.

Laura Stevens:

I think the first one is the Government Technology Innovation Strategy then it’s ‘A Guide to Using AI in the Public Sector’?

Sarah Stewart:

Correct. Laura has got the full point.

In June, Kevin Cunnington, GDS’s Director General stepped down after 3 years leading the organisation. He took a new role on, at the International Government Service, and Alison Pritchard was named as Interim DG [Director General]. Can you tell me where in the world she was when she was offered the job? Angus.

Angus Montgomery:

I think she was near Madagascar, wasn’t she, in the Indian Ocean?

Sarah Stewart:

I...I don’t think I can accept that.

Angus Montgomery:

Oh. She was on a boat in in, at sea.

Sarah Stewart:

And well it...I’m going to accept Indian Ocean because she was sailing on a boat somewhere between Darwin and Christmas Island. So I would have accepted Timor Sea or the Indian Ocean.

Okay, so technically this happened in June, July was a little bit quiet.

So GDS’s step by step work on GOV.UK won a D&AD Award for Service Design. Please can you name my favourite step by step journey on GOV.UK? Angus.

Angus Montgomery:

Is it Reporting Found Treasure?

Sarah Stewart:

Correct!

Laura Stevens:

I mean, even if I’d got in first, I would have actually been wrong. I thought it was actually Bring Your Pet to the UK.

Sarah Stewart:

Where would I be bringing it from?

Laura Stevens:

I don’t know. You might have bought your pet abroad.

Sarah Stewart:

Oh yeah. I actually did look into dog rescue in Greece.

Laura Stevens:

So you know, clearly I could have been right. But alas, it was more finding treasure.

Sarah Stewart:

So what’s so good about step by step?

Laura Stevens:

Well, there are now 47 live, and obviously, it’s really good that they are winning awards and everything but also they’re being, they’re really helping people. They are also helping the other parts of GOV.UK like our voice assistant work. So now you can ask your Alexa or Google Home if you want to learn to drive a car. And yeah, it's helping people where they need it.

And it’s quite like, when I spoke to Kate [Ivey-Williams] and Sam [Dub] about it, Kate was saying what motivated her is that ease to make government like, as invisible as possible. So say you’re dealing with a very distressing situation, like somebody has passed away, you don’t want to be like dealing with any government admin at that point. And so if the step by step can just give you the answers that you need and tell you very clearly, that’s a really helpful thing to do for users.

Sarah Stewart:

What is your favourite step by step journey, Laura?

Laura Stevens:

My favourite step by step journey is quite a boring one but I like it because I’m on the video for it. It’s How to Drive a Car. I feature saying it into a phone. Then it got screened at Sprint 18.

Sarah Stewart:

Wow.

Laura Stevens:

So you know, me in this jumper, it’s quite an old jumper. I didn’t really expect to be used in filming that day. It’s been immortalised.

Sarah Stewart:

So if you want to have a visual picture of Laura, if you want to connect the voice to the face, watch that journey. It’s on YouTube.

In July we released, oh this is, actually, this next question could be in Laura’s advantage, just given your specialist subject for design. In July, we released new updates to the colours and font on GOV.UK. The GOV.UK colour palette is made up of 7 colours – grey, black, blue, red, yellow, green and white. Which 2 colours weren’t updated? Angus.

Angus Montgomery:

Black and white?

Sarah Stewart:

Correct!

Laura Stevens:

That is great knowledge.

Sarah Stewart:

Angus is in the lead.

Angus Montgomery:

Yes!

Sarah Stewart:

Wow.

Laura Stevens:

Oh so I need to make a comeback?

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah, Laura needs to make a comeback.

Laura Stevens:

Is that because he’s got lots of half points? Trying hard but...

Sarah Stewart:

He’s not committing.

Angus Montgomery:

What’s that meant to mean?

Sarah Stewart:

In August we talked about work we had to do following July’s reshuffle. When there is a reshuffle, GOV.UK needs to update the information as quickly as possible. True or false – the GOV.UK team knows this information before the public?

Laura Stevens:

False.

Sarah Stewart:

Correct. They find out at the same time as everyone else.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah July...during the reshuffle in July, because it was quite like a big change and the changes were coming quite like quickly, the team really had to step up. And so that’s working late nights, making sure that GOV.UK is always like the canonical source of information.

Sarah Stewart:

Yeah.

Laura Stevens:

So they had to make updates to 100 individual ministers’ GOV.UK roles. They had to update ministers’ biographies. They had to add profiles to GOV.UK for people who hadn’t worked for Government before. They had to reorder the list of ministers on 22 department pages. And they had to reorder the Government Ministers page. And obviously there’s a lot of eyes on GDS, well on GOV.UK and GDS’s team, GDS’s work through that. So yeah, they did really well.

Sarah Stewart:

Go team. Ok, next question.

Alison took up the role of DG [Director General] at GDS and wrote an introductory blog post sharing a little bit about her past. It’s incredibly well written. Alison has a fantastic background in public service but what was her very first job serving the public?

Angus Montgomery:

I feel like I know this.

Sarah Stewart:

It was in the blog post, if you read it.

Angus Montgomery:

I don’t know if it was her very first job but she was Minister Responsible for Cage Fighting at one stage, wasn’t she?

Laura Stevens:

That’s quite a high entry as your first job. Minister for Cage Fighting.

Angus Montgomery:

Not Minister, obviously. She was a senior civil servant responsible for cage fighting in some capacity.

Laura Stevens:

She was pulling pints…?

Sarah Stewart:

You can’t give them clues.

Angus Montgomery:

I thought you said first job in the civil service.

Sarah Stewart:

No.

Angus Montgomery:

Oh, first job.

Laura Stevens:

No. It was first job serving the public.

Angus Montgomery:

Oh so serving the public.

Laura Stevens:

Is this a pun?

Sarah Stewart:

Yes.

Laura Stevens:

Oh!

Angus Montgomery:

You’re operating on a level that I’m not!

Sarah Stewart:

Yes! She was a barmaid when she was eight.

Laura Stevens:

Oh. Is that...

Angus Montgomery:

Is that legal?

Laura Stevens:

Do we need to check in on that?

Sarah Stewart:

It was…

Angus Montgomery:

Do we need to check on the legality of that claim?

Laura Stevens:

You need to investigate some pub wherever she grew up.

Sarah Stewart:

It was her family pub and she just served soft drinks.

Sarah Stewart:

Ok, so September. Plans for a new permanent secretary level Government Chief Digital Information Officer (GCDIO) were announced at Sprint. Alison said that GCDIO was a bit of a mouthful, so what was the title shortened to? Angus.

Angus Montgomery:

She calls them ‘The Big G’.

Sarah Stewart:

Correct. Adding that it incorporates a sense of scale and seniority for that particular post.

Mark Hurrell, the former Head of Design for GOV.UK and the Head of Graphic Design at GDS wrote the most popular blog post in Design in Government blog history. What was it about? Laura.

Laura Stevens:

So I feel like I need to claw this back after Angus took my specialist subject earlier. Is it the post about the design principles posters?

Sarah Stewart:

Correct. Yes, well done.

Laura Stevens:

There was also a very nice… we can plug the Instagram here as well, because I believe Roger Valentine did a very nice animation about those posts as well.

Sarah Stewart:

Oh.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Sarah Stewart:

Great. In October, 2 members of the Sustainability Network – Emily Labram and Will Pearson – estimated the maximum amount of CO2 that GDS produces. How many tonnes of CO2 did they estimate we produced? Laura.

Laura Stevens:

Was it 4,000?

Sarah Stewart:

Correct!

Laura Stevens:

Ah! That’s so much.

Sarah Stewart:

That’s a lot but it’s an important piece of work. It’s good to know exactly what your impact is.

Laura Stevens:

And is it on the blog post?

Sarah Stewart:

It is. All of the details are on the blog post and how they calculated it as well.

Angus Montgomery:

And where does that come from, the CO2?

Sarah Stewart:

It’s things like data centres that are consuming lots of energy. Like and whether that energy is, I mean the question is whether you can have renewable energy sources to keep things like data centres up and running and...

Laura Stevens:

Yeah and I think also, that blog post got a lot of comments, as well. So I think it’s something that other government departments or like arm’s length bodies, or whatever are looking into.

Sarah Stewart:

Yeah cause you, yeah, I guess you think that the big culprits are fashion, oil and gas industries. Actually, everyone is sort of-

Laura Stevens:

Yeah, everyone is responsible.

Sarah Stewart:

Yes.

In October, GOV.UK turned 7. Tell me, what was notable about the desks that the team worked on when GOV.UK was launched? Laura.

Laura Stevens:

Is this from an article you wrote?

Sarah Stewart:

Me? Or Secretary of State?

Laura Stevens:

Sorry, sorry, the ghostwriting that doesn’t exist.

Sarah Stewart:

Yeah, yeah.

Laura Stevens:

Is it that they were cardboard boxes?

Sarah Stewart:

Correct. Thank you for reading that by the way.

I’m going to read a quote from a GDS figure. Please can you identify the speaker, their job title and tell me what they are talking about. The quote starts, “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,” end quote. Angus.

Angus Montgomery:

That is Jen Allum, who is Head of GOV.UK, talking about, well I guess the sort of success metrics for GOV.UK. And it’s interesting what she’s saying about that, that obviously we’re not a commercial organisation, we’re an organisation that’s here to serve user needs. So the traditional kind of understanding of people, you know you want to increase the number of people coming to your site, like that’s not how we operate.

I mean it’s good to know those figures obviously. And it’s good to know who’s coming and what they are looking at and what’s getting a lot of traffic and stuff. But that’s not ultimately what motivates people and that’s not what motivates their future vision for GOV.UK, which is about serving users, helping them to do whatever it is that they need to do, regardless of whether that’s a simple thing or a complex life event.

Sarah Stewart:

Perfect answer. One point.

November saw the creation of another community at GDS. GDS has got so many lovely communities. What was that community? Laura.

Laura Stevens:

Was it Muslims at GDS?

Sarah Stewart:

Correct! Networks are a nice thing, aren’t they?

Laura Stevens:

They are.

Sarah Stewart:

What’s your favourite network? What networks are you part of?

Laura Stevens:

So at GDS I’m part of the Women’s Network. I’ve also recently joined the Mental Health Network because I interviewed Ben on the podcast, Ben Carpenter on the podcast last month. What about you Angus?

Angus Montgomery:

I’m not a member, although I probably ought to be. But I go to quite a lot of the Women’s Network events, which are really good. I think it’s great obviously not being a woman and being able to go to these things and being part of that community.

But no, I think the good thing about the networks is, even if you are not a member, they are really visible so I’ve been to quite a few events that the LGBT Network have done as well. I just think it’s really good that, yeah they’re so active and there is so much going on.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah, I think that part about being open to all is really nice. Because often you can just join them by joining the Slack channel, and that’s very, you can just be there. So if you’re joining GDS as a person who’s not been in government before or anything, you can just be like, “here’s a few friendly faces” and you don’t have to...you can be kind of as active or as inactive as you want to be as part of the network.

So what networks are you part of?

Sarah Stewart:

I dip my toes into a few pools. Does that work? I mean not physiologically. Metaphorically. I’m really interested in the work that the Women’s Group do, particularly around negotiating pay rises and public speaking. But also the Mental Health Network is really valuable because it’s such an everyday thing here. Well it’s becoming more of an everyday thing here to talk about how you are feeling. And I think that in other organisations, that’s not the case. I think there is a real push to normalise talking about it, which is ultimately very healthy.

Laura Stevens:

And it’s really nice that GDS can take like a leading role in that then, in setting a precedent on how that’s a good thing.

Sarah Stewart:

Yeah. Okay, we’ve only got 2 questions left. We’re almost at the end. So can you tell me how many types of chocolate were tried by GDS Chocolate Club in 2019? And I should add that GDS Chocolate Club is funded by its members and is an out of hours club.

Angus Montgomery:

Sarah Stewart:

Laura.

Laura Stevens:

I’m going to go much higher. I’m going to go like 24.

Sarah Stewart:

Well you’ve both fallen short. 65 chocolates were tasted in 2019.

Angus Montgomery:

Woah.

Laura Stevens:

Is this the final question?

Sarah Stewart:

This is the final question of the quiz. Name every person in the Creative Team who made the GDS Podcast series possible this year.

Angus Montgomery:

Laura.

Laura Stevens:

Angus.

Angus Montgomery:

Sarah.

Sarah Stewart:

Thank you.

Laura Stevens:

Producer Emily.

Angus Montgomery:

To give her her full title. Animator and photographer, Roger.

Laura Stevens:

And we’ve got filmmaker Graham. Producer Megan Painter.

Sarah Stewart:

Yeah.

Laura Stevens:

Designer Charlotte.

Angus Montgomery:

Couldn’t possibly forget Alastair Mogford, who not only set up this podcast but documented how we do it and wrote down a very long description which we’ve all been using now because we all forget like what the set-up is and stuff. So thank you, Alastair.

Laura Stevens:

Shout out to Alastair.

And also we’ve got to shoutout to our social media star, Lou Mullan.

Angus Montgomery:

And thanks obviously to Chris Watson.

Sarah Stewart:

Oh wait. How do we attribute points to this?

Angus Montgomery:

Everyone gets points for that.

Laura Stevens:

Because it’s a team effort.

Angus Montgomery:

Yes.

Sarah Stewart:

Aw that’s nice. That’s the spirit, isn’t it?

Laura Stevens:

Well, well done team though, because we’ve done 14 podcasts!

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah!

Laura Stevens:

Thanks to everyone there.

Sarah Stewart:

And thank you so much to all of our listeners for your loyal support over the past year.

Ok so Emily, can you tell us, can you hand me the final scores. I’m going to announce who the winner is-

Angus Montgomery:

Ah!

Laura Stevens:

Drumroll.

Sarah Stewart:

After I announce who the runner-up is.

Angus Montgomery:

Oh.

Sarah Stewart:

It was Angus.

Angus Montgomery:

Yay!

Sarah Stewart:

Well done.

Laura Stevens:

Well done Angus.

Sarah Stewart:

But today’s winner is Laura Stevens. So, your prize is 3 chocolate bars wrapped up inside a civil service lanyard.

Laura Stevens:

Oh that’s very kind of you, thank you.

Sarah Stewart:

So claps for..

Laura Stevens:

Aww! Well, but there’s 3 so you know we can divide amongst…

Angus Montgomery:

Oh, well how convenient. Apart from Producer Emily.

Laura Stevens:

I tried to do that really nicely.

Angus Montgomery:

There, there are actually 4 of us in the room.

Laura Stevens:

I will share that out amongst all of us here.

Sarah Stewart:

That’s very magnanimous of you.

Laura Stevens:

Aww.

Sarah Stewart:

Aww, good winner. Ok so that brings us to the end of the last podcast of 2019. How did you think it went?

Angus Montgomery:

It was very challenging.

Sarah Stewart:

It doesn’t sound...

Laura Stevens:

But I did come out as a winner, so I mean..

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah.

Laura Stevens:

I feel like-

Angus Montgomery:

I mean obviously I came out as a runner up, so it was more challenging for me.

Sarah Stewart:

2019 has been quite a year, hasn’t it?

Laura Stevens:

Yes.

Angus Montgomery:

Uh huh.

Sarah Stewart:

What have your highlights been?

Angus Montgomery:

Well I moved team. So I’m now on the Strategy Team, which explains why I’m not as involved in the podcasts as I was before. So yeah, that’s a highlight. But obviously being on the Creative Team was also a highlight.

Laura Stevens:

Aww.

Sarah Stewart:

That’s sweet. Laura, what’s your highlight been?

Laura Stevens:

I’ve really liked actually getting more involved in the podcasts, which is quite an appropriate thing to say in this podcast episode.

Angus Montgomery:

On the podcast..

Laura Stevens:

But no I’ve spoken to really interesting people, like Kate Ivy-Williams and Sam Dub. Yeah, lots of other people as well, on the podcast.

Sarah Stewart:

Great. Okay.

Laura Stevens:

But what about you? What was your highlights for the year?

Sarah Stewart:

Well I helped Alison with the presentation that she delivered at the Women into Leadership Conference. And we made a spoof book about Alison. It’s called ‘Alison by Alison Pritchard’.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Sarah Stewart:

Because we were talking about like stories from her life and someone thought it was real.

Laura Stevens:

Yes. I believe also, I’m quite surprised by this because you actually wrote in fake reviews, I believe.

Sarah Stewart:

Yeah, I did reviews from ‘People’s Friend’ and ‘Time Magazine’. That was really funny, and it was a really good event as well.

So thank you to all of our listeners over 2019. It’s been quite the year in the world of the GDS Podcast, we’ve covered lots of topics. So thank you for your loyal support and lending us your ears.

Laura Stevens:

And please keep listening.

Sarah Stewart:

You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service Podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. You can read the transcripts on Podbean. Bye.

Angus Montgomery:

Bye.

Laura Stevens:

Bye 2019.

GDS Podcast #13: Mental wellbeing at GDS Nov 27, 2019

We discuss mental health first aiders, how to run a mental health network and how it works at GDS.

The transcript for the episode follows:

-------------

Laura Stevens:

Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I’m a writer here at GDS. Today we’re speaking about mental wellbeing at GDS. We’ve chosen to highlight this now as November is Men’s Mental Health Month. But we will be talking about mental health and wellbeing in the workplace more generally today.

And to tell me more is Ben Carpenter. So please can you introduce yourself and what you do here at GDS, and your role in supporting mental wellbeing here.

Ben Carpenter:

Hello. Yeah, I’m Ben Carpenter. I’m Inclusive Services Lead in the Service Design and Assurances Programme. And I co-lead the Wellbeing Working Group, and I was, before we kind of rebranded as the Wellbeing Working Group, I was lead of the Mental Health Network.

Laura Stevens:

So can you tell me a bit about the GDS Mental Health Network and where it fits into the Wellbeing Group here at GDS?

Ben Carpenter:

Well the Mental Health Network used to be kind of everything in the mental wellbeing space. Now that we’re expanding things to try and incorporate all aspects of wellbeing, physical and mental, the Mental Health Network in that name, really comprises basically of a Slack channel and a newsletter and of the people within the Slack channel.

That’s not to trivialise it ‘cause those things are really important, and a lot of work goes into those things, so the Q&As etc. But whereas we used to refer to GDS’s mental, GDS’s Mental Health Network as being all things mental wellbeing, I’d now say that’s more falls under the whole wellbeing banner.

Laura Stevens:

So, these Q&As. These are regular anonymous peer-led mental wellbeing Q&As on Slack. And can you describe some of the topics that come up?

Ben Carpenter:

We organise those around topics that staff nominate and then vote for their preference. And so the topics can just vary all the time, from Imposter Syndrome to general anxiety to dealing with heavy workloads to dealing with a lack of a heavy workload, having had you know changes in, fluctuations in workload, that’s what you say. Bereavement and loss, you know, just the full range of emotional challenges.

Laura Stevens:

And how have you found people have responded to the Network?

Ben Carpenter:

So it’s not my day job at all. It’s like, it should be a fraction of my time and often it takes up a big fraction of my time. But it’s a funny area to work in and on, because it’s hard to get feedback on success. So the nature of the topic, the nature of the beast is, you might not hear from people even if something’s going really well.

A good example would be the Q&As that we hold on Slack each month.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

So you have an anonymous route through, in those Q&As, to ask questions or answer questions. And you never know how many people are watching and reading, you never know how many people read the transcripts for information afterwards. So it can be very, it can be a very kind of quiet space to work in. You can, I sometimes think ‘oh god, is this work, is it worth it?’.

But when you do get feedback, it’s very very positive and. But yeah, it’s often hard to put something more tangible on that, to sort of prove value.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s just, yeah. It’s hard to know exactly what is most valuable to users but I think it’s really…by users, I always talk about us. I talk about the Network as, and the Wellbeing Group, as a service and we should think of staff here as our users. Because I firmly believe we should be a user-centred service so…

Laura Stevens:

Sort of like doing the GDS principles in all aspects.

Ben Carpenter:

Absolutely, yeah. I mean this more than anything right, is a, if you’re going to try and help people with their wellbeing, you should be doing it in a way that you believe to be organised around what they need.

Laura Stevens:

And so yeah, a sort of more general question. Why, which might sound obvious but I think it’s good to ask it anyway, is why is it important to have a Mental Health Network and Wellbeing Group at all? What does it bring to the workplace?

Ben Carpenter:

I’m not sure. You tell me.

I mean so, that was a facetious question as in ‘you tell me’. Because I always think I want the GDS staff and colleagues to say why they appreciate the network’s efforts or presence.

But we know that people with healthy wellbeing are generally more productive in their work. So on a boring sort of corporate side, you know people work better. But we’re also a human-centred organisation, I think we are. I’m a human-centred person. So I take on this work because I care about people here.

And so there’s no, to me there shouldn’t have to be any metric in terms of productivity or sort of value, ‘cause it’s just the right thing to do. I mean imagine, flip that round. Imagine a workplace where nobody thought, or took the time to organise around their staff’s wellbeing.

Now that we’re doing this work and we have things like the ‘Time to Change’ pledges and commitments that we’ve made as an organisation, and we have a bunch of people in a working group saying, “hang on, lets try and provide things that the staff need to improve their wellbeing”, it seems perverse to everything, you wouldn’t do that.

Laura Stevens:

And can you talk a bit about the ‘Time to Change’ pledge that you’ve mentioned?

Ben Carpenter:

I can a little bit.

Laura Stevens:

Ok.

Ben Carpenter:

Yep, so Alison, Director General, signed the pledge last month or the month before. So Time to Change is a charity and they help organisations like us, companies, organisations to make a stack of commitments.

So we’ve got 7 commitments under the Time to Change pledge. It covers things like, encouraging staff to be able to be frank about their mental health, training line managers to have conversations with staff about mental wellbeing, and broader wellbeing.

All Senior Civil Servants here are going to undergo, go through some training on wellbeing awareness and support. Commitments in there as well around mental health first aid.

Laura Stevens:

I mean I was really interested when I was researching this to hear about the mental health first aiders. And when did they get brought in at GDS?

Ben Carpenter:

Well so they, they exist in...some people brought those skills with them to GDS. Some people were able to go on mental health first aid training courses while they were here.

But what we’re doing at the moment is trying to organise that group of people, because again they’re just volunteers. These are not paid, there’s not a paid role, these are people who are volunteering to be mental health first aiders for their colleagues.

So what we’re trying to do is move away perhaps from a sort of set-up that we might have had before. It was like ‘oh, you know, that bloke over there happens to have been trained as a first aider, everyone go talk to him if they’re miserable’. And instead we’re trying to say ‘hang on, there are 800 staff here.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

Right, how many mental health first aiders do we need to be able to look after, or provide that kind of support, to that number of staff?’. And what we’re aiming for is 1 in 50. So for every 50 members of staff, there’s a mental health first aider.

Laura Stevens:

What are they qualified to do, what are they not qualified to do and why would you go to them?

Ben Carpenter:

They’re not practitioners. They are listeners, they’re confidential listeners and signposters. And as simple as that sounds, to do that in a robust and reliable way without yourself struggling too much perhaps with what you might be talking to people about, takes a couple of days training.

But yes, I think it’s really important to run that as a service, not as a thing that just happens. By which I mean, base it on what we believe that users need. Make sure it’s run in a sustainable way, you wouldn’t want to have 15 first aiders now and then you talk to me in a year, and we’ve suddenly only got 3.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

So you’ve got to know how many we need, we’ve got to have funding for that, we’ve got to be constantly making sure that we’ve got volunteers to take on those roles if needed and so on.

Laura Stevens:

And how do you think, how long have you been at GDS?

Ben Carpenter:

2013...six years.

Laura Stevens:

And how have you seen support for mental health change since 2013?

Ben Carpenter:

Well...do you know when I was first here I probably wasn’t thinking about it very much. It was much more a sort of start-up feel, very whirlwind.

I’ve been more and more open about my own mental health as well in recent years. I mean I’ve always been pretty open about it, ‘cause I’ll talk to anyone about anything. But..

Laura Stevens:

That’s how you’re on this podcast.

Ben Carpenter:

Right, right. But I think I’ve also more, proudly is the wrong word, less self-consciously happy to be known for having some mental health challenges while in the workplace with my colleagues. That was probably something I would have felt less comfortable doing even in the early days at GDS. And definitely at previous organisations that I’ve worked for.

I would always have shared that sort of thing with line management or friends, but I don’t think I would have sat on a podcast saying, ‘I lead this network as best I can and I also have mental health challenges and occasionally, I’ll write about that on Slack or a blog post or something’.

So that’s something that has changed for me but I wouldn’t...I think the signing of the ‘Time to Change’ pledge is a big deal for GDS. It’s a public statement under those 7 areas. And so in terms of policy, you know the mental health first aid commitments within that are, they’re really good and they’re really big.

So it’s up to us all to actually make sure they happen.

Laura Stevens:

Would there be any other things you’d like to see change here at GDS, oh, and good practices, or that you’ve seen elsewhere that you might want to bring in here?

Ben Carpenter:

I’m really pleased with the direction things are going. It would, it really does just come down to people and time.

I’d say that fully user-centred approach to what we provide is something that I would like to see really properly embedded across all of our wellbeing mental health work.

And personally, I’m much less interested on working on something that I don’t know, or have good confidence, to be useful for people, my colleagues that I work with in terms of their mental health.

So I don’t want to just tick any boxes. And I don’t want to make us look nice within the Civil Service. I don’t, I’m not interested in any of that.

Laura Stevens:

You don’t want to pay lip service to something.

Ben Carpenter:

Right. It can sound repetitive but I think it’s really the thing that matters. So for me with wellbeing, it might be that the very best thing this organisation can do for its staff is to continue to provide places for them to talk, continue to train line managers, continue to train mental health first aiders, continue to run things like the Q&As and speaking events and make people feel, even if they never speak up and say ‘oh that was brilliant, I loved that talk’, you know, even if they’re very quiet about it or silent about it, we know that it’s valuable to staff for these things to take place.

So we don’t have to be coming up with new things.

Laura Stevens:

Uh huh.

Ben Carpenter:

Might just keep doing simple, quiet, useful things. Which isn’t always cool and isn’t always popular. But that’s what I like.

Laura Stevens:

How would you say the mental health sort of practices here, employee wellbeing, compares to other workplaces? Or have you’ve spoken, in your work with this network, have you spoken to the other people from other workplaces and have they brought in ideas or you’ve shared ideas there?

Ben Carpenter:

Lots of people are really impressed and pleased to see what GDS has set up by the way of this open spaces to be able to talk about this. And the network and the community around to support people. But the most, lots of people who come into GDS say, ‘gosh this is, this is new to me’

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

‘This is remarkable in that, just that it exists’.

Laura Stevens:

Do you think if there’s, if people are finding best practice here at GDS, is there potential for it to be shared across other government departments? Obviously if you’re involved and you go elsewhere, you can take that...

Ben Carpenter:

There is a cross-government network. People do try and share ideas and approaches. We did try and pool approaches to mental health first aid provision and training and business cases to support the recruitment of people to do that, for example.

Laura Stevens:

So there’s that opportunity for if stuff has been learnt here and tried and it’s found to work.

Ben Carpenter:

Yes. We need to get better at blogging about what we do and what works. You know we’ve done a couple of blog posts but not enough really.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah, I saw your Slack Q&A one and...

Ben Carpenter:

Yeah, wrote up that. And that was good. So I did a blog post about the Q&As that I’ve been talking about. And I’ve had 3 or 4 organisations, I’ve had meetings with since then to show them how we do, and they’ve gone off and run their own.

Laura Stevens:

And how does that make you feel? Like sort of, it’s sort of out in the open now, it’s sort of being spread.

Ben Carpenter:

It’s nice. Yeah it’s good.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

It’s nice. It seems such a simple idea but it’s, behind the scenes it’s surprisingly sort of complicated to make sure you’re trying to ask, field questions in a sensitive way really keep on top of them. The last thing you would want would be to miss, miss questions coming in or feel like peo-- I wouldn’t want staff here to thi--, I’d be mortified if I thought staff felt it was sort of poorly curated or was not sensitive to their needs or feelings. So.

Laura Stevens:

Do you think things like the Network, the Wellbeing Group, are sort of helping encouraging people at GDS to say that’s ok to say that I have mental health, have you seen that as a response in your, anecdotally or?

Ben Carpenter:

Anecdotally, yeah. Definitely anecdotally. I know that many of the comments that we see on the Slack channel, either through the Q&A sessions or just spontaneously, are people saying you know, ‘I feel so glad this network exists, I feel so glad this is something that people talk about here, I feel supported by the existence of this channel and that you guys are here piping up with this stuff and it’s not taboo, or it’s not taboo here.

Our Slack channel, I know it’s Slack it’s just Slack, but it’s the second most, it’s got the second most number of people in it of all the channels on GDS’s Slack after the community. So you know, and that’s nobody’s been forced onto there so people come in to read and listen.

Yeah, so we get...it’s another very hard thing to measure.

Laura Stevens:

And can anyone on that Slack channel, if you’re part of the Slack channel, can anybody respond to anybody else or is it just if you’re part, if you’re a mental health first aider or is it just open to all?

Ben Carpenter:

No, no. It’s just an open forum. So that’s why I think the anonymity of the Q&As is so valuable. So what we do with the Q&As is a 2 hour session every month. And you can post questions through an anonymous Google form in advance which I, or whoever is coordinating the session that month, would get and copy and paste them in Slack basically. Just say here’s a question and then people reply as a thread within Slack. And if they don’t want to answer the question publically either.

So we get, last time out I think there were a dozen questions, none of them posted live. So nobody wanted to ask what they wanted to ask straight into Slack with their name next to it. Maybe some of them would have if there hadn’t been an anonymous route. But if it didn’t matter, they would have done it. What’s the opposite of anonymous? Nonymous? Nonymous?

Laura Stevens:

Identifiable?

Ben Carpenter:

Yeah, right. They would have identified, they would be happy to be identified so. So if 12 people ask 12 questions anonymously, to me that’s a massive indicator in itself, that out of an organisation of 800 of a Slack channel of three or four hundred people, you get a dozen you know…I don’t know what, you imagine there are a dozen who do dare to ask an anonymous question.

Laura Stevens:

Of course, yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

There must be a whole stack more who are finding it hard.

Laura Stevens:

A tip of the iceberg.

Ben Carpenter:

Right, yeah. It might not be a massive iceberg but it’s still an indicator.

Laura Stevens:

And do people, how do people respond like do you have to monitor the responses or do you just let people respond how they would like?

Ben Carpenter:

I keep an eye on them for worrying signs, but nothing else. We never claim for it to be something of experts, it’s a peer-to-peer support thing.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

It was only, actually a couple of months ago, as a confession, running the Q&As and I thought it’s always been in the back of my mind, worrying that I would get a really scary message anonymously.

Laura Stevens:

Of course.

Ben Carpenter:

And you think, ‘oh my god, there’s somebody here who’s gonna hurt themselves or hurt someone else, or sounds really on the brink’. I’d always thought that felt like a risk of doing the Q&As. But to be honest, actually it’s only a risk of hearing about those thoughts, not a risk of creating those thoughts necessarily.

So it was only then that we suddenly jumped up and said we need to have a statement ready. So I do have, while I’m running the Q&As I’m ready with a document if I get something like that. I would copy and paste my message, this agreed comms message that we’ve agreed with comms and senior management, across all staff as an email and across all the Slack channels as a message, not just the Q&A, to say ‘if you sent this message containing this word’, so we wouldn’t share all of it just to make sure they knew we were talking to them, ‘then please contact one’, and we’d lead with 999.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

Or talk to a first aider. You know we’d give them contact options.

I mean it’s an odd, yeah it’s an odd leading a network like this and getting involved in this kind of work, I do feel a massive sense of responsibility.

Laura Stevens:

Yes.

Ben Carpenter:

And in a way that’s one of the things that makes me want us to do less, really well rather than take on too much. So sometimes in the network, it can be hard in the working group for all of us to find the time just to meet and just organise ourselves just to provide a few events and speakers, and get posters and you know, sell some pin badges and coffee mornings. That can be hard just...

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

Even to get to that level. So I feel like whatever we do, I want us to do it well rather than lots of things averagely.

Laura Stevens:

And how are you, you said about feeling this responsibility particularly for a network that deals with things like this, how are you supported in running this?

Ben Carpenter:

David Dilley is our mental health champion at GDS, a Senior Civil Service, Senior Civil Servant. Fiona James is the wellbeing champion. So I can talk to either of them whenever I like. Abby Peel co-leads the Wellbeing Working Group with me. So we work really nicely together, Abby’s brilliant. And there’s actually much more of like tour de force behind the stuff that does get done in the working group.

So I mean I’ve got my line manager, and I’ve got the first aiders and I’ve got the Q&As.

Laura Stevens:

So...

Ben Carpenter:

This whole thing is just therapeutic for me right.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

That’s why I’m doing this ‘cause it gives me, it’s my own private brilliant therapy network.

All the anonymous questions on the Q&As I just, are mine for example. I make them all up myself.

That’s not true, that’s not true.

Laura Stevens:

So you are supported and?

Ben Carpenter:

Yeah, of course, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

Laura Stevens:

And can you, you were saying, so mental health is part of the wellbeing group, can you talk a bit more about the wellbeing group, and the wellbeing, and its aims?

Ben Carpenter:

So yeah, so we had the Mental Health Network which was, as the title suggests quite focused just on mental health. And I think quite rightly, particularly when Fiona joined GDS and is the senior wellbeing champion for GDS.

Laura Stevens:

Is this Fiona James?

Ben Carpenter:

Yes.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

Sorry, yes. You know, it’s correct I think to pull everything together in terms of wellbeing and say, because we know there’s such strong links between physical wellbeing and mental wellbeing for starters. And if we’re trying to say you know, a bit of a common tropey type phrase about mental health is, ‘well if you broke your arm you go and see the doctor, so when you’re feeling down why don’t you go…’.

You know which is a bit of an ugly comparison made in those, because they’re not comparable really but, we should be trying to bring them together so to totally normalise mental health. We’re not, nobody’s got any qualms about physical health or moaning about physical health, so lets moan about our mental health. Let's be honest about it. Let’s ask for help.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

So that’s the evolution of that, and I really welcome it. In many ways the discrepancy, bothering to split these things up is really just a semantic exercise a lot of the time. Ditto for, so there’s a daily meditation session, 10 minute session, happens every day anyone can go 10 minutes of peaceful reflection. That’s meditation, it’s not, it doesn’t happen on my watch right, we don’t talk about it in the Wellbeing Peer Group.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

But it’s everything to do, there’s a running club that takes place every, every well at least every week. I’m not sure how often they run.

Laura Stevens:

No, I can’t say that I’m part of that so I don’t know.

Ben Carpenter:

Mental health doesn’t all have to be about crisis. It’s just about ongoing care. Yeah, looking after yourself.

Laura Stevens:

Are there any sort of tips you can give me to create a better workplace for mental health, for employee wellbeing?

Ben Carpenter:

If you’re looking to provide this for staff rather than you’re somebody yourself who has mental health challenges and you’re thinking, ‘what can I do, I’m at work what can I do?’. I think it’s the openness of the topic is primary. So be bold and be brave enough to stand up and say, ‘here’s what I struggle with’. And you know talk to people, give that message out loud, ask people to reflect back to you how they feel, does it ring any bells with them.

So I think there’s been, so Helen Nickols, who ran the Mental Health Network before I joined it as well, I feel like she really led by example you know. She wasn’t afraid, still isn't afraid to stand up and say ‘this is what I struggle with, this is how I deal with it’, you know.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

And I think if you can’t do that then it’s gonna be hard to expect other people to sort of come out of their shells and start to talk about things that might help them, in a way that might help them, sorry.

So, yeah, it really helps to have champions, people who will treat this seriously and not as a taboo.

Laura Stevens:

So be open, be bold, be honest, and have champions.

Ben Carpenter:

Yes, keep talking.

Laura Stevens:

Would be your sort of, yeah. And…

Ben Carpenter:

Yeah.

Laura Stevens:

And make sure that you, there’s a space as well I guess for people to be able to have these open conversations.

Ben Carpenter:

I think we have to be really aware in organisations that it’s a massive luxury and privilege to be able to be frank about your mental health. It can take a massive amount of privilege. So I’m a white middle aged man with every privilege really. So, and career wise, I’m probably pretty robust. I don’t mean in GDS, ‘cause they could sack me tomorrow, but I just mean I have the luxury of being able to stand up and say you know, the reason I couldn’t come to work last week for a couple of days, was you know, mental health.

To expect that of everybody is not fair. So I think it falls upon people who do have those privileges just to use that capital a bit and try and break those taboos, ‘cause it’s massively biased towards people like me.

Laura Stevens:

And how do you get in touch with the mental, how do I join the wellbeing group?

Ben Carpenter:

You go on the Slack channel, you listen, you ask questions. It’s not something you can join, it’s just there for you. It’s not a club. The only aspect of it which is a club is that you need to join the Slack channel if you want to read what people are asking or saying, but even within there for a few days at a time, it may only be little nice bits of chat and people asking questions or sharing things they’ve read. So it’s not intense.

If you want to get involved, if you want to give help you might want to train to be a first aider. If you want to give help you might want to put the Q&As in your diary, last Friday of every month 10 to 12 in the morning. And listen to people and offer them your support, if not expertise.

Sometimes people just want to be heard. Now certainly the Q&A, some of the feedback I’ve had is, ‘it’s so good just to be able to write this down and be heard, even if people didn’t know it was me who said it’. And people just say, ‘I hear you, it’s valid, you’re fine, it’s ok to think that and feel that’. So you don’t have to be like I say you know a therapist going on there with amazing clinical advice. So if you want to give help those are good ways to do that. Or you could offer to, you could think about what you could talk about if you’ve had challenges of your own, anything.

If you want to receive help, so if you need help, then there’s a mental health first aiders. Look on the wiki, search for mental health support, look at all, look at the wellbeing pages on there, see what activities and timetables there are for you to get involved with.

Go to the yoga sessions, go on the lunchtime walks, go to Abby’s crafting sessions, dial in to the Q&As, call the Cabinet Office listening service, call, go and see your GP. You know whatever you think works for you. The most important thing is to do something, it can be anything.

Laura Stevens:

So if I’m listening and I’m not at GDS so I can’t join the Slack, how would be a good way to get in touch with you if I want to find out more about setting up a Slack channel at my own organisation or running this sort of network?

Ben Carpenter:

Totally happy to be emailed, Ben.Carpenter@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk. That sounds right, is that right?

Laura Stevens:

Yeah, that’s right.

Ben Carpenter:

Yeah. I can’t give mental health advice but I will talk to you about what we do as per this podcast.

And so I often talk about leaning forward, and I think this was actually the name of the Facebook CEO’s book wasn’t it recently? And I think she stole it from me.

The analogy being if you want to jump off a really high diving board and you’re terrified of it, don’t go up to the top of the diving board and think ‘now I’m going to jump 200 feet into this cold water’. Just go to the top of the diving board and lean forward a little bit and think, ‘I know what I’m going to do, I’m just going to lean forward’. And before you know it you’ll be in the water swimming around. Right?

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Ben Carpenter:

So I think, as with any life's big challenges, take the first step and then just try and let the other steps follow.

Laura Stevens:

So thank you to Ben to talking to us today about mental health and employee wellbeing. You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms, and you can read the transcripts on PodBean.

Again, thank you very much to Ben for joining.

Ben Carpenter:

Thank you.

Laura Stevens:

Goodbye.

GDS Podcast #12: The International Design in Government community Sep 30, 2019

The founding members of the International Design in Government community share the group’s beginnings, development and impact, and tips on community management.

The transcript of the episode follows:

---------

Laura Stevens:

Hello, and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I’m a writer here at GDS. Today we’re going to be speaking about the work of the International Design in Government community. This community has grown rapidly since its inception 2 years ago, and now has 1,500 members from 66 countries and 6 continents.

The group brings together designers and design minded people working anywhere in the world to share best practice, host events and tackle common obstacles. And this summer, they held their first international event in the USA and Scotland.

So let's hear from 2 people directly involved in the community, Kara Kane and Martin Jordan. So please can you introduce yourself and tell me about your role here at GDS.

Kara Kane:

Hi, I’m Kara Kane. I’m the Community Lead for User-Centred Design at GDS. So I work on growing user-centered design capability and as well, understanding and awareness of user-centered design across UK government. And I also manage the International Design in Government community.

Laura Stevens:

So you’re quite busy.

Kara Kane:

Yes.

Laura Stevens

And Martin?

Martin Jordan:

Yeah. I’m Martin Jordan, Head of Service Design here at GDS. And this means shaping what good service design looks like across government. It means helping government increase its service design capability through recruiting, training and as well, mentoring. And then yeah, building a strong service design community across government and well now as well, internationally.

Laura Stevens:

And could you describe the community to me for somebody who has never heard about it before?

Kara Kane:

So the community is just a group of people that are all working on similar things in government. So we have a shared purpose around making better government services. And it’s just, as you said in the intro, it’s extremely diverse and extremely international so it’s grown really quickly and as we’ve started kind of running the community in different ways, so we have online channels, we do monthly calls, we’ve now started doing events. So doing, through doing these different formats, we’ve been able to help people meet each other and helping people meet each other face-to-face.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

Which then helps the online stuff and helps that make it easier because people are more willing to reach out to someone if they’ve met them in person.

Laura Stevens:

And you mention you’ve got countries from all the continents apart from Antartica.

Kara Kane:

Yes.

Martin Jordan:

Yeah. I think there are no designers there.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah. I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.

Ok so, I thought to show how diverse the community is as we mentioned earlier, I’d ask you a few questions about some of the different 66 countries you’ve got involved.

Martin Jordan:

Oh gosh.

Laura Stevens:

So do you know who your most northerly member is?

Kara Kane:

Think it might be Iceland…?

Martin Jordan:

Oh yeah, probably.

Kara Kane:

We might have people in Reykjavik…?

Laura Stevens:

Kara, you are correct.

Kara Kane:

Yes!

Martin Jordan:

I thought of Helsinki but yes, yeah, that makes more sense, yeah.

Laura Stevens:

And then we, who is your most southerly member?

Martin Jordan:

So it’s, it’s probably New Zealand. Because there are people, there are people in Wellington.

Laura Stevens:

Yes! Martin, you got that right.

Don’t doubt your guess.

And then you have, out of the members, you have both the largest country in the world by area and the second smallest, do you know what those 2 countries are?

Martin Jordan:

So one might be Russia. And the second one, I have no idea.

Laura Stevens:

OK, you got Russia, so Kara, can you do the second, the second smallest country in the world by area?

Kara Kane:

It might be Monaco..?

Laura Stevens:

Yes! Well done.

So, and then the final one, just to showcase this diverse group, you have a country that’s a member, that is made up of more than 200 islands.

Kara Kane:

I was ready for this one. I did some pre-work. So I know that this is Palau.

Laura Stevens:

Well done! So this shows how, even amongst these diverse groups, there’s lots of shared traits with design in government.

Was there a particular catalyst for this International Design in Government group? How did it start?

Martin Jordan:

So our former boss Lou Downe, at that time Director for Design, and the UK government, they like to blog. And they wrote a blog post I think in February 2017. And they referenced the D-5 countries.

