Are you involved in a digital public service? From the policy idea, design or development to data behind the scenes or the day-to-day running, we want to hear from you! Join us at Services Week 2024 this March.
Services Week is an annual event series run by the Government Digital and Data community for people working in the UK public sector. Returning for the sixth year, Services Week 2024 will take place 18 to 22 March and will focus discussion on public services from a digital and service design perspective, but participants are welcome from all backgrounds.
Sessions are designed by the community, for the community and we are looking for you to get involved. Last year, the series featured almost 50 sessions including a Ministry of Justice talk on multidisciplinary teams, local sessions run by Birmingham City Council, and lightning talks run by colleagues working in health. If you are a public or civil servant, check the open agenda as it develops to contribute a session to the agenda or see what’s coming up. People from different organisations contribute sessions, so the agenda develops right up until the start of the week.
Update: the most up to date session information and links to sign up are now also on the CDDO blog.
Services Week is about how we can work together to help improve public services. As a community we co-create value from sharing and learning. Hosting a session means you have the chance to increase the visibility of your work across the public sector, whilst participants will get a valuable insight into the work going on to improve services across government, and beyond.
Services Week is an opportunity for you to hear from professions across sectors who are focused on improving the lives of citizens. By attending sessions you’ll get direct insights into a wide range of different services across the public sector, from innovative design and development, to effective delivery. In an exciting addition for this year you will also get to hear from private sector trailblazers in the digital and data sector. During Services Week 2023, we had 46 sessions run by 20 different organisations. These sessions helped people across roles, professions and organisations to grow skills and knowledge about the design of great services.
If you are curious to know more, blog posts from previous years have lots of quotes from people who have benefitted from Services Week.
Here are some of the things we have heard:
“Services Week makes work visible across the public sector, helps join us all up, and enables sharing, learning and new connections that can have a positive impact beyond the week.”
“I learn so much from the experience of those who’ve gone before me. It helps me improve the work I do in my organisation.”
Taking part in Services Week 2024 can mean hosting or co-hosting sessions, attending sessions, or simply sharing details about sessions between people and organisations. It is also possible to publish blog posts to showcase your work during the week, so please do get in touch if you want to publish a post you have written that relates to Services Week. There are some great sessions in development for 2024, including:
Sessions can be run as online, hybrid or in-person events. Choices around session formats are yours. Tools, timings and attendance of sessions will differ depending on the outcomes you seek. You can run something live between 18 and 22 March 2024 or pre-record a session such as a webinar or podcast to release during the week itself. Session formats change every year but often include:
Always consider inclusivity, security and how people will sign up for your sessions. It might help to contact your own events team for advice on what best suits your organisation. GOV.UK has guidance on accessible communication formats. Adding your session to the Services Week 2024 playlist is another way to increase access.
If you want to host a session please add your session to the open agenda. We have also published a version on the CDDO blog.
To help promote Services Week 2024, use these slides and posters for promotion.
Join the #ServicesWeek channel on the cross-government Slack to find out more. You can also email us to ask us questions or get us to add your event to the open agenda.
Services Week is what we all make it. Thanks for taking part!
]]>A week of talks, case studies and meet-ups led to the success of Services Week 2023, where people interested in designing better services for the public came together to teach, learn and work together on improving government for its users.
This cross-organisational public sector event series grows in new ways every year. This year, from Monday 20 to Friday 24 March, we counted 46 sessions run by 20 different public sector organisations. All of these sessions shared different perspectives and made new connections across the boundaries of the public sector. From various NHS organisations to local councils and central government organisations, we co-created value and grew service literacy.
This year, the theme was designing for uncertain times, and there was plenty to consider. More than 2,000 civil and public servants attended. Lots of sessions were sold out and had over 100 attendees, while other sessions were smaller and more intimate by design. Many sessions were recorded and the video playlist for UK public servants is receiving hundreds of views. The link has been published via the #ServicesWeek channel on UK government Slack and Local gov digital Slack.
Here is what some session hosts thought about the week.
Kat Sexton, who recently joined Birmingham City Council (BCC) as Head of Function for Product said "I’m a big fan of Services Week and have loved getting involved in it over the years. It's a great way for central and local government colleagues all over the UK to take a breath, collaborate, share and learn together. Digital and Technology Services is doing some fabulous work in collaboration with service areas across BCC to ensure we are designing truly great services for our users. It was incredible to see my colleagues stepping up to deliver some brilliant talks this year and share our experiences and learning with peers across government agencies.”
Laura Churchill, Lead Content Designer, Defra, co-hosted ‘Content design in uncertain times – a Lean Coffee event’. She said: “This was my first lean coffee event. I was amazed at how many topics we collected and how deep the discussion went on each one. We could have gone on for hours to be honest. Like content therapy!”
Chloe Key, Digital Data and Technology Fast Streamer, HM Revenue and Customs, helped to facilitate the ‘Introduction to service design’ training. She reflected: “This was my first ever Services Week as someone who is quite junior in the profession. Yet, the benefit of the cross-government collaboration is undeniable! It was so great to see so many different roles, and different departments, all bettering their understanding of how to apply a service lens to issues they might encounter!”
