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

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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." [VOX POP STARTS] 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. [VOX POP ENDS] 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 folk…

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

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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: ------------- 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-fi…

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GDS Podcast #27: Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service Feb 24, 2021

Show notes

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 an…

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GDS Podcast #26: GDS Quiz 2020 Dec 30, 2020

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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. 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. [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: 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. 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 so…

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GDS Podcast #25: GOV.UK Pay Nov 30, 2020

Show notes

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. ---------- 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 sor…

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GDS Podcast #24:Celebrating Black Excellence in Tech Oct 27, 2020

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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: ------------- 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…

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GDS Podcast #23: The Data Standards Authority Sep 30, 2020

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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: ------------- 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. 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. 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…

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GDS Podcast #22: Content Design Aug 27, 2020

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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: ------------- 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: 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. 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, g…

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GDS Podcast #21: The DDaT Fast Stream at GDS Jul 30, 2020

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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: ------------- 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 a…

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GDS Podcast #20: Celebrating 2 years of the Local Digital Declaration Jun 29, 2020

Show notes

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: ------------- 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 digi…

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