Laura Stevens:

Could you explain the D-5?

Martin Jordan:

Yeah. So the D-5 countries were kind of like very digital countries that came together I think around 2011 or so. That included the UK, Estonia, Israel, New Zealand and South Korea. And there’s an ongoing conversation and a regular monthly call around design around government. And there was a special edition on design.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Martin Jordan:

That we did do in early 2017. And Lou basically wrote a blog post and said like, well we’re having this great community of designers in the UK government, but there’s probably like more stuff to do as well on a global scale, because we very likely have common issues.

We all kind of like, design services that are somewhat similar. Policies might be different, laws might be different but overall, there are a lot of like, similarities. So we might be able to like, scale co-authored patterns, we might be looking at like, how to embed user-centred culture in government.

Kara Kane:

Yes.

Martin Jordan:

All of those things. So they wrote a blog post and then we were like, ‘ok, what does it actually mean?’.

Kara Kane:

We had a form at the end of the blog post for people to let us know if they were interested in joining whatever this thing would be.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

So I went away and took that list of people, and kind of started developing the community. So we just invited all of those people to a Google group and then went from there.

Laura Stevens:

And it grew really rapidly. Like I’ve got here in the first 10 months, it grew to 250 people from 37 countries. What sort of like challenges did you face when you were growing it at that sort of scale quickly?

Kara Kane:

I think with any community, starting it is, is just difficult to start kind of forming relationships and to start getting the conversation going. So as a Community Manager, it was really about trying to get to know people in the community, trying to start introducing people, trying to just, like I would just have calls with people to find out what they’re working on to get to know them a little bit.

And then we started running these monthly calls, which were a way to, to kind of start sharing work in a different way. But again that took a while for the focus to turn away from GDS in to, to be a focus on sharing internationally. So not just us kind of telling, but us learning as well from, from other people.

Laura Stevens:

And do you find there are a lot of shared things? ‘Cause obvio--, the countries we mentioned earlier, they’ve got hugely different geographies, populations, all different. But are you finding there’s, they are these shared obstacles that designers face in government and what, what would some of them be?

Martin Jordan:

So in some places, there might not be a designer there at all but like a design minded person who’s doing it in some way.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Martin Jordan:

So they ask like, how do you, how do you make the first business case for the first designer, and then we might be able to like, share like some of, some of the arguments and also there are a lot of, a lot of good stories out there so we try to like, give them good examples that they can kind of like, go to their, their seniors and like, advocate with these stories.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Martin Jordan:

That is quite, quite, quite, quite powerful.

Kara Kane:

Then following on from that, if you think about things like immigration, like that runs across…

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

...every, everywhere. So there’s a lot that we can, can learn from the similarities and differences of how, of how we run services related to immigration or employment or benefits.

Laura Stevens:

And is it quite a lot of physical meetups or is it more sort of interaction online? You mentioned earlier there’s Google groups, Slack. So how does that, how do you all communicate with each other in the community?

Kara Kane:

When it first started it was all online.

Laura Stevens:

Uh huh.

Kara Kane:

And because it’s an international community and, from the beginning it was really widespread in terms of representation geographically, it was hard to kind of think about you know what’s, what’s something we could do to get people to meet face to face. And I think the monthly calls were a way to do that. Because we were using Zoom, so it was the first way to like, show my face…

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

...to the community. And to, for Martin and Lou, when we were all on these calls, and meeting people. But then from there, I think, when I first joined GDS, Martin always wanted to do a conference.

So we were always looking for a reason to run a conference. And then the international community seemed like that was the next natural step, was to get people together face to face.

Laura Stevens:

So yeah. You had your first official conference in London, 2018. Can you talk a bit about that and how you went about getting everybody here from all these different countries, who was able to attend with that?

Martin Jordan:

Yeah. So we had a tiny budget to actually make this happen. We didn’t spend much, much money on that. And we kind of relied on kind of, everyone paying for their own flight tickets…

Kara Kane:

So when we, when we decided to run an international conference, we really wanted to involve the community in what it would look like. So we started sending surveys and emails out to the community to say, ‘what do you want this to be? Do you want to even come? What kind of format do you want it to be? Where should it be? What time of the year?’ So we kind of used the community to figure out what it should look like.

And then from there, started to shape the agenda.

Laura Stevens:

What was the atmosphere like on the day?

Kara Kane:

It was exciting.

Martin Jordan:

I think people were like, super excited to see each other.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah,

Martin Jordan:

Because apart from like, interacting via Slack and as well as seeing each other in the monthly calls, people started following each other on Twitter, and there was quite an exchange there.

As well, some people met at other international conferences. So whenever there was kind of a design or service design conference, they were like, like almost like, you how they were like literally like asking like, ‘who else is there?’ I was in Helsinki at some point in winter when it was freezing and I was like, ‘Hey, Finnish government folks, shall we meet for tea?’ and they were like, ‘yeah!’.

So like, you were, yeah. I think it was a really really great atmosphere and for, for the conference, for the 2 days, we tried to have representatives from all continents.

So we tried to like, yeah, have a, have a good representation of of of regions. And then we had workshops on the second day. And for those workshops we really basically asked everyone in the UK government who can kind of like, host a workshop, run a workshop.

Laura Stevens:

What came out of that in terms of saying that people were more connected and did any like working groups come out of it?

Martin Jordan:

So the Finns, the folks in (the) Finnish government, started kind of like, a local community that gets together every, every month. And literally today, the Finns, as well the Estonians, run a joint workshop meetup together. So we actually started to, regionally we started connecting, connecting people with each other.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Martin Jordan:

They’re now doing things, which is amazing to see. Yeah.

Kara Kane:

I think another thing that came out of it is, so at the very end of the conference, we kind of asked people ‘do you want this to happen again?’, ‘do you want there to be another conference?’.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

And people were like, ‘yeah!’. And there’s people, in the community, who are willing to kind of, take on the responsibility to do something. So that was really, really exciting.

But I think, yeah the other thing was just, we’ve had people tell us that they know feel more confident to reach out to people. Like they’ve met people face to face, or at least they saw them at the conference, so now they feel like they can reach out to them.

People are using tools and methods that they learned in some of the workshops. They’re continuing to, to work on the things, if they, if they presented at the, at the conference, they’re continuing to work on those, on those things that they were presenting about. Whether it was a workshop format or a kind of, yeah, a different way of thinking. So that’s really exciting.

Martin Jordan:

Some countries even like, started translating some of the tools they’re using into English to make it more accessible for other community members, which is amazing to see.

Laura Stevens:

What, I was also going to ask about that. Because obviously running an international community, you have the time zones and the language, do you, how do you get round those things?

Martin Jordan:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

Time zones are really difficult for the monthly calls. In the very beginning, we tried to run, I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea but I was like, we’ll just do the call twice and obviously that did not work. And obviously that’s a ton of work.

So what we started was just to, just to move the times around.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

So it’s not like always run a call at the same time. We’re always trying to, to kind of, engage with different people. So we’ll run calls after work, later in the evening so that the Australians and the Kiwis can join.

Martin Jordan:

But not too early in the morning.

Kara Kane:

Yeah, not too early in the morning. Happy to, happy to do things after work but not before (laughter from everyone).

Laura Stevens:

And the languages, are all the calls run in English?

Kara Kane and Martin Jordan (same time):

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

We haven’t, we haven’t encountered any issues with, with language. But I think you know, going forward we’re trying to be as, as inclusive as we can. We’re trying to reach as many kind of countries working in this space as we can. So that might be something that we have to think about in the future.

Martin Jordan:

Yeah we were really impressed to hear recently that at a conference in Taiwan, a government conference, they had subtitles in 12 different languages to reflect like, all the people attending. And we still have no idea how, how to make that work but this kind of like, the level of ambition.

So at the most recent conference in Edinburgh, there was live subtitling in English and we’re looking into like, technologies to make it as inclusive as possible.

Laura Stevens:

And that leads me nicely on. Because you mentioned earlier that this, the last event in 2018, led directly to the 2019 events. And this is the first time that the events have gone global. So could you talk through those, what’s happened so far this year?

Kara Kane:

The first thing that we did this year was collaborate with Code for America. Code for America is a non-profit in the United States and they work on reforming government nationally. So they work really closely with state and local level government. They do really amazing work, and they run a summit, they run a yearly summit called ‘Code for America Summit’. And our idea was to bring the international community to the summit. So what we did was run a one-day international design in government day…

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

...before the Code for America Summit. So that was in Oakland in May of this year. And yeah, it was a real collaboration between between our 2 organisations. And to really bring the community to the US and reach people there that we’re not reaching, you’d think that the US would have a really strong design in government community, but they don’t yet. It’s still kind of nascent and forming. So it was really exciting to kind of, try and get all of those people in the room. Which they found really really valuable just to meet people like them, working on the same types of problems and challenges.

Laura Stevens:

Is that because of like, the vast geography of America or is, and the federal...or is that?

Martin Jordan:

The latter as well.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Martin Jordan:

Yeah, totally. Totally.

And of course again like, there’s a lot of stuff that they can share. And then they can share kind of like, their recipes to how to solve a certain thing with other people.

Laura Stevens:

Well, and that sharing tool--like I noticed New Zealand picked up the GOV.UK Design System and...

Martin Jordan:

Yes.

This was amazing to see. Yeah, they kind of like took that and kind of made it theirs. Like restyling it, taking a few things in and out.

Laura Stevens:

And was that facilitated by the community?

Martin Jordan:

Well to some degree. So we have those monthly calls with themes, and the most popular ones were around design systems. So we actually had to, to repeat this theme so we had it in 2018 and did it in 2019 again because there’s so much interest.

And I think this was by far the most popular call we had, with more than 100 people joining.

Laura Stevens:

Oh wow. Ok so...

Martin Jordan:

And partially it was like a group of people in one room like, counting as 1 right.

Laura Stevens:

Oh ok.

Kara Kane:

Yeah. It was our biggest call ever. I was just completely shocked to see over a 100 people online joining us on Zoom.

Laura Stevens:

Is it quite tricky to manage that as sort of, or does, is everyone quite respectful when somebody’s talking, everyone else will be muted. Is that, how is that to manage?

Kara Kane:

Yeah. We have to set some, some ground, ground rules at the beginning to say, ‘everyone please go on mute’. And like yeah, there’s kind of there’s rules around, around how to ask questions. So there’s a chat function which is really easy to use, so you can write your question in the chat.

And then if you feel comfortable enough to go off mute and ask your question during the time for questions, then you can do that. Or I just read through the questions and try and help facilitate, facilitate that.

Martin Jordan:

And there’s always recordings as well. So people can go back. So when they join the community later, they’re able to like, watch these previous calls or recordings of those, and once in a while, when people like, raise a question on Slack or on the mailing list, we’re like look, this was already covered, like have a look and they’re so thankful to like, find these resources.

Laura Stevens:

And if we can go back to the America, the conference in America. Was the community involved with organising that like it was with the one in London, or was that is that a slightly different way it was organised?

Martin Jordan:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

We reached out to some of the North American community members.

Laura Stevens:

And who would they be?

Kara Kane:

So we had people at Nava [Nava Public Benefit Corporation] in the United States, we had people at the Canadian Digital Service, people at the United States Digital Service, the USDS.

Martin Jordan:

Veteran Services.

Kara Kane:

So we kind of came up with 3 different kind of themes, which were around getting leadership buy-in for user-centered design, designing services for and with everyone and building design capacity and capability.

Martin Jordan:

This was kind of like, although it was called International Design in government day, it was more kind of like, North American design in government.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. With that regionalised context?

Martin Jordan:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Laura Stevens:

And how did it feel on the day? Did it feel similar to the one you felt, you did in London, or was it different?

Martin Jordan:

I mean I was so impressed.

Kara Kane:

It was a lot of people that we hadn’t met before from the community, or people that were new to the community. It was people that maybe hadn’t all been in the same room before.

Laura Stevens and Martin Jordan (same time):

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

As in designers working in government kind of talking about things and realising, ‘oh my gosh, I’m not the only person...’

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

...that has these really frustrating things’. Or that has you know, learning about a success of someone like you just feel, you could feel how proud people were. And that was amazing.

Laura Stevens:

And do you think that sort of, like talking, you were talking there about that sort of emotional support that the community provides, and that sense of ‘oh no, you’re not alone’. And obviously there’s very practical outcomes like you can use the same user research or you can use parts of the design system, but do you think that emotional support is quite a big part of why people get involved in the community?

Martin Jordan:

Absolutely. This is..

Kara Kane:

Yeah. Definitely.

Martin Jordan:

This is, such a, such a strong, strong point. And yeah, I think, I think we see this as well in the Slack conversations. Like people asking questions and getting then a response from from somewhere, from another part of the world, is, is really reassuring.

Laura Stevens:

And we should talk about your second conference as well in Scotland this year. So what happened there?

Kara Kane:

So when I mentioned at the conference in London, when we had the hands up, well one of the hands was Anna Henderson, who is a Service Designer in Scottish government, in the Office of the Chief Designer. So Anna and her team got in touch with us and said, ‘hey, like we’re really serious, like we really want to do this, like we’re going to get budget, like everyone is, everyone is excited’. They had you know, from their team level up to their minister, ministerial level, was really excited about running an international conference.

So Martin and I were like, amazing, let’s do this!

Laura Stevens:

Great!

Kara Kane:

Yeah. Why wouldn’t we do this?

So this was the first time that we were kind of running an event, or this is the first time that we were kind of handing over the responsibility of running a conference to someone else.

Laura Stevens:

So you didn’t do the agenda or…?

Kara Kane:

So we really kind of stepped back. And our role was to kind of, advise and share what we had learned from running the conference in London.

Kara Kane:

Yeah. So it was really shaped around the values of Scottish government, which is a lot about inclusion and participation. So the theme of the conference was participation involving citizens in the design of government and public services. And they had really amazing talks from the community, they had things on inclusive recruitment, they had things on doing international research, they had things on working with policy colleagues, and there was a fantastic keynote by Dr. Sally Witcher, who’s the Chief Executive of Inclusion Scotland.

And I think the whole atmosphere of the conference as well was really also encompassing their values. So as Martin said, they had captioning for all of the keynotes and all of the breakouts. So every single room that you went into, there was live captioning available to you. And for all of the keynotes on the main stage, we also had British Sign Language interpreters.

Laura Stevens:

And is this something you’d want to carry forward now having seen it done in action?

Kara Kane:

Yeah, I think as Martin said, with trying to figure out like, how can we use technology, and these kind of new technologies that are available, around live transcription and live translation. Like how can we use those better because that’s just, that would be just so amazing to be able to help people feel more involved if they can understand the content better.

Laura Stevens:

And we can also look forward as well to the, your final is, your final international event of the year.

Kara Kane:

And biggest.

Laura Stevens:

And biggest in Rotterdam. And so yeah, can, Martin, can you tell me a bit about that?

Martin Jordan:

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, as I said it will be the biggest conference we’ve had so far. So the Dutch government is leading on that. So the, my Dutch is really bad but the Gebruiker Centraal community, so which means like users first.

Laura Stevens:

Yes.

Martin Jordan:

Which is a community in the Dutch government that is around I think, for a few years now. So they had local events and as well conferences there for a while. And now they’re kind of like, opening up and embracing and welcoming all the international visitors. So they’re aiming although, we’re aiming for like 800 people...

Laura Stevens:

Wow.

Martin Jordan:

...that will come together for like a full three days in Rotterdam in like mid-November this year, so 18th until 20th. And there will be workshops again, because we try to like not only in all of the conferences, not only have people talking at you, but you can actually participate and interact with people. So there’s always a lot of time for like, networking and workshopping things.

At the same time as well, kind of like open, other open formats, panel discussions. So all of that is going to happen. And again, there’s been like call for participations, we have been creating a kind of like, advisory board, again an international advisory board. Where people from different continents kind of like help shape as well, the content.

We’re still on an ongoing basis like asking for more content, because there will be so many people so we need a lot of content as well.

Laura Stevens:

So you’re doing a call out now live to…

Martin Jordan:

Yes!

Laura Stevens:

So how if you, how do you put something forward, how do I go to this conference?

Martin Jordan:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can go to ‘international.gov-design.com’. There you find all of the events that have happened already, and the one that’s happening next.

Laura Stevens:

And are you hoping this will, you mentioned for like the American one was a bit more localised to North America. Are you hoping this will have a more global outlook because it’s just a bigger conference?

Martin Jordan:

The other day, I was listening to a talk from the Italians and I feel like everybody is kind of innovating in another pocket. So at the beginning some people were like, ‘oh GDS is so far ahead’, but like, we are ahead in some regards. In other regards like, other governments are totally leading. So there’s a lot of stuff we can learn from each other.

Laura Stevens:

Is there an example you can think of, maybe from that conference that you were like, ‘oh, they’re doing so much better, we can learn from them’.

Martin Jordan:

So the design system that was created by the US folks and as well the design system created by, by the Australians, contains like various components that we might not have had.

So there has been, after one of the calls, like kind of like, an immediate exchange of code...

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Martin Jordan:

...which was like, wow. We were like, ‘oh this is a component we do not have here’. So that people…

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Martin Jordan:

...just share code literally, just…

Laura Stevens:

Straight away.

Martin Jordan:

Yeah. Which is quite amazing, amazing to see. Yeah.

Laura Stevens:

And in terms of obviously, you’ve had a really significant growth over these past few years, in terms of where you want to the community to go, is there any plans you’ve got for 2020, in terms of maybe, targeting different countries or growing it further or in a different direction. What would be your take on that?

Kara Kane:

In terms of the events, we’re intrigued to see how we can continue running those, and how we can continue having the community take ownership of those events. So we have been in, we’ve had people contact us from 3 different countries saying that they’re interested in running a conference. So we are in talks.

Laura Stevens:

Watch this space.

Kara Kane:

Watch this space.

So we’re trying to think about you know, how many events should we do a year, and what should those events look like, and how big should they be. So we’re working on a bit of a conference playbook…

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

...at the moment, that we can share with people who want to run a conference, to really help them be able to do it.

So in general for the community, going forward, we want it be, we want it to continue to be a place that is supportive for people working in this environment and in this space. We want to continue bringing people together, we want to continue seeing things like the Finns and the Estonians kind of working together and running events together.

And you know, people working on similar service areas coming together to share and learn from each other. But we really you know, in the future, want to get to a point where we’re, as Martin said around the design system example, like how can we share interaction and service design patterns.

Martin Jordan:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

There’s so much kind of possibility for that. So how can the community facilitate that and what does that look like and is it possible, and at what level can we get to, and how can we keep you know, stealing from each other.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

Stealing code, stealing ideas and just you know, really learning from what everyone else is doing. So it’s really about kind of, maximising share and re-use, which is the theme of the November conference.

Martin Jordan:

Exactly, yes.

Laura Stevens:

And so if, how would I join this community if I’ve been listening to this, wherever I am in the world, how would I join?

Martin Jordan:

So we have quite a few blog posts on the design in government blog, that is one of the GDS blogs.

There you have a dedicated international category, and whatever international blog post you read, at the bottom there are all the links to join the Google group. And then you’re part of the community.

Kara Kane:

So once you apply to join the Google group, and join the community, then you’re sent a welcome email. Which kind of tells you about the Slack channels, it tells you about the recordings of the monthly calls, it tells you about the events that are coming up. So you can immediately find out what’s going on and how to get involved.

Laura Stevens:

And tell me about applying. Who exactly can join the group?

Kara Kane:

So it’s open to people that are working embedded in government, working in user-centered design. So you could be a designer, a user researcher, some working in accessibility, anyone who’s interested in design, and you have to be interested in talking about those things, from any government in the world, is welcome to join.

Laura Stevens:

And I don’t know if we could round off with maybe some tips that you, on how to set up your own community, if this is something, if there’s some quick fire tips that you’ve found over learning this community. Sort of, how do you scale, how do you keep momentum going and what tools do you need.

Is there anything you’d want to add those?

Kara Kane:

I think the first thing is using platforms that people are already on.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

So…

Laura Stevens:

Don’t reinvent the wheel.

Kara Kane:

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Please.

Just people use Slack, so use Slack.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

People use email, so use Google groups. It makes it so much easier if you make it hard for people to actually get to the platform where the conversation is happening, you’re already putting up a barrier to your community.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

So make it really easy, easy to access once you’re part of the community. And easy to, easy to respond and join conversations.

Martin Jordan:

And if there are events happening, whether they’re kind of like online calls or like physical meetups with talks, like if you can, try to record stuff. So if there is like material you can share, because people will either kind of like, join communities later. Yeah, do that.

Or as well be not able to attend, and if you can then share the materials so they can still consume it in their own time, it’s really beneficial.

Kara Kane:

Yeah and I think, building on that, is just having different formats. So not just having a Google group or a Slack group, where it can be really really scary to ask a question or share something.

Having things like monthly calls where you’re kind of, inviting people in to present, inviting people to consume information in a different way, having face to face events where people can network and meet people in a different way. Just having different options for people to feel engaged in the community.

Laura Stevens:

So different formats, use the tools people are already on and record what you do.

Kara Kane:

Yes.

Martin Jordan:

Yeah.

Laura Stevens:

Three excellent tips.

Kara Kane:

And help introduce people.

Laura Stevens:

And is that sort of, facilitating..?

Kara Kane:

As a Community Manager.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Kara Kane:

It’s really, especially in the beginning, is just help facilitate relationship building.

Laura Stevens:

Yeah.

Arrange lots of cups of coffee.

Kara Kane:

Yeah.

Laura Stevens:

So thank you to both Kara and Martin today for telling us about their experience in running the international design in government community. So thank you for coming on.

Kara Kane:

Thank you!

Martin Jordan:

Thank you.

Thank you to both Kara and Martin today for telling us about their experience in running the international design in government community.

You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify and all other major podcast platforms. And you can read the transcripts on Podbean.

Thank you both again very much.

GDS Podcast #11: On clear writing Aug 27, 2019

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.

The transcript for the episode follows:

------------

Angus Montgomery: Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Angus Montgomery and I’m a Senior Writer at GDS. And for this episode of the podcast, I’m joined by my colleague Sarah Stewart.

Sarah Stewart: Hello. I’m also a Senior Writer at GDS.

Angus Montgomery: So our voices might sound quite familiar because both Sarah and I, with our colleague Laura, have been on all the episodes of the GDS podcasts that we’ve done so far and as part of those episodes, we’ve been interviewing people across GDS and across government about their work and talking about the things that they do to help transform government and to build digital services and to make things better for users.

And, we realised that we’re nearly a year into this podcast now, I think this is our 11th episode, and we haven’t actually properly introduced ourselves and talk about what we do, and how our work contributes to digital transformation across government and helps everyone in GDS and across government do their jobs better. So that’s what we intend to do with this podcast.

Sarah Stewart: And we’re also going to be sharing our top tips for clear writing, which we’ve put together over the past 3 years of working at GDS, so we’ll be sharing those with you as well.

Angus Montgomery: Yeah, so Sarah and I, just as a bit of background, we’re both Creative Writers at the Government Digital Service. We both joined on the same day. Can you remember what day that was? Testing you.

Sarah Stewart: It was May 23rd.

Angus Montgomery: I thought it was the 22nd.

Sarah Stewart: Strong start.

Angus Montgomery: Sarah’s memory is better than mine. May 23rd 2016. And we work as part of a team called the Creative Team in GDS.

And we’re in a team that also has people like filmmakers, production experts, graphic designers, Graham Higgins, who’s also in the room with us, who is doing the production of this podcast and is one of our filmmakers, and audio production and all sorts of other amazing things as well.

And our role, the role of our team, is to help everyone in GDS, from Director General down throughout the organisation of all parts talk about their work, communicate their work and explain what it’s doing to help government work better and to make things better for users.

Sarah Stewart: Don’t sell us short, Angus. We also write at a ministerial level as well. So it’s from Minister down.

Angus Montgomery: So, yeah what we want to do with this podcast as Sarah has already talked about, is explain a bit about our jobs and what we’re here to do, talk a bit about writing and communication and why it’s important and to give our ten top tips, pieces of guidance, principles, whatever it is that you want to call them about how to write and communicate more clearly.

So that’s what we’re going to do. But before we kick that off...Sarah, can you tell me a little bit about what your background is and how you came to work at GDS?

Sarah Stewart: Well I don’t know how far we should go back - but at school, the only 2 things that I thought I was good at and enjoyed were English and rounders. And there’s not much you can do with rounders, so I pursued English. I read English at university, came down to London, did my postgrad down here. Became a journalist. Hated every second of it. I was a business journalist and it was a generally terrible experience for me. Although I did pick up some useful things, like always carry a notebook and pen with you, which I still do to this day.

Angus Montgomery: How’s your shorthand?

Sarah Stewart: It is non-existent. And also about libel as well, that was an important lesson.

Angus Montgomery: Oh yeah, that’s very important.

Sarah Stewart: And then I was lucky enough to get a job working at Shelter, which is a housing and homelessness charity and they also campaign for better housing rights and conditions. And I was a Content Writer and Producer there, so I launched their advice Youtube channel, I edited their advice on their website, I launched their advice sound clips, and I edited their blog as well, of case studies.

And then after a couple of years, I found out about the job at GDS.

Angus Montgomery: What attracted you to GDS?

Sarah Stewart: Funny story actually, I had never heard of GDS before applying. I was at Shelter and someone that I worked with left the job advert on my desk with a post-it that said ‘this is the kind of job you can go for in a few years time’ and I thought ‘Screw that, I'll apply for it now.’

It wasn’t really my ambition to work in government, but it kind of worked out well. I really enjoy what we do now. But you did know about GDS before you joined.

Angus Montgomery: I did. So my background was similar in the sense that I was a journalist, I hadn’t worked doing anything else actually, I’d been a journalist my entire career

Sarah Stewart: And you liked it?

Angus Montgomery: Uh, yeah. I mean like...Liked is not a strong word.

Sarah Stewart:...liked it more than I did? Did you cry in the loos everyday like I did?

Angus Montgomery: No, that’s really unpleasant and horrible. I’m sorry that you went through that. But there might have been some loo crying at certain stages. I think the thing about journalism, as you sort of implied, is that when it’s good, it’s really fun and it is a great industry to work in.

And you can do lots of different things, and lots of exciting things and meet lots of interesting people. It is really really tough. And when it’s bad, it is very very unpleasant and a difficult environment to work in.

So I was working for a website called Design Week, which covers the UK design industry. Around the time I became editor was around the time that GDS was setting up and launching and getting a really big profile. And was winning awards like a D&AD black pencil and the design of the year awards, so obviously it was a really really big design story. And I got to know some of the design team in GDS, and I was you know obviously, while that was happening, an observer of what was happening, I was reading all the blog posts, I was looking at all the posters and all the other communication that it was putting out

Sarah Stewart: Oh my god, you’re really putting me to shame.

Angus Montgomery: But GDS was a really big story, it looked really interesting to me, was hugely appealing in the sense that of, something similar to what you said, this was an organisation that was serving the whole nation.

And an organisation that was very clearly there to do something good. It was there to help government work better for users and for everyone, for civil servants and everyone. Being involved in something like that was really really appealing, and remains really really appealing, it’s why I still come to work everyday.

Before we get onto the kind of, the writing aspect and the top tips, the kind of the educational part of this podcast, what is it that you enjoy most about working at GDS and what do you find most satisfying?

Sarah Stewart: That’s a good question. I’m lucky to say that they are quite a few things that I enjoy. I like the fact that when I write, and that can be if I’m drafting a speech or writing a presentation or helping someone edit a policy document or write a ministerial forward, that I’m actually doing something that’s important to the idea of democracy, because in order for people to make good decisions, they need to know what the facts are. And I like that I can ask the difficult questions that get to the facts, I like that I can challenge people and say ‘no, you need to include more detail’, I can say ‘you should leave this out because it’s maybe not the right time to come out and say this particular thing.’

I love the feeling when someone, maybe this is a bit self-indulgent, but when someone is delivering a speech that I’ve written, it’s like the best feeling in the world, because I’m naturally introverted and I know that these words aren’t my words, but when a joke goes down really well and the audience laughs or when you, you know, when the key message has been hit and people understand it and an action is taken, that’s massively rewarding.

But there’s... I get so much pleasure from just the act of writing. I mean when I’m not doing it at GDS, I’m doing it in my spare time. There’s just something really satisfying, I guess like mathematicians, when they do a sum correctly or they workout a formula and it and it all works out wonderfully well, it’s writing a sentence that flows beautifully and is truthful and you know, moves people to do something or to consider something in a different way.

So I don’t think there’s really one part that I don’t enjoy. I mean I hate meetings, but doesn’t everyone? What, how about you?

Angus Montgomery: I think something similar. Although I’m kind of less wedded in a weird way to the craft of writing. I mean writing, it’s not something that I don’t enjoy but I kind of, I don’t get a huge amount of pleasure in a sense from, like constructing a sentence or the kind of technical aspects of it. But the thing I enjoy most is, I really like the idea that writing is structured thinking.

So when you write something down, you need to be really clear and it needs to be really structured and it needs to make sense. And so the thing I get most satisfaction from is, when you’re working with someone to help them explain a difficult concept that can exist maybe only in their own head, and they’re explaining it in a way that they can’t fully articulate, you’re just about understanding it. And there’s that breakthrough moment when you write something down and you show it to them and they go ‘yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to say!’

Sarah Stewart: Yeah.

Angus Montgomery: ‘That makes total sense, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do’. That to me is the really satisfying part of this, is like getting. And I suppose corollary to that is the fact that we work with really intelligent, really nice people as well, but really super intelligent people that are really driven and really focussed on what they’re doing, and have these really complex things going on in their heads.

And maybe because they are so close to that work, the aren’t always capable or don’t always find it easy to communicate as clearly as possible. And that’s really our role is to go in there and say, ‘right, let me inside your head, let me inside all those really deep technical details and All the different things that you’re thinking about. And I will help you communicate this clearly’.

Sarah Stewart: Yeah.

Angus Montgomery: And like that to me is the really satisfying part, it’s like being the bridge between this really intelligent person who has a really complicated idea, and the person who needs to understand that.

At the risk of asking I suppose a cliched question, tell me about your day-to-day, and what it is that you actually do, and what it is that we do and what we write and produce?

Sarah Stewart: Yeah, so we write a whole host of things. So there’s obviously the kind of straightforward written content, so blog posts, press articles, op-eds. I tend to...

Angus Montgomery: What’s an op-ed?

Sarah Stewart: Oh sorry. Good question. It’s, well actually I was, I…

Angus Montgomery: I don’t know the answer to this actually, which is why I…

Sarah Stewart: It’s either…So there are some people who think it’s an opinion editorial. So someone just speaking about a subject that they know. Other people think that it means ‘opposite the editorial page’ But basically what we take it to mean, and what I’m doing I think, is writing an opinion piece so…

Angus Montgomery: For a newspaper or magazine.

Sarah Stewart: Yeah for a newspaper or a magazine. And so I’ll be writing on behalf of somebody, I don’t think it’s any secret to say that you know in government, there are speech writers and there are other...people like us exist in order to kind of help Senior Civil Servants communicate.

So, I tend to specialise in speeches but we also write presentations for people across GDS, we might be writing forewords for strategy papers, we might be editing, you know, policy documents, but that’s a very small part of what we do I think. And we also write scripts for animations and films and do things like podcasts.

Angus Montgomery: So we wanted to give you ten principles that help us communicate clearly, and that we think you might benefit from as well. And some of them are you know, things that might seem obvious and some of them may be are a bit more left field. But they are all things that we kind of, help us to our day-to-day jobs.

So without further ado, Sarah do you want to give us point one and tell us a little bit about it?

Sarah Stewart: OK so my first principle is: Establish ‘The Point’. Before you write anything, whether it’s a speech, a blog post, a presentation, a love letter – establish what the point of your writing is. And ‘The Point’ comprises two parts – and I’m thinking of trademarking this actually, it’s: What you want you want to say and why it needs to be said. We’ll come onto audience in just a second.

So once you’ve established what the point is, write it on a post-it note, stick it at the top of your doc. It will be your guiding star. It will keep you relevant, it will keep you focused and if you can’t figure out what the point is, don’t write. Don’t agree to do the speech. Don’t agree to do the presentation. The chances are you’ll come up with the point at a future date, but if you’re really struggling to establish what it is that you want to say and the reason for saying it, just don’t do it. You’ll waste people’s time and wasting people’s time is a sin.

Angus Montgomery: Point three of the point, I think. You’ve got what you want to say and why you want to say it but also who you want to say it to.The audience, as you mentioned, is an important thing. You have to assume that the thing you’re saying is interesting to someone or to a group of people, and then you have to work out who that group of people is. Knowing that will help you work out the best way of communicating your message. It might be that the thing you want to say or write is best done as a blog post, or it might best done as a film, or best done presentation or it might be better to draw it as a picture and create a poster of it. Knowing the what, the why and who you’re trying to tell it to, will help you shape your message and the way you’re communicating your message.

My first point so number 2 of our principles is, ‘write it like you’d say it’. So I mentioned earlier about a big part of our role, or the main part of our role is to help organisations, this organisation, communicate in a human voice.

To me a human voice is the voice that you would use to describe something to a friend when you’re you know, having lunch or at the pub or at the park or whatever. Like if this is that thing about like, if you’re trying to describe a really difficult technical concept, then think about how you would explain it to a friend or to your mum or to you know, son or daughter or whatever it might be.

And then write down the way that you would do that. So it shouldn’t be really that much difference between the written word and the spoken word. Although obviously you’ll have far fewer sort of ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and all those sorts of things.

But like a human voice written on page should sound like speech to me. So when you read something, it should sound like someone is saying it to you, someone is speaking to you in the way that, in a sort of slightly informal, kind of suppose, kind of friendly tone of voice but in a way that’s understandable and relatable.

And that really helps you to, I think, get away from what can be a quite, there can be a formality about the written word, and I think that this is again, why some people find writing quite a sort of scary prospect, is it can feel like you have to use the longest most complex, most impressive words possible.

And actually you really don’t. You need to use the shortest, clearest, simplest words possible just as you would if you were trying to explain something verbally really clearly. So write it like you’d say it, and the way, a thing that can help you to do that is, as you’re writing something down, read it out.

Does it make sense if you say it out loud? Does it make sense if you say it in your head? Does that article that you’ve written sound like something you would naturally say? If it does, then you’re broadly along the right lines I think.

Sarah Stewart: That’s a good tip. And it neatly links it my next point, which is ‘don’t try and sound clever’.

Essentially what you want to be is clear and concise and don’t over do it. Don’t try and impress anyone because you are probably doing something that is impressive. You probably have all the vocabulary you need to express it clearly. Leave it there.

This reminds me of a good quote by the investor Charlie Munger. He said ‘if you want to be thought of as a good guy, be a good guy.’ So if you want to come across as smart, then be smart and explain what you’re doing. But don’t go out there having an agenda that you have to come across as something. It’s inauthentic.

You see it, particularly in academic writing. People who are so in that world become - it’s almost impossible to cut through what they’re saying. For example, my friend sent me the abstract of his book and his opening sentence was 58 words long with no punctuation. I could individually pick out what every single word meant, I knew the meaning of each word but in the syntax, in that sentence, I had no idea what was going on. And I was trying to give positive feedback and I said look I’m really sorry, I don’t know what it is you’re trying to say and he said: ‘Oh, well, it’s written for academics’ - well, presumably at some point you want other people to read it!

Angus Montgomery: Sometimes in this organisation as well, people say ‘oh it’s written for Senior Civil Servants’ or it’s written for a particular audience or it’s written someone whose a specialist, but they are people too. When you’re a senior civil servant, you don’t suddenly become this person who communicates in a really arcane fashion or understands things in a really complex fashion. You’re also a person who needs to understand things really, really quickly, so being able to write things down and explain things in a clear and accessible fashion is appropriate for any reader, regardless of who they are.

Sarah Stewart: Yeah, actually there’s a really good discussion if you want some further reading or further listening. It’s Stephen Pinker in conversation with Ian McEwan on academic writing and the importance of clear writing. So after you’ve listened to this podcast, do give it a watch it’s on YouTube.

Angus Montgomery: Which leads nicely, these are segueing quite nicely together I think, to my point or my next point. Which is something that we say quite a lot at GDS, which is ‘show the thing’. And by that we mean if you’re talking about something or you’re trying to tell someone about a product or a service or a thing, just show it.

Explain how it works, say what it is, don’t use metaphors, don’t try to dress it up, don’t try to make it sound like it’s doing things that it isn’t. Just explain what it does.

Because as you’ve just said, if the thing that you’ve built or the thing that you’re trying to describe is valuable and worth talking about, then all you need to do is explain it clearly and it will do the work for you.

You don’t need to dress it up, you don’t need to put marketing on it, you don’t need to you know make it sound like it’s the incredible next you know, use loads of adjectives like ‘stunning’ and ‘life changing’. You just need to show it and if it’s a worthwhile thing then the reader will understand that and accept that and will be on board with it.

So show the thing, talk about it as clearly as possible, say what it does, and that’s all you need to do. That’s basically it.

Sarah Stewart: I’ve come up with an original next principle, Angus. Burn! Which is about feedback and welcoming feedback and a sub point of this, is the message: you are not your writing.

So the other day, some kids came in for work experience. Can I call them kids? Some students came in for work experience and I spoke to them about my job and writing more generally. And a question they asked was ‘what do you do when someone gives you really bad feedback about your writing?’ I think the most important and first thing that you should learn and it’s the most difficult thing that writers have to come to terms with is: you are not your writing.

Yes, it has come out of your head and through your hands and is informed by the experiences you’ve had, but once it leaves you, it is a separate entity. And once you have that disconnect, that it is a separate entity, you stop being precious about it and you start thinking about the work and the work is the most important thing.

So, when someone says to you ‘this is a really confusing piece of writing’ or ‘this is a really confusing essay ‘ or ‘this is a muddled blog post’, they are not saying ‘you are a terrible person.’ They are not saying ‘you’re an imbecile’ or ‘you are a failure as a writer’. They are saying ‘this is muddled’ ‘this is confusing’. It doesn't feel good to be criticised or to have negative feedback, but it’s a gift. It’s an opportunity for you to...

Angus Montgomery: Feedback is a gift

Sarah Stewart: It really is. I was thinking about the best advice I was ever given as a writer which was being told, when I was a journalist, which is probably why I hated it so much, that I was a rubbish writer. So I think I needed to hear that things weren’t very good or I would have been writing, you know, like a crazy woman for the rest of my life. You need feedback, you need to welcome that in. Because it’s always about the work, it’s never really about you, and it’s never even about you when you’re writing memoir or yoru autobiography, it’s still a separate thing.

Angus Montgomery: That leads, leads very neatly into my next point.

Which is another GDSism, something that we say quite a lot at GDS which is, ‘the team is the editor’.

And before I got into this, because it’s a common thing we say at GDS, I should probably give a shoutout to some of the original Creative Team and Creative Writers at GDS, who you know we’re standing on the shoulders of giants and all that stuff, a lot of certainly my ways of working and thinking have come from these people.

So people like Giles Turnbull, Ella Fitzsimmons, Matt Sheret, Amy McNichol and this is the thing I used to hear a lot from them, ‘the team is the editor’ and that means, to pick up on exactly your point, we’re not doing this writing on our own, like we are the writer kind of in charge ultimately of the document or the piece of writing that will go out but we’re working in collaboration with a lot of other people.

So we could be working in collaboration with the person who has developed the idea or product or service or whatever it is that we’re trying to communicate. We’ll be working with a comms specialist who will be thinking about what’s the best way to best place to publish this.

You might be working with someone who edits the blog. And we’re working with the rest of our team as well because we’re not working in isolation. Pretty much everything that I write, I share with you and I think vice versa.

And you have to, you’re nothing without an editor. A writer is nothing without a good editor. No book that you have read and no newspaper article that you’ve read and no film that you’ve seen and no commercial you’ve seen on TV is just a result of a single writer...

Sarah Stewart: That’s so…

Angus Montgomery: ...with their vision.

Sarah Stewart: Yeah, that’s so true. And I think that’s why people get so put off writing as well because they seem, people think of writers as, like, strange creatures inspired that they you know, get hit on the head by muse and are able to write perfect prose.

But it goes through loads and loads and loads of editing to get that kind of pure, perfect sentence.

Angus Montgomery: So ‘the team is the editor’ and the editor is the unsung hero of writing as well. They are the person in the background that is making all these things work. The reason people give feedback isn’t because they want to undermine you or attack you, it’s because they want to make the work better. And you have to welcome that and find that as well. As a writer it’s really important not to isolate yourself and do it on your own, and plough away and...

Sarah Stewart: It is nerve-wracking to share your work and you do have to be aware of when, for example, say I’m writing a speech, it’s not unusual to have twenty people in the document all feeding in their ideas and you have to be able to distinguish: what is a ‘showstopper’ so a fact that needs to go in or something that has to come out because it’s incorrect, what’s personal opinion and what’s style. And if you have a really clear idea of that, there does come a point where you can say, ‘Actually, no, I’ve taken in everything I need to take in and I’m happy with the piece now.’

Just to add to that, sharing with the team and the team is the editor, of all things I’ve written and shared with you or shared with the team, I’ve never had a case where it’s been made worse by a suggestion, the work has always improved.

Angus Montgomery: If the person who is giving you feedback understands what this piece of writing is trying to do and that person is sort of vaguely competent, then they will give you useful constructive feedback.

Sarah Stewart: I feel like maybe we’re rambling on this or maybe I’m rambling on this, but In terms of feedback givers, it’s very easy to criticise someone. It’s very easy to say ‘this isn’t good’. It takes intelligence to say what’s not quite working about it. So when you are giving feedback to someone, really consider, first of all, of course, their feelings because you don’t want to come across as, well you don’t want to be an awful person, but what’s useful for them to know about this. And we’ve got some fantastic posters around the office on how to give feedback effectively. So just make sure that if you’re required to give feedback, you’re doing it in an intelligent, kind way.

Angus Montgomery: In a constructive fashion.

Sarah Stewart: Yes, better.

Angus Montgomery: and your next point?

Sarah Stewart:... is to ‘read’. Reading is as important as writing. If you want to be a really good writer, you have to read lots and you should read good things. You know like the classics like Nabokov, James Joyce and Jane Austen. Yes of course you should read them because they’re fantastic, and it’s a pleasure to read a good writer.

But also, just don’t be too much of a snob about it.Read a Mills and Boon book, read Fifty Shades of Grey, and again no shade on E.L James because she’s a multi-millionaire doing what she loves.

Angus Montgomery: It takes skill to write that stuff surely.

Sarah Stewart: Yeah. In particular I would say read poetry. Not only because I think it’s super cool, poetry can teach you a lot about conveying complex ideas in a very short space of time and you know, we’re you know kids of the digital age, we don’t have a very long attention span so understanding how to kind of compress ideas is very important.

But poetry can teach you a lot about the music of a sentence. And especially for speech writing, it’s particularly important. A poem can teach you about the sound of words, the meter, how a piece scans, it’s called scansion. So there’s no alchemy to writing really well, it is just about practicing writing and reading.

Angus Montgomery: Any poem in particular or poet in particular?