Katharine Beer, Senior Interaction Designer, is from the Department for Education, where colleagues hosted several sessions. Said Katharine: “I absolutely loved Services Week 2023 and am so thrilled to have been a part of it. I was lucky enough to take part in a great ‘Introduction to service design’ course, explored ‘Resetting communities of practice’ and ran 3 sessions of my own around topics I am passionate about. I’ve since watched many of the other sessions and benefited from them too. Being part of our cross-government community is one of the most invaluable aspects of my role and is partly why I joined the Civil Service in the first place. To go from eagerly watching the Service Week recordings a few years ago to being part of it myself has been amazing. Thank you to everyone who was involved!”
Simon Manby, Senior Product Owner at the Ministry of Justice, told us why they ran a session on multidisciplinary teams and product development in a changing policy landscape: “Services Week is a valuable chance to look across the public sector and see what other teams are doing. The Modernising Lasting Powers of Attorney team at Justice Digital always try to contribute. This time me and my colleague Holly spoke about policy and digital working to achieve common outcomes. We had 100 attendees, it was ace to hear other people’s experiences across this evolving space. There is always someone who has done or is doing the work that you are, and the serendipity of finding them, sharing experience and stopping duplication is the greatest asset of the public sector community, and something we should be proud of, and nurture.”
Sarah Stokes, Lead User Researcher at the Care Quality Commission and Nick Walton, User Research Officer from NHS Business Services Authority teamed up to run a series of lightning talks on user-centred design topics.
Sarah said: “It was great to connect people from Care Quality Commission, NHS Business Services Authority, Department for Work and Pensions and Government Digital Service as presenters, and many more from central and local government as attendees!”
Nick reflected: “Services Week is a celebration of the work we do. Co-organising the lightning talks helped strengthen and forge new connections in the cross-government community. It was fantastic to meet new people as part of the overall planning group. It was also the perfect opportunity to reach out to ex-colleagues.”
Colleagues from the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) who lead the digital, data and technology profession published the Services Week 2023 daily line-up on their blog and were keen to help organise the event. Megan Lee Devlin, Chief Executive of the CDDO explained why Services Week is such an important event: “One of the key aims of the government is to make digital services to the public more efficient and accessible, as set out in our Transforming for a Digital Future Roadmap. Services Week has a vital role to play in enabling civil servants to do just this.”
We will be looking for volunteers to help with Services Week 2024. If you were inspired by this year’s event, if you’ve volunteered before, or even if you’ve never been before but would still like to be involved, we would love to hear from you. Contact us on the #ServicesWeek channel on the cross-government Slack, or email the Services Week team.
There is also a chance for civil servants to share learning from Services Week 2023 sessions wider across government during June and July at Civil Service Live 2023. Email the Central Digital and Data Office for details.
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As designers we know that the products or services we design need to be accessible for people using them. And we know that making things accessible makes them better for everyone. But we don’t always consider how the internal tools and outputs we create need to be accessible too. Not only does this ensure everyone in your team can participate, but it also means that your artefacts are more likely to help you achieve what you want to achieve.
Mapping is an important tool for service designers, but we can often create complicated, inaccessible maps. In this blog post I will outline why it is important that your maps are accessible and how this will help you. Then, I will give some tips about how to make your maps more accessible. This can be hard, but maps do not always need to look pretty or cool to do the hard work to make it simple.
There’s lots of different types of maps you can create, for example journey maps, service blueprints and service maps. In this post I will talk about some general principles that you can apply to all of them.
When we create journey maps we’re creating them to influence someone or decide something. For example, we use them to make decisions, show what works and what doesn’t work in a service, or show the scope of the service.
If a map is not accessible then you are limiting the pool of people who can make decisions or engage in it, you are excluding people and limiting the perspectives you can get on your work.
It’s important to remember that people experience barriers for various reasons. These reasons can be very personal and people should not have to disclose a disability, impairment, or accessibility need. So, if you assume that nobody has an accessibility need, it’s very likely you are excluding people. You also don’t know what needs those people who may join your team in future may have.
If you make your journey map accessible then it is most likely to be simpler to engage with. If you want someone to make a decision based on what a map is showing, or highlight parts of the journey that are not working, you’re more likely to be able to do this if the map is clear and simple. This means you have to do less explaining and that people can focus on the questions and points you want them to focus on, not navigating or understanding the map itself.
It will also help time-poor senior stakeholders use it, the kind of people who only have time to skim read everything and are context switching.
There’s also a lot of value to be had from people who are not a digital specialist or someone not in your immediate team seeing the map and engaging with it. Whilst tools like Mural don’t require digital expertise to use, they can still be confusing and overwhelming.
When we’re working remotely it’s easier to be less purposeful about what you create. There isn’t a fixed amount of wall space, so you can keep on producing stuff. This can offer lots of opportunities but, it also means we can leave a litter of stuff behind.
The most simple tools for creating journey maps are the tools we are most likely to keep for a while, for example Google Sheets. They will evolve with technology and won't get overtaken by other tools. You never know when your department might need to reprioritse funding for an application like Mural, or it will get acquired into another tool which you can’t afford.
