IWDevs 15

#IWDev 15

The GDS’s

Gavin [email protected]

#IWDev 15The GDS’s….

(my heavily caveated view!)

#IWDev 15The GDS’s….

Why talk about the Government….• Complete change of mind-set over last

few years• Doing some really cool things – Agile

Development, Continuous Delivery, User centred design to name a few

• Load of resources that might be of interest or useful

• Don’t get to code enough any more so if I don’t talk about this may never say anything!

#IWDev 15The GDS’s….

What are the GDS’s?Part 1: The Government Digital Service• Team put in place to deliver the

Government Digital Strategy (part 2)• Part of the Cabinet Office

• In-house team – moved away from ‘Big IT’

• Lots of recruitment at http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/jobs/

• http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk

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The Government Digital Service

• Multi-disciplinary team, covers everything from requirements, build and all resultant business change

• Website is their blog – built on Wordpress and a customised $79 theme

#IWDev 15The GDS’s….

• GOV.UK – reducing the number and cost of government websites

Main projects

(Remember the £105m website?!)

• Delivering the Digital Strategy and ‘Digital by Default’ which is part 2 – the Government Digital Strategy

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The second GDSPart 2: The Government Digital Strategy

• Created in 2012 in response to commitment to deliver services digitally

• Covers the whole of central government

• Each major department responded with their own digital strategy

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Government Digital Strategy• Predict savings of £1.7 to

£1.8 billion annually

• Cross government approach to ‘Assisted digital’ supports the strategy

• 14 explicit actions that come as a result

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How does it fit together

Government Digital Strategy

Service Design Manual

Performance Platform

Guides & Resources

Digital by Default Service Standard

Guides & Resources

Standards to be met

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What does it mean though?• Any transaction that takes place more than

100,000 times annually have to be redesigned from the ground up - with digital as the default channel. E.g. car tax online, universal credit, personalised registrations, prison visit booking

• Has to be a plan to get digital uptake to 80%, ‘assisted digital’ giving ways to increase uptake

• Focus on proper metrics to measure use and those metrics to be publicly available on the “performance platform” - https://www.gov.uk/performance

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So why is it interesting?• Digital By Default Service Standard• 26 criteria that have to be met before a service

can go live – comes into effect April 2014• Technically minded but realistic at same time –

use agile, make it open source, multivariate testing

• All criteria supported by related guides

• Everything is freely available • We’re not paying 100’s of millions of taxes to the

big I.T. companies!

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The Service Design Manual(my favourite bit)

• Simple Mantra – Build services so good that people prefer to use them.

• User Centred Design – put users at the heart of the process not at the end

• The old way• The new way

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The Design Principles1. Start with needs (users not your own!)2. Do less3. Design with data4. Do the hard work to make it simple5. Iterate. Then iterate again.6. Build for inclusion7. Understand context8. Build digital services, not websites9. Be consistent, not uniform10. Make things open: it makes things better

https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples

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Design Principle - Do Less“Government should only do what only government can do. If someone else is doing it — link to it. If we can provide resources (like APIs) that will help other people build things — do that. We should concentrate on the irreducible core. We’ll make better services and save more money by focusing resources where they’ll do the most good.”

• Content rationalisation – in this example ‘Bee Keeping’

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Design Principle - Iterate, then Iterate again“The best way to build effective services is to start small and iterate wildly. Release Minimum Viable Products early, test them with real users, move from Alpha to Beta to Launch adding features and refinements based on feedback from real users.

Iteration reduces risk. It makes big failures unlikely and turns small failures into lessons. This avoids the 200 page spec document which can turn into a bottleneck. This, again, is the core advantage of digital: we’re not building bridges — things can be undone.”

• When GOV.UK was released to beta there was a iteration to go live 3pm the next day – released as planned with host of fixes

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Guides and Resources• Everything is open and everything is accompanied

with a guide• Guides targeted to all user groups (Service

managers, designers, developers, performance analysts)

• Covers 90+ topics from Continuous delivery and running retrospectives to standalone mobile apps to hosting.

• Short and concise – good links. Common sense when you it but subjects across the board

• All guides have direct links to github for download

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Guide - Service Design Phases• One of the guides• Summarises the 5 steps

used on the development of all online services

• Each stage cross link to associated guides

• Nice to see they acknowledge developments are finite with the ‘Retirement Phase’

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Guide - Progressive Enhancement• Part of the ‘Making Software’

set of guides• Relates to ‘beta’ and

‘live’ phases

• Basic straight forward advice

• In a good way almost states the obvious but reminds you it’s good to keep things simple

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Guide - Measurement• Part of the ‘Measurement’

set of guides covering this and KPI’s

• Relates across all phases• Short guide trying to

ensure all services are measured in the same way

• Makes it clear that the measurement information will be made public

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To finish…….• Lots of cool things (easier to see if the

tethering worked and you got to see it)

• Nothing really rocket science – just good common sense

• After years of the horror stories about Government ICT projects (NHS £12bn project scrapped, £105 on a single website) it feels a real refreshing approach to doing things

• Very ‘real world’ – rings so many bells with things we discuss at IWDevs

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Acknowledgements & Links• Goes without saying most of this cribbed straight

from GOV.UK so can’t take any credit for the good stuff

• Links:• http://www.gov.uk• http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk• http://www.gov.uk/service-manual• http://www.gov.uk/service-manual/digital-by-default• http://publications.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digital/

• Thanks for listening!