Sarah Stewart: Well...good question. I would recommend the Confessional poets, so like Sylvia Plath. But actually, do you know what? Any American poet from the 1950s onwards because American poetry in particular, they have a way of, I say ‘they’ in a very general sense, I would recommend the Confessional School and the New York School in particular – – as you’ve asked – because they just say it how it is.

And also the Beat poets as well, although they can talk a lot in abstraction, you can learn a lot by their directness.

Angus Montgomery: Yeah.

Sarah Stewart: So yeah. Ginsberg, Kerouac.

Angus Montgomery: Yeah.

Sarah Stewart: Frank O'Hara.

Angus Montgomery: Very minimal viable words.

My next principle, next tip, is quite a practical one. And it’s something that might not work for everyone, but I find really really helpful, which is to never start with a blank page.

So if you’re writing something, the scariest thing is when you kind of open up a Word doc or a Google doc or have a physical sheet of blank paper in front of you, and you’re like ‘oh my god, what do I do with this now?’ like ‘I need to turn this from this blank sheet into a speech or an article or a blog post or a presentation or whatever it might be.

And that blankness is the most terrifying part of this and starting is the most terrifying part of any project and writing is no different. So the way that I deal with that is when I have a blank page in front of me, I immediately go to Google or other search engines are available obviously, and or previous pieces that I’ve done that are similar, copy paste and just throw as much text as I can on to that page, that even if it’s only tangentially similar, gives me something to work from.

So that I’m not starting from scratch, so that I have something to bounce ideas off of or something re-work or something that guides me in the right direction, and also takes away that fear of you know, just having a totally blank page in front of you.

Sarah Stewart: I do that all the time actually. If I’m writing a speech for example, I always write ‘good morning or good afternoon everyone’. And then if anyone asks me if I’ve made any progress, I can at least say I’ve made a start!

Angus Montgomery: Yeah exactly. The vital start is there.

Sarah Stewart: Yeah. It’s psychologically important to have something down on paper.

Angus Montgomery: Yeah.

Sarah Stewart: You’re right.

Angus Montgomery: So I think it’s that, it’s that starting and then sort of flowing, flowing from there basically.

Sarah Stewart: Yeah.

Angus Montgomery: And what’s your next principle?

Sarah Stewart: So my next principle I’ve entitled, ‘enough is enough’. So just don’t overdo it. Just write enough, and enough doesn’t mean writing an epic poem nor does it mean writing a haiku. Sorry, there are a lot of poetry allusions in this – but it means writing enough to get the job done.

And the poet Frank O’Hara had a lovely quote about, you should read it, it’s called...it’s in a piece of writing that he called Personism: A Manifesto. And he describes writing and how effective writing is wearing a piece of clothing so it fits you perfectly, so it does exactly the job that it’s meant to do.

Angus Montgomery: It’s showing the thing.

Sarah Stewart: And you might ‘show the thing’...it’s a very confusing analogy.

Angus Montgomery: It’s a very confusing mixing, we’re mixing several metaphors here to prove a point.

Sarah Stewart: Yeah.

Angus Montgomery: But yeah. And bringing me, without really a segue in this one, but bringing us nicely nevertheless to the final point which is, ‘stay human’.

And this is not necessarily a writing point, this is something obviously that we should be all doing all the time in whatever work we do, but the reason I’m talking about it, and we’ve touched on this several times, writing isn’t something that we just do in isolation on our own

Writing our, the writing that we do is helping one person, one human being, convey a message to another person, another human being or a group of them. And the people in that process are really really important, like the written word is important, but the people in that process are the most important parts.

So just when we’re dealing with people, we always try to be as nice and humble and listen as much as we can and advice and guide and all those sorts of things. But just try and do it nicely because it can be a stressful situation for people.

So thank you Sarah.

Sarah Stewart: Thank you Angus. This has been nice, hasn’t it?

Angus Montgomery: This has been nice.

Sarah Stewart: So that brings us to the end of our 10 principles. This podcast will be embedded into a blog post, which will be published on the GDS blog. Please leave your comments for clear writing and any advice that you have for others.

Angus Montgomery: Thank you for listening to the latest episode of the GDS podcast. We hope you enjoyed it and if you want to listen to previous episodes that we’ve done or what to subscribe for the future, then please just do to wherever it is that you download your podcasts from and hit the subscribe button.

And we hope to have you as a listener again soon.

Sarah Stewart: Farewell.

GDS Podcast #10: Improving government services with GOV.UK step by step navigation Jun 28, 2019

GDS’s Kate Ivey-Williams and Sam Dub talk about their award-winning work, explaining why and how the navigation was created, and its impact on users.

A full transcript of the episode follows.

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Laura Stevens:
Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Laura Stevens and I’m a writer here at GDS. Today we’re going to be speaking about the award-winning ‘Step by Step’ navigation on GOV.UK. This is a navigation that breaks down complex tasks into simple steps. The navigation follows you throughout your journey, indicating what to do now and next. It also shows you what previous steps you might have missed. For example, getting a provisional driving licence before booking a driving theory test. To tell me more about this is Kate Ivey-Williams and Sam Dub, so, please, could you introduce yourself and tell me what you do here at GDS, for Kate first?

Kate Ivey-Williams:

Yes, so I am Service Design Lead for GOV.UK. That basically means my work focuses on 2 things. It’s looking at how the platform of GOV.UK helps government to deliver services, but also looking at how the GOV.UK programme, as a group of people, are helping government to improve those services.

Laura Stevens:

Sounds great, and Sam?

Sam Dub:

I’m a product manager working on GOV.UK. For the last couple of years, really, I’ve been focusing on navigation of GOV.UK. That means, really, making things easy to find, but also, with ‘Step by Step’ navigation, making things easier to do. Ways that we can join things up so they make sense for users is a key part of that.

Laura Stevens:

Okay. Your team won a prestigious design award last month. That was from D&AD. How did you feel when you found out about that?

Kate Ivey-Williams:

Really exciting. I think it’s like you spend a lot of time looking inwards at government and having a strong belief that you’re working on the right things and doing things that make sense, but it’s very nice to get recognition from people outside of your world of work, and peers across the industry, that the thing that you’re working on is a good thing and that it feels meaningful beyond just the context that we’re working in.

Sam Dub:

I think one of the things that’s really nice about it is it’s an iteration on GOV.UK. A lot of the work there are like re-launches or rebrands, and this is like a continuation of some of the thinking that’s been around GOV.UK since the beginning. It feels like a kind of validation of a process of iteration, like week by week, month by month, we’ve got to this new place. It’s quite exciting.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

I was a bit unsure, actually, whether we would win an award, because obviously GOV.UK has won 2 awards previously, mostly focused on… They were awards for content design, and I was unsure whether entering this they would just see it like, “GOV… It’s just the same thing.”

Laura Stevens:

You’re just getting all the awards, aren’t you?

Kate Ivey-Williams:

They’re just, “What do you want another award for?” But we entered it in a different category and I think they did understand that we’re trying to achieve slightly different things. Driven by the same principles, we’re now focusing on doing slightly different things and working in slightly different ways than we did 5 years ago, or whenever we won the previous awards.

Sam Dub:

It built on that work. The early achievement, the big achievement of GOV.UK in its first year was just getting everything together in the same place. That’s something that Neil Williams was talking about on… I think it was the first or second episode of the podcast.

Laura Stevens:

Yes, the first podcast; yes.

Sam Dub:

He was leading that work. Just getting all those departmental websites shut down and all that content moved into one place was a huge achievement. Then there was a, kind of, follow-on challenge for that, which was like, “How do we make this stuff findable and usable, and how do we join this content up and these transactions up across departments?”

We’re able to do what we’re doing because of that work that came before us, but it follows in a, kind of, tradition of ideas of, like, joining things up for users, making things easy, like making sure that users don’t have to understand the structure of government in order to find what they need.

Laura Stevens:

This is what I was going to talk about, like how ‘Step by Step’ came about. What was the genesis of it?

Kate Ivey-Williams:

It’s, kind of, the reason that I joined GOV.UK. I was one of the first service designers to join GDS as an organisation. Lou Downe joined first and established service design as a profession within GDS, and then they brought in myself and another person. I joined GOV.UK with the idea that, “Okay, you’re going to be on GOV.UK and you’re going to think about how does GOV.UK do services?”

I’ve been at GDS for about 4 years now, and it took, probably, about a year and a half before we could kick off this work in any meaningful way, because we had to still do quite a lot of technical work on GOV.UK, bringing all the content into one place so that we could do consistent universal navigation across all content. There was quite a lot of technical debt to deal with.

It’s been ticking along and our ideas have been evolving, a year and a half ago, we were able to really kick this work off in earnest and think about how all of those ideas translate into something actual, real.

Sam Dub:

Yes, and it’s such an attractive idea. For me, somebody who didn’t have all that background, coming to it at that point, it was just such an exciting idea – the idea that we could have, like, a single page that would tell you everything you needed to do in order to get something done, something big, and chunky, and meaningful, like learning to drive, or starting a business, or employing someone, these complicated processes. If, as government, we could just create one page that’s well structured and explains exactly what you need to do, that’s such a valuable thing for users, for citizens. That was a really exciting idea to just pick up and run with.

Laura Stevens:

Why did you pick the first one, which was ‘Learning to Drive’?

Kate Ivey-Williams:

There was quite a lot of previous work done in that area. When Lou first joined GDS, they went off to Swansea, and worked a lot with DVLA, and were looking at a lot of the driving services, so we had quite a historical knowledge base in that area and already had quite a good understanding of that journey.

From that respect, it was quite a good one to pick up, because we had stuff we could build on, but it also is a journey that’s quite simple, and linear, and quite easily understood.

Sam Dub:

I think it’s, kind of, exemplifies what this pattern, this design pattern, this new feature on GOV.UK is for, in that inside ’Learning to Drive’ you’ve got a load of guidance. You’ve got stuff like… The ‘Highway Code’ is probably the best-known part of that. You’ve got all these kinds of transactions you need to do with government.

Before you start, you’ve got to get a provisional driving licence. That’s a transaction with government. Then, at some point in that process, you’ve got to do your theory test. You’ve got to take some driving lessons. Then you’ve got to take your practical test.

You’ve got to do those things in the right order, like you can’t take a driving test until you’ve got your provisional licence. So, it was just a really nice kind of model for how we could start organising that content in a simple sequence that made sense to people, to make that easier.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

‘Learn to Drive’ had quite a good mix of things across it that we could start testing the pattern slightly about how it could deal with real processes that a user’s going through, not just the government processes.

Laura Stevens:

I was actually going to talk through the design of that, because it went through quite a few rounds, iterations.

Sam Dub:

Like with most things, we start in identifying a need. We knew that we needed to join up transactions and guidance, because you need both. You need to engage with the guidance, and you need to do these transactions, so we started developing prototypes for how we do that.

As with most things in GDS and GOV.UK, we start with user research. That’s bringing in people who are in the process of learning to drive. We put these early prototypes in front of them and we really asked them just to go through the… To engage with them naturally, as if they were in their own homes, and do the parts of the journey where they were at, at the moment.

That allowed us to evolve a design over… I think it was, in the creation of the original pattern, about 10 rounds of user research. Each time, we were bringing a slightly different prototype, like building on the learnings and insights from the previous round, and really honing this design pattern to a point where users felt comfortable with it. It felt natural, it felt intuitive to them.

Laura Stevens:

You also went up to Neath, as well.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

To the Digital Accessibility Centre. Yes, that was good. We went a whole crew of us. We were, like, the back end, front end: me, the designer; you, the product manager; user research. We all went along and we tested it with, I think, around 10 people who were in the Digital Accessibility Centre who have varying access needs, whether that be cognitive ability or sight, or perhaps it’s… I think one of the people we tested with has ADHD [Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder]. There were quite a lot of different access needs that we tested against, and that was… It was such an interesting day, yes.

Sam Dub:

Yes, we learnt tons from that, and that directly translated into improvements to the designs that make it work better – for everybody, actually.

Laura Stevens:

Now there are 41 ‘Step by Step’ lives. You’ve got quite a range. You’ve got, obviously, the first one, ‘Learning to Drive a Car’, ‘Getting Married’, ‘Getting Divorced’. On a slightly lighter note, you’ve got ‘Reporting Treasure’, as well.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

Yes.

Sam Dub:

Yes.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

My favourite.

Sam Dub:

For the metal detectorists out there, if you find your Anglo-Saxon hoard, unfortunately you have to tell the government about that. You can’t just keep it and so that’s a ‘Step by Step’ process. It’s about, like, we deliberately picked early on these wildly diverse types of processes from, like, something really emotionally taxing and legally complicated, like divorce, and then something like, if you find buried treasure or the cargo of a shipwreck, you have to tell government about that. We were testing to make sure that this pattern could handle all these different kinds of interactions that people have to make with government.

Laura Stevens:

How did you go about creating these step by step?

Kate Ivey-Williams:

We’ve developed a bit of a standardised process now where we’ve now got enough traction with government that in the early days we were going out to departments and saying, “We think your thing would work really well as part of this user journey thing that we’re doing on GOV.UK. You don’t really know what it is yet, but we’d love to give it a go. Can you be our alpha partners?” to a point where we’ve now got enough traction with government that they’re coming to us so we’ve actually got hundreds of ‘Step by Step’ journeys in our backlog that we could build, and now it’s about picking up them, based on prioritisation.

And once we… We have 2 different starting points. Sometimes you have a really tangible idea of what the journey is and who the users are. When you’ve got that idea, you can start building a draft of that journey internally in GOV.UK with our content designers, who are brilliant service designers, actually. They interrogate the content on GOV.UK and start mapping out a draft of this thing.

Then, alongside that, we start working out who are the departments involved? Who do we need to get into a room to go through this journey, validate it, make sure that we are going to be pointing at the right things, in the right order, so that users can do all the things they need to do?

Sometimes you start off with a much more fuzzy service area where you’re not quite sure what journeys should be built in that area, or it’s just it’s a bit complicated. You need to think: how are you going to break that down?

Laura Stevens:

Does that journey happen here at GDS, or would you go out to the departments?

Sam Dub:

It’s generally whatever works for the participants. I think this is, maybe, a thing that, outside government, people are not necessarily so aware of: that, with a journey like employing somebody, that’s how a user sees it in terms of, “Okay, I need to hire someone for my business,” but actually that’s owned. The guidance and the transactions are owned by 5 different departments that could be in 5 different offices, in 5 different parts of the country.

What’s exciting is getting all those people in a room together and going, “Actually, collectively, as government, we own this thing. We own the journey. You don’t just own your little bit. We all, together, can make the journey of employing someone really simple, quick, seamless.” It’s really exciting getting those people in the room. People are generally really up for that, like they’re enthusiastic about making the whole thing better.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

More often than not, as well, these workshops, it’s the first time that these people have ever met or thought about how their things join up. That’s really one of the key reasons why this ‘Step by Step’ stuff exists. It’s not just about creating a good experience for users who are trying to do things with government. It’s like 20% that, but it’s like 80% getting government to understand their services, and know who else in government they need to collaborate with when they’re thinking about improving those services, and getting them to take ownership of that as a joined-up, cross-departmental group of people.

Sam Dub:

That’s what we really hope happens with this stuff, is that when we’re just getting started in terms of, like, we’re at 41 at the moment, there are hundreds of these kinds of services that the government provides.

Kate Ivey-Williams:
So many – so many.

Sam Dub:

We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Laura Stevens:

You’ve been busy.

Sam Sub:

But then once, even for … So, the 40 that we’ve mapped out – and you can go see them on GOV.UK – they’re also just the beginning. Those things are 7 or 8 step processes. It’s really great to have a group of people come together and, maybe, have a think about: “Okay, now we’ve mapped it out and seen it all in one place, actually that’s quite complicated,” like, “This, maybe, doesn’t need to be an 8 step process. Maybe we have a policy goal which is reducing this down to 3 steps.” That as, like, Step By Steps’ as an enabler of, like, transformation and improvement of services is one of our goals for this work.

Kate Ivey Williams:

It’s journey mapping, basically, which is like… As a service designer, that’s our bread and butter, is doing journey mapping, because that’s how you understand how everything works and what’s going wrong, but it’s translating that into something that’s, kind of, shiny and people want it.

Laura Stevens:

There have been some really good outcomes, I’ve got some figures, like since launch it’s been used by 10.5 million people. Is that still correct?

Kate Ivey-Williams:

Yes, possibly more because I think that’s the numbers for the overview pages, which are… Within every ‘Step by Step’ journey you’ve got, like, the overview page, which is the journey on one page, but then every page within that end-to-end service will also have the ‘Step by Step’ navigation on. Actually, there are more people using the navigation on the content and transaction pages than they are using the overview pages, so yes.

Sam Dub:

Yes, that’s one of the key insights that are shaping GOV.UK, is the fact that users generally start from search, and they land deep in GOV.UK on content, or they might only think about the process in terms of a transaction. They might think about driving in terms of: “Okay, I’ve got to take a test.” Actually, there’s a load of stuff you need to do before you get to there. It’s about helping users, when they arrive on a piece of content, to go, “Actually, this is part of a 5 step process. Maybe I need to hop back a few steps, do a little bit first, and then I can do this bit.”

We’re making it clear on the site. You’ll see it looks like a kind of underground map on the right-hand side of webpages. It’s a beautiful, responsive design, so it looks good on mobile, too. It’ll show you exactly, using this kind of underground line metaphor, exactly where you are in that process.

We’ve seen that in the lab, users telling us, like, “This is really useful. This makes this process seem manageable,” for some things that often don’t, things that people often need, maybe get professional help or have to call and have to get a lawyer to come and help them do it because it feels so vast and unmanageable. Just by breaking it down and saying, “This is what you need to do now. This is what you need to do next,” really, really helps people.

Laura Stevens:

How do you know that people are reading the content and making use of it?

Sam Dub:

I think we start with user research, but then we start looking for data at [site] scale [when we] start publishing things on GOV.UK. One of the things that we developed alongside the ‘Step by Step’ navigation is this new component. You’ll see it at the bottom of every single page on GOV.UK. It’s just got one very short question in a little blue bar at the bottom of the page, and it just says, ‘Is this useful, yes or no?’. It’s a kind of live usefulness vote that we’ve got running on every page of the site.

This is a common technique across the web. We didn’t invent this, but it gives you a very useful starting metric for what’s working for users and what’s not. It’ll often flag an issue that you then might want to take into a user research lab and look at more in detail: “Actually, what’s going wrong here?” But one of the first signs we had that we were like, “Really on the right track here,” is that the usefulness scores for the new ‘Step by Step’ journeys that we published – the first [set of] ‘Step by Step’ journeys – were way higher than some of the things that they were replacing, and equivalent formats.

We had, like 80%, 90% usefulness scores, which were great news for us. I think the no prompt, if you say, ‘No, this page isn’t useful,’ you’re prompted to give us a bit of feedback. If one of the ‘Step by Steps’ isn’t working for you, there is this mechanism for people to say, “Actually, this is why. This is the bit you’ve… You’ve missed this bit,” or, “I’m in this circumstance and this doesn’t work for me.” It’s a way of us getting feedback at scale from users, and that’s always where we’re focused. We’re always watching the live performance data of what we’re doing, to make sure that it’s right for the circumstance, that it’s right for where we’ve applied it.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

We know it helps people because we’ve seen, for example, the ‘Applying for tax-free childcare’, once we introduce the ‘Step by Step’ – well, the hypothesis before we built the ‘Step by Step’ was that people were not checking whether it was right for them, or they weren’t checking their eligibility before jumping into the transaction itself to apply. They were using the application process as a bit of an eligibility checker, which is not what it’s built for.

Because of that, a lot of people were dropping out, or failing, or applying for the wrong thing. After introducing the ‘Step by Step’ navigation, in the analytics we saw more people who were hitting the transaction page but then jumping back to the eligibility guidance, and then coming back to the transaction and going through it successfully because they were going through with confidence that this was the right thing for them. Fewer people were applying for it incorrectly.

Sam Dub:

That – those kind improvements, getting people just, like, not jumping into transactions that are wrong for them, filling in the right form – is like, one, it saves users tons of time, and primarily that’s what we care about. The secondary impact of that is that also, in turn, saves government loads of money, like having to deal with forms that aren’t filled in right, or calls to call centres because someone doesn’t understand how stuff [has been]… How a service works. That also costs government money, and civil servants time. So, by making things better for users, it has this benefit of saving government time and money, as well, which is really nice.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

I’m nodding.

Laura Stevens:

Can you give me a step by step to making a ‘Step by Step’?

Sam Dub:

There’s a serious one. As a family, we’ve been talking a lot about lasting power of attorney, and everyone in my family is healthy and good, but my parents are in their late 60s and it’s a sensible thing for people to start talking about and planning ahead.

So, within, like, family WhatsApp groups and email, people are just pinging around links to GOV.UK guidance, going, ‘Have a look at this. Is this like…?’ Because there’s a different role for the person who is making the lasting power of attorney, and the people who will, essentially, have an obligation to look after that person if something was to happen to their health.

We’re pinging around guidance, discussing this, and I’m sitting there going, “We should totally do this,” like, “There’s a user need here.” This is complicated. There are decisions being taken. It’s a thing that some people go and seek legal advice about.

Whilst, as a product manager, I wouldn’t abuse my position to get stuff made that’s helpful to me, there’s an indication that there might be a need there. That’s something that we could do the research to actually see if there really was something there, but I’d love to see that happen.

Laura Stevens:

How would you go about doing that if you wanted to create that particular one?

Sam Dub:

In that case, you would look at the parts of the service and the guidance that exists around it. Then you get someone like Kate to come and run this, these workshops that we’ve now got pretty practised at, but Kate can probably tell you what happens.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

Yes, less me and more the content designers, because they are experts in knowing what’s on GOV.UK and how it all fits together. They’re really good. Content design is basically about explaining government services in a really clear way so that people understand them.

And I think we’ve now got to a point where we’ve got the right balance where we’re taking something in that helps them share their knowledge and helps us to get moving quickly so that we can give them something back quickly that is the results of their collaboration.

Sam Dub:

Invariably, something does emerge that’s new and that is a new way of framing something. That is something that no one department could have done on their own.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

Exactly.

Sam Dub:

We certainly couldn’t have come, arrived with that up our sleeve and said, like, “This is how it’s going to be structured.” It’s a genuine collaborative process where the input of the expertise in the departments about the different parts of those journeys come together to create this thing that is, hopefully, framed in a way that makes sense to users and is how they think about it, rather than how government thinks about that problem.

Laura Stevens:

Yes, I was going to touch on that, how you’re making government think about itself as a place that delivers services. It sounds like, [with all] this collaboration, that’s been a key outcome from this.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

There are a lot going on across government to help them think about things in a slightly different way, to help them think about themselves as service providers. Like, the new service standard is really strong on that, and about getting government to think about services and whole problems, and tackling those collaboratively, but I think ‘Step by Step’ is one of the really tangible tools that enables departments to start work on that. It’s the first step on the road, I think, yes.

Laura Stevens:

And I should probably also finish the Step by Step. Once the workshop has been done, what’s the next stage with your service here?

Kate Ivey-Williams:

Usually, if we’re going into that workshop with a fairly good idea of the journey and we have that very draft-y thing in the publishing tool, as the conversations are going on with the departments that’s been facilitated by someone from our team, someone else in our team is sitting in the background, updating the draft of that thing in the publishing tool.

So, by the end of the workshop we can show them the tangible output, a sort of first-draft example of what they’ve been discussing, with the caveat that we need to take that away and do a bit more massaging of the content.

Then the thing gets “2i” internally. That’s a jargon-y term for it gets reviewed by another content designer within GOV.UK. Then we send it out for fact-check with departments. This follows our standard mainstream guidance fact-check process, where it goes to the subject-matter experts within departments, who then say, “Yes, that is factually correct. Go ahead and sign it off.” Or they give us feedback about, “Actually, you’ve misunderstood something there.”

Sam Dub:

I always enjoy when it goes to the lawyers. That’s when you know it’s like… That’s when you know you’re changing stuff, because the lawyers are there to make sure that, in the way that we’re presenting this in a simple way, we aren’t straying from what’s legally correct, and we aren’t misleading people, but we are… Presenting some of these complicated legal processes as a simple one-pager does mean it needs to get read and fact-checked by a lawyer in the process. There is often this wide range of expertise that we need to consult, and people who, in the process of reframing this stuff, we’ve had to consult, but everything’s gone live. At every point, we’ve reached a consensus. When everyone sees it at the end, they go, “Oh,” like, “That’s better.”

Kate Ivey-Williams:

Yes.

Laura Stevens:

Does it go back to that point of, exposing those…? Perhaps the policy challenges that this is what part of the process is.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

Yes. I think sometimes a confusing and complex policy is hidden in guidance that is spread across GOV.UK. When you extract it and expose it in this really simplified view of that thing, you actually realise the policy is complicated or the thing doesn’t make sense, because the policy is complicated.

Hopefully, that is… Showing them that is the start of a process of thinking: “How can we simplify this, because this is confusing users and this is making work for us, as government, it’s making work for them to try and understand something which should just be simple.”

Sam Dub:

That was really one of the early learnings of this, was that we needed to get the policymakers in the room for those workshops, because often there can be a process where our content designers do a bunch of work and then they pass it over to policy people. Some context is lost there. If you’ve got the policymakers in the room from the start, that’s another kind of collaboration. It’s different departments and it’s different disciplines being there to inform the process.

Laura Stevens:

These ‘Step by Steps’ have also been very helpful to the voice assistant work, as well, haven’t they?

Sam Dub:

Yes. This is part of a broader strategy. We sometimes talk about GOV.UK now… Or trying to make GOV.UK understandable to humans and understandable to machines. I sometimes wonder, when we say that, what people are imagining, like some kind of robot overlords.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

Exactly.

Laura Stevens:

Our new user.

Sam Dub:

To be clear, to clear this up on the GDS podcast, not for the robot overlords, one example of what we mean by that is so that our content is understandable to search engines. If you do a search for becoming a driving instructor or learning to drive a car, from a search engine on mobile – actually, this is something that’s gone live in the last month – they’re able to see the… The search engine is able to look at the structure of our content.

You get, like, this little carousel of steps that appears that you can swipe through. You can jump to: “I’m at step 3 of ‘Learning to Drive’,” like, “I’ve got my provisional licence, so now I’m studying for my test, so I can jump to that.” That’s powered by some mark-up that we’ve added to our ‘Step by Steps’ that makes them easier for machines to read. It’s the same mark-up that powers search that can also power voice assistance, so you can query those ‘Step by Steps’ – or the content within those ‘Step by Steps’ – in the same way.

Laura Stevens:

I’ve also seen a figure floating round that there are, like, 400 services you want to do this to. Is that how many, or is it literally just-?

Kate Ivey-Williams:

That’s that finger in the air. I think that’s based off of the amount of mainstream guidance we have, which is it covers the really major, far-reaching government services, but, because ‘Step by Step’ navigation can work across all content on GOV.UK, it means that even beyond those 400, if there are departments who are sitting in some really niche area of government, they can still start using this pattern for something that [might]… Maybe it only has 200 users a year, but they can still start thinking about it and piecing their journey together in the depths of Whitehall content, as well. There’s potentially way more than 400, but that covers some of the really key services that we know we would like to build.

Laura Stevens:

What sort of journeys are definitely not ‘Step by Steps’? Like, when you’re thinking, if you’re listening and you’re working on a service, what would be not suitable?

Sam Dub:

This is a crude indicator of it, it’s generally stuff you need to do in more than one sitting, like you can’t learn to drive or get married in one web session. It’s going to take a bit longer.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

One day. I think you can in Estonia, probably.

Sam Dub:

It will generally be something where you’ve got to read a bit of GOV.UK, go and do a thing in the real world, come back, and then read or do something else. That’s a, kind of, gut-feel indicator of when some navigation that’s going to help people join up those activities is going to help.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

When I think about the ‘Step by Steps’ I want to build, one of the ones I really wanted to do was what to do when someone dies, because it is these high-emotion, really difficult times of life when the last thing you want to be doing is thinking about government admin. I know they’re a bit depressing, but that’s what motivates me, is to take the pressure off people at those horrible times and make life a little bit easier.

I think other ‘Step by Steps’ I would love to build would be, like, helping people who are out of work, and tying together all the services and the suite of things in that space that could support them in that time of life, or other things like that. That’s where we can add, I think, the most value.

Sam Dub:

It’s those moments in life where you really value somebody saying, like, “You just do this, do this, do this, and you’ll be fine.” Yes, that’s what motivates us, I think.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

Totally, yes.

Laura Stevens:

Not adding unnecessary stress or pressure on a highly emotional situation.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

Yes. Who wants to think about government when you’ve got all that other stuff on your plate? No-one.

I think it’s about making government much more invisible. Ultimately, people don’t want to think about that. They want to get on with their lives.

Laura Stevens:

“Thank you” to Kate, and, “Thank you” to Sam today. You can listen to all the episodes of the Government Digital Service podcast on Apple Music, Spotify, and all other major podcast platforms, and you can read the transcripts on Podbean. Thank you very much again.

Sam Dub:

Thank you.

Kate Ivey-Williams:

Thanks for having us.

GDS Podcast #9: An interview with Chantal Donaldson-Foyer and Warren Smith on corruption and the Global Digital Marketplace May 30, 2019

We discuss the Global Digital Marketplace, how it is improving government procurement and tackling corruption around the world.

The transcript of the episode follows:

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Sarah Stewart: Hello, and welcome to the GDS Podcast. I’m Sarah Stewart, I’m a senior writer at the Government Digital Service. I’m in the studio today with two aficionados in the world of government procurement, Chantal Donaldson-Foyer and Warren Smith. Chantal, you’re head of product for the Global Digital Marketplace and Warren, you are the programme director for the Global Digital Marketplace. Welcome to you both.

Chantal Donaldson-Foyer: Thank you.

Warren Smith: Thank you very much.

Sarah: So just to start off, could you tell me a little bit more about your roles, what exactly you do?

Chantal: All right. So as head of product of the Global Digital Marketplace, I look after the programme as a whole in terms of our offering and what we’re going to do with the country. So we’ve got teams who are looking after each region and I help the product managers for each of these regions build up their offer and actually deliver it.

Sarah: Cool, Warren?

Warren: So, I have the easy job, I set the direction, the vision and make sure that we have the senior stakeholder relationships maintained in our partner countries, and that includes with the FCO as well.

Sarah: Now, government procurement enthusiasts will know what the Digital Marketplace is – but for those who don’t I thought it would be a good idea to do a quick recap before we move onto talk about your international work. So what is the Digital Marketplace?

Warren: The Digital Marketplace is a platform that is available to all of the UK public sector to enable them to buy digital data and technology products and services in support of government transformation.

Sarah: And we do that along with the Crown Commercial Service?

Warren: Yes, we do, they’re a key partner organisation for us in the Cabinet Office.

Sarah: Now, before the pair of you worked on the Global Digital Marketplace you were also on the Digital Marketplace.

Warren: Correct.

Sarah: I did describe you as aficionados earlier, so I’m going to put this claim to the test, and enrich our listeners understanding, and try and make government procurement even more interesting, with a quiz.

Warren: Love it.

Sarah: You’re going head-to-head.

Chantal: No pressure.

Sarah: No pressure. Okay, so this is on the Digital Marketplace. What happens when you open up the procurement market to suppliers of all sizes rather than just big tech companies? I’ve a list of four things that you could possibly pick from.

Warren: Oh, it’s multiple choice.

Chantal: Okay, yes.

Sarah: It’s multiple choice.

Warren: You encourage a more diverse supply chain to be involved.

Sarah: That’s on my list. Okay, well done.

Chantal: You get better value for money.

Sarah: That’s correct. It’s happening even in the room as we speak. There’s the air of…

Warren: Anticipation? (Laughter)

Sarah: I was going for competition. The increasing competition. And also the locations are more diverse.

Warren: Of course. Yes.

Sarah: Okay, this might be slightly harder. Second question, what was the Digital Marketplace’s total sales figure at the end of March?

Warren: £5.7 billion.

Sarah: Wow, correct. Okay, can you tell me what is the government’s aspirational target figure for SME spend?

Chantal: The target figure is £1 in every £3 to be spent with SME.

Sarah: By which date? Bonus question.

Warren: 2022.

Sarah: Yes.

Sarah: Which government launched its own digital marketplace in record time by working with us and using our open source code?

Chantal: Australia.

Sarah: Correct.

Chantal: Yes.

Sarah: The bonus question, how many weeks did Australia take to launch its own digital marketplace?

Warren: Six.

Chantal: Five?

Sarah: Five is the correct answer

Warren: 5 weeks, good on them.

Sarah: I have to say, yes, very good, good job. I’ve got to say, it’s a relief between the pair of you, you both got them right. So I think we’re all up to speed on the digital marketplace, so let’s go global. What is the Global Digital Marketplace?

Warren: The Global Digital Marketplace is a programme that’s working in partnership with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office aimed to help overseas governments in emerging economies to tackle corruption by transforming their procurement of digital data and technology products and services.

Sarah: How did that come about?

Warren: It was mainly following the summit that took place in 2016. Where it was felt that there was an opportunity to apply the same approaches that we’ve taken in the UK to open up markets to open up procurement and make it more transparent as a way of helping to tackle closed markets, closed processes, and more opaque processes that are often the breeding ground for corruption so that was really the sort of genesis of the concept that became the Global Digital Marketplace programme.

Sarah: The corruption angle is very interesting,how in practical terms is this corruption happening?

Warren: So it’s a good question. I think when considering corruption you have to look at the whole system in which corruption is taking place. On the one end you’ve got the very obvious corruption which is where individuals are for personal gain misappropriating public funds, but I think you also have to look on the opposite end of the spectrum where weaknesses within the system could lead to corrupt practices to take place. So perhaps inefficiency and effectiveness within government processes or the systems, or opacity within those processes, a lack of transparency, these are all opportunities for reform and are often the breeding ground for where the corruption can start to manifest.

I think certainly the Global Digital Marketplace Programme is focusing on designing out opportunities for corruption to take place and focusing on the people involved so that we can help to build capability and increase integrity.

Sarah: We spend $9.5 trillion a year, so that’s global government procurement spend, and that’s not just IT, and of that number 2.6 trillion, which is nearly 30%, is lost through bribery or corruption.

Warren: Yes.

Sarah: So it’s a huge thing that you’re trying to tackle here. How exactly does it work, how did you begin this process?

Warren: So we first engaged with a range of governments that were priority countries for the FCO. This is after we got the endorsement and the backing to actually take this approach. It all really starts by having the conversations with the governments and the supply chains and civil society organisations within those countries to understand what are the barriers, what are the challenges, and equally what are the opportunities for how we can work together.

We’re not claiming that we’ve solved the problem by any means in the UK but we’ve made a start, and an important start, in showing that a different way of thinking and working in – to tackle procurement is – it is possible. We also look to opportunities to how we can learn from other governments as well as sharing what we’ve been able to achieve in the UK.

Sarah: I’m really interested in the diplomatic angle here, because – say for example your friend is singing very, very badly, you might not want to tell them directly they’re singing very, very badly but it’s in everyone’s interest for them to get better. How do you approach governments, like what’s your first step, and do you take a different approach for every country, do you go and meet them?

Warren: Yes, and that’s a really important point, is not to take a standard one size fits all approach, you have to tailor your engagement approach depending on the context, and, yes, I’ve got loads of friends who are terrible singers-

Sarah: Even in a band?

Warren: I know, yes, myself included, that’s why I’m never on the vocals. So very quickly, even though the kind of the starting point for the conversation is around tackling corruption and procurement reform, very quickly the conversations turn to government transformation and public service transformation and greater openness and transparency of government.

So I think it’s really important to see the antithesis of the negative and focus on the positive, because that’s very much where the impact and the outcomes that we want to achieve are associated. Yes, that’s how we shift the conversation to one of the future positive.

Sarah: And so for the record, who, which countries are we dealing with?

Chantal: All right, so we are currently in five countries, so that’s in Latin America, Mexico and Columbia and South Africa in Southern Africa and Indonesia and Malaysia in Southeast Asia.

Sarah: What about the discovery work, so how does that kick off?

Chantal: So actually to do the discovery we engaged with the UK supply chain to help us conduct all of the research that was necessary for us to define what the delivery of the programme was going to be. So we worked with four partners who come with us to the country and try and understand what are the opportunities that exist, what current best practices or great examples we could kind of build and grow further, and also what the challenges were in the countries to understand where we could add value and where we could work together, share our experience, see whether that can help them, or not.

Sarah: So can you tell me some of the things that came out of that early stage discussion work with the suppliers? What kinds of things were they saying about what they wanted?

Chantal: Each of the suppliers had a different area of expertise, and an area that they were looking at in countries across all five countries, and including some of our team and some people from GDS came along to the discovery. So actually over the last five weeks, four weeks, we’ve been working together in workshops to define what we have found, because actually we think that by bringing together all our findings we can come up with a better rationale rather than everyone working on their own, so we’re just currently formulating what our findings are.

I think there are several themes that come out, but overall the Global Digital Marketplace is looking at things beyond just the digital marketplace, so it’s all its associated reforms, looking at the standards and assurance process before contracts are awarded, the spend control process, then how procurements are designed, how contracts are designed, then the assurance of the delivery itself, how data underpins all of that, as well as the capabilities that are available in countries, and so together we’ve reviewed all of that and pretty much in all countries found opportunities at each of these levels I think, and in terms of transparency, an exciting part of that is looking at how we could help these countries share more of their data in the open contracting data standard.

Sarah:How were those countries identified in the first place?

Warren: So we were provided with a long list of potential partner countries by the FCO, which are priority countries for them in terms of anti-corruption. It was necessary for us to prioritise out of that long list, because we’re a small team to begin with, so we used a range of publicly available indexes to give us a general measure of complexity. Things like the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, and various others from, like, the OECD and such like, so that gave us a, yes, an overall score which enabled us to put countries into two different tiers, so we focused on the tier one countries effectively.

Why can't the UK government just write a how-to guide and provide some open source code and let a government get on with it?

Chantal: I think part of what we’re trying to do as well is show our way of working, so bringing user-centred design principles as well as our agile ways of working into our delivery so that we can share that with partner countries live, and so that they can really experience it and feel it, rather than just reading something, some nice guidance and some stats about how it makes things better, but actually being there, feeling it, engaging with the users directly is so powerful that no guide would be able to match that kind of experience, and I think that’s why we wanted our delivery to be very much implementation focused because that’s the best way to learn.

Warren: I think just building on that, I mean, that’s exactly what we did for Australia as a bit of an experiment in 2016. They could have just come in and taken the code but actually it was the combination of open source code and technical assistance from UK government, in terms of GDS, sending some people from the team to spend the time with them to take the code and to implement, I think that’s what – it was the combination of those things which led to their delivery in just five weeks.

Sarah: So how do you work with five countries, like what does your month look like, where are you touch points, how do you meet, how do you collaborate?

Chantal: Well, it’s quite hard, especially when you look at it on a map and think about just the time zone problem, it’s a massive challenge for our team, but it’s also really exciting because we get to work together with the overseas Embassies and High Commissions who support us on the ground. Yes, so we do visits every few months in country and then use other tools to be able to talk, stay close.

Warren: We use Slack we use Hang Outs, so even though we are geographically distant and time zone presents a challenge it’s still possible to have a working relationship with a highly distributed team, I think, yes.

Sarah: I’d like to talk a little bit about MOUs, Memorandums of Understanding. You’ve just signed some, tell me about those.

Warren: Yes, at the beginning of March, Kevin, our director general, signed three MOUs with some not for profit organisations to support Global Digital Marketplace. That’s really exciting. It’s been some time in the making but we’ve got there so, yes, each of those organisations are recognised globally for their leadership, for their skills, for their experience and capabilities, all of which support the strategic direction of Global Digital Marketplace. So

Warren: The first is the Organisation for International Economic Relations, or the OIER Which is also the organisation that’s behind an initiative called ‘United Smart Cities’.

Sarah: Where are they based?

Warren: Vienna. The second is the Open Contracting Partnership, or OCP, and the third is the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management, or the IACCM. The OIER and United Smart Cities are focused on implementing information communication and technologies to support the delivery of sustainable smart cities. They are active across the globe in a number of cities and they are closely linked to a number of United Nations agencies as well.

The Open Contracting Partnership is an organisation that’s spun out from the World Bank and they developed the open contracting data standard. They are huge advocates and great campaigners for greater transparency in public procurement, and the Open Contracting Data Standard , or the OCDS, is a key element of the Global Digital Marketplace programme delivery, and the third, the IACCM, is a globally recognised organisation that’s focused on building capability and capacity in commercial and contracting.

Sarah: What does their signing the MOU mean in real terms?

Warren: It gives us the ability to align on common areas of interest. It gives us the ability to identify countries where we have a common interest in and where we’re already engaging, and it also gives us the ability to bring together those – the skill sets of the different organisations and thinking about the collective rather than the individual.

We have a workshop planned in a couple of weeks’ time in Vienna where we bring together all of the organisations, and we look forward to the next 12, 18 months and identifying those opportunities for collaborative delivery. It’s really important that we look at the tangible delivery opportunities that can draw on the individual capabilities of each organisation.

Sarah: Where are you in the process now, you’re collecting feedback from the discoveries?

Chantal: Currently we are analysing still the findings from - well, we’re towards the end of that, but we’ve done the trips to the five countries, we’ve brought together all the teams that have been doing that, so both client and GDS, and we’ve brought together the findings and now we’re developing the recommendation. This is going to be a kind of a long list, that we’re going back into countries to present and discuss and shape that together with our key stakeholders there what the next phase of delivery is going to look like.

Our next phase is our alpha phase where we want to pilot different types of approaches, so we’re just trying to see what will that exactly look like and also how does that fit in with what the stakeholders in each country want to achieve, and matching that is our next step

Sarah: So are you working with just national governments or sub-national governments?

Warren: Both, yes.

Sarah: How does your approach differ

Warren: The engagement approach is consistent. I think the challenges faced are different. In very much consistent with the UK sub-national, are closest to frontline service delivery, so either city or municipality level, and national obviously is trying to take a national view on what to do.

What we’re trying to do is transcend those organisational boundaries, and actually there is a level between that which might be, say, states in which obviously there are multiple cities or districts, so it’s looking at, okay, what are the needs of each of the different levels of government, where are the challenges, and what are the opportunities that we can help to bring together coordination between national efforts and sub-national efforts on the ground.

Sarah: Are you on a timer here? What are your target delivery dates?

Warren: Ultimately we’re funded until 2022, which is in line with the UK’s anti- corruption strategy, so that’s another 3 years on that current funding envelope, and while we’re taking the long view we’re looking at how we can then break that down into the next 6, 12, 18 months, and always have a rolling view of what our activities are likely to be notching through that time period.

Sarah: Will you identify any other places to work?

Sarah: Because I saw a map.

Warren: There’s always a map.

Sarah: I've seen a map and they had some some rather exotic locations, but I saw Bristol.

Warren: I wanted to, in that map, I wanted to call out a couple of UK cities. The list to call out is too long on that small map, but initiatives like the Local Digital Declaration and leading local government organisations who are really showing the way in terms of what digital transformation can look like at a local level. Calling those out on the map gives us the ability to bring together stakeholders who are trying to do the same thing in different countries around the world.

So, for example, the profile of Bristol might be very close to a city in Indonesia where they have a similar demographic or they have a similar set of challenges, there could be value in bringing those stakeholders together to share information, share technologies, share approaches, share lessons learned so that everybody can benefit from one another. That’s certainly a really key part of what we’re trying to do, is bring together and form a global community of reformers where procurement transformation is the heart of their digital transformation as well.

Sarah: It’s a bit like town twinning for the digital age.

Warren: Funny you should say that because that’s exactly how… Yes, digital twins.

Chantal: I would add also that we’re seeing really interesting initiatives in some of our partner countries and we’d like to explore the idea of exchanging experiences between them, so it’s not just a UK to another country exchange but really this community is self-organised and has people talking all over the world. That’s the ambition at least.

Warren: Absolutely, and it’s multi-stakeholder, it’s multi-directional, so it’s not about, as you say Chantal, it’s not UK pushing out to others, it’s actually this we’ve got a lot to learn from other governments, the flow of information and expertise should be multi-directional and, yes, when you start connecting different regions and governments in those regions , and the UK is kind of convening that, I think that presents some really interesting opportunities.

Yes, so while we’re focused on the Global Digital Marketplace programme as funded by the FCO with an anti-corruption focus, there’s certainly an opportunity to look beyond that and maybe that’s the next phase of our work.

Sarah: So what kinds of initiatives have piqued your interests across the globe?

Chantal: think the most exciting initiative I came across was probably in Guadalajara in the Mexican state of Jalisco, where we saw that they’ve done some incredible work at mapping the city and mapping different services, so it’s city services across the city so that you could see what was happening where, and also the town planning so this could inform their future policies and interventions, which was just really, really remarkable.

Warren: A couple that I have seen. For example, in Malaysia, Selangor State, they have a very bold ambition to be the smartest state in the Association of Southeast Asia Nations by, I think 2026. That’s all about embracing digital civic participation to deliver transform public services, so their Smart Selangor Delivery Unit is one of our key stakeholders in Malaysia. Equally, in Indonesia, West Java province, so the current governor of West Java was the former mayor of Bandung City, Ridwan Kamil, so he’s a very forward thinking, senior leader who understands the role of digital and technology in delivering transformed public services. Again, they’re likely to be a key partner for us.

Chantal:Yes, we’ve seen the Colombian procurement body Colombia Compra Eficiente, they’ve published a whole bunch of their data in the Open Contracting Data Standard quite recently so that’s been a really fantastic initiative we’ve seen.

Warren: Equally, Mexico are very forward in terms of their embracing Open Contracting Data Standard.

Sarah: That’s quite a lot.

Warren: Yes, so this is I think what’s exciting, it’s not only understanding the opportunities for what we can do together in a country, it’s what we can learn from other countries where they’ve perhaps been a step or two ahead of the UK.

Chantal: An example in South Africa is that they have a central supplier database, which was developed quite a few years ago, but is actually a really good example of how having data in one place is actually incredibly powerful. Different ministries are essentially able to draw from that to be able to sense check the suppliers that are bidding for their procurements so that’s been a very impressive piece of work we’ve seen.

Sarah: In your Indonesian example you touched on leadership, how much of your work is around leadership and culture?

Warren: I think that’s absolutely integral to all of it. We have been identifying who are our key stakeholders to lead and sponsor, but also how do we ensure that when we’re working together that they have that vision and the direction and they’re able to bring their teams along with them? There was an article published I think just last week actually in GovInsider talking about the CIO for Malaysia, and she’s fantastic, she’s visited GDS at least once, I think a couple of times, and so when we were presenting to her actually the tables turned quite quickly and she was basically presenting to us about how they’re using GDS standards and approaches as their benchmark for how to deliver their transformation. It makes for a very engaging and compelling conversation when the leaders within the countries are basically saying we want to align around these kinds of principles and practices which then means that we’ve got a really solid foundation for a good conversation and delivery.

Sarah: Is it possible to identify any quick wins against corruption? Is it a case of just making contracts really, really simple and then you can, you know, that’s the first step in winning the battle?

Chantal: I like that making contracts simple as a quick win, because contracts are certainly a very difficult challenge I think generally in the world of procurement. I think there isn’t really a quick win in tackling something as systemic as corruption, but I think there is something around starting small and choosing a very specific area in a location, in a sub-national government for example, and trying to build that out. Showing how that works, and also building the buy-in of stakeholders across the board that this approach can work. I think it’s not really about quick wins, more about choosing – starting small, testing it out, iterating it and growing it in the long term.

Warren: I think that relates also to your question around culture, because the ingrained systemic issues of corruption can often be quite an overwhelming thing to tackle, by demonstrating, as Chantal says, that it is possible to take a different approach by starting small, demonstrating a success, building trust and building confidence and bringing people along with you on that journey and then scaling from there and I think it’s hugely satisfying when you can see the delight in a stakeholder or the users, to see, “Oh my goodness, change is possible,” and people are really looking for that change. So, yes, it’s that approach of incremental and iterative and then scaling from there I think is absolutely key.

Sarah:The Global Digital Marketplace is a partnership between GDS and the Foreign Office, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who does what?

Warren: GDS is responsible for the delivery of the programme. FCO, they’re responsible for a broader overarching programme which is called the ‘Global Anti-corruption Programme’. That contains a number of activities of which the Global Digital Marketplace Programme is one. They’re managing quite a diverse portfolio of activities that involve a number of other government departments, some multilateral organisations like the OECD and the UN are involved as well. Our focus and our responsibility is on delivering against the objections that we’ve set which will help to achieve the more broader objectives of the FCO’s Global Anti-corruption Programme.

Sarah: Will we continue to engage with suppliers going forward, and if so how?

Warren: Absolutely. In exactly the same way as we have done in the UK, the supply chain is an absolutely critical element for our transformation. We would mirror that approach in our engagements, particularly as we move beyond discovery and transition into alpha we will be reengaging with our supply chain partners in the UK to share the opportunities for how they could work with us to support Global Digital Marketplace delivery over the next 12 to 18 months.

Sarah: What will be keeping you busy in the short term?

Chantal: What’s keeping us busy is the trips to our partner countries because we’re, as I mentioned earlier, going there to present what we think might be good activities for the next stage and discussing and shaping that with them, so over the next two, three months we’re going to go over different parts of the team, but I think it’s that coordination of who’s going out when that’s currently keeping us busy, and then actually being in country and engaging and running workshops, presenting our findings, that’s really what’s going to be the next, yes, the next phase.

Warren: Yes, and that’s not without its complexity because we are engaging with a broad spectrum of stakeholders, the decision makers in the country, the people that we want to partner with in order to support our delivery, and that includes domestic supply chain in country as well as civil society organisations.Trying to line up the right people to gain their buy-in and their support for our plan going forward is absolutely critical. We have to be respectful of their availability so, yes, that’s going to be a diary challenge for us all.

Sarah: So you’ve been here since nearly the beginning of GDS’ creation, could you have imagined that the Digital Marketplace would be global?

Warren: No, certainly not at the beginning. I think it goes back to – it absolutely goes back to Chantal’s point of the importance and the power of starting small, iterating and then scaling those approaches, which is effectively what we’ve – what we’re doing now, and the fact that the digital marketplace is now being seen by the Crown Commercial Service as a key enabler for their transformation I think is testament to the fact that the successes of what we’ve seen through the Digital Marketplace so far have been recognised, and now we can build upon those things from a domestic UK perspective, and equally the same goes for overseas with the Global Digital Marketplace programme. Yes, it certainly wasn’t the anticipation from day one but nice to see that evolution, yeah.

Sarah: Can you tell me about the makeup of the Global Digital Marketplace team, who have you got in there?

Chantal: So the Global Digital Marketplace team is growing right now, so we’ve been doing a whole bunch of hiring in the last couple of months and are still in the process of doing that. I’ll talk about what our finished team will look like, but essentially so we’re going to have a product and delivery duo looking after a region, so three, we’ve got three regions, and then we’ve got subject matter expertise on digital and data and technology skills and capabilities, commercial and commissioning, as well as-

Warren: Standards assurance.

Chantal: Standards and assurance. Then we’ve got also, in our different partner countries, we’ve got delivery support in each of the Embassies or High Commissions who are supporting the delivery on the ground

Warren: So that shape is suited to our activity over the next kind of 12, 18 months, isn’t it? We would naturally look to shape and reshape the team if we need to, but certainly the roles that you’ve articulated, Chantal, those are our core civil servant delivery focused roles that we’ve been putting in place.

Chantal: Yes, and I would also add to that. We’ve been supported by different teams in GDS as well, so the standards and assurance team have supported us on our discovery as well as the digital data and technology capabilities team. They’ve been crucial at shaping what our discoveries were like and the kinds of things we were investigating, and some of which have – some of who have also joined us on our discovery trips.

Sarah: Where can people find out more about your work?

Warren: The GDS blog. Yes, certainly the GDS social media channels. We would like to be regularly talking about the work that we’re doing, being open about the work, and once we’ve had an opportunity to share discovery, insights and propositions with our stakeholders in country we’d like to be able to talk about that openly as well, so keep your eye out for that.

Sarah: Excellent. Well thank you so much for joining me on the GDS podcast, it’s been a pleasure to learn more about the work that you’re doing

Warren: Thank you for having us.

Chantal: Thank you.

GDS Podcast #8 - An interview with GDS Director General Kevin Cunnington Apr 30, 2019

GDS Director General Kevin Cunnington talks about his time in tech and digital government so far, and discusses GDS’s plans for the future.

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A full transcript of the episode follows:

Angus Montgomery:

So welcome to the latest episode of the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Angus Montgomery, I’m a senior writer at GDS.

For this episode I’m in the slightly unusual position of interviewing my boss, or the boss of the organisation I work for. It’s GDS Director General Kevin Cunnington. Kevin, thank you very much for joining us on this podcast.

Kevin Cunnington:

Thank you for inviting me Angus.

Angus Montgomery:

So Kevin, I’d like to talk to you today about your time in GDS. So you’ve been here for, getting on for three years I think, and your priorities for GDS as we enter the new financial year and what’s coming up over the next year.

But before we get onto all of that, I’d like to talk to you a bit about your time before GDS and before government, because you’ve been a technologist, or involved in digital and technology for your entire career, and you’ve got quite a storied career before you joined GDS.

I think first of all, as I understand, you studied computer science and you have a master’s in artificial intelligence, so what first led you to that subject matter, to wanting to study technology and then develop a career in it?

Kevin Cunnington:

So I went to a boys grammar school, well rather dare I say, a stuffy traditional boys grammar school, where you really had a choice of doing the arts or the sciences, so I did the sciences - maths, physics, chemistry and luckily, a bit on the side, general studies.

And I was always fascinated in two areas beyond that, which were computer science and astrophysics. And oddly, at the time, both were equally as bonkers because I had never seen a computer, none of us had. No boy from my school had ever gone on to study computer science, so when I decided that was what I was going to do, I was the first boy ever from my school to study computer science, having never seen a computer [0.01.58].

Angus Montgomery:

If, at the risk of asking a very personal question, and you can answer in general time, what sort of general time are we talking about?

Kevin Cunnington:

1979.

Angus Montgomery:

Right. Oh wow.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yes, I went ‘79 - ‘82.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Cunnington:

So if you’re familiar with the history of computer science, we’d just about invented the BBC Micro in ‘79. But the first real personal computer, the IBM XT80, XT, came out in ‘81. So you know, nobody had ever seen a personal computer.

They existed only as mainframes really in large regional centres that none of us had ever seen. So taking a punt, and doing a degree based on something I’d never seen before, seemed like quite an odd option really. But it’s worked out ok I’d have to say.

Angus Montgomery:

And your master’s as well, I presume at the same...at this sort of time, artificial intelligence was in the very early stages of our understanding. What was it that drew you to that and what was the kind of, what was going on in artificial intelligence then and is it still relevant to what we’re talking about today?

Kevin Cunnington:

No, it was very different then. So you’re right to say, there was very little work in A.I. back in ‘83 when I did my second degree. And we just had this report called the Lighthill report which said, largely it was rubbish and it’ll never work.

So my timing wasn’t perfect but my interest in A.I and computing has always been with the effect on people really and how it kind of works, not necessarily the programming, but the effect of computing - although I do love programming as well. But it was different then, ‘cause we actually used to programme A.I systems by hand.

Angus Montgomery:

Wow.

Kevin Cunnington:

In these really obscure languages like Prolog and Lisp, which are based on quite complicated mathematical constructs oddly enough, the last thing you’d expect to be quite natural. And so I spent a whole raft of my master’s degree programming Prolog and Lisp on things like chess playing. My thesis was around, kind of flexible airport selection. So I built this system that learnt that if you couldn’t go to that airport which was your favourite, then you’d most likely pick the next one, and therefore we could offer that as a potential option in the first place.

Angus Montgomery:

Oh wow.

Kevin Cunnington:

So yeah, quite ahead of its time really.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned, I mean obviously you were involved in writing programming back then, is that something you still do today when you have time or are still involved in?

Kevin Cunnington:

No, because when I started out in programming in the traditional languages like Pascal and C, and I actually come past programming Codebar oddly enough, but my passion was always Prolog and Lisp, and since they’re no longer really around, I just, you know, wouldn’t have the skill set to programme in Java or Ruby nowadays, so I’ve not done any for years really

Angus Montgomery:

But it’s still there, still there, the skills I’m sure.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah, I think I’d like to go back to it when I retire kind of thing.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah, go back to early ‘80s artificial intelligence. And then, so after studying you worked for PWC [Pricewaterhouse Coopers], and developed, or pioneered their use of Agile methodology.

Can you tell me a bit more about sort of, again, what Agile methodology was like, and presumably this was sort of mid to late ‘80s, and what was Agile like back then and how does that relate to what we’re doing now and how we use Agile?

Kevin Cunnington:

So I think the kind of crystallising example is I got sent to this regional city in England to help a large insurer try to automate the process of life insurance, underwriting for life insurance. And people had had a go at that in the past and failed miserably because it’s quite complicated. And I was the first person to try it using A.I techniques and it worked, first time in the world it ever worked, and we came out with a programme that could underwrite life insurance quite comprehensively.

Angus Montgomery:

Wow.

Kevin Cunnington:

And it was really...so A.I was like user researchers now.

Angus Montgomery:

Right, yeah yeah.

Kevin Cunnington:

You used to sit down with people, we used to actually video the experts doing their job and then we used to interactively programme up what they’d told us and we iterated that over time, so very much like Agile is today, lots of user research, lots of interaction, lots of feedback, lots of intelligent challenge.

And then in, I think it was ‘92, PWC shipped me off to their, what they called, their technology centre in California in Menlo Park, to write down everything I’d learnt about doing A.I using Agile. And this I duly did, it took me six months to deposit the whole contents of my mind onto a book, which was actually quite big, but that then became PWC’s global methodology for developing expert systems, A.I systems, using Agile.

And it was broadly what you’d expect to see today. You know we said prototypes are important, you need to understand the scope of what you’re doing, you need to test and learn, you need to do user research and it’s all not changed very much if we’re being brutally honest over the, what’s that, 25 years.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah, well it works, so yeah, why change it? And your background, so as well as working at PWC, you worked for various other sort of large organisations, so Vodafone, Goldman Sachs.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yes.

Angus Montgomery:

And it covers, your background kind of covers large organisations as well as startups and entrepreneurial work, so you’ve got a, quite a varied kind of work history before you came to the public sector. How do you use that experience in your current role in government and kind of, what are the similarities and differences between that and what you do know?

Kevin Cunnington:

So I think you know, my kind of, original company was PWC, which was a management consultancy. And apparently today, PWC run the best kind of, fast track scheme in the UK, and they probably in fairness to them, did then. And it was really helpful because as a scientist, my ability to write and present and critique, you know, was that of a scientist. So I was taught how to present, I was taught how to write, I was told how to do analysis and that, it turned out to be a really great start in life. And I spent that, broadly best part of a decade, doing A.I systems.

And as people know, in the ‘90s when greed was good and lunch was for wimps, I sold out and went to work for Goldman Sachs in New York running their trading systems. Which when you say it that way sounds slightly mad but all trading systems are written using Agile. So the fact that I knew how to do Agile at scale and quite quickly and quite well, turned out to be quite a big advantage for them and for me.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah definitely.

Kevin Cunnington:

And then as you say, I had a spell as an entrepreneur. Having been a successful entrepreneur originally, I made quite a bit of money and most people know I lost 13 million quid on a venture, which I do say to people, if you meet my wife, please don’t mention it ‘cause she has stopped mentioning it now.

But at the time obviously it was quite traumatic. And then I went back to work for Vodafone as their Global Head of Digital before joining the Civil Service about five years ago now.

Angus Montgomery:

So you joined, so your first role in the Civil Service was with DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] as Director General of Business Transformation, that’s correct I think.

Kevin Cunnington:

It was.

Angus Montgomery:

Can you tell me a bit more about that role and what you were responsible for and what you were doing?

Kevin Cunnington:

So back in the day it was called the Director General for Digital Transformation and my job was really twofold. The overarching part of the job was, how to transform DWP to be fit for digital and you know, as we know, we did that via the Academies, and all the rich picture work that we did in creating a vision. But the really tangible part of my work was helping to recruit, train the digital teams for the big programmes like Universal Credit back in the day. And that’s broadly what I spent the first two and a half years of my Civil Service life doing.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah, so it’s kind of, bringing people in and building capability. Those, those two things across the department.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah, I’ll tell you, the big thing we did was bring in the Academies. Which was not a new idea, it was an idea that we’d used in Vodafone. But in Vodafone, we’d used it to train largely graduates in digital, because even Vodafone couldn’t get ahold of enough graduates.

In the Civil Service when we first tried it, we blatantly took the idea and reimplemented it and I wasn’t sure whether it would work, and this would be one of the big positives and learnings for me that, we’d tried it on graduates, in the Civil Service we were trying it on older people like myself, and it was at all clear to me that older people would respond to being re-trained in digital. But the reality was they loved it because it gave them a whole new lease of life, it made them feel really modern and updated, and they really warmed to it.

And it’s been, some of the big successes, we’ve had people put off their retirement because having been re-trained, they enjoyed it so much, they want to carry on working. Which was, you know, you’d never believe that was true but they’ve been a massive success. We’ve trained 10,000 people now in the Academies over the five years.

Angus Montgomery:

Brilliant. And when they first started five years ago, was it in DWP?

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah, 24 Feb 2014.

Angus Montgomery:

Even got the date.

Kevin Cunnington:

It’s my birthday Angus, so it’s hard to forget.

Angus Montgomery:

Oh right, wow. Very fortuitous. And so that, and again the Academy, the idea of that is upskilling people with potentially no digital capability, or no digital knowledge whatsoever and kind of giving them the skills and potential for a new career.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah exactly. When I first joined DWP, we were kind of in that twilight of 2013 in the Civil Service. And I was told DWP, when I think about this now and I was reminiscing the other day, I must have been incredibly controversial because DWP told me they got 300 experts in digital. And after the first few days, I hadn’t met one so I was beginning to get a bit suspicious, so I wrote down as a word cloud, the 50 terms you really need to understand to understand digital and particularly if you like, the GDS version with discovery, alpha and beta. And challenged the whole of the organisation if someone could get 50 like I could, then I would absolutely consider them an expert, and that’s fair enough. And a lot of people came forward and the highest score was 20.

Angus Montgomery:

Oh really? Wow.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah. And you realise actually, we probably are kidding ourselves relative to industry. We’re not where we think we need to be. And at that point, that’s how we kind of came to the academy system. For me, it was always better to retrain our folk even if that was a gamble in the way we described earlier than it was to kind of, you know, put them to one side and hire a whole set of new people who aren’t part of the Civil Service culture. But, and this again is a really true story. When we first trained people, and then put them back into their departments and their host building, people used to say to them, ‘we don’t do it like that around here Kevin’.

So in the end I got this entire building, bit like we are here today, in Leeds. And we commondered the first floor, the ground floor, and we used that to train people in the Academy. Then we commandeered the next two floors for people to go off and do digital programmes. So they were entirely sequestrated from the rest of the business because, if they were put in the business, we had this terrific organ rejection.

And you think about that now, and you think that must have been incredibly controversial that I set up a building to incubate digital.

Angus Montgomery:

To develop this new way of thinking.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah, yeah but it’s all true and you know I, again I was reminiscing the other day, I even stopped people who weren’t qualified from going through the Academy from doing digital for a while.

Angus Montgomery:

Oh wow.

Kevin Cunnington:

Because we had a number of people who thought they knew, you know ‘cause of the 300 expert thing again, thought they knew what they were doing and they didn’t, so I stopped them and made them get completely trained in the Academy, then I let them crack on.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah. And were you seeing, so when people were being trained in the Academy and then going back into DWP and sort of, after this sequestering, were you seeing then the change in the department or the capability building?

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah, I think it took, so in DWP over the first 3 years, I think we trained 5,000 people. Because, at peak, we were training 3000 people a year. And it was only through you know, mass re-education if you like, or mass education, that we got to a point where, you know these people who knew about digital weren’t strange folk anymore. They were more you know, the core fabric of the business.

And it still is a fact that 80% of the people who were trained in the Academies are really around awareness of digital, not practitioners for digital, only about ⅕ of the people go on to be practitioners. But the majority of the effort was just stopping people from being worried about it or thinking it was alien or thinking it was different. And eventually critical mass won and we thought digital was part of our DNA, and if you went into DWP today, you’d never consider doing something that wasn’t digital, you would genuinely be digital by default.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah. So it was a real culture shift.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah, exactly.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah, yeah. That’s great. And obviously while you were at DWP, GDS had been around for 2 or 3 years beforehand. What was your kind of relationship with GDS and how were you working with them when you were at DWP?

Kevin Cunnington:

So, GDS invented a construct which, I still think to this day is a really good idea, called Digital Leaders. And it was essentially getting all the heads of digital together on a monthly basis, chaired by GDS. And I was part of that. So I was always part of the kind of family. DWP did have, occasionally, some GDS folk working with us on some of the programmes but relatively small numbers.

I think it wasn’t until about 2015, that the chair of the Digital Leaders changed to be Chris Ferguson and myself. We completely changed the dynamic to say it wasn’t just about the centre but the centre in partnership with a big department, and from there I had a lot more engagement with GDS. Obviously prior to arriving here in GDS.

Angus Montgomery:

I think it was August/September 2016 when you joined.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah, I think it was. Yeah.

Angus Montgomery:

You joined as the first Director General of GDS, and tell me about when you joined, what were your sort of, first impressions. I mean obviously you knew the organisation well, you’d been working very closely with it but actually sort of, coming in the door and sort of, becoming part of GDS, what were your impressions of it?

Kevin Cunnington:

Oh it was definitely quite different to DWP, even though, I mean honestly we had absolutely mimicked GDS in DWP in our digital centres by putting up the bunting...you know, really ruthlessly just stealing all the good ideas. But GDS was just fundamentally, purely digital and it was, yeah, incredibly different. It was much more challenging, people were much more open, it wasn’t anything like so hierarchical and it was still kind of like, a big startup back in ‘16 [2016]. And like, you know where it is now in ‘19 [2019] where it feels more like an enterprise.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah yeah yeah.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah, it was way different and you know the statistic today in GDS, is 47% of us are in the age bracket of 30-40.

Angus Montgomery:

Oh wow.

Kevin Cunnington:

So that’s quite a lot different from I guess, the general profile of the Civil Service.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah.

Kevin Cunninton:

And particularly DWP. So you really did notice it had much more, yeah, much more youth on its side immediately when you walked in the door.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah. And what, and when you joined what were your first priorities for, well yourself and for GDS?

Kevin Cunnington:

Oh I think they’ve honestly remained the same. And it’s funny because I had my equivalent from Australia here today to chat, and I was saying, the two bits of advice I always consistently give digital organisations, digital countries, starting out are one, build capability, get the academies sorted at scale. Two, don’t start building applications until you’ve got your identity strategy sorted out.

Angus Montgomery:

Right.

Kevin Cunnington:

Because if you don’t get your identity strategy first and foremost ahead of, then you find yourself in the kind of position we are which is, playing catchup on identity.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah.

Kevin Cunnington:

And there the two, they’ve always been my two priorities here at GDS.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah.

Kevin Cunnington:

Support the Verify programme, build out the Academies.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah. Brilliant. And what were you, when you joined, obviously you said it was very very different from DWP, what were the differences in the sense of like, moving from a department to the centre and what you could do here and what you couldn’t do from the centre that you could do in departments?

Kevin Cunnington:

I think the main thing is that I always felt in DWP, notwithstanding the fact that I was running a bigger group probably two or three times the size of GDS, I wasn’t quite as busy if that makes sense. I had more time to think about the strategy. And famously we used to have these Friday morning breakfast meetings with the ‘brain trust’, quotes around that, where we just used to think about what DWP could look like in 2020, 2025, 2030.

And I think it’s taken you know, as you say, nearly the two and a half, three years I’ve been here to get to a point where I think I've now got the right structures and management team in place, that I’m actually beginning to free up to think about what is our 2030 vision, what is the future of A.I in the workplace and yeah, it’s taken quite, it’s taken much longer than I thought it would to get to that point where I’ve got that same quality of thinking time that I had in the departments.

Kevin Cunnington:

Which is just an interesting observation, really.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah, that is interesting. And well in what other ways as well, I mean you obviously, in that respect GDS has changed in that you kind of, now have that space to think about that stuff. What other ways do you feel that GDS has grown and developed so far in your time here?

Kevin Cunnington:

Well I think the two obvious things you’d highlight is, it’s much bigger. It’s 860 people today, and I think it was about 400 when I joined, it’s of that order, so it’s much bigger.

The new building here in Aldgate is just brilliant. I think it’s made a massive change of quality of life for all of us here in GDS. But I think there’s some other things as well. Acquiring the Academies gave us a national footprint for the first time.

Angus Montgomery:

So we have Academies, sorry, in Leeds and..

Kevin Cunnington:

Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle. Hopefully I keep saying Bristol outloud, for the good people of Bristol to hear me, so hopefully that’ll come true at some point.

And I think the other thing that’s changed is we’ve now got the Introvert Network and of course, we’ve got the BAME [Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic] Network, which didn’t exist back then, so I think we are you know, continuing to embrace diversity and inclusion here in GDS.

Angus Montgomery:

And that’s a very obvious thing that diversity and inclusion is, it’s something that we talk about a lot in this organisation, and rightly so, but I think I’ve not worked in organisations like this where it’s so obvious that the organisation cares about that, and I think that that’s really important.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah, I’m the same. I think it’s integral to its DNA.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Cunnington:

And you wonder, I mean it’s one thing to take great pride in around GDS. I mean it’s not, I didn’t start it but nevertheless I feel the real responsibility of making sure we continue to be diverse and inclusive going forward.

Angus Montgomery:

Definitely. And looking forward, because we’re recording this in April and we’re moving onto a new financial year.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah.

Angus Montgomery:

So there’s a lot of work going on in GDS and around government as a whole as people prepare for it and people think about, not just the year ahead but as you’ve mentioned, the 10 or 20 years ahead and what we could do.

So first of all, could you tell me a little bit about what your priorities are for the next year?

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah so in terms of priorities, I generally try and describe GDS you know, through the lens of history where, in 2012 we started out by digital by default, which was all just about building confidence that as a Civil Service we could insource some of these things and do them.

The next phase, 2015 onwards, I would say is building capability. That the integration of the Academies, the GAAP platforms, all the things we’ve done to scale the business.

And then I’d say over the last 12-18 months, we’ve talked more about transformation, collaboration and innovation really. That’s the kind of slogans we batted off for Sprint last year and so with that in mind, and we’ve got some big things landing in the very short term, we’ve got the A.I review that we’ve been doing on how A.I could be used in the workforce, that we’ve done in conjunction with DCMS, landing over the next few months. We’ve got the minister’s review on innovation and how that could land, although that report is becoming much broader than innovation. It’s really kind of front-running what I think we’ll end up saying as part of SR19, or spending review 19.

Angus Montgomery:

Brilliant. Yeah.

Kevin Cunnington:

And then we’ve got quite a big set of tours really. So we’ve got all the new Sprint conferences in the devolved nations, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, which of course we’ve never done before. We’re doing a special in Leeds and then of course, we’re heading home to London in September. And then on the back of that, we’ve got, we’re attending every Civil Service Live doing keynote presentations, and we’re doing the Let’s Talk About Race workshops as well.

Angus Montgomery:

Yes, which is towards the end of the month I think, isn’t it? Yeah.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yes exactly. And then towards the end of the month, we’ve actually got Breaking Down Barriers. Which is our functional view of how we promote BAME people into the SCS [Senior Civil Service] within digital.

Angus Montgomery:

Into Senior Civil Service.

Yeah. Wow. So a lot coming up.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yes.

Angus Montgomery:

A lot touring and a lot of talking. And yeah, a busy summer ahead. And as we kind of, as you think about your priorities, in your opinion, what, can you summarise what GDS is here to do and how that role is developing and how it will develop, I suppose over the coming years?

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah so you know, we’ve tried to highlight the core values of GDS by putting them into pithy slogans really. ‘Show what good looks like’, and GDS has always been great at showing what good looks like from, right from the early days of user research right through to now. We show what good looks like.

Two, slightly new but ‘do the hardest things’. So my view is, GDS should be prototyping things today that departments will want to explore in 2 years time. Good example of that would be voice activation on GOV.UK.

Third value is around reflecting the society we serve. We talked a lot about diversity but we also need to encourage SMEs (small-to-medium enterprises) across the UK to work with us. We also need, as GDS, to have a more regional footprint.

And then the fourth value we talk about is helping government transform. And that for me, is the one I want to tweak going forward. I think our role is not to help but to lead.

Angus Montgomery:

Ok.

Kevin Cunnington;

And just be more proactive about, this is what good in the space of biometrics, or this is what good in the space of voice activation, looks like. And begin to work more proactively with departments to lay out that roundmap that we asked them to follow. Yeah just be much more proactive in the fourth category.

Angus Montgomery:

Ok. That’s interesting. So is that proactive in the sense of sort of, actively working with these projects or doing these things as exemplars almost?

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah exactly, exactly like that Angus. Working with some departments on exemplars, setting the standards and then, really, encouraging, cajoling even, departments to say well, now we’ve figured out how to do voice activation of services, why wouldn’t you make all your major services voice ‘activationable’ by 2027.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah.

Kevin Cunnington:

That kind of thing. I think the other big shift is the local digital declaration. Where we’re obviously working much more closer nowadays with local authorities, which I think is a really good thing for the UK because citizens interact far more frequently with local authorities than they do obviously, central government.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah. That’s really interesting. And finally, because we’re getting, we’re running towards the end of this episode, just finish with a couple of well, I suppose, quick fire-ish questions. First all, what’s the most challenging part of your job?

Kevin Cunnington:

Oh quick fire? I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t say keeping your eye on the ball really. There’s a lot going on, and actually just keeping as focused on the core business as well as planning for EU Exit, is definitely the most difficult part of it.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah. Keeping all, yeah...keeping in charge of everything. What’s the most enjoyable part?

Kevin Cunnington:

Well this will come as an irony ‘cause most people know I’m quite, well I am an introvert, that’s why I took up computer science but, I love the touring if I’m honest.

Angus Montgomery:

You’ve got a lot of it coming up so.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah exactly. You know, the fact that we’re going on tour with as we said, Sprint, Civil Service Live, Breaking Down Barriers. I think people also know that when I was in Vodafone, for 3 and a half years, I didn’t spend a single week in the country, in this country.

Angus Montgomery:

Wow.

Kevin Cunnington:

I was perpetually as the Global Head somewhere else, looking at stuff in the Czech Republic or Italy. And I feel you know, in the back half of this year, I’d like to do more support our international directorate, Chris Ferguson’s directorate in flying the flag a little for Britain overseas.

Angus Montgomery:

‘Cause there’s a lot of work going on there.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah, and showing you know, why we have done some of the things we’ve done. And obviously learning from others as we do that.

Angus Montgomery:

Yeah.

Kevin Cunnington:

And that, that would make me very happy.

Angus Montgomery:

Brilliant, yeah. And final question, what’s your, what are you most proud of from your time at GDS so far?

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah, there’s, there’s a huge list you know, from GAAP, GOV Wifi, all the work we’ve done on GOV.UK for EU Exit, which I think has been brilliant. The work we’ve started on innovation, the innovation survey, the innovation landscape, the new pipeline process, local digital declarations, the publication of the 7 Lenses book. Being on top of EU Exit, the Academies, the Emerging Tech Development programme, the Global Digital Marketplace. I mean it’s just..

Angus Montgomery:

The list goes on.

Kevin Cunnington:

Yeah, yeah, you could be doing that for quite a while couldn’t you?

Angus Montgomery:

So thank you again to Kevin for joining us, and thank you for listening to this episode of the Government Digital Service podcast. I really hope that you enjoyed it. If you want to listen to future episodes or in fact, if you want to listen to the episodes that we’ve done so far, please do go to wherever it is that you download your podcasts episodes from, so Spotify, Apple Music, all those places. You’ll find us there, so hit subscribe and we hope you enjoy what we do in the future. And thank you again and goodbye.

Kevin Cunnington:

Thank you Angus.

GDS Podcast #7 - How has digital changed public-sector organisations? Mar 28, 2019

We speak to people from across the public sector about how digital has affected their lives, their careers and the organisations they work for.

Those who contributed to this episode are:

Kevin Cunnington, Director General of the Government Digital Service
Sally Meecham, Head of Digital Data and Transformation for UK Research and Innovation
Caron Alexander, Director of Digital Shared Services for Northern Ireland’s Department of Finance
Matthew Cain, Head of Digital and Data from the London Borough of Hackney
Caren Fullerton, Chief Digital Officer for the Welsh Government

----------

A full transcript of the episode follows:

Angus Montgomery:

Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Angus Montgomery, and I’m a senior writer at GDS.

We’re recording this podcast in March 2019, and a few days ago, on the 12th March, it was the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for linking information across different computers , which was the proposal that he wrote that would eventually become the thing that we now know as the World Wide Web.

And this anniversary got us thinking, like lots of other people I suspect, about how much the World Wide Web has changed the way that we do things, the way that we work, and our lives. And in particular for those of us working in the public sector, how much it has changed public services and the way that governments and other public sector organisations, can deliver services and can improve the lives of the people using those services.

So for this episode what we wanted to do was, we wanted to hear the views of people across public sector digital roles, not just in central government but in local authorities, in devolved administrations. And we wanted to hear from them about how digital has changed the way that they work and what it means for them, and the advantages and the changes that it’s brought to their roles.

So we put out a call for contributions from people in senior digital roles and lots of people were kind enough to respond and what we did was, we emailed a bunch of questions out and people responded by sending audio clips of their thoughts. So we’ve got a whole load of audio clips, a load of great answers and we’re now going to use those audio clips to create this episode of the GDS podcast, so rather than hearing from just one person, you’re going to hear from lots and lots of different people and lots of different viewpoints.

So first of all, thank you very much to all of those people who contributed to this episode. In this episode, you’re going to hear from Kevin Cunnington, who is the Director General of the Government Digital Service. You’re going to hear from Sally Meecham, who is Head of Digital, Data and Transformation for UK Research and Innovation. You’re going to hear from Matthew Cain, who is Head of Digital and Data for London Borough of Hackney.

And you’re also going to hear from two people working at devolved administrations, and you’re going to hear a lot more from them in the future, because we’re working with...GDS is working with devolved administrations to run a series of Sprint events this year. So we’re going to be talking about those in the episode as well, so we’re running Sprint events all across the UK in partnership with the Scottish government, the Welsh government, the government of Northern Ireland and Leeds city council. And in this episode, you’re going to hear from two of our partners, who are working on those Sprint events. You’re going to hear from Caron Alexander, who is Director of Digital Shared Services for Northern Ireland’s Department of Finance, and you’re going to hear from Caren Fullerton, who is Chief Digital Officer for the Welsh Government .

So that’s my very long intro over. The TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) version of that is, you’re going to hear from lots of different people, lots of different sound clips, and it’s going to be a lot of fun and it’s going to work seamlessly, I hope.

So let’s get down to it. So the first question that we wanted to find out was, why people wanted to work in digital, what excited them about it and what it’s meant for their careers. For lots of people, digital has always been a part of their working lives, so this was the case for Kevin Cunnington and this is what he said to us.

[Audio starts]

‘My bachelors degree is Computer Science, my masters degree, as people know, is in A.I. In 1992, this is a trip down memory lane, I wrote PWC’s global methodology of how to develop A.I systems using Agile. So I’ve always been a digital person. I spent most of my life in blue chip corporates really, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), Goldman Sachs, Vodafone, but I had a spell in the middle as an entrepreneur with mixed success if I’m honest. We built one company and sold it for lots of millions of pounds, and then I build another one which failed to make any money on them, and lost rather a lot of money. And I do say this to people, if you ever get to meet my wife, please don’t mention it, because she has forgiven me now but she wasn’t very happy about it at the time’.

Angus Montgomery:

And for some people, digital represented a new opportunity in their careers, it represented an opportunity to do something that they might not have imagined they were going to end up doing. This is Sally Meecham who’s got a really interesting story about how she ended up in a digital world.

[Audio starts]

‘I was a set designer, and I attended an internet conference about twenty years ago. And was just immediately enthralled and excited by the opportunities, the reach, the ability to connect, to have your own voice, be who you want to be with digital. That day I had an idea for a website, and I hadn’t really been using the internet hardly at all, so was quite surprised when this idea popped into my head for a peer-to-peer travel review website. And literally within the next few days, I’d given up my job, I met some people to set up a business and we set up a website. And within four months, I was an internet guru, which is obviously silly, but there weren’t that many people doing it at the time, so I’ll take that. And I still love digital, I think it’s phenomenal and we just need to keep working to make sure that it is fair’.

Angus Montgomery:

Sally Meecham there, from set designer to internet guru in just four months. So a common thread that came through in a lot of responses, and something we’ve obviously explored lots in this podcast previously, is the opportunity that digital provides to improve public services, and to improve the way that government and other organisations can serve people. So here’s Matthew Cain on that theme.

[audio starts]

‘In Hackney council, digital has changed our expectations of what we can do with technology and data to meet residents’ raised expectations. We’re using user centered design Agile approaches in order to redesign services so good that people prefer to use them.’

Angus Montgomery:

Shout out for GDS there as well which is great to hear. Caron Alexander had a similar, or a response on a similar theme, and also talks about the opportunity for digital to impact the way that government and [other local] other public sector organisations can deliver front line services to people. Here’s what she had to say.

[audio starts]

‘Working in digital transformation provides great opportunities to work closely with service owners and users, and really understand the needs. It’s very rewarding to work collaboratively, designing services that are easy to use, services that are accessible when and where you want to use them, and using a device of your choice.’

Angus Montgomery:

And Caren Fullerton explains how digital has changed her career as a civil servant and how that’s developed over the time she’s worked in the Welsh government and the Civil Service.

[audio starts]
‘Working in a digital role gives me a really great opportunity to focus on something which I’ve always really enjoyed in my career in the Civil Service, which is to look in a fresh, or even a critical way sometimes, at the way in which we work. My first job in the Civil Service was as an analyst, and every year we used to look at our data collection exercise, look at how we could redo the form, improve our IT system, change the way we presented the results. And so a focus very much on learning and continuing to improve and, for me, the opportunities offered by my current role are to look at everything we do, whether it’s a corporate system or whether it’s a system that provides a service to the population, look at it in a way that means we never have to stand still, and we’re always looking for ways to change and improve’,

Angus Montgomery:

So it’s great obviously, to hear very personal responses about how digital has affected people’s working lives, and what it’s meant for them on a personal level [0.08.00].
As I mentioned at the start of the podcast, all the people that we spoke to, have very senior digital roles in public sector organisations. So we wanted to kind of go beyond the personal viewpoints, and find out also how, what digital has meant, not just for these people but for the organisations that they work for and lead, and what it’s helped those organisations do.

And here’s Matthew Cain again. He’s talking about how digital really helps Hackney council meet the needs of its users, of the people who live in the borough of Hackney.

[audio starts]

‘I wanted to work in digital because I was always passionate about public services and about good public policy. But I always wanted to be able to see how that happened on the ground. So the opportunity to come in and work for the public sector gave me a chance to harness the inspirational qualities that Francis Maude (former Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General) and Mike Bracken (co-founder of GDS), and Tom Loosemore (co-founder of GDS) had led in the Government Digital Service, and give me an amazing opportunity to put that into practice myself.’

Angus Montgomery:

And Caren Fullerton sort of continues on that theme and talks specifically, not just about services but how digital can change the way that public sector organisations can deliver the policy that drives those services as well. Here’s Caren.

[audio starts]
‘I think the biggest change for us in terms of impact of digital on the way we work, has been to transform the way in which we develop and deliver policy. So through the whole policy cycle, whether it’s the discovery phase, looking at how the world looks at how we engage with our stakeholders to look at what the case for change is, all the way through to actually delivering the policy out there in Wales. Digital tools, digital thinking, user centered thinking has actually offered a whole new way of working, which people, who work in the Welsh government, are really enthusiastic to embrace’.

Angus Montgomery:

And Kevin Cunnington who as well as being Director General of GDS, has worked in senior digital roles at the Department for Work and Pensions has, you know, quite an interesting sort of oversight of how digital has developed in central government.

He talks about how, over recent years the environment has really changed in government and the public sector, now digital ways of working and responding to user needs are business as usual in many organisations.

[audio starts]

‘When I started in DWP (Department for Work and Pensions) in 2013, there were no other digital people apart from me. There was no profession for people like me in the Civil Service. There was no academies, there was no training. When we first set up the first academies and trained people in digital, I then went back into the existing DWP workplaces, and people used to say to me, genuinely said, ‘we don’t do it like that round here thanks’. So in the end, I ended up setting up an academy in a building in Leeds, and taking over the whole building. So we used to train people on the ground floor, and then allow them to work in an Agile way on the first and second floors, because the native environment in DWP was just so alien for them, they had to be sequestered, or quarantined, in this single building in Leeds. So I say the biggest changes, when you look back, nobody ever debates now whether we should do things digitally. Digital is business as usual.’

Angus Montgomery:

‘Nobody ever debates now that we do things digitally’, which is a great point and a great position for us to be in. And Caron Alexander sort of echoes this point about how digital can change organisational culture.

[audio starts]

‘Digital transformation has really started to change the culture within the Northern Ireland Civil Service. Now we’re designing our citizen facing services around people, the people that use those services and the uptake of our online digital service has exceeded all of our expectations’.

Angus Montgomery:

And as I mentioned at the top of the podcast, this change in culture and the whole idea of how digital can drive transformation, collaboration and innovation is something we, as GDS, are going to be exploring more in the Sprint series of events that we’re going to be running this year.

And we’re running these in collaboration with devolved administrations, including Northern Ireland and Wales. And so we wanted to hear from Caron Alexander, what she’s looking forward to in Sprint Belfast, which is the event that we will be doing there shortly. And here’s what she had to say.

[audio starts]

‘I’m really looking forward to meeting new people, and hearing about digital developments across UK government. It will be great to showcase some of our local digital transformation successes, to share experiences and to discuss lessons learnt with colleagues from across the public sector.’

Angus Montgomery:

And as well as doing a Sprint in Belfast, we’re also doing a Sprint in Cardiff in collaboration with the Welsh government. And so we wanted to hear from Caren Fullerton, what she’s planning and what she’s looking forward to from this sprint event.

[audio starts]
‘What I’m most looking forward to in Sprint Cardiff is actually meeting up with people who work in the same kind of role as me elsewhere in the Civil Service, find out about what they’re doing and learn about their experiences, good and bad, and hopefully taking some of that learning and applying it to the things that we’re doing here. There’s also a great opportunity to tell people about the things that we’re doing within Welsh government, and to sing some of our own praises for once’.

Angus Montgomery:

So lots to look forward to at these Sprint events, and if you want to find out more about them, then keep your eyes peeled on the GDS blogs because we’ll be talking a lot more about them in the coming weeks.

So finally, we’ve heard a lot about kind of how digital helps organisations deliver things better and how digital can change organisational culture, and Sally Meecham sort of closes off this section by pointing out that while obviously, digital has brought huge benefits and it is becoming business as usual, or has become business as usual for large public sector organisations, we do need to be careful not to sit on our laurels, and we need to make sure that we are continuing to drive forward and talk about, and showcase the great things that digital can bring. Here’s Sally.

[audio starts]
‘For me, it’s more consistency, design standards, spend control, empowerment and transparency. We’ve only really just begun this journey, it’s a few years old, and not everyone has adopted it. But it’s critical we stay on this path, it’s critical we still have standards and openness in government’,

Angus Montgomery:

So for our final sort of subject that we wanted to hear from people about. We heard about changes that digital can bring on a personal level and changes that digital can bring to organisations, and we wanted really to drill down into the specifics, to hear, not just about kind of, you know, cultural change or transformation of services, but what are the specific things that digital and digital government, and digital public services allow people to do that they couldn’t have done before. So Sally Meecham has an example that will be familiar to lots of people I think, about how digital has changed an aspect of her life and probably changed the same aspect of lots of listeners’ lives as well.

[audio starts]

‘I’m going to start with banking, which used to be for me, a really horrible experience. We needed to make that we were there for their opening times, and that we were lucky if we got somebody who was helpful and the queuing, just the whole thing about it, I used to really detest. And I do my banking, my personal banking and my business banking, when I want it, on what device I want to do it on. And I think that the advancements and changes of online banking are just getting better and I just think you know, it might sound a bit boring but it really does free up time to do things a little less boring instead’.

Angus Montgomery:

So I think the banking example is a really useful and interesting one for those of us working in the digital public sector because it’s the same thing for delivering government services. So what digital is allowing people to do as Sally has said, is do things in their own, on their own devices and freeing up people’s time. So rather than you know, government and other public sector organisations absorbing people’s time through difficult services, we’re making these things easy to do so people can spend the rest of their time doing the things that they actually want to do. So I think that’s a really valuable example. Matthew Cain focuses specifically on how digital has helped him and his colleagues working lives. And again, lots of this will feel familiar to those of you who work in digital public sector organisations.

[audio starts]

‘The work we’ve done in Hackney together has included some of my absolute career highlights, whether that’s the improvement to the Hackney work service, which means that more than 40 people now have a job that they didn’t have this time last year. Our work in fostering to improve the experience of applying to be a foster carer, or our work in the housing services. Personally though, the way we use Google Drive has changed the way I collaborate with teams, with people across the organisation and outside the council. Twitter has enabled us to develop much broader networks across the sector so that we can tap into the expertise in central government and local digital agencies. And Todoist is a brilliant tool for making sure that I can communicate and work well with my own teams’.

Angus Montgomery:

So lots of good examples there about how digital has helped Matthew’s day to day life, and helped him and his team deliver those great services. And when we asked Caren Fullerton this question, she had a really interesting and quite specific example about how digital can improve service delivery for a very particular group of users. The user group is those people who use assistive technology, so things like screen readers. And here’s Caren talking about how digital has helped to deliver services for that user group.

[audio starts]

‘So we’ve always given high priority to serving their needs well. Being as flexible as possible in making a range of tools available to users of assistive technology. But the way in which we’ve integrated the service to them with our basic service provision, has not worked particularly well. So typically we would roll out some new software or new hardware, and come to the needs of that group of users, the assistive technology users, right at the end of the project when it became a problem to solve, sometimes very difficult problems, so in some cases, software that had been rolled out to 95% of the organisation couldn’t be rolled out to the final 5%. This wasn’t satisfactory, and meant we were spending an awful lot of resources on actually providing support to those users. So by transforming the way we thought about that service, we were able to reduce support resources and to actually improve service and most importantly, enable those staff to be much more productive and the simple way of doing this was to start any new project with the roll out to that particular group of users, so from about 3 years ago, we have started to do that. So new phone systems, new hardware which we’ve recently rolled out in the last year or so, moves to Windows 10, upgrades to software, we have taken the needs of assistive tech users to be the ones that we need to sort out right at the start of the project and that has meant that, the needs of our, the majority of our users are relatively straightforward to deal with in the second and third stages of the project. So what it’s given us is a slightly longer start to some of our projects because we have to deal with some of the more challenging integration issues right at the beginning, but a much softer landing towards the end of a rollout, much better service for our assistive technology users enabling them to be productive, and to receive the same service as everybody else, and has required lower levels of support from our software teams as the services have gone into regular business as usual service delivery’.

Angus Montgomery:

So Caren Fullerton there with quite a specific example of digital improving something. Caron Alexander focuses on, in her response, on the broader benefits that digital tools that can bring, that is if you build these digital tools using the right approach and embed them across organisations.

[audio starts]

‘In driving forward the Northern Ireland digital transformation programme, we used a principle of re-use when developing new digital services. This has resulted in a growing number of reusable technical components which are now in our digital toolkit. And these components are available at little or no cost for subsequent projects and also, this can substantially increase the pace of delivery.

Angus Montgomery:

And Kevin Cunnington also focuses on tools and platforms, and one platform in particular, GOV.UK Verify, which is government’s identity assurance platform. And he has an anecdote from his family, and how GOV.UK Verify has helped them.

[audio starts]

‘A good example happened recently with my wife, where my wife’s been a long time user of the Verify system, she used it to check her state pension. The other part of her pension is with the NHS, because she was an NHS worker. And that’s always been problematic because historically, it’s one of these systems that’s got a you know, a cryptic username and an even more cryptic password methodology, so she’d never remember it. And everytime she goes to check it, she has to ring them up and get them to tell her da da da. But good news. The NHS pension scheme has adopted Verify. So she texted me at work, saying ‘this is brilliant, I’ve just used Verify to check my state pension and I’ve just used Verify to check my health service pension’. She said, ‘I love your Verify’, she said, the highest compliment in my line of work you ever get.

Angus Montgomery:

So there you go. We’ve heard from a range of people, kind of at a range of different levels about what digital has brought to them from the personal, to the professional, to the way that their organisations are structured, to the culture, to the way that they deliver services.

So I wanted to give a big thanks again to everyone who contributed their answers to this, and gave us some really really great responses. And I hoped that you enjoyed this episode and I hope that you found those responses interesting and valuable as we did.

And if you would like to contribute your own thoughts about how digital has changed the way that you work, and what excites you most about working in digital public services, we’d love to hear them so please do share on social media. You can use the hashtag #GDSpodcasts, all one word. And also if you could tag us at @GDSTeam in your comment, that would be brilliant. And then we can sort of see what you’re saying and share them more widely and it would just be lovely to hear kind of, more widely from people about what they think about this.

So that brings us to the end of this episode of the GDS podcast, so thank you very much for tuning in and listening. If you’d like to catch up with any of our previous episodes, or if you’d like to subscribe to future episodes, then please head to wherever it is that you download your podcasts from, we’re on all the major platforms, Spotify, Apple Music, Pocket Casts, everything like that. Find the GDS podcast and hit subscribe, and we hope you enjoyed this episode, and we hope that you will tune in again in the future. Thank you very much and goodbye.

GDS Podcast #6 - an interview with Oliver Dowden, Minister for Implementation Feb 21, 2019

Minister for Implementation Oliver Dowden shares his highlights from the past year, his passion for emerging technology and his surprising first job in tech.

A full transcript of the episode follows:

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Sarah Stewart: Hello and welcome to the GDS podcast. I'm Sarah Stewart. I'm a senior writer at the Government Digital Service.

We're recording this podcast on location in the office of today's guest. Oliver Dowden became Minister for Implementation in January 2018. With this promotion came responsibility for digital government. One year on, we will talk about his year in office, his current focus and the future, in particular innovation. Minister, welcome.

Oliver Dowden: Good afternoon, thank you for having me on.

Sarah Stewart: Now, most people can imagine what a studio looks like but not many people would know what a minister's office looks like. So can you help set the scene? Where exactly are we?

Oliver Dowden: Well I'm very fortunate with this ministerial office. It's the sort of ministerial office that people imagine their minister to have. It's actually overlooking Horse Guards Parade, so you can see where the Trooping of the Colour happens. And it's one of those classic sort of 18th century buildings with a very high ceiling. So it's a very pleasant place to work. I'm very privileged to have an office like this.

Sarah Stewart: And we're right in the middle of Whitehall as well, so we're really at the centre of government.

Oliver Dowden: Yes, completely. We're number 70 Whitehall, so we are next door to 10 Downing Street and to the Treasury building, Parliament is diagonally opposite and it’s in the Cabinet Office.

The Cabinet Office is really the heart of the government machine. It's kind of like the government's HQ. It brings different parts of government to work together. It coordinates, it cajoles. We try to facilitate things working across the whole of government. And one example of this is the Government Digital Service - how we ensure that digital transformation happens across government, how we have the same standards across government, how we embrace emergent technologies in government.

Sarah Stewart: It’s a really fantastic place from which to operate. So, just before we start...I take it at the portrait of Pitt the Younger on your wall isn't from your personal collection?

Oliver Dowden: No, sadly, sadly it's not and I'm certainly not trying to send any message with Pitt the Younger behind me! [laughter] I look at Pitt the Younger and think how little I have achieved! I think he became Prime Minister in his twenties, although I think he perhaps died when he was about my age or shortly afterwards.

Sarah Stewart: Well at great risk to my reputation, I'm going to venture some 18th century political trivia – I believe it was it was Pitt the Younger who shaped the role of Prime Minister into one of a coordinator of government departments – so this is my convenient segue into asking you how it feels to be a coordinator of a government department.

Oliver Dowden: Well I work to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, David

Lidington, so I suppose he's the ultimate coordinator of my government department in which I serve as a minister. But certainly an awful lot of what I do as a minister is coordination.

So whether that is the functional agenda that works across government, so the coordination of a common government estates policy, coordination of common government HR, common government commercial relationships and common government digital practices, all of this is about trying to move from a situation where you have in each individual government department you have a completely separate commercial team, a completely separate estates team completely separate HR team, and say ‘actually in most government departments we have a lot in common so why don't we try and work together, follow the common good and harness our combined powers’, as it were, and it also fits into another part of my brief which is implementation...I’m the Minister for Implementation people usually ask ‘well what does that actually mean?’...

Sarah Stewart:...Yes, how did you get that title? Is that something you select yourself? Or..?

Oliver Dowden: Yes, well it was the Prime Minister...so when the Prime Minister appointed me at the beginning of last year, she said that one of the big challenges we have in government is it's perhaps the easiest thing is for politicians to make promises. It's harder, in particular at the moment, in a hung parliament, to get legislation through Parliament to make it happen.

But then how do you actually ensure that the delivery happens on the ground? And what can we do as a Cabinet Office, as ministers to try and coordinate the delivery on the ground and to deal with problems when delivery isn't happening in the way that we want. That's the essence of the implementation role: trying to unblock those problems, trying to ensure that we're on track to deliver the things that the public elected us to do. And also, I'm aided in that by the fact that I have oversight of all the government functions, so I can use the sort of mechanisms we have into our procurement relationships through commercial, our digital relationships through the digital team to try and get that broader picture of how government works.

Sarah Stewart: So was there anything in your background that prepared you for your role? How did you end up here?

Oliver Dowden: Well it depends where you want to begin with the journey. I mean, I went to my local comprehensive school and from there, I did quite well academically and I thought you know, I did quite well academically, what do you do if you get good grades? I fancy could I be a maybe a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher or maybe an accountant? Those were the only things I could think of. So I thought well law sounds... being a lawyer sounds quite interesting, so I applied and was fortunate enough to win a place to study law at Cambridge. I studied law...I didn't find it the most exciting, enjoyable thing to do [laughs] but I got offered a place, a training contract, with a city firm. But I wasn't so sure about it so I decided to try and do something different. So I actually worked in Japan teaching for a year in rural Japan...

Sarah Stewart: Oh wow.

Oliver Dowden: ...which was a fascinating experience in very, very rural Japan. I was a long way from any other English speakers and I didn't actually speak a word of English – of Japanese – when I arrived so I sort of had to learn my Japanese from a book. But it was a fascinating experience. I came back, I completed my legal training, but I realised very rapidly that law wasn't for me and after a few different jobs, I kind of got into advisory work and from there found out about an opportunity to work for the Conservative Party. I've always been a Conservative, but never thought of politics as being something I'd actually do for my main job.

I worked on the 2005 election campaign and I got to know David Cameron. And when he became leader of the Conservative Party, I ended up working for him on the 2010 General Election campaign and he asked me to go into Number 10, initially as political adviser and then deputy chief of staff in Downing Street. And I genuinely thought when the 2015 election came around, I'll leave after that. And then essentially my home seat... the incumbent Member of Parliament was retiring from my home seat, and eventually after lots of sort of deliberating and discussing it with my family, I thought I'd regret not, you know, seizing the opportunity and having the privilege of representing an area that I knew so well. And I was fortunate enough

to be selected as a candidate and elected as Member of Parliament in 2015, and then fortunate enough to be appointed as minister in the government by the Prime Minister at the beginning of 2018.

I mean, I think in terms of what shaped me and helped me in this, I think having exposure to lots of different people from lots of different backgrounds whether that's, you know, a complete culture shock of teaching in rural Japan or...I certainly don't come from a political family or a family that has any experience in sort of government, so you certainly get a different perspective there in terms of seeing things from the outside. That's certainly given me, and in my wider ministerial role, a passion for ensuring that we have genuine diversity both in the Civil Service and in public appointments, because I really think that if you get a group of people around the table who have different experiences whether that's culture, education, gender, ethnic background, those different experiences coming together helps you make better decisions and strengthens decision-making. And also, I think it's morally incumbent on government, for the country, to be governed by people who represent the country as a whole.

Sarah Stewart: I'd like to know what your very first job was.

Oliver Dowden: My very first job was actually working in a warehouse in Dunstable, which is just outside of Luton in Bedfordshire. It was an import/export business and I spent many holidays and summers and so on. Particularly two tasks I remember: respraying faulty produce that came in and then and wiring lamps. I wired lots and lots of lamps during those years and then boxing and packing and sending them on. But it was a relatively small organization and our duties extended to everything including cleaning, and you know the whole gambit.

Sarah Stewart: So the seeds for technology were sewn actually at a very early age.

Oliver Dowden: The practical application of technology, definitely!

Sarah Stewart: So you we're David Cameron's deputy chief of staff, so you were around during the creation of the Government Digital Service. How does it feel to go from witnessing the creation of an organization to being the minister

responsible for it in quite a short period of time?

Oliver Dowden:

I mean I don't I don't want to overplay my hand in the creation of the Government Digital Service – I pay real tribute to Francis Maude who was the minister that drove the creation of this.

And you know, in Number 10, we were very supportive of it, and I think what Francis did fantastically with the Government Digital Service was to seize the opportunity of creating something that sits across the whole of government, drives digital transformation. And he took some very bold decisions. He wasn't afraid to break things as it were, to drive the digital transformation. And he really got the Government Digital Service established and established the UK's a world leader in this space. So I kind of had a sense of the origins of the Government Digital Service, certainly coming in as one of the ministers responsible for it, reporting to David Lidington.

I think there's more we can do to be telling the story of how much GDS has achieved and how much it is currently doing. So for example if you look at Government as a Platform, the creation of GOV.UK, that's a common platform for all of government, it brings together disparate areas of government activity which now literally has billions of hits every year. We're pioneering things like GOV.UK Notify, GOV.UK Pay, again all of this is trying to do two things. First of all to move away from individual departments to the common government experience. I think most people just want to go somewhere and get government to do something for them. So removing those kind of artificial boundaries, but secondly continuing this push about how we drive the best innovation and disruption because it's really the tech revolution is driven by disruption and it's that's quite a challenge for government to cope with it but we have to keep on pushing because otherwise we will find government falling behind the rest of the economy.

Sarah Stewart: So what's the current focus for digital government at the moment?

Oliver Dowden: Well I think it's a number of things. First of all it is continuing and driving their end-to-end digitisation of government services so we need to... almost all government services now have an initial digital interface, but it's not the case that all government services are digitised all the way through. Often there are mechanical back-office functions, that slow things down and we're not taking the best advantage of the use of tech. So that is the kind of that digital transformation sits at the core. It's also creating commonalities across government, so continuing to drive the government as a platform and continue to develop such as GOV.UK Notify and so on. It's about driving up training and understanding – not just people in the digital profession – but wider policymakers say they understand the potential and it's also about seeing how we can apply the latest technology and GDS being a guide and a leader for departments in how they can embrace that new technology.

Sarah Stewart: So as you've alluded to, your brief is very varied. How do you focus your time?

Oliver Dowden: Well, to a certain extent they complement one another. So if you take, for example, emergent technology, I'm very keen for the government to embrace emergent technology, to use the opportunities that are there to help transform the service that citizens receive, and do so in a more efficient way. That kind of then links in to how we deliver and how we achieve implementation, but it also links into the commercial part of my brief because a lot of that has to be procured from the private sector.

So I tend to think of it more in terms of where can I really focus my efforts. But an area that really interests me, and I think we've got a huge potential, is in relation to GovTech and to innovative technologies and government digital transformation. I think for a number of reasons. I think first of all, it's one of those few areas where you can say hand on heart, if we get this right we can deliver more for less and we can deliver a better outcome for citizens. That's pretty unusual across different areas of government. The second reason is that we have a wonderful tech sector in this country and actually if we can prove that tech works to deliver better outcomes for people in the UK Government, it unlocks opportunities for tech companies to apply that around the world. I think thirdly, in terms of the wider implementation role, if you think about how people's experience of consuming in the private sector has changed enormously in the past 10 or 20 years through disruptive technologies whether that's – not recommending any particular company – but let's say the way Amazon has transformed the shopping and consumer experience, Airbnb in relation to accommodation, as Spotify and others in relation to the consumption of music, all those kind of disruptions are making products more easily available, often more cheaply available and more readily accessible in general. I think we should be aspiring to do the same thing in respective to public services. And I think if we fail to do that in respective public services in years to come people will begin to draw an unfavorable contrast between how they consume services in the public sector versus how they do so in the private sector.

Sarah Stewart: So, what exactly is standing in our way, in terms of government making process?

Oliver Dowden: There are areas of very very good practice across different bits of government. So, for example, HMRC has done a lot of work in terms of embracing repeat robotic processes, similarly DWP, if you look at, for example, the government GovTech Challenge. This is a fund to use new and emergent technologies. We've been doing some fantastic stuff around AI and geospatial data but it's not a consistent picture. So I think one of the things I'm trying to do in the production of an emergent technology strategy, is to try and draw out the best of what government is doing, showcase it, learn what we did to make that work well so then those lessons can be applied elsewhere in government. But it links into other areas as well. How we procure those kind of things from the private sector how we get the best of innovation from the private sector and it goes to things like the culture of government. So we want to make sure that people feel empowered to be able to take proportionate risks. I think you're not going to get innovation without taking risks and sometimes those risks will go wrong. It is okay to fail, if you're helping to drive that innovation. So, trying to achieve that that cultural change as well.

Sarah Stewart: Why do we need a strategy?

Oliver Dowden: It’s not about government sticking a finger in the air and saying ‘we want to go for blockchain because it's the technology of the moment’, it's just thinking how we how we can make use of that, so that that kind of started the ball rolling. But when you start the ball rolling about how do you think you can use emergent technology, that opens up wider questions, as I said around procurement, around the culture of government, so it's sort of broadened into those different areas. And actually it's been very interesting in framing this strategy – rather than us sort of sitting in Whitehall with a few at policy officials trying to come up with a policy, we've tried to go out there and talk to people. So I've held events in different parts of the country, indeed I also attended an event in in Paris where we talked about this as well, which was hosted, well variously attended, by both the President of France and the Prime Minister of Canada, which gives you some sort of indication of the seriousness that all governments are taking. But we've also been to Edinburgh, to different parts of England, the rest of United Kingdom. And you get consistent messages coming through. And those relate to how we need to change the culture of government, to embrace new technologies, how we need to change the way we buy in technologies, how we need to improve skills. So hopefully what people will see in the strategy, when it's produced, are sensible steps to help us do that. I'm not promising that this is going to be the endpoint, clearly it won't be, but hopefully there will be some helpful signposts along the route.

Sarah Stewart: So in that period of engagement was there anything that really stood out to you? Any ‘aha!’ moments you learned from any of the academics or the practitioners or tech leaders in the field?

Oliver Dowden: I think all roads lead back data. And it's certainly the case that data...it really feels to me that this year and the next year is the moment where we move from seeing the potential of data that's been talked about a lot to actually it's starting to lead to some big breakthroughs in how we do things differently. And actually you're starting to see it in the health sector already. And I think that it strikes me that this is a very exciting time, but in order to unlock that there's a lot of work to be done. For example, the government holds a huge amount of data, but often that data is not accessible, so we need to look about how we make it more accessible and we also need to look at how we make people not just do all the sort of tech experts understand the potential but all policymakers need to understand the potential of the data that they hold. So I think if there's one ‘aha moment’ when I thought that this is something we could really go big on that is probably it.

Sarah Stewart: If I could just move on to talk to you about your work with SMEs and the GovTech sector.You've said previously that innovation relies on, or successful innovation relies on, a good relationship with the private sector. Why can't government go it alone?

Oliver Dowden: Well I think we have we have so many opportunities out there. If you look at the kind of interesting, innovative stuff that is going on with SMEs, it’s not just SMEs, large companies as well they're doing interesting stuff with emergent technologies, they're doing interesting stuff with data. The idea that government is going to have all the answers or can create all the answers... if we don't embrace that what's going on the private sector [could mean] we're missing out on a huge amount of knowledge and creativity. And I think the best way to proceed is to work in in partnership, so there will be some instances – and GDS does this a lot – GDS does stuff in-house, but equally we buy in skills and knowledge and I think that then reinforces a healthy mixed-market economy whereby we create opportunities for the private sector. The private sector manages to grow through having those opportunities, but we get lots of ideas and intellectual property from the private sector. I think that enriches both sides of the economy in the UK and helps strengthen our position as a global digital leader.

Sarah Stewart: How are you making – or how is government – making it easier for the private sector and the public sector to collaborate?

Oliver Dowden: We've already made a good start with GovTech [Catalyst] which is a £20 million fund announced by the Treasury just last year that has been run through Cabinet Office and the Government Digital Service. We've had three rounds of challenges doing lots of interesting... taking lots of interesting challenges and using emergent technologies to address them. And what GovTech has done is to try and sort of soften the barrier between government and the private sector through procurement, because I think, too often, government decides what it wants then goes out to market with a very prescriptive solution and quite a rigid procurement process. Having the opportunity to have a competition where you have different stages so different people pitch into what the solution might look like is one things we managed to do with GovTech, and it forms part of a pattern that I hope we can add to where we have the opportunity for soft engagement in procurement before it actually happens. We can get the ideas from the private sectors to what we're after and how we procure it.

Sarah Stewart: So there is life for digital government beyond the end of the Government Transformation Strategy? They'll always be work to do.

Oliver Dowden: Oh there will always be work to do. I don't think the digital transformation of society and the economy as a whole is going to end anytime soon [laughter] and government has to keep up with it.

Sarah Stewart: And of course, we're supporting EU exit as well. GDS is playing an important role there. Do you think that meeting the short-term needs of EU exit will in be in any way compromised, or compromise, the longer term ambitions for government transformation or indeed, do you think it will accelerate it?

Oliver Dowden: I think it's more likely to be the latter. I think there are there are big opportunities created by the need to adapt to Brexit and certainly, necessity can often drive innovation and I think that's one of the core things that GDS is doing.

Sarah Stewart: You mentioned the principles of GDS and indeed other departments who are undergoing digital transformation. And the first principle is users first. And I suppose as a constituency MP, you're doing user research all the time, listening to what people want and wanting to deliver on those things. How does that play into your role as a minister? How does what they say, translate?

Oliver Dowden: I'm the number one thing is that most people care about outcomes not processes. I think what GDS is doing is increasingly shifting that focus towards the output regardless of the different government processes so for example we're looking at how you can just type in ‘learn to drive’ and it cuts across the different parts of government that help you achieve that or ‘start your own business’ or ‘move house’ – all those kind of things. That's that's what citizens are looking for and I think that's that would be an increasing trend in what we're doing I think. That also links in to how you interface as well. Depending on almost precisely how old you are, you relate to digital in different ways and increasingly there's use of voice technology, accessing technology through all different mediums we need to make sure we're keeping up with that.

Sarah Stewart: You mentioned visiting the GovTech summit in Paris. Do you keep an eye on what other governments are doing in the innovation space? Is there any country in particular that's piquing your interest?

Oliver Dowden: Well I think we're fortunate to be quite ahead of the curve in the UK, but I'm always conscious of who's playing catch up and it's interesting – all around the world people are starting to do this. So Singapore have made it a huge priority and hopefully I'm going to Denmark later this month, where again the government there is really committed to digital transformation and everyone knows about Estonia as well, that was the leader though clearly Estonia it’s slightly different. Canada is doing a lot of work. I was talking to High Commissioner about it just the other day. So there is definitely...I wouldn't say a race because I think we're all trying to get to the same endpoint, but I want to make sure that the UK is at the forefront of doing that.

Sarah Stewart: Yes, what do they say? A rising tide lifts all ships?

Oliver Dowden: Exactly.

Sarah Stewart: When you were on your travels and conducting your engagement to inform the strategy was there anyone in particular that you found particularly interesting or that really helped shape your understanding?

Oliver Dowden: Yes there's lots of examples. I think what's being done with CivTech in Scotland it's very interesting. We've kind of done a similar thing to it with GovTech but I think there are definitely lessons that we can learn from there. You can't help but be impressed by some of the tech applications particularly in relation to virtual reality. That's some way down the line for government but it is certainly something that makes you think.

Sarah Stewart: And just as we draw to a close, what have been the high points of your year?

Oliver Dowden: Well it was I must say it was a tremendous privilege to be in Paris and President Macron hosted us for lunch at the Élysée Palace, we were able to talk about this on a pan-European level. That brought home to me how this is an exciting and emergent trend, but also looking in terms of the practical application, seeing how the use of technology has been transforming people's lives and that's what we're all in government for in the end, making people's lives better.

Sarah Stewart: And there was one more thing…the podcast of course.

Oliver Dowden: Of course! Oh but you asked up til now! The podcast is ongoing!

Sarah Stewart: Well that brings us to the end of today's podcast. Thank you so much for joining us it's been really interesting.

Oliver Dowden: Pleasure, thank you.

Sarah Stewart: Thank you very much for listening. I hope you enjoyed it and that you'll listen again next month when we talk to more interesting people about interesting things in the world of digital government. Until then, farewell.

GDS Podcast #5 - an interview with Kit Collingwood Jan 30, 2019

Former DWP Deputy Director Kit Collingwood takes a look back on her time in the Civil Service, and we discover how she founded the OneTeamGov movement.

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A full transcript of the episode follows:

Angus Montgomery:
Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast, my name’s Angus Montgomery, I’m a senior writer at GDS and I’m very pleased to be joined today by Kit Collingwood, currently at DWP but recently announced soon to be leaving and getting an exciting new job in agency-world, so we’ll be talking to Kit about her time in government and looking back over some of the things that she’s done, so thankyou for joining us Kit

Kit Collingwood:
Thanks for having me.

Angus Montgomery:
So Kit, just to kick things off could you tell me a little bit about your role at DWP, your current role, and some of the things that you do there?

Kit Collingwood:
Sure. So my role is head of data transformation for the Department for Work and Pensions, so what my teams do is we work in the intersection between data, digital and technology to improve services and improve decision-making.

Angus Montgomery:
And how did you end up there? What’s your career path been so far? Because you’ve been around- well, I think it’s fair to say you’re a well-known figure in digital government. You’ve been around digital government for a while. What’s that journey entailed?

Kit Collingwood:
Well, it’s a huge cosmic accident actually. I worked actually in the engineering sector for five years after I graduated. I was a proof-reader and a translator for five years and then I decided that I wanted to be in the public service in some capacity. So I in 2009 joined the civil service fast-stream. I was a policy maker for three years working on different areas of justice policy, and I worked in parliament for a while putting a bill through parliament.

When I came from the end of that experience, I almost left the civil service because the ways that I thought that policy making and parliamentary work were happening were so antiquated and so out of touch with the average person’s experience that I’d really sort of lost faith with a lot of government ways of working and I was really saddened by a lot of what I’d seen. There was really no empathy or contact with people on the outside of Whitehall and I felt myself really distanced from average human experience.

At the same time, I fell into a delivery manager job at a place called the Office of the Public Guardian, which is one of the executive agencies of the Ministry of Justice. I applied for it as a fast-stream role, so it was just one of the regular rotation roles. I didn’t know what a delivery manager was. I didn’t really know how the internet worked, and I knew nothing about agile or about technology. I applied for this role called delivery manager which looked quite fun, and it turned out to be the delivery manager for the lasting power of attorney service, which was one of the first exemplars in the GDS transformation programme.

So this was coming towards the end of 2012, which is why I’ve been around for a long time because the beginning of digital government I suppose was around that time in the way that we know it now. GDS was about a year old really.

I had an induction that was hilarious in hindsight where my boss sat me down on my first day and she said, “Here’s your induction. I’ve just quit.” So my boss quit on my first day, and she was head of the transformation programme for the Office of Public Guardian. I, being the cheeky youngster that I was, went to her boss and said, “Can I have her job please on a temporary promotion?” And he was foolish enough to give it to me, and that’s how I came into digital government.

Angus Montgomery:
Oh wow.

Kit Collingwood:
So I was the accidental head of a transformation programme that I had no idea how to lead, but I did have some ideas about how I thought the place could be better run. So at that point, I was working with a guy called Chris Mitchell from GDS who was one of the very first sort of transformation partners which GDS would place with departments to help them understand how to do digital. He and I got on very well and I also got on very well with Mark O’Neill who was the other person sort of in place at the Ministry of Justice, where OPG was.

So they began to teach me the ropes about what this thing called digital was because I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know what a software developer did. I had no idea about how all of this works, and really the first six months of that were just me learning and learning and learning. Very quickly I met a few people who would completely transform how I thought about government. Tom Loosemore, Mike Bracken, Richard Pope, Tim Paul and a few others, so I would go to the old buildings in Holborn and that’s how I learned what digital government was, was from those people. They really taught me the basics of why this thing was necessary, what transformation meant, and they inspired me to stay in public service.

Angus Montgomery:
I’m interested in- because you sort of described in your early career you were becoming frustrated at the lack of human-centeredness or lack of humanness of governments, but you didn’t know what digital meant. So you kind of obviously had a lot of empathy and you understood that government needed to be more user-centred, but at what stage or how did you realise that digital was a way or the way to do this? Or is digital the way to do this?

Kit Collingwood:
No, I don’t think digital in itself is the way to do it, but it’s one of the tools that we need to be able to do it. So the ability for technology to bring services into people’s homes and everyday lives is part of the way that government should re-approach human connection. I’m fairly convinced about that, but it’s only a subset I think. We, I think, need fundamental retraining in empathy skills, or training not retraining. Fundamental training in empathy skills in order that we can approach the people we serve with compassion.

That’s not sort of pure cuddly thinking. There’s a huge economic benefit to understanding end users better, because if you understand the impact of your ideas and your policies on the average person then you can more effectively implement those policies. That to me just stands to reason, so to me high empathy has financial gains for government as well and it frustrates me that people don’t often see that.

But to put that aside, to answer your original question, the way that I sort of connected this idea of human connection and digital government was through user research, the kind of doggedness of user research. And quite quickly coming into- I think I inherited a team of sort of two or three people at the OPG and they were bolstered by some GDS folk. I mean, it’s a dream to have somebody like Richard Pope being able to effectively just consult on your ideas with, and that’s kind of an incredible privilege to have had. But there was also this cohort of user researchers, and I didn’t know what one of those was.

So just observing them at close quarters, this idea of iterating on your ideas, not doing a massive big bang thing and then just sort of hoping it works, which was- that is the way that government has and had done things. Suddenly there was this cohort of people who would do something small and then test it, see if it worked, and then do something else and then test it to see if it worked.
I saw the potential for that outside of technology, so I could see the application of that in policy-making very easily.

I could see the application of that even in law-making, which is more controversial, but I can see that. And in fact law-making is iterative actually. It goes through both houses several times, but to me the connection to end users is still lacking, and it’s got huge application for customer service as well, iterating in your ideas. None of the things I’ve just said are remotely original. They all happen now, but at the time it was quite revolutionary. So this idea of getting in a room with people who would be on the receiving end of your stuff, that was huge to me and that really reinvigorated my faith in public service.

Angus Montgomery:
And can you describe for people who weren’t around, say, back then, it wasn’t that long ago, but in 2012 when the exemplars programme was running, what was the exemplars programme? How did it function and what was the purpose of it?

Kit Collingwood:
Well, it was 25 high volume services that had a huge potential to be transformational, so it was things- so lasting power of attorney was one and that’s the ability to give somebody the power to act on your behalf if you lose mental health. There were things like carers’ allowance, which is part of my current department, Department for Work and Pensions, and also some less emotive but high volume stuff, so a lot of the DVLA’s digital services, a couple of them fell into that transformation programme as well.

So these were high volume services that would show the potential for digital government, and they were acknowledged as being the starting line really. It was to get 25 of them into beta within a certain timescale to show the pace that was potentially there. And for me to begin to develop the skills that government would need to be able to be digital for the future, one of the things which has really dragged, it’s a lot better now, but one of the things that really dragged was this acknowledgement from government that we need this massive cohort of skills to be able to be sustainable in digital beyond something that was a programme, you know, beyond something finite.
So I used that exemplar programme to build up a lot of trust and support in what I was doing so I could hire the right kind of people because I could see that this wasn’t going to go away.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes, yes. How did that actually function day to day, and what was the kind of relationship between- because exemplars is very much run by GDS with these departments. How did that work in practical terms? Was there a sort of mixed GDS/MOJ team? How did that work?

Kit Collingwood:
Yes, there was initially, yes, and then GDS slowly peeled off. I’m wary that I’m speaking entirely from my own experience. I know that I have an overwhelmingly positive experience of it. Other departments I know felt almost affronted that GDS were coming in and sort of telling them how to do their own services effectively, and I know that there was tension there.

Angus Montgomery:
Why do you think your experience was positive in that sense? Because GDS was still coming in and kind of telling you or showing you a way of doing something. Why do you think that worked when it might not have worked elsewhere?

Kit Collingwood:
I never felt that I was being told anything. Maybe it’s because I was so keen to listen, so I felt very humbled by being in this new role, so part of it undoubtedly will be how willing I was to listen to them. I was in a new executive agency, so the OPG was new to me. The Office of the Public Guardian was new, so I was learning the professional domain I was in. I was learning the technical domain and I was learning about digital government so I felt extraordinarily empty-headed. But I’m a really good leader, so I knew I could lead the things. I knew I’d have the right ideas, but I had so much to learn and probably me being so open to learning helped us move that path. If I’d have had slightly more emotional and professional capital invested in what had already gone before, maybe it would have gone less smoothly. That was definitely part of it.

The other thing is I recruit curious people, so the team that I brought in to work with me in the OPG were secondees from operational centres, people from policy-making, some external hires. I always promoted a culture of partnership with GDS, so for me they were friends from the beginning. I had no reason not to have that attitude and other people did.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes. And I suppose the other kind of truism that’s spoken about the exemplars is that they were really, really difficult to work on and that there was burnout and that there were people working incredibly hard but getting incredibly frustrated, and was that something you experienced as well?

Kit Collingwood:
I didn’t burn out. I found it hugely energising, and again I think my teams were protected by the fact that we did have such a positive relationship. I’m quite keen on sustainable mental health so we never were a team that would work until midnight. We never thought that was cool. We never thought there was anything cool about that, so it never felt very tense in our office. It never- and also you have to embrace a bit of humility in what you’re doing. You’re doing something great and we had a great sense of pride about that, but it’s not brain surgery. Nobody was going to die if we all knocked off at 6:00pm instead of 10:00pm. We took it incredibly seriously but not too seriously, so we never did burnout.

We were extraordinarily focused. We basically did one thing for nine months and then we did a second thing for another nine months, so sustainability was always on my mind. And I found very quickly, because I got promoted quite quickly at that time, I was in danger at the end of my time of OPG of losing visibility of individual products being delivered, so I always had this awareness that you can reach a tipping point where people will start to feel out of focus, and I’d known that from my own experience. So I always tried to have empathy with my teams and make sure that they could work at a pace that suited them.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes. And they understood- because the other thing about working in that sort of environment is you’re delivering so quickly, you kind of need to- I don’t know. This is just me positing, I suppose. You kind of need to step back and look at what you’ve achieved as well and if you’re delivering really quickly that can be quite hard to do.

Kit Collingwood:
Yes, it was a whirlwind. It always felt like a happy whirlwind, and a lot of the- we had like the lowest turnover of the whole place, you know, really high engagement, and there were people still working in that digital team that have been there now for five or six years, so it was a good place to be, but the pace was high. I remember a year in we looked back at what we’d done and we’d done one service from scratch to public beta, an additional service from scratch into alpha. We’d done the first digital strategy. We’d quadrupled the team size. We’d redrawn how we did recruitment. We’d changed the pay scales. We’d redone our commercial contract so that we were outside of big IT contracts, and what else had we done? There was something else as well. Oh, we’d redesigned the governance as well so we could do our governance.

And we’d sort of looked back after a year and we were like, “Holy.” We did a lot, and a lot of it was- there was a real lack of self-importance to that team. We knew we were doing good stuff, but when we wrote our strategy it was like eight pages so we did it in about three weeks, so there was a real lack of fanfare in a good way. You know, it was just heads down and crack on and try not to show off too much.

Angus Montgomery:
It’s interesting you say that because that’s one of the things, because I joined GDS in 2016 because I’d been a journalist before so I’d been a sort of observer of digital government and one of the things that really struck me about what GDS and what people working in digital were doing was that they were delivering stuff. GDS in particular was really vocal about the work that it was doing, but it was showing the work. It wasn’t talking about abstract things or concepts or strategies. It was like, “Here’s a thing that we’ve done. Here’s how it works,” and that was really inspiring as someone outside this.

Kit Collingwood:
The phrase of strategy as delivery is banded around by everybody now, and it’s almost had its hay-day. People have almost stopped saying it in some circles, but I can’t describe how powerful that was to somebody like me who’d come out of the most bureaucratic part of Whitehall, you know, the middle of a policy team, a kind of strategic policy team, and I’d come out of- I’d worked for all three main political parties by that point, so I’d joined the government in 2009 and I’d worked for the coalition government which I was working for at that time.

So working with a lot of different ministers doing things like ministerial handover, loads of briefings, lots of policy documents, lots of consultation, very slow, sluggish pace. Great work being done but sluggish, and suddenly this idea that we could be released from writing constant documents to prove the worth of what we were doing was just ridiculously revolutionary, and I can’t exactly describe why. It’s so obvious that you could get on with the work rather than spend a million years doing a 100-page business case, but to me that was like, “Oh, Christ, I can do this so differently.” And that’s why our strategy took three weeks and it was eight pages, and our business case was like ten pages.

The hidden bit about that was a lot of me putting my neck on the line saying, “No, no, no, I’m going to write this short. It’s going to be really short, really simple,” trying to simplify everything, and that’s where the effort went. It’s a funny analogy actually because it’s the same way that the design plans went as well. Government websites are massively overdesigned. Then GDS comes out with something that’s basically a white page with a green button in the middle with a bit of highlighting on it and everyone is like, “Oh. That’s how we’re going to design things now,” and they were like, “Yes, yes. We just basically don’t put much on the page.” Everyone is like, “Oh, right,” and it’s a really analogous approach to what I took to everything after, business cases, documentation, recruitment processes, governance. Everything went the same way. You don’t need to clutter it with all of that noise.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes. It’s just so incredibly powerful because you were in government while this was happening, but I was reporting on the private sector and the private sector organisations weren’t doing this. It took an organisation within government or a group of people within government to drive this kind of simplicity home. And working in government now and understanding the complexities of it, it’s just unbelievable almost that that happened.

Kit Collingwood:
Yes, and of course it peed people off. Of course it did. Everybody who had ever built one of those websites would be peed off because that’s your work being rubbished by these people, all of whom were pretty young. They were highly paid because they’d come from the private sector. They were off, siphoned off from Whitehall. They were other, and they were consistent. GDS were consistently othered by a lot of big government departments, and still are frankly. I don’t think you can be a rebel of that magnitude without peeing off a hell a lot of people.

What I took as my task was to try and- I’d been in a policy-making community that thought that digital government were a load of jeans-wearing hipsters. Now I was in a digital community that thought that policy-makers were a load of 50-year-old white fuddy-duddies, and elements of both of those things are true. You know, there are jeans wearing hipsters in digital government and there are white middle-aged fuddy-duddies in policy making but that doesn’t mean that we’re not trying to do the right thing.

So from that point, my mission was just trying to connect people so that- you can’t do anything without trust so it’s just trying to increase the level of trust between the different communities that I was operating in.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes. And how did you- because I guess we’ve talked a lot about the exemplars and the rapid pace of what was happening, the rapid pace of change, and touched on things like the controversies around that. But you’ve been in government for a long time and carried on that work, and how did you make it sustainable? How did you take that kind of environment and that thinking and sustain it into another department, into another role, into new teams?

Kit Collingwood:
I think it was a series of steps really. There were some mechanistic steps such as I began quite early to realise that government funding isn’t set up for digital. It is a bit better now, but at that point you did project works. You’re funded for a blob of thing and when the thing ended you weren’t funded for the thing anymore. Well, that was never going to work with things like CICD, so the continuous delivery of technology doesn’t work with that funding model. I blessedly realised that quite early and I started to work very closely with finance and commercial business partners to smooth out that path so that things like- this is so boring, but this was what got it done. CapEx versus OpEx was well-known and well chartered, so I didn’t want to have a drop in the team that was sharp between this thing called build and this thing called run. For me that’s still a false divide. Well, anybody who works in a DevOps way, that’s a false divide.

So I plotted with them to go from a full team size- say your team size is 10. Over time I would look to retain 4 of that team and I would build that into a bigger business case and I’d have like a slide down from one to the other. And putting in the groundwork with those people who are naturally mistrusting of something where it looks like you’re trying to game an existing process and just getting them to see what I was doing and these services- if you run these services while in perpetuity, you don’t have to then have this change request of £1m a year down the line.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes, that comes in, yes, yes.

Kit Collingwood:
Because you’re continuously enhancing what you’re doing, but you can enhance it with a smaller team and it wasn’t always cheaper actually or it didn’t always look cheaper, but I knew that you’d then five years down the line wouldn’t have to buy the thing again because you’d have built it in-house. So it was a lot of donkey work of redrawing everything about how we do finance and commercial work and commercial partnering and governance and all that kind of stuff, so that was part of it.

Part of it was government catching up, so digital became not weird while I was a couple of years in, call it 2014, digital government was then effectively becoming sustainable in its own right. I had to fight a lot less hard to get the basics that I wanted to get done done. In the early days I had to have Mike Bracken come and advocate for the things I wanted to get done. It was that ridiculous. I didn’t need that by 2014, and at that point I moved to Ministry of Justice digital, the central digital team, and that had people like Dave Rogers in it who’s still there. He was great, and you kind of move from sensible support people to sensible support people.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes. How do you kind of- well, it might sound a stupid question, but how do you identify and how do you end up working with people like that? How do you find allies?

Kit Collingwood:
How do I find allies?

Angus Montgomery:
Because I do get the sense there’s kind of a network of people in different departments now, and the names are probably well known of people who are doing good things who-

Kit Collingwood:
Yes. How did we all find each other? Sort of thing.

Angus Montgomery:
How did you all find each other? Yes.

Kit Collingwood:
I think we were all curious. So this community of- they’re well known on digital government Twitter. That community of people. You know, there’s probably a couple of hundred of us who’ve been around for- call it five years or more. Dave Rogers is one of them. All of the original GDSs are in there as well, although many of us have gone our separate ways.

For the ones who weren’t the real inception, so the Mikes and Toms, I think curiosity was a big bit of it. A lot of us found each other from being mutually introduced by well-networked people, so people like Tom would introduce us sometimes. Emer Coleman was another one for doing that. Kathy Settle. There were these people who knew people and they’d say, “Oh, so and so,” and then people would make some kind of connection between us and we’d almost invariably get on, so that was part of it.

Those of us who came out of Whitehall as opposed to being external hires found a natural empathy with each other because we’d been so frustrated by where we’d been and we were generally known as being pains in the bum basically where we are and we were quite grateful- I always think if you, in any meeting room, say you’ve got 12 people in a meeting room, you’re the one that feels really outré and the radical one. You’re just in the wrong room, and suddenly you’re in the right room and it’s just this huge comfort.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes, that was going to be my next question is kind of, what are you looking for in these people? Because it sounds like a mix of sort of bravery in a sense of they’re willing to take a risk with something. They’ve got convictions, but also they have empathy.

Kit Collingwood:
Yes. Well, I probably can’t swear in this podcast, can I?

Angus Montgomery:
I think you maybe could.

Kit Collingwood:
I’ll put it the opposite way. I only work with lovely people, that’s my rule, so three is something about being kind and warm that is at the core of the kind of person I would look to work with. But there’s something about- the way I put it is we want to reform the machine without breaking it, so all of those people are massively inpatient with the way the government works, massively frustrated, want to beat their heads against the wall but basically love the place, and if they leave they’ll always come back. They are either civil servants through and through in their DNA or you know that you’ll see them again in some point in the future, and it’s those people who care deeply about public service, it gives them that lovely balance of wanting to do the right thing by end users but without completely breaking the machine that they’re working in, and it’s a really hard balance to strike. But when you find it, it’s like gold dust. They’re the best people.

Angus Montgomery:
Right, okay. And the other thing I wanted to talk to you about was One Team Gov as well because you were one of the- were you one of the founders of One Team Gov? Is that right?

Kit Collingwood:
I was.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes. Well, first of tell me why it was set up and what the purpose if it is.

Kit Collingwood:
One Team Gov was born out of my frustration at the lack of empathy between government professions, so it’s the ultimate realisation of my experience leaving policy-making and going into digital government really. And having observed and then worked in such a tribal system where if you weren’t us, you were them and you weren’t to be trusted. Well, id’ belonged to two tribes and I was like, “Well, where’s the ‘us’ in the middle of all this ‘them’ then if everybody is ‘them’?”

So I spoke at a conference in March 2017 about- I gave a talk about data as it happens. That’s what I’m working on at the moment, and I was advised to go and see a guy speak after me called James Reeve who works at the Department for Education. I’d been told he was a great speaker and I listened to him and I spoke to him afterwards and we got on really well, and he was also coming out of policy making and going into a digital role, so the same thing that I’d done, what, five years previously he was now doing.

We talked about the experience of how policy-makers don’t get on with digital people in mutual mistrust, and we’d said we’d both been to professional events. We’d been to policy-making events and digital events, but there was no rebel event just for- where are all your generic rebels regardless of background? Where is anybody welcome?

Angus Montgomery:
This is how you find each other, was it?

Kit Collingwood:
Yes, exactly. And the tagline we often use for One Team Gov is if you’re tired of waiting for the revolution, start one yourself, not that we aim to start a revolution. That’s really self-important, but we did want to have an event where you would be welcomed as a reformer regardless of your background. You didn’t have to be some whizzy fast-streamer. You didn’t have to be anything really, and we just had a single event.

As we were coming up to the event we realised that we wanted to make it a community, so we, classic bit of partnership, Joe Lanman who works here as a designer designed us some branding and we built a little website and we got some regular meet-ups in which are still going now 18 months down the line. All we aimed to do was just to give a safe space to rebels, that’s all. So those people who don’t want to trash the machine but want to make it better, we just wanted to be the people that they could go to, and that was it. It was and is super simple really. [00:35:30] It’s based mainly on networks, on connections and on honest conversations with people. But the heartbeat of it is our meet-ups that we have in London, Cardiff, in the north, Scotland, Stockholm, Ottawa.

Angus Montgomery:
Internationally now.

Kit Collingwood:
Yes. So it spreads internationally through those same networks of those positive rebels, and, yes, I’m really proud of it. It gives such a safe space to those people who are just sitting in the wrong meeting room being that single person. They just need to find the right meeting room and we’ve given them that.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes. One of the things that strikes me having talked about your time working in digital government is you’ve gone from, and this is kind of, I suppose, illustrative of digital government as a whole. You’ve gone from working on an exemplar, so a single service or a single digital touchpoint, to working in an area where you’re bringing together people from across different professions to look at kind of the much wider picture, and that to me kind of illustrates the broadening of digital government, how we think about it from kind of these single touch points to suddenly these whole services or these whole kind of policies. Is that kind of how you see your career having developed? Do you think it has kind of gone like that?

Kit Collingwood:
Yes. Yes, I think it has. It started off as a blob. We were almost a carbuncle in the beginning and seen by some as a carbuncle as well, and the world to make digital governments sustainable- well, you know, they say that it’ll be sustainable when we stop saying digital, but we’re not there yet. And to my mind, you’ll still need specialist technologists in government so you’ll always have a thing called a technology team or a digital team or something, so it’s not quite the ambition to never say digital ever again but it should evolve in meaning, I think, to encompass not just technologists but people who are interested in internet-enabled reform, which is kind of how I would characterise it.

So, yes, it’s definitely evolved from being something where you’re a heavily specialist team relatively separated from the rest of the organisation to something where every profession is welcome. One of the things that- I get a bit [00:40:26] twitchy talking about things that I’ve done that I’m proud of because I get self-conscious, but there are a few and of them there’s somebody called Kaz Hufton who was- she worked for the Office of Public Guardian and she worked in our call centre. She’s one of our operational people and we found her and she was an exceptionally good and is an exceptionally good product manager.

We found her in operations, and she proved very quickly that she was going to be better at this job than anybody else we could find and we made her a product manager, and I had to propose and then stand behind that decision. She needed to be promoted about three times because the grade difference between operations and digital was quite tricky at that point, but we did that and it proved something. It proved that if you’re this thing called operations, you don’t have to stay there forever just as I hadn’t in policy. You can transition your career actually, and people come into digital and learn how to do product development. You don’t need a million years to learn how to do it. You need a lot of smarts, a lot of empathy, very open ears, and then professional skills that you learn down the line.

I was so glad that we gave her that break, and that’s something that I’ve done consistently ever since is not assume that if somebody is a policy-maker that they can never be a digital person or vice versa. It’s the same reason I started One Team Gov is it’s kind of this you don’t have to stay in that tribe actually. You can go and work across, and I suppose where I am now working in data is a natural extension of that because to my mind, there needs to be a data leap for government in the same way that there was a digital leap for government from 2011 onwards.

Data people are still a little bit off in a silo in a corner being nerds. They’re even siphoned off from product teams, so one of the missions that I’ve had in DWP is to work intersectionally between digital data and technology so that we blur those professional boundaries. Somebody like a data scientist is a classic- you know, if you call them sort of a coder analyst, they’re already a technologist and a data professional, so why do they have to sit over in that corner? Why can’t they come and be in this product team? And embedding data scientists into product teams has been one of the things that we’ve done in DWP to absolutely great effect.

So again it’s trying to fight the good fight every day for people, dropping their assumptions about what somebody can and can’t do.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes, yes, yes. And just before we finish off, I’d like to ask you, I suppose potentially at the risk of making you feel uncomfortable, a couple of questions about you and how you operate, I suppose. You said earlier in this conversation that when you’re taking about going on the exemplar you didn’t know much about digital but you knew how to lead, and you are one of the people in this world who’s seen, I suppose, as a role model, as a leader. What sort of behaviours do you hope that you’re showing, that you hope that people kind of pick up? What do you hope that you’re role modelling that people will pick up from you?

Kit Collingwood:
I’m kind to people.

Angus Montgomery:
That’s the best behaviour.

Kit Collingwood:
You can never have too much kindness in the world, I think, and I think I’m pretty consistently kind. I will say that about myself. I’m very willing to re-examine what is a yes and what’s a no because I’m very dogged in the pursuit of what I believe to be right, and I think that’s a good role model for the bit of government I’m in because you have to be fairly persistent to get things done and I’ve never taken a no to be a final no. I’ve always been able to chase down what I believe to be the right answer. I don’t know if that’s- maybe I’m ideological, but I’ve always tried to fight for the right thing.

I hope that I am seen as being passionate about diversion and inclusion because I am. Although I’m a woman in technology and a gay woman in technology and a gay woman parent in technology, my interests do go beyond that and I would hope that I have given other people space to progress where they thought they might not have that space. So inclusiveness with age, grade boundary, professional boundary, colour, disability, I hope that I’m not deluding myself, that that is something I’m known for.

And as I said, I do try and give my time to try and make the place a bit better, so things like One Team Gov and mentoring people, that kind of thing. If I were to leave an impression of myself, I hope that that would be in it.

Angus Montgomery:
And who do you look to as a role model or who inspires you at the moment? Either within this world or outside it, I suppose.

Kit Collingwood:
Am I allowed a few?

Angus Montgomery:
Of course. Just like a dinner party thing.

Kit Collingwood:
My girlfriend would have to go on that list. One of the most amazing product people I’ve ever observed and the kindest person.

Angus Montgomery:
Just for the sake- who’s your girlfriend?

Kit Collingwood:
Kylie Havelock.

Angus Montgomery:
Kylie Havelock.

Kit Collingwood:
Yes. Yes, she’s taught me a lot about kindness and about diversion and inclusion as well and a million other things. My kids inspire me all the time. They’re not constrained by what anybody expects of them, and I love that about them. I try and learn from them and try and- they’ve made me challenge a lot of my assumptions about myself and about the world.

And then professionally, I’d always say Lara Sampson who works at the DWP who is the most consummately brilliant civil servant I have ever worked with and has remained that to this day. She wins the prize. She is incredible and inspirational.

I would always say Tom Loosemore as well who’s effectively very quietly, without anybody knowing it, mentored me for about six years without ever asking for anything in return and has quietly been responsible for several of my career moves without ever taking credit for it or asking for anything back. So given that this will be public, I’ll say publically thank you to him. He’s done a lot for me without anybody ever knowing that, so I’ll always be grateful.

Angus Montgomery:
And just finally, if there’s one piece of advice you could give to someone, so say there’s someone in your situation now going back, what was it, six years ago, kind of in a role. You were in a policy role were you were kind of thinking, “This isn’t really what I’m interested in. This isn’t giving me the empathy, the satisfaction that I want.” What advice would you give to that person that you've learned over the last seven or eight years?

Kit Collingwood:
Wow. I’d say find a hero. It’s always good to have somebody to look up to think, you know, what would so-and-so do in this situation? I think it’s always good to see a perspective that isn’t your own.

I’d say a good dose of sort of mindfulness for want of a better word, so realising where you are on the frustration versus action scale. There can be a feeling amongst some civil servants in particular that they’re so frustrated the only thing they can do is leave, and I’ve seen many people go their way and it’s not a bad thing to do at all. It’s the only thing to do for a lot of people, but there’s this tipping point and if you’re on this tipping point of, “Oh my God, I want the world to be better but I want to stay and make it better,” I’d always say contact One Team Gov because you’ll find some likeminded people as well.

But I’d also say to them, if any of those people are listening, you’re not alone. So many civil servants are frustrated. The civil service is frustrating. It will always be, but it’s the best place in the world, my belief is, and if you’re on that tipping point where you’re incredibly frustrated but believe you can do something better, it’s not just you. And again if you’re that one person in a room of 12 who’s just in the wrong room, go and find a different room and you can start to feel more normal, and there are so many lateral moves you can make to get that done and you might just start to be reinvigorated like I was.

Angus Montgomery:
And those rebels are easier to find now.

Kit Collingwood:
Very easy to find now. Yes, so Clare Moriarty is one of them and she’s got one of the toughest jobs going in government at the moment. Jeremy Heywood was one as well. He was one of the people who gave me advice, again when he didn’t have to. A very tough time for him that showed me that truly he was on the side of the revolutionaries. He wanted to see reform as well, so you can move up the pay scale and up the ladder and be a rebel as well. You can do that.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes. Kit Collingwood, thank you very much for joining us.

Kit Collingwood:
Thank you for your time.

Angus Montgomery:
Thank you. Thank you very much for joining us for that episode of the GDS podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to listen to any more of what we’re doing, then please go to wherever it is that you listen to or download your podcasts and subscribe to the GDS podcast because we’ve got lots more exciting stuff coming up this year, so we hope you’ll join us again soon. Thank you very much.

GDS Podcast #4 - a review of 2018 Dec 07, 2018

For our last podcast of 2018 we talk about what GDS has achieved and what we're looking forward to in 2019.

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A full transcript of the episode follows:

Angus Montgomery:
Hello, and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name’s Angus Montgomery, I’m a senior writer at GDS, and today I’m joined by Sarah Stewart, who is also a senior writer at GDS.

Sarah Stewart:
Hello, and thanks for having me.

Angus Montgomery:
It’s really great to have you here, Sarah. I mean, we spend all week sitting opposite each other across a desk and now we’re going to sit across from each other and speak into microphones.

Sarah Stewart:
I quite like the idea that I’m assuming the role of guest speaker with specialist knowledge of any one subject.

Angus Montgomery:
You are the one with the expertise here, let’s face it.
The reason that it’s me and Sarah doing this podcast… If you’ve listened to GDS podcasts before you’ll know that what we’ve done previously is, kind of, either Sarah or I have interviewed an expert speaker, so we’ve had Neil Williams on GOV.UK, Terence Eden on open standards and emerging technology, and we’ve also spoken to the GDS Women’s Network.

But, what we want to do with this podcast, because it is the final podcast of 2018, is do a look at the year in review at GDS, what GDS has done over the last year, the things it’s achieved, the things it’s launched and kind of just go back through those and our take on them, we’ve even got some audio clips from the people who were involved as well.

I think Sarah and I, because we work across GDS and our job is to help people, kind of, tell the story of their work, we’ve kind of had a ringside seat for a lot of this stuff.

GDS’s work has kind of been split, broadly, into three themes this year, and this podcast is going to split into those three themes as well. Those three themes are:

Sarah Stewart:
Transformation; collaboration and; innovation.

Angus Montgomery:
Full marks for that.

Sarah Stewart:
Thank you very much.

Angus Montgomery:
So, transformation, collaboration and innovation is, kind of, how GDS talks about its work. when we first started to use those terms, at Sprint ’18, which was the big event that we held back in May, where we, kind of, talked to the rest of government and the rest of the wider public about what we were doing. So, let’s get into it…

Oh yes, sorry, just to… Someone who did also speak at Sprint, as you well know, and you’ve worked closely with him throughout this year…

Sarah Stewart:
It’s Minister for Implementation Oliver Dowden.

Angus Montgomery:
It’s Minister for Implementation Oliver Dowden, and here’s what he had to say about us:

[Audio starts]
‘Though transformation innovation and collaboration you’ve not only saved billions of pounds across government, but you’ve changed the way people interact with government every day. What you do really matters, it really does genuinely improve people’s experience of government in their day-to-day lives.’
[Audio ends]

Angus Montgomery:
Oliver Dowden there really summing up what GDS does and why it’s here, and it’s really nice to hear that sort of thing from senior backing.

Sarah Stewart:
Yes, exactly. I think the really encouraging thing about having Oliver Dowden overseeing the work of GDS is that he really understands the link up between creating a modern government and involving the tech sector. We have to be honest about the limits of government, we don’t have all the answers, but what we do have, in this country, is an amazing tech sector that’s attracting billions of pounds of inward investment. We’ve got some amazing companies just literally down the road, of course we should be partnering with them. It just makes sense for us to all link up, the tech sector, the public sector, and push our digital agenda forward.

Angus Montgomery:
I think he’s been really heavily involved in GDS, particularly recently with the innovation stuff as well.

Sarah Stewart:
Yes, I suppose we’ll come to that in a bit, but he’s been really behind… He announced the Innovation Strategy, I think the emerging themes from that will really address things like how we connect more with the private sector and how we focus on upskilling existing civil servants, and also policy makers so that they understand emerging tech. I was thinking about it the other day, about how if people are buying technology, so people are utilising technologies in government, those people who are buying also need to understand what those technologies do.
So, in the same way that you’d go to the doctor and say, “I’ve got this ailment” and the doctor prescribes the information and the medicine, and you expect them to know how it works as well, it’s not just going in and taking something off the shelf. So, I think that’s a really encouraging thing that’s he’s championing as well.

Angus Montgomery:
Brilliant. Top marks Oliver.

So, the first theme we’re going to discuss is transformation. We published a Transformation Strategy at the beginning of 2017, and I think 2017 and 2018 have been the years when we’ve really started to deliver against it. I think we’re now halfway through it as well?

Sarah Stewart:
Yes, that’s right.

Angus Montgomery:
Growing common components is a big thing, because I think one of the aims of the Transformation Strategy was to drive common components across government, and by common components, obviously, we mean things that can be built once and used again and again by departments, like GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay. This year has seen some really impressive examples of services using those things.

Sarah Stewart:
Yes, like the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, they’re using GOV.UK Pay to help people who need to pay for emergency passports. Also, increasingly, GP surgeries are using GOV.UK Notify to remind patients of their appointments, which I really need. I mean, it’s improving efficiencies as well, because of the amount of people who don’t turn up to appointments and just that little reminder is so helpful, and it’s on your phones.

Angus Montgomery:
They always show those dire warnings in GP surgeries, don’t they, of the number people who’ve missed appointments that month. I know GP’s surgeries aren’t over resourced a lot of the time, so it’s a real drain on them if that happens. I think things that will prevent that from happening are amazing.

Sarah Stewart:
The really cool thing about these common components, and especially Notify, is that it’s really meeting people where they’re at. People are looking at their phones, people spend so much time on their phones it makes sense to have that reminder to your phone. It’s just efficient and it just works. So, I’m not surprised that take-up has been so incredible.

Angus Montgomery:
One of the other things that’s quite exciting is because a lot of these common components are reaching maturity now, like they’ve been around for a year or so, but what’s starting to happen is you’re starting to see services using them all together. I think in the Disclosure and Barring Service are one of the first people to do that, and we’ve got some audio:

[Audio starts]
‘We’ve relied heavily on GaaP components. We’re the first service to integrate with three of the GaaP components all at once.’
[Audio ends]

Angus Montgomery:
There you go, the first service to integrate all three GaaP components at one. So, I think that’s really exciting, seeing these things not used in isolation but seeing whole services built on these things as well.

Sarah Stewart:
Yes, and that’s been a huge emphasis this year, end-to-end service design, and if you can incorporate those common components… It just makes sense, doesn’t it, going offline and online might be an option for your particular service, but it’s nice to have that option to integrate more if you need them to.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes, and making it easy for the teams as well. I think if you’re starting to use Pay and Notify platform as a service you, as a developer working on that team, have got all this stuff just to hand that you can build a service really quickly around. That was, kind of, always the government’s platform vision, and it’s really amazing to see that starting to happen.

Sarah Stewart:
I can’t remember where I was, actually, I went to do some filming this year and think it might be with DVSA, but they talked about how it’s not just having common components that you can just take off the shelf and your relationship with GDS is done, there is a continued relationship. They invite feedback and they want to support you in your use of it. So, I think we’ve done quite a lot of work in terms of… Maybe helping isn’t the right word, but like guiding people and being a supportive friend of take-up and how they’re going to integrate it into their systems.

Angus Montgomery:
Again, that is, to me, exactly that. That’s one of the reason these things are so amazing, is because they’re designed and built for government, but you’re not just designing and building something and handing it over to a team and saying, “Go ahead and use that.” You have a relationship. If you’re using Pay you have a relationship with that Pay team, you can give your feedback on it and they can make the product better based on your feedback. It’s this symbiotic thing which is really cool.
The other thing that we should probably mention, which happened, I think, a couple of weeks ago, is that GOV.UK Notify won a civil service award, or the team that build it.

Sarah Stewart:
Wowser, that’s really cool.

Angus Montgomery:
Wowsers indeed. A big hats off to that team, who are awesome. They won an award, I think, for operational delivery. But, basically, the award recognised the work that that team has done, not just to develop a product but also to support it and work with government services to make sure that Notify is a great thing to use, so that’s really cool. But one of the things we’ve started to do a lot more this year is work more closely with local authorities. What is it about local authorities? Why should we work closely with them?

Sarah Stewart:
I suppose, it’s because they’re the ones who are delivering user-focused services, and because the needs of the people that they’re dealing with are so complex, and the services that they use are so complex as well. So, of course it makes sense to help them simplify how they’re interacting and give them the tools that make that process a lot more straightforward and a lot more efficient.

Angus Montgomery:
That’s brilliant. A lot of the challenges that the government has had that GDS has been working on, those are replicated in local authorities and, like you say, they’re the ones that are, kind of, delivering a lot of these services, like blue badges and collecting bins and things, the things that, kind of, really rile you up if they’re not done properly. So, GDS being able to get involved in that is really exciting.
I think there’s a clip from one of the local authorities we’ve been working with, and they use the Digital Marketplace, that’s Hackney Borough Council, and they’re doing some really exciting stuff as well.

[Audio starts]
‘One of my personal favourite projects that we’ve used Digital Marketplace for in the last year was a piece of work to examine what the opportunity is to use digital to improve the recruitment and retention of foster carers, which was incredibly valuable for the council and for our residents, but also could develop a true partnership as well as long at some longer-term opportunities to use technology very differently.’
[Audio ends]

Angus Montgomery:
That’s Matthew Cain who’s, I think, head of digital at Hackney Borough Council, and that’s a really interesting example of the kind of thing a local authority does. The recruitment of foster carers and using digital, and in that case a digital marketplace, to improve something like that is really cool.

Sarah Stewart:
The other thing that’s going to support that, so it’s not just an ad-hoc relationship that we’re having with local authorities, is the publication of the Local Digital Declaration as well, which shows our commitment to working with local authorities across the whole of the public sector. I think it has 100 signatories on it now?

Angus Montgomery:
I think there are 100 signatures.

So, we’re one of the co-publishers, I think with the Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government and various local authorities, and there are something like 100 signatories already. Yes, it’s a commitment from all the signatories that they will follow these principles of digital development, which are the things that you would hope they’re talking about, like focusing on user needs, using the right technology, and all that sort of thing.

Yes, you’re right, it’s really interesting. I think the world of local authorities is so big, there are so many and they’re delivering so many different, often quite small and challenging, services. It, kind of, seems like a world that is really hard to get a handle on. I think that it’s really interesting to see GDS approaching that in a kind of structured way, through the Local Digital Declaration, but also giving really tangible things that can help, like common components. It’s amazing to see the progress that has already happened with it as well.

Sarah Stewart:
Just on that, I used to work for a charity and when people were interacting with their local authorities it wasn’t just the case that they were going just for one thing, they had a host of different needs that needed to be addressed, and local authorities are the people who are servicing those needs and making sure that all of those things get done.

Angus Montgomery:
Also, 2018 was a year in which GDS launched quite a few things and updated quite a few things as well.

Sarah Stewart:
Yes, like the GDS Design System.

Angus Montgomery:
The GDS Design System, which I think is really… This appeals to the geek side of me because this is, basically, a collection of all the patterns and components that a designer or a front-end developer and, for the most part, would use to create a government service. So, you’ve got things there telling you about how to design a button, which typeface to use, which colours to use-

Sarah Stewart:
Why is that important?

Angus Montgomery:
It’s important because, in much the same way as GaaP components, it’s about making it easier for those teams to use something so that they don’t have to design their own button style or design their own dropdown menu, or whatever. There is one that they can just pull the code from and put it into their service.

Also, then it provides consistency. So, if all the government services are using the same things… And the things in the design system are heavily user researched, so, it’s the kind of GDS principle of, like, “Do the hard work for service teams, but also provide a consistent experience across all things.” If you want to lose an hour or two then go and have a mess about in it, because there’s something really cool stuff to find and look at.

Sarah Stewart:
The geek emerges.

Angus Montgomery:
Exactly.

Sarah Stewart:
It’s been a year of launching and relaunching at GDS, so we introduced a new spend controls process and we’re rewriting the service standard, which you know more about than I do, Angus.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes, the service standard is really exciting, and we’ve blogged quite a bit about this already, I think Stephen Gill and Lou Downe, who are both working on it, have written quite a lot. The Digital Service Standard has been around for quite some time, and was initially developed, primarily, to help develop digital touchpoints and digital services, and is focused on that. The idea of the rewrite is to help government and teams within government to think about whole end-to-end services, what that means and how they can help the user do something from the very start of a service to the very end of it.

It’s going to be really exciting and interesting to see what that means and how that works. There are quite a lot of blog posts about it as well, if you should go to the GDS blog to find out more, as you should do for all of the things that we’ve discussed.

Sarah Stewart:
Excellent plug.

Angus Montgomery:
Excellent plug... there is plenty of amazing writing about all of these things, even if I do say so myself!

Sarah Stewart:
I’ll tell you what else is exciting.

Angus Montgomery:
What else is exciting, Sarah?

Sarah Stewart:
GOV.UK is exciting.

Angus Montgomery:
GOV.UK is never not exciting.

Sarah Stewart:
It’s been a big year for the team behind GOV.UK because they’ve been doing some super-cool work with organising their content. So, they’ve been doing supervised machine learning to organise all of the content on GOV.UK, or in certain sections they’re organising their content. That means that we can do cool things, like voice activation.

And the example is, if you speak into a Google Voice system and say, “How old do I need to be to drive a car?” the information that is surfaced is GOV.UK content, and this content is the best, it’s the most authoritative.

Angus Montgomery:
That is amazing. I think what is really amazing is, like you say, they sorted out the structure of the sites and then they did the fixing the basics, solving hard problems and all that stuff that GDS says all the time. This is a really good example of that. Like, sorting out the content, which was a really hard and a really challenging thing to do, but having done that they can do really exciting whizzy stuff on it. We were discussing the word whizzy just yesterday, I think.

Sarah Stewart:
Yes, the amount of times…

Angus Montgomery:
But, it is whizzy. I think you said it was a public-school boy word, which I’m pretty-

Sarah Stewart:
Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.

Angus Montgomery:
No offence taken.

But, it is whizzy stuff, like voice activation and like the step-by-step work that they’re doing as well, which kind of takes all the content involved in a particular service, like you used the learning to drive example, and puts that all in order for the user to be able to navigate really quickly and easily, and to understand where the are in the process.

Sarah Stewart:
It’s so brilliant, because when you think about things, life impacting things, like learning how to drive, it can be so daunting. If you can just shine a light in the darkness and say, “Look, these are the eight steps that you need to get your driving license, let’s tackle step one. Let’s do it all in the same journey, and at least you can tick that off.” How amazing is that? You don’t need to rootle around the internet, you don’t need to Google the internet, that’s another phrase we’ve been using a lot recently, to find the answers. It’s just all in one place. It’s bliss.

Angus Montgomery:
It is, and it’s great. It has been a really big year for GOV.UK and it’s really amazing to see them developing this stuff and the new stuff that’s happening.

Plug time as well, if you want to find out more about this, we did a podcast with Neil Williams, who, up until recently, was head of GOV.UK, he left in September, I think it was, to go and be head of digital at Croydon Council, but before he left we recorded a podcast with him in which he said this:

[Audio starts]
‘Absolutely, we’re iterating widely again, I’d say, so it’s back to that feeling of early GOV.UK, where we’re actually able to turn ideas into working software and working product relatively quickly, again. So, some of the stuff we’re doing now is actually greenfield stuff, again, we’re back to a lot of the ideas we had, way back when in the early days of GDS, around making the publishing system really intuitive and giving data intelligence to publishers so that they can understand how services are performing and see where to prioritise and get that really rich insight about how their stuff, as a department, is working for users.’
[Audio ends]

Angus Montgomery:
So, yes, we talked a lot about transformation, and it’s time to talk…

Sarah Stewart:
About collaboration.

Angus Montgomery:
About collaboration.

Sarah Stewart:
What do we mean by collaboration?

Angus Montgomery:
What do we mean? Well, collaboration, basically, means working together, which is the thing-

Sarah Stewart:
I do actually know the answer to this, sorry, in case the audience don’t think I don’t know what collaborative means.

Angus Montgomery:
Let’s just be clear, this is an interview trope which is to ask a question that you know the answer to in order to illicit a comment from the person that you’re talking to. Just because we’re asking each other these things doesn’t mean that…

Sarah, tell me about GDS and what it does… We do actually know what this means, or I think we know what this means, anyway.

Collaboration, in order to answer your question, Sarah, basically means working together, which is, of course, what GDS has done since the very beginning. So, GDS was set up to work with and across government to help them develop digital services, transform what they’re doing and make things better for users. We can’t do this stuff unless we are collaborating, unless we are working together.

We mentioned Sprint earlier as well, which is the big event that we held back in May, where GDS and other people from across movement talked about the really cool things that they were doing, and there was a strong collaboration angle throughout that.

And there were a lot of really good case studies, interesting case studies of work that was going on. After the day we were looking back on Twitter and talking to people who’d been at the event and they were saying, “This is one that made me cry, and I didn’t expect to,” “I went to this workshop, I came out and I was so emotional that I was weeping.” It was a workshop about open standards, and this was the case study that they used:

[Audio starts]
‘Hands off. He’s got a belt on, get his belt. Up… Okay. In you come, fella. Alright.’
[Audio ends]

Angus Montgomery:
So, for the benefit of people who obviously couldn’t see what was happening, because that was a video clip and we played it on a podcast, which is an audio medium, so it was quite a lot of indiscrete splashing, but what was actually happening there was that was someone being rescued-

Sarah Stewart:
A real person.

Angus Montgomery:
That was a field video-clip, or however you describe it, from the RNLI, rescuing someone from the River Thames. The reason that was played in an open standards workshop is open standards is super important when it comes to things like emergency services, because you might get various emergency services, like the police or RNLI or the Maritime and Coastguard Agency responding to various incidents at the same time, and they need to be able to share information about those incidents really, really quickly.

Sarah Stewart:
The profound takeaway from this is, obviously, people’s lives are being saved, but the launch time for lifeboats is reduced from 10-15 minutes to under 2 minutes.

Angus Montgomery:
That’s incredible.

Sarah Stewart:
If you can think of what can happen, even in two minutes, to someone who’s in the water for that long…

Angus Montgomery:
Yes, falling in the Thames in December, and you don’t want to be in there for 10-15 minutes. So it’s amazing.

I mean, obviously this got people really emotional because you’re seeing a video of someone, literally, getting pulled out of the Thames, and the work that you have done to develop and open standard or to develop a common system for sharing information, which seems like a really abstract thing, but then you see the real-world example of this stuff and that’s really amazing.

Sarah Stewart:
We spoke to Terence Eden, who’s the open standards lead at GDS, about open standards, and if you want to find out more listen to that podcast. There are some things that you think are so mundane, in a theoretical sense, but the real-world practical outcome is so so important. So, I highly recommend you listen to that.

Angus Montgomery:
Yes, another plug for the podcast, which is a good thing.

Also, one of the big things, staying on this collaboration theme, that we’ve been doing is helping government work together and build capability through things, like the GDS Academy, which has gone from strength to strength this year.

Sarah Stewart:
There have been some big milestones. We’re nearing 10,000, would we call them students? Colleagues?

Angus Montgomery:
Students/colleagues/civil servants/people trained through the-

Sarah Stewart:
Those with a thirst to learn. We hit almost 10,000 who have passed through the GDS academy and about 1,000 of those students have been through the Agile foundation course.

Angus Montgomery:
This is really important work because it’s showing people the opportunities that a digital government brings for their skills and capabilities, and for their jobs as well. I mean, people are training in new and interesting jobs because of the GDS Academy, and that’s really exciting.

Sarah Stewart:
What I think is super-cool about it is that people can feel left behind when things move forward and when people move from different processes. Digital can be quite a daunting thing and something that they feel like might be a stumbling block to them or might prevent them from continuing their work in the civil service, but what the academy does is say, “Actually, we can support you in your knowledge and we can support you in your growth, and if you want to learn about all these really cool and interesting things that we’re doing, and the ways of working that are open to you as well.”
So, we’re not just abandoning people who don’t have those digital expertise, we’re saying, “Here is a foundation course that will help you get up to speed and give you the confidence to go and bring it back to your departments and deploy it.”

Angus Montgomery:
You’re right. I think one of the things about digital, and not just in government, I suppose, but in general, is that it can be seen as quite a clique-y thing, it’s like, “If you understand this digital thing then you’re part of it, but if you don’t then,” you know, as you say, “You might get left behind.” The idea that we’re, through the GDS Academy, able to bring people into this is really cool, and makes it not a clique-y thing but make it a big, kind of, community, potentially, of civil servants, and that’s really cool.

Like we say, we’re approaching 10,000 students, we’ve got new academy classrooms in the GDS building, I think just the floor below us as we speak.

Sarah Stewart:
It looks very swish.

Angus Montgomery:
Which does look very swish, indeed.

They did a pop-up in Canada as well, which was quite good.

Sarah Stewart:
Did they?

Angus Montgomery:
Yes, they went over there and spoke to the Canadian government about what they’d done at the GDS Academy, and after that the Canadian government set up their own. So, there you go…

And it’s been an exciting year for GOV.UK Verify as well, the government’s online identity assurance programme, because the standards and guidelines which currently underpin the way Verify works are now being opened up to the private sector to build on. And what this means is that in principle, the same digital identity platform that helps you check your state pension could in future also help you check your savings account too and other things that you do in your kind of day to day non-government life so that’s really exciting as well.

So... we’ve done transformation…

Sarah Stewart:
We’ve done collaboration.

Angus Montgomery:
Let’s move onto innovation.

Sarah Stewart:
Which I feel is my specialist subject. Do you want to do the music?

Angus Montgomery:
What? Is this innovation music? Oh…

Sarah Stewart:
No, that was Mastermind.

Angus Montgomery:
Sorry, that reference just went straight over my head. Sarah Stewart…

Sarah Stewart:
...on innovation. So, 2018 has been a big year for innovation, and not just in this government but in governments all across the world. So, in summer, I’m sure you heard, that the French government announced a £1.5 billion investment in research into artificial intelligence. The Singaporean government, or actually the prime minister said, that innovation was an obsession for them, not just an interest, an obsession. Countries like Norway are doing some really interesting things, actually, the prime minister launched this programme calling it a kind of Tinder…

Angus Montgomery:
Nice.

Sarah Stewart:
So the government is helping clean tech industries reach out to international markets.

Angus Montgomery:
To literally hook up with those markets.

Sarah Stewart:
Exactly. Oh God…

But, what we’re interested in is the UK, sorry, let me bring you back. Let’s land at Heathrow and tell you about what’s happening in this country. So earlier this year we published a survey of all emerging tech activity across government, so we know the extent and where innovative activity with emerging tech is happening. So, we know, for example, like we mentioned earlier, that GOV.UK is using supervised machine learning, as is the UK Hydrographic Office, and that BEIS, DFID and Defra are using big data and sensors to improve agricultural yield and protect crops.

Angus Montgomery:
So, lots of cool stuff happening, but I think one of the things that we talk about a lot that’s really interesting is that all this work going on in isolation is great and really exciting, but for it to have an effect you kind of need to have an overarching strategy, you need to be able to do it in the right way you need to be able to make sure that you’re not just chasing after the latest shiny thing…

Sarah Stewart:
Whizzy things.

Angus Montgomery:
Whizzy things, to make it a theme. Sarah, you interviewed Terence Eden, as you’ve already mentioned, for the podcast that we published a couple of months ago, and Terence had some words about this as well:

[Audio starts]
‘How do we make sure that government doesn’t just grab at the new fashionable tech, because it’s new and fashionable?’
‘It’s a good question. The author William Gibson has a beautiful quote, which is ‘The future is already here, it’ just not very equally distributed yet.’ That’s not really the case. The future isn’t here. We’ve got glimpses that if we can build this huge dataset, then we will be able to artificial intelligence the blockchain into the cloud and magic will happen. Yes, you’re right, people just go a little starry eyed…’
[Audio ends]

Angus Montgomery:
So, Sarah, how do we avoid people being all starry-eyed and just chasing after the latest whizzy new technology?

Sarah Stewart:
We use a strategy, Angus, which is exactly what the minister announced after the publication of the survey. So, it was good that we had a landscape and we had a much better understanding of the emerging tech that was being used across government, but we needed to round it up with a strategy. To ensure that we’re moving forward in a clear and sensible way the strategy was the thing.

So, GDS is leading this, but the minister has been attending quite a few engagement meetings to get the expertise from tech leaders, academics and practitioners in the field about what this strategy needs to address, because we don’t want to get into the situation where, in five years’ time or ten years’ time, we’re playing catch-up. So, I think that’s going to be published in the spring.

Angus Montgomery:
Brilliant, I look forward to it and look forward to seeing what we have to say in that.
One more thing, we talked about this earlier on but the idea of the academy and GDS as a whole, upskilling and helping build capability across the civil service and digital, we’ve been taking that into emerging technologies as well, through the pilot Emerging Technology Development Programme. Sarah, you spoke again to Terence Eden about this, because I think he’s one of the first people who went through the pilot.

Sarah Stewart:
Yes, that’s right. The idea is that there are going to be people who are skilled up and specialists in emerging technologies, so they can go into departments across government to help other teams and spreading the word. The pilot was run earlier this year, and you’re right, Terence Eden was on there, and here’s what he thought of it:

[Audio starts]
‘I think that’s what the Emerging Technology Development Programme is about, is making sure that civil servants can code, making sure that they understand how they would build an AI system, understand what the ethics are, learn about what the reasons for and against using a bit of technology like distributed ledgers are, because otherwise we end up with people just buying stuff which isn’t suitable.’
[Audio ends]

Angus Montgomery:
So, super important stuff. Just one final, but super important, part of the innovation work that GDS has been doing over the last year is the GovTech Catalyst Challenge.

Sarah Stewart:
Yes, that’s right. This is a £20m fund which is designed to incentivise tech companies to help the public sector with challenges that they may face.

Angus Montgomery:
So, two really cool things about this is it’s dealing with really interesting public sector challenges, like how do you deal with loneliness and isolation in rural areas, or how do you help track a waste chain across its whole process or how do you help to keep firefighters safe when they’re out on emergency calls? But, what it’s also doing is bringing in the interesting emerging technologies, so things like artificial intelligence or location sensing or wearable tech and, kind of, using them on these specific examples, but by doing that it’s proving the value to the wider public sector as well.
So, if you use that emerging technology in one particular incident or in one particular incidence you might then find other applications for it in the public sector. So, it’s kind of like a testing ground for stuff as well, which is really exciting.

I think what is really cool about this is that the GovTech Catalyst Fund has been going now for some time and, as you mentioned, there have been a number of challenges launched. We’re starting to see potential where it could tackle real issues, like I mentioned earlier about keeping firefighters safe.

Sarah Stewart:
The other really cool thing as well is that it’s a London team, so the team is based in London, but the challenges that are coming in are not solely London based challenges, they’ve come from all over the country as well.

Angus Montgomery:
Let’s hear from Wales.

[Audio starts]
‘If I was to wear the tracking device and I was committed to a building it would make me feel safer, because I know that if any of my other communications fail or if I’m needing assistance then they’re going to know where I am.’
[Audio ends]

Angus Montgomery:
So that’s Mid and West Wales Fire Service, who have a GovTech Challenge competition out for the moment, for tracking for firefighters when they’re out on emergency calls.

Sarah Stewart:
The other beautiful thing, if I can call it beautiful, if I can call boosting the economy beautiful, is that it gives small, kind of, nimble SMEs a chance to do business with government. So, it’s not just monopolised by massive companies, it’s really helping the burgeoning GovTech sector to grow, and this is one very tangible way in which is happening.

Angus Montgomery:
It’s helping the right people work on the right problems, which is what it’s all about.
That was innovation. So, we’ve done it all.

Sarah Stewart:
Yes, we’ve done it.

Angus Montgomery:
We’ve done transformation, collaboration and innovation, and that was an overview of 2018 at GDS.
What was your favourite moment of 2018, Sarah?

Sarah Stewart:
Good question. I think it was April, when the late Jeremy Heywood, came in to talk to the organisation. I was impressed by the amount of stuff that he knew because his portfolio must’ve been enormous. To know in very precise detail exactly what’s happening in every part of government was really inspiring, not only from a digital perspective, but also as a civil servant. You just think, “Wow, that’s colossal intellect deployed just brilliantly.”

Angus Montgomery:
Yes I think I’d agree with you about when Lord Heywood came in. Like you said, he was such an impressive speaker and showed such a massive intellect, but also a real interest and passion about what GDS was doing. Like you say, his brief was so massive that he would’ve had to have a handle on so many different parts of government, for him to come in and be really interested, engaged and talking to individual people and talking to the organisation as a whole was super-impressive. So, I think that was definitely a highlight for me.

I think the other highlight was something we’ve talked about quite a lot, which was Sprint, which was super hard work, I think, for everyone involved, but really amazing and really amazing to see people at GDS and people from across government get the opportunity to talk about the work that they’ve been doing and see the reception that that got. Having a workshop about open standards that left people in tears and things like that were really amazing.

Sarah Stewart:
For the right reasons.

Angus Montgomery:
So that was really cool.

Next year, what are you most looking forward to?

Sarah Stewart:
Spring, because in spring the Innovation Strategy will be published.

Angus Montgomery:
Ah, the strategy.

Sarah Stewart:
The strategy… How about you?

Angus Montgomery:
For me, I guess, it’s a bit of a cop out answer, but more of the same. I think what I really value about GDS is that there are lots of organisations that use words like transformation, collaboration and innovation, and other words like that, but use them in quite intangible ways, and just don’t really deliver against them. I think what we’ve proved over the last year is that we are delivering loads of really tangible, amazing things.

There are things that we and other parts of the government have done this year that are changing people’s lives. That, to me, is the reason GDS exists. We talk to the talk but we’re delivering this stuff as well, we’re actually doing stuff, and more tangible things. The Innovation Strategy is a part of that, obviously, and seeing tangible outcomes from that, more people using common components, more services that have been transformed in a way that it’s going to help people go about their lives and make people’s lives better.

I think just the stuff that we’ve done over this last year has been brilliant, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of its next year.

So, that wraps up 2018 and the 2018 year in review podcast.

Sarah Stewart:
What a year it’s been.

Angus Montgomery:
What a year it’s been.

Sarah Stewart:
Wait. We’ve forgotten to mention the most exciting thing that’s going to happen in 2019.

Angus Montgomery:
What’s that?

Sarah Stewart:
The continuation of the GDS podcast series.

Angus Montgomery:
Of course. As I mentioned before, this is the fourth episode of the GDS podcasts that we’ve done, and we’ve got plenty more exciting ones planned. So, if you’ve enjoyed this one and you enjoyed the previous ones that we’ve done, then go to wherever it is that you listen to your podcasts and subscribe to the GDS podcasts because we’ve got a ton more exciting stuff happening next year.

Sarah Stewart:
Oh yes.

Angus Montgomery:
Oh yes.Thank you very much for listening. Thank you for joining me, Sarah.

Sarah Stewart:
Oh, you’re welcome.

Angus Montgomery:
And goodbye.

Sarah Stewart:
Goodbye.

GDS Podcast #3 - an interview with the GDS Women‘s Network Dec 03, 2018

Liz Lutgendorff and Rosa Fox from the GDS Women's Network talk about why the network was set up, what it does and discuss wider issues of inclusion and diversity.

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A full transcript of the episode follows:

Angus Montgomery:
Hello, and welcome to the third edition of the government digital service podcast. My name’s Angus Montgomery and I’m a senior writer at GDS, and for this episode of the podcast we're going to be talking to Liz Lutgendorff and Rosa Fox from the GDS Women’s Network, so thank you very much both for joining me.

Rosa Fox:
Thank you for having us.

Angus Montgomery:
Before I start, if I could just ask you, because we're going to go on to talk about the Women’s Network and what it does and why it was set up, and why it exists in GDS, and we’re loosely talking about it because 2018 is the centenary of women suffrage in the UK, and in fact I think on the 21st November 1918 women could be elected to parliament for the first time, so I think in February there was universal suffrage, or women suffrage in 2018, in November women could be elected to parliament, so we’re hoping that this will be released at about that date so that’s why we’re here.

But before we go into that, I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about yourselves and how you ended up at GDS and what you do. Liz, if you could let me know, how long have you been at GDS and what do you do here?

Liz Lutgendorff:
I’ve been here almost seven years now, so I am like a veteran of GDS.

Angus Montgomery:
Since the beginning.

Liz Lutgendorff:
Almost the beginning, so I’m pre-GDS but not pre-GOV.UK, I think, so I was brought on in January 2012. Originally I was looking at this site called Business Link, if anyone remembers it, to analyse the user needs to add them to what was then the beta of GOV.UK. I was with the content team for about four or five years, and then I worked with the GOV.UK programme as a whole, trying to make us more efficient and use data better, and then January this year I moved to Verify to do the same thing, so looking at data analysis, how the programme works, things like that.

Angus Montgomery:
Cool, and Rosa, what do you do and how long have you been at GDS?

Rosa Fox:
Yes, so I’ve been at GDS for nearly three years, and I work as a software developer. I was on GOV.UK for two years doing mostly back end development in a language called Ruby and I then joined Verify, maybe about six months ago, so, yes, me and Liz are now on the same programme, and, yes, working in Java on the Verify project, so, yes, it’s good.

Angus Montgomery:
What was your background, what were you doing before you came to GDS and to government?

Rosa Fox:
Worked in quite a small Ruby on Rails agency previously, and then before that various jobs, mostly in small tech companies, and then before that I was studying my degree which was half music half computer science.

Angus Montgomery:
So sort of background in the wider private sector tech industry?

Rosa Fox:
Yes.

Angus Montgomery:
Liz, how about you?

Liz Lutgendorff:
Broadly the same. I was working for a start-up and before that I was working for a company that did accessible formats. It was a translation company but also did accessible format, so kind of just that, and then before that I was in Canada and I was in university.

Angus Montgomery:
Cool. You’re both obviously involved in the Women’s Network at GDS. Do you have formal roles in it, what do you do for the network?

Rosa Fox:
I am a co-chair of the Women’s Network. In January we re-launched the network, so me and a colleague called Amanda Diamond, who is now on loan to ACAS, but she was really instrumental in re-launching the network with me. On Amanda’s departure Nicky Zachariou and Laura Flannery have joined me as co-chairs. As a part of that, as a part of the big re-launch, which I can go into more detail later, we created five working groups, and we have people involved in a lot of the different groups, so Liz is involved in events mostly-

Liz Lutgendorff:
And the pay transparency.

Rosa Fox:
Yes, and pay transparency.

Angus Montgomery:
Okay, cool, so very active roles both of you.

Rosa Fox:
Yes.

Angus Montgomery:
Why does the Women’s Network exist and what’s its purpose, what’s it there to do?

Liz Lutgendorff:
I’m trying to remember back to when we started it, but I think it was still at Aviation House, were you here when it started or had it already existed?

Rosa Fox:
I read that it started in 2014, so I wasn’t here but you probably were.

Liz Lutgendorff:
I think it was generally that GDS had been growing larger. We were becoming more – moving more from being a kind of scrappy start-up to actually having formal things, and how we as employees improve the organisation. I think a lot of us were actually becoming permanent employees rather than contractors as well. I remember we had by the old purple sofas, so like we don’t have meeting rooms as normal, and we just kind of got together and was like, “Do we want to do this thing?” Everyone was like, “Yes, we should do this thing.”

It started as I think as a lot of just email, talking about things that were happening, not really any huge, formal structure that we have now, and then over time it become more formalised. We were like, “What do we want? What kinds of goals do we want to achieve?” And so we did some more events. We weren’t really quite active in changing policy yet, that’s come more with the formal re-launch

Angus Montgomery:
Do you remember, was there a particular spark or a catalyst that led to this happening?

Liz Lutgendorff:
I’m not sure. I think there are other people who recognised that there was a gap, that we didn’t have one. I wasn’t really involved, I just remember it happening and being at the group. I think it was just we didn’t have it and we thought there were things that we could improve. We recognised the fact that we had far fewer female developers, a lot of the technical roles were male dominated with only like maybe one or two people who were women in senior levels and things like that. Our SM team was generally quite male heavy I think at that time, it’s gotten better in recent months and years.

Yes, it was mainly a recognition that we didn’t have this and we recognised the imbalance in the workplace at the time. There were several changes quite early on I think, or maybe not early on but under Stephen Foreshew-Cain, our second director, we went to having female representation on every interview panel, which I think the people team have stats that show that that actually increased the amount of, at least people accepting job offers, or giving job offers I think it was, and then as well as making the commitment of not to speak at events that are male dominated, so making sure that women are represented on panel discussions or in the conference in general.

It was quite nice to have that commitment quite early on from our senior management to improve women’s opportunity in these panels as well, so putting women forward to speak at GDS events, rather than having the same people who may have previously spoken anyway and don’t really need the kind of experience or profile raising, so that was quite nice, that was fairly early on in the development of the network I think by engaging with SM team.

Angus Montgomery:
Did you find SM, senior management team, and leadership, did you find that they were quite receptive to this idea of having a women’s network, and was the organisation receptive as well?

Liz Lutgendorff:
Yes. In general I think GDS is quite acceptant of most networks, if not all networks, so it’s good, but especially under Stephen I think it was – action happened as a result of it which was really nice.

Angus Montgomery:
Rosa, as someone who joined GDS when the Women’s Network had been set up and existed, what do you remember when you first came across it and what you thought of it?

Rosa Fox:
Yes, so I suppose software development, it is very male dominated, and I suppose on a lot of my teams I was often the only woman, so when I heard that there was a Women’s Network I kind of – I felt even though the guys on my team were lovely and fortunately I didn’t experience any harassment or discrimination, but sometimes if you’re struggling or, you know, you kind of want to be around people that you can relate to. I don’t know, it made me feel a bit more comfortable knowing that I had more of a support group there.

When I found out about the Women’s Network, I think it was probably through the inspirational speaker series, so I think that’s how I probably heard that it was in existence and, yes, and then I started going to meetings and things from there.

Angus Montgomery:
Had you ever come across anything similar in other roles, in your jobs before GDS?

Rosa Fox:
Not so much because I worked at quite small companies. Outside of work I co-organise something called Code Bar, which is free weekly coding workshops for people underrepresented in the tech industry. Although in a work capacity I hadn’t I’d done a lot of diversity related community stuff outside of work, so in terms of having a supportive network of people and building that and being involved in that it was quite a big part of my life, but to actually have it in work wasn’t something that I’d had before, as such, but I think that was just because I’d worked at quite small places.

Angus Montgomery:
What’s it like, because I think I probably joined you, yes, about the same time as you and had a similar-ish background, in that I’d worked in smaller organisations in the private sector, and to me one of the really notable things about coming to GDS was the fact that these networks existed but the fact that they were so active, and it was really inescapable that these kinds of networks existed and this diversity existed, and that was really amazing and something that just really stuck with me.

I remember my first few days just seeing things like rainbow flags all over the place and stuff like that. Having come from an environment that I thought was quite inclusive to one that was really, really obviously inclusive was really amazing. Did you find something similar, or how do you feel about-?

Rosa Fox:
Yes, I think it helps a lot to just be very vocal about what is acceptable and what you want and the kind of culture that you want to have. For example, we have lots of posters that we put all over the walls and things just to try and be like, “We’re here, we’re present.” I think the more that you make your values known then the easier it is to call out when something isn’t right. That is still difficult to do even with everything that we have, and that is something that we’re still working on improving, but I think ultimately knowing that we’re creating somewhere where people should feel comfortable to be themselves and feel included is really important, so I think it’s good to shout it from the roof tops and try and make sure everyone is-

Angus Montgomery:
Again, one of the things that struck me is the amount of, like you say shouting through the rooftops, but the amount of energy that you need to have to keep that going as well, like it’s really important to continue to be really, really vocal about this stuff. Liz, is that something that you found, kind of having been involved in the network since the beginning? It’s not that you can't just do this thing and then let it go; you’ve kind of got to keep going with it and got to keep really vocal.

Liz Lutgendorff:
I would say anyone listening in any capacity, I get involved with so many things because I’m generally a person who will just do them, I will get involved and I will be an active person and so this isn’t the only network I’m in, for example, but the problem is that networks live and die by the people who get involved, and having the umbrella is great but you still need the individuals to do the planning, do the organisation.

I think there’s a difference between joining and thing and you’re like, “There’s this thing, and that’s wonderful and I’ll participate and go to the things,” but it takes an extra level of personal courage and political capital to be, “I’m also going to be the annoying person who raises the thing that has upset the group,” and being that front person to say, “This wasn’t appropriate,” or putting on a controversial talk if we want to do that, or something like that.

And again, I think when it ebbs and flows is when people have left and were doing that role and there’s a vacuum to replace it, or you’re just really busy, work in GDS ebbs and flows as well, and so if you feel you have the time and energy and you’re not afraid of doing that, like get involved, we need you, we always need you. Don’t feel like you’re going to step on people’s toes. Just say, “I’d really like to help.” What would you like me to do? This is what I’m interested in.” They will love you for it.

No one will think you’re butting in or being mean or trying to take over, it’s we just need the help. We’re all working every day, we have holidays, we have good days and bad days and so anyone who can pick up the slack is completely 100% absolutely welcome to get involved.

Rosa Fox:
It does take courage. Some of the issues that we deal with are – they can be emotionally draining, but we just do what we can to support each other. You have to think back to the suffragettes, deeds not words. As a community they got together and they fought for change and they got it, so just keep going.

Angus Montgomery:
You mentioned that it’s challenging, and obviously it takes a lot of energy, but you’re seeing change because you are – things are changing because the network exists and that must be hugely rewarding, do you get that feeling as well and is that what keeps you going in a sense?

Liz Lutgendorff:
Yes, I definitely think from being here seven years ago that GDS in different ways has gotten better and worse. Worse in the sense like it’s not as small as it was so you don’t feel involved in every decision, sometimes you don’t know where things come from, sometimes you don’t know who these people are because they’re on a different floor and you’ve never met them, but in others ways it’s become much better.

I think the hiring practices have gotten a lot more slicker. We definitely have more women involved in the workplace, and in senior positions. We have now the time to do the network things. I think at the very beginning it was just like, “Let’s get stuff over the line, oh my God,” so busy, so stressful, and so it’s mellowed in the sense that we have the time, people aren’t expected to be heroes and just constantly deliver and deliver and deliver.

So in that way I think it’s a much better workplace, especially for people who want to be involved in something but have kids, or have caring commitments, or are reservists, or whatever, that you don’t feel like you’re letting the team down if you can't spend 100% time delivering the thing, you can take that time out to help make the workplace better. I think on aggregate it has become better.

Rosa Fox:
Yes, and I would say it is so rewarding. For example, one of the things that we’ve done is a break into public speaking workshop, and so when people sign up… So originally it was for the Women’s Network, now it’s for anyone underrepresented in tech, and when people register they fill out a form and they talk about what holds you back from public speaking, what are your worries, what are your fears. It’s really sad to see the responses and it seems like, “I’m worried I don’t have anything interesting to say. I’m scared that I will completely freeze when I get on stage.” All the worries that people have about public speaking, but when people turn up, the women are so talented, they’ve got so many amazing stories.

I think what kind of world do we live in where these people have been told that they don’t have anything to say, so to see people go from…And it’s not their ability that’s the problem, it’s the lack of confidence, and to see people go from these fears to then to see them present at the end and go on to speak at conferences and do all these things, and I think having underrepresented people out there speaking, having a voice, is so important and it’s so inspirational to others as well. Things like that I find really, yes, really inspiring.

Liz Lutgendorff:
I was just thinking about GDS I think, and it’s still present, it was present in the beginning and it’s still present now, is that everyone wants to see the best of people and so, again, the getting involved in public speaking, you can go there knowing that they’re going to be supportive and no one’s going to laugh or anything. They’re there because they genuinely have either struggled themselves, they want to help people, and that’s the same ethos across GDS, that everyone wants the best out of everyone, and they want to help them get there.

Coming to work for GDS must be lovely for some people because I know coming from another job that you don’t have that, right, it’s kind of like it’s a terrible workplace, not everyone hates each other but there are cliques and stuff like that, and it’s genuinely amazing to have such support here and I think, I don’t if it’s unique, I don’t know if other teams across civil service experience this, but when people leave the thing that is common to everyone leaving is like, “I don’t know why I’m leaving, this is truly amazing and I’ve never worked with nicer people in my life. I’ve learned so much from everyone.” I think even if we change, in whatever ways we change as an organisation, as long as that stays true I think GDS will always be an amazing place to work.

Angus Montgomery:
In your time in the Women’s Network, what do you think is the most rewarding or valuable thing that the network has done, or what’s the thing that you think, “So pleased that we did that?”

Rosa Fox:
There are literally so many things. I’d say as an overall general thing, and then I can go into a few more examples but, yes I think so when I talk about all the different working groups that we’ve got, so obviously the chairs of the network are just a few people, we’ve only got so much time, so the network basically relies upon the work of so many people coming together and making change. I think that in itself is something, but, yes, we have inspirational speakers that come in.

I suppose the public speaking workshops, so training and mentoring, there’s a training and mentoring group, they had a launch of a mentoring, I want to say ‘service’, but that’s not the word, mentoring scheme here at GDS, so that’s basically pairing women with mentors to help them with questions to do with career progression and advancing their careers. Yes, that’s something exciting that’s happened.

I remember the previous network did something called ‘reverse mentoring’. When I started GDS, I think it was two months after I joined I did that, and I was reverse mentoring Alex Holmes who was the COO at the time. That was really interesting because I think – so at the time when I thought of a COO, I think of this superhuman, like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, or someone like that, so to actually be able to regularly talk to the COO of the company you work at is really inspiring because you find out from them how they got to that point. Also, it makes you realise that maybe it’s not completely unattainable, which is really positive. Yes, things like that.

What else have we had? Things like having diverse interview panels is another thing. This is quite an interesting one, so the previous people that were in charge of the Women’s Network managed to get lots of the fixed term appointment contracts to be made permanent, because obviously if you’re going on maternity leave and your contract runs out you don’t have that job security. I think, yes, pushing things forward like that has been really good.

Angus Montgomery:
One of the things related to that, and it’s a thing that obviously we talk a lot about at GDS, but there are lots of statistics about how underrepresented women are in the tech industry, so I think there’s a PWC report that I’ve seen quite a lot that says something like, “Only 15% of people working in STEM,” so science, technology, engineering and maths, “In the UK are female,” and only 5% of people in leadership positions identify as women as well. It’s an obvious question but why, why is that, and is the tech industry particularly bad, and what are the things that make it so?

Rosa Fox:
I think it stems from a young age. Apparently women were the first computer programmers after the war. We were there, well, I say coding, writing the code out by hand and making punch cards and things like that but I think the 1980s was probably when the male domination crept in and it became more lucrative to be a programmer.

It became I suppose the kind of sci-fi hacker image started. I suppose, I don’t know, women must have just got slowly pushed out. I mean, I don’t think the numbers have improved much since the eighties, which is such a shame. I think a lot of it is how we’re conditioned from a young age. Girls, partly I think it’s girls are not really taught to take risks and things in the way that boys are, you know, “Boys will be boys, girls shouldn’t play in the mud,” that kind of thing. With programming, it does take a lot of grit and determination at first. You have to get comfortable with making mistakes because you break things all the time, things aren’t going to work, you have to sit there for hours trying to get… Like you’ve missed out a bracket and then you realise and then your code works. Things like that. I think maybe that’s part of it. Another thing is maybe it’s got this kind of geeky image, maybe it’s not considered cool to programme computers, and if you’re a girl and you’re at school maybe you’re more interested in trying to fit in with your friends. Maybe it does stem from that age.

I think also girls are just told that they can't do it. I’ve heard of – I knew someone who was studying computing A level quite a long time ago now at school, and they basically said, well, her tutor just constantly put her down. They had an anonymous test score announcement and someone had scored really highly, and they were like, “Put up your hand, who do you think this was?” It was her, so she was constantly put down but then she would get good grades. I think, yes, if you’re told that you’re not going to be good at something and then the opportunities aren’t there then… Yes.

Angus Montgomery:
Also, and I don’t think this is true just of the tech industry but I know for a fact this is true of industries beyond that, but the level of representation of women the higher up you go, the more senior you get, becomes less and less, and that figure about only 5% of people in leadership roles identify as women. Why is that an issue? On top of this structural discrimination, I suppose, against women coming into the tech industry you’ve then got this career progression issue. Why does that happen?

Liz Lutgendorff:
Yes. It’s not an individual company thing, it’s society. In organisations a lot of the tech stuff is going to be small companies, probably not with great HR policies, probably not with leave or flexible working is not a thing that exists, and so if you’re a carer, mother, if you have any of these responsibilities which disproportionately fall towards women that’s not going to be really attractive, and that’s also where you can also get lots of experience and actually go from being a small start-up to scaling up quite quickly and being in those senior roles, so if you don’t want to do that then where do you go?

Some place within GDS you have those structures and places that allow you to rise but GDS is civil service, not a lot of people know that there are tech opportunities in the civil service, still, even though there in GDS, there are loads of digital teams within many government departments who will offer you that support, and so until that changes across a lot of the tech sector I don’t know if it will improve.

The same with being in a senior role, if you’re not seen as constantly going for that then you’re not going to rise either, and putting yourself out there. If you want to go on leave to have a child or something then that’s going to hold you back. There is enough research that says that’s a big problem.

I think as well, you have to be quite vocal, you need to have, maybe not even vocal but just have that aim and relentlessly pursue it. I don’t think a lot of people are raised like that, like Rosa said. I was not raised like that. My mum was born in the Netherlands and she did a mathematics degree in the 1960s, or something, and she only could become a teacher, that was her only option at that time and so when I was raised my mum was like, “You can do whatever you want.” I changed my mind every five minutes. She was like, “Doesn’t matter, just work for it.” Typical kind of very Dutch approach to things. “Work for it and you do it.”

So I grew up with a very different perception of I can literally do everything. Which has made me probably more mouthy than I should be, but at the same time when I’m in the workforce I know that I am on average probably a lot more argumentative than most of my female colleagues, but on par with my male colleagues because I don’t really see that difference, because that’s how I was raised. Unless you’re getting that support probably from a young age you’re not going to be like that.

Even growing up through high school and university I was always like, “I’m going to do public speaking. I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.” My parents were all supportive; they never said I couldn’t do anything. You need a lot of support from a lot of different angles to be able to get to that position and to fight for that position. Probably disproportionate to the people who are male and getting those positions because it’s kind of expected.

Rosa Fox:
I was going to say, yes, that’s so true. Girls have for years outperformed boys in every subject in school. It’s not down to the ability of women, women are just as intelligent. I want to say if not more, but… No, it’s about equality. We’re just as intelligent as each other and it’s just awful that women are treated as second class citizens when it’s just the structures have just been so skewed for so long and it just needs to change.

Angus Montgomery:
We’ve talked a lot obviously about the Women’s Network and about, I suppose, as a consequence of that what women are doing to help each other in the workplace, and you as women are doing to help other women, but what can men do to help? Well, as a starter, the Women’s Network is open to everyone, you don’t have to identify as a woman to be a member, that’s correct isn’t it?

Rosa Fox:
Yes.

Angus Montgomery:
Presumably still the majority of members are women. Do you have a lot of members who don’t identify as women?

Rosa Fox:
Yes, I’d say the majority are women. It’s International Men’s Day in a couple of weeks so we’re having a male allies event, and we’re having someone, an Oxford professor called Taha Yasseri and he’s going to be doing a talk about data science in the everyday sexism project. Then we’re going to have two GDS workers, so Kieran Housden and Matt Gregory and they are going to be talking about shared parental leave. Then we’re going to be talking about what it is to be a good male ally, kind of like a group discussion. Hopefully we’ll be able to get more people of any gender to join the network as a result of that as well. Hopefully that will be improving, but at the moment, yes, it is mostly women.

I’d say to be a good ally, firstly I think it’s recognising your biases. I think calling out bad behaviour and setting a good example. Also I think if a woman tells you that they think something is sexist or they think that something is harassment then it probably is. I find it stressful when people try and undermine someone’s opinion on something like that. I think if someone tells you this is sexist it probably is, stop doing it kind of thing.

Liz Lutgendorff:
I think on a really individual level, especially in the workplace somewhere like GDS or the civil service, or anywhere where you have a performance review at the end of the year or mid year, whatever, is to always… If a woman asks you for feedback try to give it to them. Like if you can only give one piece of feedback and one’s a guy and one’s a woman, try to give the feedback to the woman because it’s going to be harder for them to get good quality reviews.

The other things is always carefully think about what you’re saying in these things, because you get a lot of flaky, qualitative behaviour sort of thing. So like women will be more strident or they will be more argumentative, but men never get those descriptions in reviews and things like that, and so if you’re on the receiving end of that, like if you’re a manager and you are getting that feedback from someone, not even just a woman but anyone who is an underrepresented minority, to really drill down into it, like what exactly was the thing.

You get a lot of second hand, “I didn’t really like the way they constructed that email.” It’s a perfectly innocuous email, they’ve just kind of that unconscious bias has crept in. So every time there is some sort of unqualified or vague piece of feedback that is especially about behaviour, drill down into it, examine it, see if there is some bias at play.

Women and underrepresented groups always get hit with that stuff, whereas a lot of men don’t. It can really hold people back. These sorts of things really affect women quite strongly because it’s like, “I thought I was being a good team member, communicating, getting all my stakeholders involved,” all these sorts of things. It just throws people for a loop.

This is more from all my union experience but it’s so tough to get good, practical, delivery focused reviews. It’s like, “Yes, they delivered this thing, it was really well done,” all that sort of stuff, so give good, evidenced feedback for people. That will help them career wise more so than probably anything else that you could do for them. Or if they need help with something be very thorough, help them through the problem, build their confidence while you’re solving that problem, but just be there, be supportive, be un-judgemental and just help them in small ways to progress.

Angus Montgomery:
Just as a final question, the Women’s Network has been around for several years now and obviously as we’ve spoken about has done a lot of things, how would GDS be different if the Women’s Network didn’t exist?

Liz Lutgendorff:
I think we’d have less women in the workplace.

Rosa Fox:
Yes, definitely, less women. I think the culture would probably be not very nice really.

Liz Lutgendorff:
I think it would be all right but it wouldn’t be as thoughtful as it is. I think over the years it’s become far more thoughtful. Yes, definitely less women! (Laughter)

Rosa Fox:
Yes, maybe it would be more hostile. Yes, probably just wouldn’t be such a nice place to be day to day.

Angus Montgomery:
So real tangible, not only a nicer place but more women in the workplace literally because of the network?

Rosa Fox:
Definitely. I think the work we’ve produced as working for the government, our products have to work for everyone, so if we’ve got more of a range of inputs and we have better products that we produce, so…

Liz Lutgendorff:
I have no idea why the people who took shared parental leave took it because they knew of it, but I know the civil service in general has been the largest uptake of people using shared parental leave. So for those who don’t know it means that if you meet certain qualifications you can basically split the time off between your partners. So you might take four months, the mother might take four months, the mother or the other father might take four months, whatever, however you break it down.

I think because it’s so un-judgemental in terms of where we work and that you won't be disappointing your team if you leave for four months to spend that quality time with your child that more men will take it here. I know so many men who have taken shared parental leave with GDS and it’s just great, you get to have that time. I’m not a parent, I don’t know what it’s like but I imagine it must be nice not to have two weeks and have to go back and have a newborn in your house. To be able to take that time and become a parent must be really nice.

Rosa Fox:
Yes, the countries where there is a greater amount of maternity and paternity leave, they have better gender equality so, yes, I think it’s so important, and if more importance, and understanding the importance of care giving, I think we’re so taught career, career, career, but actually if we didn’t have care giving then people can't have careers, so I think if more appreciation was given towards that as well, which I think it is here at GDS more so than a lot of other places, then I think that’s good. If people are happy outside of work they’re going to do better work when they’re at work. Hopefully.

Angus Montgomery:
Just to finish off, for anyone who’s listening to this, how can they get involved with and join the Women’s Network?

Rosa Fox:
Please join. Yes, we have a Google group, so usually a lot of the communications are done through that so it’s probably best to join that. Otherwise, just message me or Nicky or Laura and, yes, there are plenty of different groups that you could be involved in. It’s like if anyone’s got an idea that they want to make happen then we’re open to try and make it happen.

Angus Montgomery:
Brilliant, well I hope lots of people do. Yes, Liz and Rosa, thank you very much for joining me.

Rosa Fox:
Thank you.

Liz Lutgendorff:
Thanks.

Angus Montgomery:
Thank you very much for joining us for that episode of the GDS podcast, I hope you enjoyed it, and if you want to listen to any more podcasts please go to wherever it is that you listen to your podcasts and subscribe to it, we’ve got lots more coming up. The next episode which we will be releasing in December will be a review of the year at the Government Digital Service, so please subscribe and listen to that one, and I hope you enjoy what we’ve done and what we’ll do in the future. Thank you very much.

GDS Podcast #2 An interview with Terence Eden Nov 07, 2018

GDS’s Open Standards Lead Terence Eden talks about the mission to make government more open and the risks and rewards of emerging technology.

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The full transcript of the interview follows:

Sarah Stewart:

Hello. Welcome to the second GDS podcast. I’m Sarah Stewart, Senior Writer at the Government Digital Service. Today I’ll be joined in conversational paradise with Terence Eden. Terence is known variously as a tech enthusiast, as a digital troublemaker, as the man who hacked his own vacuum cleaner to play the ‘Star Wars’ theme tune, but in a professional capacity he is the Open Standards Lead at the Government Digital Service. Terence, welcome.

Terence Eden:

Thank you very much for having me.

Sarah Stewart:

So how do you explain what you do?

Terence Eden:

What I tend to say, in a very reduced vocabulary, is, “We have computers. Government has computers, and those computers need to talk to each other, but sometimes those computers don’t speak the same language.” It’s my job to say, “Hey, can we agree on a common language here?” Then, when we can, those computers speak to each other.

It’s, kind of, as simple as that. If we publish a document and it’s in a format that you don’t understand, that’s a barrier to entry for you. You can’t get access to the data or the information you need. If we publish it in such a way that it’s only available on one manufacturer’s type of smartphone, that’s a barrier. We can’t do that, so it’s my job to say, “No, let’s make it available to everyone, in a common language.”

I’ve got a big sticker on my laptop which says, ‘Make things open. It makes things better.’ That applies to a whole variety of things, and there are people here working on open data, and open source, and open government, but my part of the mission is to say that, when government produces documents or data, everyone should be able to read them.

It’s unacceptable that we say, “Okay, if you want to interact with government, you need to pay this company this money, for this software, which only works on that platform.” That’s completely antithetical to everything we’re trying to do, so my mission – our team’s mission – is to go around government, saying, “There’s a better way of doing things, there’s a more open way of doing things, and we can help you with that.”

Sarah Stewart:

That sounds completely straightforward.

Terence Eden:

You’d think, wouldn’t you? Most of the time it is. When you tell people and you say, “If you publish it like this, then only people with that computer can read it,” it’s like a light goes off.

Sarah Stewart:

Do you go out to departments proactively, or do they come to you?

Terence Eden:

It’s both. I spent last week talking to the DWP and the Government Statistical Service, and I’m speaking, I think, this week to a couple of different departments and ministries. We go out, we chat to them, but quite often they come to us and say, “Hey, users have complained about this,” or, “Hang on. We think we need to do something better. What should we do?” and we offer just a wide range of advice.

Sarah Stewart:

Government is huge and technology changes all the time so how do you make sure you are progressing in the right direction, that you’re achieving what needs to be achieved, and that your work is ‘done’, I mean is it even possible to say your work is ‘done’?

Terence Eden:

Wow… It’s a slight Sisyphean task, I think, because there’s always going to be a new department coming online which doesn’t get it, or someone who’s come in, and a bit of work which only gets published every five years, and the process is never updated. It’s a rolling task.

We monitor everything the government publishes. My team, when we see a department which only publishes something in a proprietary format, we drop them an email and say, “Hey, look, here are the rules. This is what you need to do. Can you fix it?” Most of the time they do, and we’ve seen… We’ve published some statistics. We’re seeing a steady rise in the number of open-format documents which are being published.

That’s great, so we’re on our way with the mission. You can’t expect everyone to keep on top of every change in technology and the best practice all the time, so there is always going to be a need for bits of GDS to go out and say, “You know what? This is best practice. This is the right way to do it, and we can help you get there and make things more open.”

So… we need to do, I think, in GDS and across government, a better job of understanding what our users want – what they need, I should say – and also explaining that user need back to the rest of government.

Sarah Stewart:

But what’s your focus at the moment?

Terence Eden:

We have a problem with PDFs. I don’t think that’s any surprise. I’ve published the stats, but there are some critical government forms which are being downloaded millions of times per year, which could be better served being online forms. When someone has to download, print out a form, fill it in by hand and then post it back, for someone else to open it up, scan it, or type it in, we-

Sarah Stewart:

It’s the worst.

Terence Eden:

It’s the worst. It’s rubbish. It’s a rubbish user experience. It’s expensive and it’s not very efficient. It means you’re waiting weeks to get an answer, whereas if you can just go on your phone and type in your name, address, and all the other bits that they want, and hit ‘go’ and then get either an instant or a rapid decision, that just transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, as we say.

So, a large part of the next six months is going to be finding those… It’s not low-hanging fruit, but it’s just those big, horrible things which just no-one has got round to tackling yet. Some of them, there are good reasons and there are whole business processes behind, but we need to be pushing and saying, “Look, in 2018 this isn’t good enough. This isn’t the way that we can behave anymore.”

A lot of what I do is going round to departments, and doing presentations, and talking to people individually and in groups. I see that continuing. We also work a lot with SDOs: standard development organisations. I’m on a committee for the British Standards Institute, and I work with World Wide Web Consortium, and so we’re making sure that the government’s view is represented.

We don’t ever want to produce a standard which is a government standard, and it’s the government’s own standard. It’s the only one, and we’re the only people who use it, because no-one wants to deal with that. We want to have… We want to be using internationally accepted standards. If you’re an SME, if you’re a small-medium business and you want to pitch for some work for government, you don’t need to go and buy a huge, expensive standard, or you don’t need to do a piece of work just for us. Your work can be applicable everywhere.

That said, it’s important for us to be on these standards development organisations so we can say, “Actually, our user needs are going to be slightly different from a FTSE 100 company, or from a charity, or from someone else.” We can just shape those standards so that they’re slightly more applicable for us.

Sarah Stewart:

Someone listening might ask: why can’t government use, say, something like Google Forms instead of a PDF? Why can’t government just do this?

Terence Eden:

In some ways, they can. With that particular example, we need to understand people’s concerns about privacy. If we were using a third-party form supplier, for example, do you want, if you’re filling in a form which says how many kids you’ve got, how many have died, and your health issues and all that, do you want that going to a third party to be processed? Some people will be comfortable with it. Some people will, rightly, be uncomfortable with it. We need to make sure that any solution that we pick actually addresses users’ very real concerns.

There are several pieces of work around government trying to get forms right. Part of the problem is that each department has their own set of users, with their own set of user needs. If you are a, I don’t know… If you’re a farmer applying for a farm payment, you have very different needs to if you are a single mother applying for child benefit, to if you are a professional accountant trying to submit something to HMRC.

So, just saying, “We’re going to have one standardised way of sending data to the government” might actually not work. We have to realise that users all have different needs. It’s tricky, and there are ways that we are helping with it, but I think that’s going to be a piece of work which is going to continue rumbling on, just because some of these processes are very old-fashioned, and they still rely on things being faxed across and being handwritten.

Sarah Stewart:

Faxed? That can’t be right. Actually, no, I can believe it

Terence Eden:

Lots of stuff just goes through via fax because, if you’ve got a computer system built in one department, and a computer system built by someone else in another department, and they don’t speak the same language, actually the easiest way to do something is to send a photo of that document across. That’s easiest and quickest. Fax is relatively quick, but it comes with all of this baggage and it doesn’t always work right. We see that fax machines are vulnerable to computer viruses and stuff like this.

Sarah Stewart:

And the noise.

Terence Eden:

And the noise, but sometimes we have these little stopgaps, which are good enough for the time, but they never get replaced. Part of the work that we’ve done with the Open Standards Board is to make sure that all emergency services use a standard called ‘MAIT’ – Multi Agency Incident Transfer – which basically means you don’t need a police department to fax across details to an ambulance or to a coastguard. Their computers, even if they’re made by different people and run different operating systems and programs, they all speak to a common standard.

So trying to find where those little bugs in the process are is part of our job. If people want to help out, if they know where problems are, if they come across to GitHub, we’re on ‘github.com/alphagov/open-standards’. They can raise an issue there and say, “Hey, there really ought to be an open standard for,” dot, dot, dot, or, “Look, this process really doesn’t make sense. There’s this open standard which would save us a lot of time and money. Can we adopt it?”

It’s as simple as raising a GitHub issue with us. We do most of the hard work to find out whether it’s suitable, and we take it through a slightly convoluted process, but it keeps us legally in the clear. Yes, then we can, hopefully, mandate that across government and start the work on getting people to adopt it.

Some of the stuff we do is small. Saying that text should be encoded using Unicode UTF-8, that just basically means that, when someone sends you a document with an apostrophe in it, it doesn’t turn into one of those weird… We call it ‘Mojibake’, where there are just weird symbols in place of-

Sarah Stewart:

The squares.

Terence Eden:

Yes, the weird squares. That is a really boring, low-level standard, but it just makes everything easy, all the way up to something like MAIT or International Aid Transparency Initiative, which allows you to see where all the foreign aid that we spend, and all the grants that we make, goes. That’s hugely important for understanding, if you’re a taxpayer, where your money is going, but, if you’re in the charity sector or the aid sector, understanding how government is using funds to improve lives.

We don’t want information to be locked away in filing cupboards. We don’t want it so that, if you request some information, you have to send an FOI and then you get a scan of a fax posted off to you. That’s rubbish. We want this information front and centre so that, if people want to use it, it’s there, and that it works absolutely everywhere.

It doesn’t matter which phone you’ve got, which computer you’ve got, you should be able to access all of the information that you’re entitled to, with no intermediaries, no having to pay for extra software. It should just be there. If we make things open, then we make things better.

Sarah Stewart:

Another area of focus for you is emerging technology - innovation is a hot topic in government at the moment with the publication of the tech innovation in government survey, the GovTech catalyst fund, and the development of an innovation strategy. How do we make sure that government doesn’t just grab at new fashionable tech because it’s new and fashionable?

Terence Eden:

The author William Gibson has a beautiful quote, which is, “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed yet.” That’s not really the case. The future isn’t here. We’ve got glimpses that, if we can build this huge dataset, then we will be able to artificial intelligence the blockchain into the cloud and magic will happen. You’re right: people just go a little starry-eyed over this.

What we need in government is people who understand technology at a deep and fundamental level, not people who see what a slick sales team is selling, not people who read a report in a newspaper and go, “We could do that.” You need a fundamental understanding.

Sarah Stewart:

Do you really think it’s possible that every Civil Servant can understand the fundamentals of emerging technology and digital practice?

Terence Eden:

Yes.

Sarah Stewart:

Because it can seem quite frightening.

Terence Eden:

Yes, absolutely. We wouldn’t accept a civil servant who couldn’t read or write. We can be as inclusive as we like, but we need to set minimum standards for being able to engage with the work that we do. Similarly, we wouldn’t accept a civil servant who couldn’t type or use a computer in a basic way.

I think there’s a lot of nonsense talked about digital natives. What a digital native is: someone whose parents were rich enough to buy them a computer when they were a kid. That’s great, but not everyone is that lucky, but what we can do is say, “We’re not going to just train you in how to fill in a spreadsheet. We’re going to teach you to think about how you would build a formula in a spreadsheet, how to build an algorithm,” and you can start building up on that.

We have to be committed to lifelong learning in the civil service. It’s not good enough to say, “Okay, this is your job. You’re going to do it for the next 25 to 40 years, and there will be no change in it whatsoever.” That’s unrealistic. I think as part of that – and it’s not going to happen overnight – we need to make sure that when someone comes in and says, “We’re going to use an algorithm,” that everyone in the room not only understands that but is able to critique it, and potentially be able to write it, as well.

I think that’s what the ‘Emerging Technology Development Programme’ is about, is making sure that civil servants can code, making sure that they understand how they would build an AI system, understand what the ethics are, learn about what the reasons for and against using a bit of technology like distributed ledgers are, because otherwise we end up with people just buying stuff which isn’t suitable.

We have a slight problem in that we don’t want to tie ourselves to tech which is going to go out of date quickly. It would have been… You can imagine a GDS in the past saying, “Let’s put all of government onto Teletext.” That would be great, but that has a limited shelf life.

We’ve got a statement which says that government shouldn’t build apps, because they’re really expensive to use, and they don’t work for everyone. Okay, maybe there are some limited circumstances where we can use them, but by and large we should be providing on neutral technology platforms, like the web. We need to understand exactly what the limitations are when we say, “Bitcoin, blockchain, the cloud, AI,” anything like that.

So, there are new technologies, and we do adopt them. We can be slow to adopt them, and part of that is: are we chasing fashion, or are we chasing utility? It’s very easy to confuse the two. We wouldn’t, I think, go for transmitting government documents by Snapchat, for example. How cool would that be?

Sarah Stewart:

The filters, yes.

Terence Eden:

Brilliant, but what’s the user need for it? Is it just we want to do something that looks cool? That’s not a user need.

Sarah Stewart:

Yes. The amount of times I hear people talking about headsets, as though everybody in the country is going to have a VR headset.

Terence Eden:

Yes, we’re all going to be jacked into the cyber matrix, (Laughter) watching VR stuff. Yes, and maybe VR will take off; maybe we will… In a year’s time, I’ll be the head of VR for GDS. How cool a job title would that be?

Sarah Stewart:

Well, remember me, or look for me in the matrix.

Terence Eden:

Yes, but is there a user need for it? For some parts of government, you might say, if you’re doing planning decisions, for example, “Would it be good to strap on a VR headset and take a look around this 3D representation of the town after the remodelling or after the bypass has been built?” whatever it is. Okay, yes, you could make an argument for that. Do people want to interact with government in something like ‘Second Life’, or ‘Minecraft’, or ‘Fortnite’, (Laughter) or any of these things which are just coming out? Maybe.

Sarah Stewart:

I’d love to see the customisable characters.

Terence Eden:

Yes, brilliant. We’ve got to be ever so slightly careful that this cool, shiny tech is going to last, because, if we make an investment in it, that’s other people’s money that we’re spending. When I was in the private sector, it’s shareholders’ money that you’re spending. It’s still someone else’s money that you’re spending, and you have to have a really good business case.

It’s alright for us to experiment. Some people in Department for Transport are brilliant at this. Take an idea, run it for a few weeks, and don’t spend more than a few thousand pounds on it, and a few people’s time. Can it work? Does it work? If it doesn’t work, brilliant, we’ve saved money by saying, “Look, doing it this way is probably not going to work for us.” What we don’t want to do is go full in and say, “We’re going to make 3D ‘Angry Birds’ avatars of all civil servants, and then you can play them on your Oculus Rift, or something like that. It’s nonsense.

Sarah Stewart:

Is sandpit testing something that happens across government, it happens loads in the financial industry, but in government does that exist?

Terence Eden:

In part it does. One of the big problems that I see is people are afraid of failure. They shouldn’t be. If we were to say, “We are…” It’s very easy to run a procurement exercise and say, “We’re going to choose the best,” but sometimes what’s the necessary thing to do is, “We are going to ask three or four people to build something, to build a prototype in a few weeks, and we expect two of them to fail.” When you say that and you say, “Hang on, we’re going to spend money and we know that it’s going to fail?” Yes, but we don’t know which one is going to fail. We need to try four or five different approaches. Rather than wait until we’ve spent £1m and there’s a public enquiry on it, let’s get the failure out of the way as soon as possible.

That’s really scary for people of all levels in the civil service, but it’s absolutely necessary. We need to experiment. We need to take risks – small, self-contained risks where, if it fails, okay, so we’ve spent a bit of money, but not an extortionate amount. We’ve spent a bit of time, but only a few weeks, and what we’ve come up with is: “You know what? Doing it that way, it just won’t work. We’ve experimented, we’ve failed, but that’s going to save us more money in the long term.” It’s a mind-set change, and it’s psychologically difficult to turn to your manager and say, “I want to fail at something, please,” but it’s absolutely necessary.

Sarah Stewart:

So somewhat related to that is learning and development. I know that you were involved in the pilot ‘Emerging Technology Development Programme’, which was run through the GDS Academy, could you tell more a bit more about that?

Terence Eden:

So, I’ve already gone on a course to learn ‘R’, which is statistical language. My statistics skills weren’t great, if I’m honest, so being able to learn how to use a really powerful tool like that, and start doing some machine learning on the data that we’re getting in, has been incredibly useful for my job, but I’m also going around talking to other civil servants about things like facial recognition and digital ethics.

It’s really easy for us to see, “Wow, we can do something like face recognition. How cool would that be for our department?” but we also need to think about, “What are the problems? What are the dangers? What are the moral, legal, and ethical considerations that we have to do?”

We know, for example, that, with a cheap webcam and some open-source code, you can do crude gender recognition, so you can say that “This face looks 90% male,” or, “80% female.” That might be useful in some circumstances, but it’s also particularly scary, and difficult, and troubling if you get it wrong, or if someone doesn’t want their born gender revealed, or anything like that.

Where we see bright, shiny, new technology, “We could do something really cool with this,” we also need to temper it and say, “Well, what are the downsides? What are the moral limits to what we can do with this tech?”

Sarah Stewart:

You mention moral limits, and I would like to talk to you a little more about government and ethics, especially as it relates to emerging technology - what is our responsibility?

Terence Eden:

I’m not sure – I’m not a politician, obviously – I’m not sure whether it’s our place to say for the private sector, or for individuals, or for open-source projects what to do, but we absolutely have a duty to talk to civil servants about what they are responsible for.

We have a civil service code, and it says that all of us have to act impartially, and a whole bunch of other things, but it doesn’t… It talks about acting in an ethical fashion, but it doesn’t necessarily address the code that we create. If you’re working in a big department, and you’ve got a big project and we’re going to create some cool machine-learning thing to look at data, then you should be doing an ethical review on that. The Department for – what are they called, ‘Data and Ethics’?

Sarah Stewart:

Oh we have the Centre for Data Ethics.

Terence Eden:

Centre for Data Ethics, yes. If you’ve got a big project that you’re working on, and you’re doing some big data, and you’re trying to learn something from there, then talking to the Centre for Data Ethics is a good thing. You should absolutely be doing it, but, if you’ve just got your laptop one lunchtime, and you’ve downloaded some open-source code from GitHub, and you’re running a machine-learning algorithm on a huge dataset, you can do that by yourself, with no oversight. Should you? What are the ethical considerations that you, as an individual, have to consider?

Sarah Stewart:

Okay, cast your mind back to July. You were at the National Cyber Security Centre. I was there, too. I saw you with a robot. What was all that about?

Terence Eden:

The robots are coming for us. There’s no doubt about that, (Laughter) but what we have to understand is, when we say, “The robots are coming for our jobs,” what jobs do we mean? What are the limits of robotics? What can they do? What can’t they do? We built a really simple Lego robot which solves a Rubik’s Cube. You can go online. The instructions are there. The source code is there. It took my wife and I an afternoon to build it, and this solves a Rubik’s Cube faster than nearly everyone in the building. There’s one person in this building who can beat it, so his job is safe. (Laughter)

Okay, so government doesn’t sort Rubik’s Cubes, generally. That’s not our job, but we do lots of repetitive work with data which is just rote work. Can we train a robot to do that? How do we deal with edge cases? What are the limits when we start doing robotic process automation? That’s what people need to start thinking about now, is what value do they bring to a job which couldn’t be encoded in an algorithm? I think that’s a challenge for all of us.

Sarah Stewart:

Just to confirm, the robots are or aren’t coming for our jobs, specifically writers?

Terence Eden:

Yes. Do you have a spell check on your PC?

Sarah Stewart:

I do.

Terence Eden:

There we go. There is a piece of AI which is doing your job. We don’t think of that as AI, but there’s some really sophisticated technology going in to say, ‘Not only have you misspelt that word, because it doesn’t match the dictionary, but, looking at the context, you probably mean this word.’

Sarah Stewart:

Yes. That’s already happened. Do you remember the Microsoft paperclip? It looks like you’re writing a letter.

Terence Eden:

Yes.

Sarah Stewart:

Actually, I was having a conversation with someone a couple of months ago about speechwriting and how, if you have all of the elements of speechwriting and a computer program, so kind of the rule of three, repetition, a story that includes a beginning, a middle and an end, you actually don’t really need a human to do that.

Terence Eden:

Absolutely.

Sarah Stewart:

Although I probably shouldn’t say that, because I need my job.

Terence Eden:

I think what we’ll see more is robotic enhancement, if you like, so, as you say, writing a speech, maybe having Clippy coming in and saying, ‘You’re writing a speech. Do you need help with that?” isn’t-

Sarah Stewart:

Clippy, yes.

Terence Eden:

Maybe that’s not what you want, but having something which will gently guide you down the right path, making sure that your spelling and grammar is correct, that the structure is correct, that will all be great. Similarly, when you receive a document and your email program has already scanned it and gone, ‘Well, that’s the address, and this is the person who sent it,’ and things like that, you’re just being augmented a bit by a robot, by a bit of artificial intelligence.

That’s slowly creeping in. I think lots of email programs now offer buttons at the bottom where you can just read the email and it says, ‘You can either reply, “Yes, that’s great,” or, “No, I need more time to think about it.”’ Realistically, that’s what you want to say, quite a lot of the time.

So… Robots are coming for us all now.

Sarah Stewart:

As long as they don’t come for us in… I’ve seen, like, five films in my entire life, and there’s… Is it ‘I, Robot’, with Will Smith? At first the robots are friendly, and then in the second half I think the robots try to kill… This is like when I try to explain ‘Star Wars’ to you, and you actually know...

Terence Eden:

We need a podcast of you explaining ‘Star Wars’, because it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

Sarah Stewart:

It’s really complex. Let’s talk about the past - you used to sell ringtones - what made you want to work here?

Terence Eden:

Working in the private sector is great, and working in the public sector is also great. I think people get really hung up about there being a difference, and there isn’t. I’ve worked for some of the biggest companies in the UK, and they have all the same problems that a large government department has. I’ve worked for tiny start-ups, and they can be just as agile as GDS is. There are positives and negatives.

I’d spent a long time doing private sector stuff, and it was great fun, but I saw the work that GDS was doing and thought, “I want to be part of that. I want to be pushing the conversation forward. I want to make sure that the government, the civil service in the country where I live, is doing the right thing.”

It’s really easy being on the outside, snarking, and I think we’ve all done it. (Laughter) It’s like, even if you’re just snarking about the train company or whoever it is, it’s really easy just to go, “They’re all useless,” nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, but it’s harder to come in and say, “Right, I’m going to try and push from the inside.” I don’t think I’m going to succeed at everything that I want, and I’m not coming in with the attitude that I’m going to revolutionise government. I think it would be dangerous if any one civil servant could do that. (Laughter)

Sarah Stewart:

I did try.

Terence Eden:

Did you? But I’ve come in with the attitude that there is a task here that I believe in that I think is important for this country and internationally. If we can lead the way, then we can help influence other people in other countries to do the right thing. That’s fantastic.

I’ve met with government representatives from around Europe, from around the world, and they’ve been consistently impressed with what GDS is doing. Some of them are going, “You’ve got some open-source code. We’ll take that, thanks. Wow, these open standards principles that you’ve got, that makes complete sense for us. Yes, we’ll take it. We’ll shuffle it around to meet our local needs, and go off and do it.” That’s brilliant.

This job wasn’t my career goal. It just so happened that all the work that I’d been doing with standards, and with open source and stuff like that, suddenly this job seemed to fit perfectly. I’ve not had a career plan. I’ve just, sort of, jumped from thing to thing that I found interesting and has coincided with what I’ve been doing anyway, so, yes, it’s mostly luck.

Don’t get me wrong, ringtones are fun – but this is actually having a positive impact on people around the world. That’s great. I love it.

I’m proud of the team. I’m proud of the work that we’ve done. I’m proud of the departments who have invited us in, been sceptical and gone, “No, alright, yes, we’re going to make some changes to that,” and I’m proud of the fact that, when we go around to departments, they quite often…

I had a lovely chat with a department who said, “We’ve done this, and we’ve done that, and we’ve opened this, and we’ve opened that. How are we doing?” (Laughter) When I said, “My goodness, you are just streets ahead of everyone else,” they just beamed with pride. That was absolutely lovely.

Sarah Stewart:

For the uninitiated, can you explain what open standards are and what open source is?

Terence Eden:

They’re two very different things. Open standards means that, when you’ve got two computers that want to communicate, the language that they use is standardised. Everyone can understand it. We actually have a 48-point definition of open standards, which I’m not going to go onto here, but basically it’s the organisation which creates it. They create it in an open fashion. That means you can see the process by which it happens and that you can go in and make some changes.

They publish it for free – we don’t want government departments to be spending thousands of pounds on standards again and again – and that they have wide international adoption. That’s what open standards are. It just means that our computers can work with computers around the world for free.

Sarah Stewart:

Tell me about open source.

Terence Eden:

People have the right to see how decisions are being made. Open source is about… In one sense, it’s about publishing the code that we use to run bits of the country. You can see how the GOV.UK website is built. All the code is there, but when we start saying, “Okay, this is how a decision is made, this is how systems integrate with each other,” we should be publishing that. There are several good reasons for doing this. Firstly is it increases trust. If you can see, if you’re a user and you can see how this code works, hopefully you will trust it more.

Sarah Stewart:

So how are we doing in the world stage on open standards?

Terence Eden:

Good. Could do better, but I always think we can do better. We’re involved with some EU committees around the world, and we are one of the few governments which are on the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium’s advisory committee. Yes, we are going out, we are leading the way in certain areas, but what we’re seeing – and I think this is fascinating – is some countries leapfrogging us.

When I worked for the mobile phone industry, one of the problems with the UK was we had this huge investment in 2G networks, and then another huge investment in 3G networks. You would find countries in Africa which never had, even, landlines before, going, “We’ll just build a 3G network.” They don’t have any of that legacy investment, so they were able to leapfrog us in terms of speed, and connectivity, and price. GDS has been going for, is it, like, six years now?

Sarah Stewart:

Seven. I think we’re approaching our seventh.

Terence Eden:

Six, seven years, yes, so, naturally, we’ve got a lot of legacy stuff that we’ve built up. That means some processes which are a bit slow, and that’s fine, but then you see other countries who’ve skipped to the end. They said, “Okay, so we’ve seen all the mistakes GDS have made. We’ve seen what they’ve come out with at the end. We’ll just take that end piece and run with it.” Brilliant, that’s great. I think we have paved the way for lots of people, but there’s always more we can do.

Sarah Stewart:

So internationally, who do you think is doing good work - which governments are piquing your interest?

Terence Eden:

I’ve got to give a shout out to New Zealand. I think they’re doing some amazing things, making their government more open, more transparent, getting on board the open source and the open standards train. That’s partly – that’s entirely – a testament to the people who work in New Zealand’s public service. They absolutely get it, and we’re seeing them spread out around. I know that some of them have gone off to Australia, which is great.

We’ve got some GDS alumna off in Canada, and now they are doing brilliant stuff. One of the lovely things about Canada is lots of their digital strategy is on GitHub, so you can just go along and say, “Hang on, you could do something better there,” or even as simple as, “There’s a spelling mistake there,” and fix it. I think that’s wonderful for openness.

Sarah Stewart:

You’re a bug hunter yourself, aren’t you?

Terence Eden:

I am, yes.

Sarah Stewart:

You’re in Google’s Hall of Fame.

Terence Eden:

My wife and I are, yes.

Sarah Stewart:

Oh both of you?

Terence Eden:

Yes. No – well, it was my wife who discovered the bug, and then I reported it, so we’re joint recipients, think.

Sarah Stewart:

What was the bug?

Terence Eden:

So Google Calendar, if you typed up a reminder to yourself which said, ‘Email boss@work.com about pay rise,’ if you put that in the subject line, it would automatically copy it to your boss’ calendar.

Sarah Stewart:

That’s a big bug, isn’t it?

Terence Eden:

Yes. Basically, yes that’s what happened, so we reported it and they fixed it, but finding bugs is good fun. If people find bugs in government, they should tell us, because we’ll fix them.

Sarah Stewart:

So what does your vision of a future government look like, a successful future government, look like?

Terence Eden:

The government of the future – I hope – will be more open, and it will be more collaborative. I don’t want GDS to be a single government department. I want GDS to be everywhere. I want everyone to know what good looks like and how to code in the open.

I think the government of the future will have fewer barriers. Someone asked me the other day what department I was in, and I said, “GDS.” They went, “No, which subdivision of GDS?” I haven’t got a clue. I just work for GDS. Really, I work for Cabinet Office. If I’m completely honest, I work for the civil service.

If someone from DWP says, “I need some help with something,” I’m going to go and help them. Of course I will. If someone from anywhere in the country in the civil service says, “We need some help with this,” why wouldn’t I go and help them? I think we need to break down these barriers. If the best team at content design happens to be in Defra, or wherever, great, we should be learning from them. They should be teaching us.

I would love it not only if the government of the future was more open, and more transparent, and more open source, and used more open standards, but that the civil service was really just one civil service. It wasn’t just based in London, and that we can… It’s not based in London now, but that we felt free to move more or less anywhere within it and give people the help, and the advice, and the support that they need, and learn from anyone in any department, because we are not Defra, and DWP, and Department for Health and anything else. We’re not. We are one team, OneTeamGov.

Sarah Stewart:

It’s really interesting that you've said that – we’re actually recording a podcast with Kit Collingwood from OneTeamGov and DWP fame in December. Okay final question – you’ve hacked your vacuum, your car is on Twitter, your house turns off when you leave it – what’s next?

Terence Eden:

The next thing that I’m interested in is biohacking. So I’ve got some fake nails, just like fashion nails, and they’ve got a small bit of computer circuitry in, which is kind of like your Oyster card. It’s an NFC chip, and they glow when I put them around electromagnetic fields, so, if I’m on the tube and I put my hand against an Oyster card reader, my fingertips glow.

You can also put data on there, so I can transfer data from my fingertips. That’s kind of silly, but I’m fascinated by how we can enhance people.

What are the things that we can put on us and in us which will make us better? That’s what I’m interested in.

Sarah Stewart:

Terence, thank you so much.

Terence Eden:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Sarah Stewart:

That brings us to the end of this month’s podcast. I hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll listen again next month when we talk to another interesting person about interesting things. Until then, farewell.

GDS Podcast #1 - An interview with Neil Williams Sep 28, 2018

Outgoing Head of GOV.UK Neil Williams talks about his time at GDS, the successes and challenges, and what the future holds for the UK government website.

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The full transcript of the interview follows:

Angus Montgomery: Hello and welcome to the very first episode of the Government Digital Service podcast. My name’s Angus Montgomery, I’m a senior writer at GDS and for this episode I’m going to be talking to Neil Williams, who is the head of GOV.UK. And Neil is leaving GDS shortly for an exciting new job, so we’re going to be talking to him about that and also talking to him about his time at GDS, because he’s been here since the very beginning. So I hope you enjoy this episode and let’s go straight into the conversation.

Neil Williams: I'm going to Croydon Council. So leaving not only GDS-

Angus Montgomery: South London?

Neil Williams: South London. South London is the place to be, I have to say. Yes, not only leaving GDS, but leaving the Civil Service actually, because local government is not the Civil Service of course, to go and work in Croydon as Chief Digital Officer for the council there. They've got a lot of ambition, and it’s a really exciting time for Croydon. People laugh when I say that.

Angus Montgomery: I just laughed as well. I didn’t mean to.

Neil Williams: Croydon has this reputation that is completely unwarranted, and we’re going to prove the world wrong. It’s changing massively. It’s already gone through a lot of change. You're probably aware of some stuff. It’s got a Boxpark. There’s a lot of reporting around the Westfield/Hammerson development that might be happening, which we very much hope is happening. Also Croydon Tech City. So Croydon’s got a lot of growth in the tech industry, tech sector. Fantastic companies starting up and scaling up in Croydon, and that’s all part of the story.

Plus the stuff that’s more in my wheelhouse, that I've been doing here in GDS around transforming services. Making the public services that Croydon provides to residents and business to be as good as they should be. As good as everything else that people expect in their day to lives using digital services these days.

Angus Montgomery: So not much on your plate then?

Neil Williams: It’s quite a big job. I'm excited about it. There’s a lot about it that’s new, which is kind of giving me a new lease of energy, the fact that I've got this big challenge to face and lots of learning to do.

Which reminds me a lot about how I felt when I first working with GDS in fact. Just how exciting I found the prospect of coming and working for this organisation, and being part of this amazing revolution. I'm feeling that again actually about the job in Croydon, [00:02:33] about the work to be done there.

It seems like the right time. It’s a perfect time and place, where I am in my career, those things coming together. It’s a really good match. So it came up, and I put in for it, and lo and behold I am now Chief Digital Officer in Croydon Council from mid-October.

Angus Montgomery: You’ve been at GDS since before the beginning, haven’t you? Seven, eight years?

Neil Williams: Yes, I was working it out this morning. It’s seven years and two months. I was 34 when I started working in GDS. I'm 42 now. I just had my birthday last week.

Angus Montgomery: Full disclosure.

Neil Williams: Yes. That’s maybe too much information to be sharing. I didn’t have grey hair when I started. My youngest child was just born, and he’s nearly eight now. So yes, it’s been a really big part of my life.

Angus Montgomery: So you can track your late 30s and early 40s through images of you standing in front of number 10?

Neil Williams: Yes, and unfortunately quite a few embarrassing pictures of me on the GDS flicker. (Laughter) There have been a few regrettable outfits for celebrations and milestones launching GOV.UK, and celebrating GOV.UK birthdays, where looking back on it I may not have worn those things if I had known it was going to be on the internet forever. (Laughter)

Angus Montgomery: Now you say that, there’s an image of you… I'm trying to remember. I think it’s at the Design Museum, when GOV.UK won the Designs of the Year, and you're wearing a Robocop t-shirt. (Laughter)

Neil Williams: Yes, I am. I can tell that story if you like. That’s one of my proudest GDS moments, I think. Maybe we will get to that later. Do you want me to do it now?

Angus Montgomery: Well, no. Let us know where that came from, because this is…

Well, just as a bit of context, because I've gone straight into that, but you’ve been head of GOV.UK since the beginning, and in 2012, shortly after GOV.UK launched, it won the Design Museum’s Design of the Year Award, which is an incredible accolade. I can’t remember what it beat, but I think it beat several…

That’s one of those awards where they judge things like buildings, and cars, and new products, and mad graphic design. So for a government website to win that award was really incredible, I think.

Neil Williams: Yes. Actually, we were talking about it the other day, and Mark Hurrell, the head designer on GOV.UK, he said it’s actually the first time a website ever won that award, which I had completely forgotten. Yes, it was amazing. That was 2013.

We had launched GOV.UK in 2012, as in replacing Directgov and Business Link, which were the previous big super sites for public services. Then we were well into the next phase, which was shutting down and replacing all of the websites of departments of state.

I was very much working on that bit of it at the time. My head was down and working very attentively, in this fairly crazy timescale, to shut down those websites, and starting to look at how we were going to start closing down the websites of 350 arms-length bodies. A huge project.

In the midst of that, in the midst of that frantic busy period, someone approached me. It was Tom Loosemore, Etienne Pollard. One of those early GDS leaders. Saying, “Oh, there’s an award ceremony. We’ve been nominated for an award, and we need some people to go. Can you go to it?”

Angus Montgomery: “We need some people to go.” That’s an attractive… (Laughter)

Neil Williams: Yes. It was just like, “We need a few people to make sure we’re going to be represented there.”

Angus Montgomery: “To fill the seats.” (Laughter)

Neil Williams: I now know that they knew that we were going to win, but I didn’t know that, at all, at the time, and I didn’t really think much of it. “Oh, yes, fine. Yes, I will go along to that. That’s no problem at all.”

I think it was the same day. I'm not sure whether it was that same day or a different day when I was given notice, but anyway, I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t dress up for the occasion. So I rock up to the Design Museum in my jeans and in my Robocop t-shirt, an OCP logo on it.

The evening included quite a lot of free alcohol. It was quite a glitzy affair, and I was definitely under-dressed for the occasion, but I thought, “That’s fine. We’re just here to be part of an audience.” Hanging around at the back, having the free canapes, partaking of the plentiful free wine that was being distributed.

Then Griff Rhys Jones, who was presenting the award, gets up on stage and announces the winners in each category, and we won our category. Much triumphant jubilation and celebration.

Then went on to reveal that we won the whole thing. We won the Design of the Year Award as a whole. Which then led to this photo call. By which point I was quite drunk as well. I had no idea this was going to happen.

Yes, so there’s that famous photo of a bunch of GDS people accepting the award, all quite smartly dressed, apart from me letting the side down with my Robocop t-shirt.

Angus Montgomery: Tell me how you got involved in this thing in the first place. You’ve been in the Civil Service before, but you're not a career civil servant, are you? Or you hadn’t been.

Neil Williams: Well, yes. I would like to think of myself as not being a career civil servant. I started in the private sector, in a communications publishing agency. It was a magazine agency.

I thought I wanted to be a journalist actually. I did English at university. I thought I wanted to be a journalist. Went into publishing. Was passionate about publishing and the power of the printed word. Distributing information to people. Equipping them with information. Informing people and so forth.

I went into corporate publishing, as a way to learn about publishing, but whilst I was working for that company the internet was becoming a bigger deal, a bigger thing.

I was also mucking around in my spare time with comedy websites. That was known by my employers, who then said, as they were starting to think about, “How do we get in on this?” they asked me if I wanted to run the London office of their new digital offering to their clients.

I leapt at the chance. That was a really good leg up for me. That’s where I learnt about digital, about building websites. So that was a great place, where I learnt…

I said I wanted to be in publishing and journalism. The information is power thing excited me, and of course doing that digitally, doing that online, massively more so. More empowering people.

I fell in love instantly with the immediacy of what you get with publishing to the web, and providing services over the web, and getting the feedback, and being able to improve based on the fact that you can see in real time what users are doing. That’s been my passion ever since. After a few years of doing that…

That is now a dwindling small part of my career, when you look back on it, so it’s probably true to say that I am a career civil servant. A few years in a digital agency. Then I wanted to see the other side of things, and be client side, and see something through to its outcomes, rather than just build a thing and hand it over. I joined the Civil Service. I joined the government communications profession.

Angus Montgomery: I know it well.

Neil Williams: And my first gig was in the Department for Trade and Industry, as it was then, as an assistant information officer. A young, eager civil servant.

There were some digital elements to that job, but actually quite a lot of my earliest Civil Service gig was going to Number 10 every week to do the grid meeting, which is the Alastair Campbell era. It’s still the process now.

And I was moving around within the department. So there’s an eight-year period, which I'm not going to go into in any detail,where I moved around between different departments, doing digital things.

I worked my way up the greasy pole of the Civil Service. From a web manager, managing a bit of a website and looking after the content and the information architecture, through to running whole teams, running the website, intranet, social media side of things.

During those years I did a lot of work on product development, around online consultation tools and digital engagement platforms. And lots of frustration actually. So this brings us to the beginning of the GDS story.

Angus Montgomery: This is the 2010 Martha Lane Fox bombshell?

Neil Williams: Yes. The old way, the traditional way, and this is pretty common not just in government but everywhere, websites sprung out of being a thing led by communications teams. “It’s just another channel for us to do our communications.”

And it is, but it is also, as we all now know, the way that people do their business and transact. People come to your website to do a thing, to use a service, to fulfil a need. It took a long time for the Civil Service to recognise that.

For many years myself and others in the digital communications teams within departments were getting increasingly frustrated. A lone voice really. Trying within our departments to show them the data that we had and go, “Look, people are coming for things that we’re not providing them with. We need to do a better job of this.”

A lot of that falling on deaf ears, not getting prioritised in the way that it needed to, and also clearly fragmented across thousands of websites, across all of these organisations.

A lot of great work was done before GDS, and this story has been told on the History of GDS series of blog posts, which if people haven’t seen are really well worth looking at.

Tom Loosemore has talked about this before, about standing on the shoulders of giants. There was enormous effort, over many, many years, to digitise government, to centralise things, to put users first.

Directgov and Business Link were the current incarnations of that, of a service-led approach, but it was just a small proportion of the overall service offering from government, and it was still really quite comms focused. The conversations were about reach, and there was advertising to try and promote the existence of these channels, etc.

Lots of it was written from the perspective of the department trying to tell people what they should do, rather than understanding what it is that people are trying to do and then designing things that meet those needs.

So GDS. In 2010, this is a really well-told story, and people are pretty familiar with it now, but 2010 Martha Lane Fox was commissioned to review the government’s website, particularly Directgov. She took a broader remit, and looked at the whole thing, and, in summary, said, “Start again.”

Angus Montgomery: ‘Revolution, not evolution’.

Neil Williams: ‘Revolution, not evolution’. Yes, that was the title.

Angus Montgomery: And everyone at GDS, or who has been at GDS, has said, like Tom, that we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, and huge amounts of work was done beforehand, but why do you think Martha’s report was such a turning point? Because it was, because it led to a huge amount of change.

Neil Williams: Yes. It’s a really pithy, succinct little letter. It’s not reams and reams of paper. It was just quite a simple call to action really. Which was to say, “You need to take ownership of the user experience, in a new organisation, and empower a new leader, and organisation under that leader, to do that, to take a user-led approach.” That was the different thing. Take a user-led approach, and to use the methods that are being used everywhere used.

Government had not yet really caught up to what was going on in the wider technology industry around ways of working, agile and so forth, around working iteratively, experimentally, and proving things early. Rather than upfront requirement specs, and then out comes something at the end which you then later discover doesn’t work.

Those were the two things really. It was that focus on user needs, and work in that different way, which was bringing skills into government that hadn’t been here before. Design, and user research, and software development skills that hadn’t previously been done in-house. It had always been outsourced.

Angus Montgomery: So it was a clear and simple strategy, or strategic direction, from Martha Lane Fox’s report. There was a clear mandate. This has been talked about a lot, that we had, or GDS had, Francis Maude backing it at a very high level, and giving it the mandate to-

Neil Williams: Yes, absolutely. That was the other thing. It wasn’t just Martha’s letter. It was absolutely a kind of perfect storm of political will and the timing being right.

Yes, the Martha letter came out when I was Head of Digital Comms, or some title like that, at the Department for Business. I had moved around between departments. Ended up back in the Department for Business again.

It was advocating something pretty radical, that would be a threat really to the digital comms view, to a comms-led view of controlling our channels. That was an interesting situation to find myself in, right?

I was reading this stuff from Martha and thinking, “This is brilliant. This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is absolutely the right thing.” But then internally my job required me to do some more maybe circumspect briefing to the minister and to the director of comms about, “Actually, well, this is a risk to us.”

So I was doing both of those things. I was talking internally about the positives of what this could mean for government, but the risks to our organisation, but publicly I blogged…

I thought, “This is brilliant.” I blogged enthusiastically, because I had a personal blog at the time, about my thoughts on how this could be the beginning of something really exciting.

That’s the thing that led me to meeting Tom Loosemore. Tom Loosemore, who as we all know is one of the early architects of GDS, saw my blog post, and got in touch and said, “Let’s have a chat.” And that’s how my journey into GDS started. It started by answering that email from Tom Loosemore and going for pizza with him.

Angus Montgomery: The power of blogging.

Neil Williams: Yes. We had a chat over pizza, where he was talking about his ideas for getting an alpha. Getting a team together that could produce something quickly, as a sort of throwaway prototype, that would show a different way of working.

Tom was saying stuff that was exciting but contained many new words. (Laughter) He was talking about alphas and agile ways of working. I don’t know what these things are.

Angus Montgomery: Now we’re at a stage, at GDS and throughout government, where agile is a touchstone of how we work, and it’s accepted that doing things in agile is doing things better, and there’s lots of opportunity for people to learn how that works, and what that means, and apply that to the things that they do, but at the time, as you said, this didn’t really exist in government. You, as someone who had worked in government, probably didn’t know what agile was.

Neil Williams: No.

Angus Montgomery: How did you learn about it, and how did you know that this was the right approach?

Neil Williams: A mix of reading up on it. Initially just going home and Googling those new words and finding out about these ways of working. But also it immediately spoke to me.

I had been through several years of several projects where I had felt just how awful and frustrating it is to build websites in a waterfall way. I've got some very difficult experiences that I had at [BEIS], when we rebuilt the website there, and it was project managed by a very thorough project manager in a waterfall way.

I was the Senior Responsible Officer, I think, or Senior User I think it is in PRINCE2 language, for the website. As the website was progressing we had a requirements document upfront, all that way of working. We were specifying, with as much predicting the future and guesswork as we possibly can, a load of stuff, and writing it down, around, ‘This is what the website needs to do. This is what the publishing system needs to do’. Then handing that over to a supplier, who then starts to try and interpret that and build that.

During that process, seeing as the thing is emerging, and we’re doing the user acceptance testing and all of that stuff on it, that this is just far away from the thing that I had in my head. So there’s already a gap between the written word and then the meaning that goes into the heads of the people who are then building that thing.

Then also all of the change that’s occurring at the same time. Whilst we are building that thing the world is not staying still, and there is an enormous amount of change in our understanding around what we want that thing to do.

Trying to get those changes in, but facing the waterfall approach, rigid change control process, and just feeling like I'm banging my head against a brick wall. It was really frustrating. Then when I…

Back to the question about how do I learn about agile, and some of these new concepts, it was really only when I got in there. I knew what the bad thing felt like, and I knew that that wasn’t right. I knew that you absolutely need to embrace the change as part of the process, embrace learning as part of the process of delivering something as live and ever changing as a website.

Then I came in as a product manager, initially part-time, and then full-time when GDS was properly established and able to advertise a role, and started working with Pete Herlihy, who is still here now in GDS.

Angus Montgomery: Yes, on Notify.

Neil Williams: Yes, he’s lead product manager on Notify now, but back then he was delivery manager.

Again, Tom Loosemore was making stuff happen behind the scenes. He was the person who introduced me and Pete. He said something along the lines of, “Neil’s the guy who knows what needs to happen, and Pete’s the guy who knows how to make it happen. You two should talk.” So we did.

I learnt a lot of what I now know from working with Pete and working as we then built out a team. Working with some terrific talented software developers, designers, content designers, and so forth, and user researchers, in a multidisciplinary way.

Learning on the job what it meant to be a product manager. Obviously, reading up about it. I went on a few courses, I think, too. But mostly learning on the job.

Zooming back out a little bit to the GDS career experience, I've learnt so much here. I've never learnt as much probably in the whole of the rest of my career as I've learnt in my time here.

Angus Montgomery: Because that first year was learning about agile, putting a team together. Learning how to build this thing. Learning how to land it. At what stage did you realise, “Oh, we’ve done this now. This thing is landing, and it’s getting big, and it’s successful. Oh, wow. We’re in charge of a piece of national infrastructure now”?

Neil Williams: That’s an interesting question. I always knew it would. We knew what we were building at the start. We knew we were building something-

Angus Montgomery: So you never had any doubts that this was going to work?

Neil Williams: Oh, God, yes. We had absolute doubt. The prevailing view when we started was that, “This will not work.”

Not internally. Internally, it was certainly a stretch goal. (Laughter) It was ambitious, and it felt a little bit impossible, but in a really exciting way. That is one of the key ingredients of success, is you want your team to feel like something is only just about doable. (Laughter) There’s nothing more motivating than a deadline and a nearly impossible task. Also a bunch of naysayers saying, “This will never work.” And that really united us as a team.

Angus Montgomery: So what then happened? Because I think we talk quite a lot about the early years, and a lot has been written, obviously, and GDS was blogging like crazy in those days about the early stages, and how quickly you built the thing, and how quickly you transitioned onto it.

One thing that we have talked about as GDS, but probably not in as great detail, is what happened when it then got big, and you had to deal with issues of scale, and you had to deal with issues of…

Something a lot of people on GOV.UK have talked to me about is tech debt. That you built this thing very quickly and you had quite a bit of tech debt involved. How did you deal with that? Presumably you always knew this was a problem you were going to have to face.

Neil Williams: Yes, to a degree. That 14 people that did a bit on alpha scaled very rapidly to being 140 people. There were lots of teams working in parallel, and building bits of software just in time, like I was just talking about. Just in time for…

“We’re not going to build anything we don’t have to build. We’re just going to build what’s necessary to achieve the transition, to shut these other websites down and bring them all in.”

But that approach means you're laying stuff on top of other stuff, and things were getting built by different teams in parallel, adding to this growing code base, and in some cases therefore duplicative stuff happening. Where maybe we’ve built one publishing system for publishing a certain kind of format of content, another publishing system for publishing another kind of format of content.

Then in the process we’ve ended up with two different ways of doing something like attachments, asset management. Then we’ve got complexity, and we’ve got bits of code that different teams don’t know how to change without quite a steep learning curve, and so on. And that was the case everywhere.

Given the pace of how fast we were going, and how ambitious the timescales were for shutting down what turned out to be 1,882 websites… (Laughter) Exactly. It was incredible.

We knew, yes. We knew. It was talked about. It was done knowingly, that, “We are making things here that we’re going to have to come back to. That are going to be good enough for now, and they’re going to achieve what we need to achieve, but they will need fixing, and they will need replacing and consolidating.”

So we absolutely knew, and there was much talk of it. Quite a lot of it got written down at the time as ‘This is some tech debt that we’re going to definitely need to come back to’. Yes, we weren’t blind to that fact, but I think the degree of it, and the amount of time it took to resolve it, was slightly unexpected.

That’s partly because of massive personnel change as well. Straight off the back of finishing… Well, I say finishing. GOV.UK is never finished. Let’s just get that out there. Always be iterating.

GOV.UK’s initial build, and the transition, and the shutting down, the transition story of shutting down those 1,882 websites, had an end date, and that end date felt like a step change to many people.

As in lots of people came into GDS in those early days to do the disruptive thing. To do the start-up thing. To do Martha’s revolution. Then at that moment of, “Actually, we’ve now shut down the last website,” to lots of those people that felt like, “Now we’re going into some other mode. Now we’re going into actually we’re just part of government now, aren’t we? I don’t know. Do I necessarily want to be part of that?” So there was some natural drifting away of some people.

Plus, also, the budget shrank at that point. The project to do the transition was funded and came to an end. So actually we were going to go down to an operational smaller team anyway. So a combination of attrition, of people leaving anyway, plus the fact that we did need to get a bit smaller.

Also, at that time, that’s when the early founders of GDS left. Mike Bracken, Tom Loosemore, Ben Terrett left around that time. Which also led to some other people going, “Well, actually, I came here for them. I came here with them. And I'm leaving too.”

So that meant that we had the tech debt to deal with at a time when we also had quite a lot of new stuff. We had all of this unknown and not terribly well-documented code, that was built really quickly, by lots of different people, in different ways. Plus people who weren’t part of that joining the team, and looking at it and going, “Oh, what have we got here? Where do I start with this?” (Laughter)

So it took a long time. I think it’s common in agile software development to underestimate how long things might take. It’s an industry problem that you need to account for.

Angus Montgomery: Well, this is the interesting thing, because it feels to me as an observer that there have been three main stages of GOV.UK so far. There’s the build and transition, which we’ve talked about quite a lot. There’s the growth and sustainability years, I suppose, where you were sorting out the tech debt, and you were making this thing sustainable, and you were dealing with departmental requests, and you were putting in structures, and process, and maturing it.

Now it feels like we’re in a new stage, where a lot of that structural stuff has been sorted out, and that means you can do really exciting things. Like the work that Kate Ivey-Williams, and Sam Dub, and their team have been doing on end-to-end services. The work that’s been going on to look at voice activation on GOV.UK. And the work that’s been done that Nicky Zachariou and her team have been looking at, machine learning, structuring the content. And it feels like now, having sorted out those fundamentals, there’s a whole load of stuff we can do.

Neil Williams: Yes, absolutely. We’re iterating wildly again, I would say. (Laughter) We’re back to that feeling of early GOV.UK, where we’re able to turn ideas into working software and working product relatively quickly again.

Some of the stuff we’re doing now is greenfield stuff. Again, a lot of the ideas we had way back when, in the early days of GDS, about making the publishing system really intuitive, and giving data intelligence to publishers, so that they can understand how services are performing, and see where to prioritise, and get really rich insights about how their stuff as a department is working for users, we’re getting to that now.

We’re starting to rebuild our publishing tools with a proper user-centric design. Which we didn’t do enough of, because we had to focus on the end users more in the early days. It’s great to be doing that now.

We’re also deleting some stuff, which were the mistakes that I made. (Laughter) Which feels good on my way out. Some of the things that we did, that have stuck around way longer than we intended them to, are now being deleted. We’re now able to go, “Actually, we know now, we’ve known for a while, that this isn’t the right solution,” and we’re able to change things more radically.

Yes, we’re doing really exciting stuff. Thanks for mentioning it.

Angus Montgomery: What are you most excited about? Because Jen Allum, who was lead product manager on GOV.UK for a couple of years, I think, she’s taking over now as head of GOV.UK after you leave. What are you most excited about seeing her and the team do? What do you think is the biggest challenge that they face?

Neil Williams: I'm thrilled that Jen is taking over the job. She obviously knows the product, knows the team really, really well, and she’s absolutely brilliant.

There is some incredibly exciting stuff happening right now, which I will be sad not to be here for. You mentioned one of them. That’s the step-by-step navigation product, which is our solution for, “How do you create an end-to-end holistic service that meets a whole user need?”

If you’ve been following GDS at all, which if you're listening to this podcast you probably have, then you will have seen stuff from Lou Downe, Kate Ivey-Williams, many other people, around end-to-end services and what we mean by services and service design. Around good services being verbs and bad services being nouns.

Government has the habit of creating schemes, and initiatives, and forms, and giving them names, and then they stick around for a very long time. Users end up even having to learn those names in some cases.

The classic example is, “I want to SORN my car.” What the hell does that even mean? Whereas actually what they want to do is take their car off the road. It’s an actual thing that an actual human wants to do.

Nearly every interaction or task that you have with government requires more than one thing. You need to look at some content. You might need to transact. You might need to fill in a form. You might need to go and do some stuff that’s not with government. You might need to read something, understand what the rules are, and then go and do something offline.

If you're a childminder you’ve got a step there, which is you’ve got to go and actually set up your space and get it inspected. Then you come back, and there’s more to do with government.

Those things need setting out clearly for people. It’s still the case now. Despite all of the great work that we’ve done on GOV.UK to improve all of this stuff, it’s still far too much the case that people have to do all of that work themselves. They have to piece together the fragments of content, and transactions, and forms that they need to do.

So what we are doing with our step-by-step navigation product is that’s a product output of a lot of thinking that’s been happening in GDS for many years, around, “How do you join services together, end-to-end, around the user?”

We’ve got that product. It’s been tested. It works really, really well. To look at you might just look at it and go, “Well, there’s not much to that, is there? That’s just some numbered steps and some links.”

Yes, it is, but getting something that looks that simple, and that really works, is actually a ton of work, and we’ve put in a huge amount of work into proving that, and testing that, and making sure that really works. Making it as simple as it is.

The lion’s share of that work is actually in the service design, and in the content design, going, “Let’s map out what is… Well, first of all let’s understand what the users need. Then let’s map out what are the many things that come together, in what order, in order to meet that need.”

Angus Montgomery: Before we wrap up I just wanted to ask you to give a couple of reflections on your time at GDS. What’s the thing you're most proud of, or what was your proudest moment?

Neil Williams: That’s tricky. I've been here a long time. I've done a lot of… I say I've done a lot of good stuff. I've been around whilst some really good stuff has happened. (Laughter)

Angus Montgomery: You’ve been in the room. (Laughter)

Neil Williams: Right. I've had a little bit to do with it. It’s got to be the initial build, I think. Other than wearing a Robocop t-shirt to a very formal event, which I'm still proud of, it’s got to be the initial build of GOV.UK and that was the thing that I was directly involved with and it was just the most ridiculous fun I've ever had. I can’t imagine ever doing something as important, or fast paced, or ridiculous as that again.

There were moments during that when… Actually, I don’t think I can even tell that story probably. (Laughter) There were some things that happened just as a consequence of the speed that we were going. There are funny memories. That’s all I'm going to say about that. If you want to-

Angus Montgomery: Corner Neil in a pub or café in South London if you want to hear that story in the future.

What was the scariest moment? Or what was the moment when you thought, “Oh, my God, this might not actually work. This thing might fall apart”? Or were there moments like that?

Neil Williams: I don't know. No, I think we’ve always had the confidence, because of the talent that we’ve brought in, the capability and the motivation that everyone has.

When bad things have happened, when we’ve had security threats or any kind of technical failures, just the way that this team scrambles, and the expertise that we’ve got, just means that I'm always confident that it’s going to be okay. People are here in GDS because they really care,and they’re also incredibly capable. The best of the best.

I'm not saying that’s an organisation design or a process that I would advocate, that people have to scramble when things fail, but in those early days, when GOV.UK was relatively newly launched, and we were going through that transition of from being built to run, those were the days where maybe the operations weren’t in place yet for dealing with everything that might come at us.

There was a lot of all hands to the pump scrambling in those days, but it always came right and was poetry to watch. (Laughter) Those moments would actually be the moments where you would be most proud of the team and to be part of it. When it comes down to it these people are really amazing.

Angus Montgomery: Finally, what’s the thing you are going to miss the most?

Neil Williams: Well, it’s the people, isn’t it? That’s a cheesy thing to say, but it’s genuinely true. I've made some amazing friends here. Some people who I hope I can call lifelong friends. Many people who have already left GDS, who I'm still in touch with and see all the time.

It’s incredible coming into work and working with people who are so likeminded, and so capable, and so trusting of each other, and so funny. I laugh all the time. I come into work and it’s fun. It’s so much fun.

And we’re doing something so important, and we’re supporting each other. The culture is just so good, and the people are what makes that. Cheesy as it may be, it’s you Angus. I'm going to miss you.

Angus Montgomery: It’s all about the people. Oh, thank you. That was a leading question. (Laughter)

Neil Williams, thank you so much for doing that and best of luck in the future. We will miss you lots.

Neil Williams: Thanks very much. Thank you.

Angus Montgomery: So that wraps up the very first Government Digital Service podcast. I hope you enjoyed it - we’re aiming to do lots more episodes of this, we’re aiming to do around 1 episode a month and we’re going to be talking to lots of exciting and interesting people both inside GDS and outside GDS and we’re going to be talking about things like innovation and digital transformation and user-centred design and all sorts of interesting things like that, so if you’d like to listen to future episodes please go to wherever it is you get your podcasts and subscribe to listen to us in the future. And I hope you enjoyed that episode and I hope you listen to more. Thankyou very much.

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