The internet produces electricity. When we’re doing stuff online it has a carbon footprint. It’s stored in data centres which are powered by huge amounts of energy. The devices we use to access it need charging. In general the more complicated the thing, the more carbon it produces. The more space it takes up and the more power it needs to run. Make it simple and things might be a little bit better for the planet. As Gerry McGovern says, “[data production has a] wholly unsustainable growth rate and it will have cataclysmic impacts on the environment if it is not radically reduced”.
Here I am assuming you have some understanding of how to create maps in general. If you don’t, read this blog post which tells you the steps to make a service map.
The common ways I see maps not being accessible are:
Before you jump in to creating a map, think about why you need it in the first place. As designers we often jump into creating things. Creating artefacts can help us feel like we’re producing helpful things. Vicky Houghton Price has written a whole blog post about this.
But before you jump in think about:
Start by using software that is accessible. I sometimes use Google Sheets or Excel, but that is still pretty clunky. You can use Mural if you have an accessible template, although it still might not be fully accessible. You can use a wall too, but you’re likely to need to digitise it, and you’ll need to make sure everything is big enough for people to read. Check the accessibility statement of the software you are using, and whether it meets WCAG requirements.
Think about what you really want to show and what questions you are answering through the map. Focus on showing just that thing.
If there are rows or swimlanes which don't help you to show that thing then take them out! You might want to make a totally different map which shows them instead.
As our design principles state, it’s all about worth doing the hard work to make it simple. This will reduce clutter and make your map simpler to understand and use.
Use colours which have a high contrast to the text. Keep them muted. Make sure colour isn’t the only way to identify a theme or set of ideas.
Try and keep things in straight lines, and reduce the need for lots of arrows or other information. This can get confusing.
Try to keep it so that the map fits on one screen, and people only need to scroll from left to right, not up and down as well.
Caption: This is an example of a more muted colour palette which has 'good' contrast. These colours are less overwhelming if you have many of them next to each other, like in a map. You can also use different shades of grey or one colour
Some things might work for you, other things you might do differently or find a better way for. We’re keen to start a conversation about this and hear how you make your artefacts accessible in the comments.
]]>Services Week, the cross-organisational event series for people working in the UK public sector, is back. Returning for the fifth time, Services Week 2023 will take place 20 to 24 March 2023. The theme for this year is Designing for Uncertain Times. So, if you are a public or civil servant, why not join in and join up with others during Services Week 2023?
Services Week is an annual cross-organisational event series focused on improving public services. In Services Week 2022, 24 different public sector organisations ran 50 events online. These sessions connected people across professions to grow skills and knowledge about user-centred service design.
Once again, from local and central government to health and education services, we want to showcase all that is good about public services. We want to make good work more visible and enable connection, collaboration and learning. We want to create value together that will help us and benefit the public.
As in previous years, the Services Week 2023 planning group wants to grow service literacy. Together, we will run the Introduction to Service Design training during the week. And we encourage all sessions that teach skills.
The last few years have seen a lot of uncertainty and change in the world, and the public sector is no exception. It has not always been easy to adapt in this fast-changing environment. Sometimes, it can be difficult to test all of our assumptions when designing at scale or pace, or when things are unpredictable.
We especially welcome sessions that relate to this year’s theme of Designing for Uncertain Times. Sessions might relate to end-to-end design across boundaries. They might focus on a team’s flexibility, impact and metrics, or share success stories that cut through in today’s context.
You might want to showcase how you have adapted to change in a user-centred way. You might want to share how you’ve done agile delivery. How to grow agility and prepare for uncertainty in the future. You might want to share how you’ve reused patterns, designs or capabilities. It might benefit others to know how you’ve prototyped at pace or built for resilience.
As a community, we are all at different stages of design maturity. We can all learn from each other and be great sources of support for each other.
Services Week is for all UK public and civil servants who are interested in good services. You can join in as much as you choose, and in ways that suit your work, your context and organisation. The format and theme are deliberately open and flexible by design.
You can host or co-host a session, attend sessions, or share information about sessions with others in your organisation. We also want to publish related blog posts here during the week, so get in touch if you want to write something.
You could connect the theme to your current organisational priorities. You could run something live, between 20 to 24 March 2023, or pre-record something and release it during the week. You could make an internal meeting open to other organisations, to get feedback and connect with others working on similar projects.
Session formats change every year and have previously featured:
As always, in the community spirit of learning and sharing, we want to make this a safe and inclusive space that centres accessibility and wellbeing. Do consider formats, channels, tools, timings, and how people will sign up to and engage with your sessions. There is GOV.UK guidance on Accessible communication formats. Sessions can be run online, hybrid or in person. We will also add as many recorded sessions as possible to a Services Week playlist to increase access.
Use this Services Week 2023 slide deck to promote Services Week inside your organisation, or make a copy and adapt it as needed. The deck includes virtual backgrounds to use during meetings, promotions or sessions. Use these Services Week 2023 posters to promote the event series.
If you are planning a session, you can add the session to this daily line up document.
If you want to attend sessions, keep an eye on the daily line up. There is also a published to the web version.
There is a #ServicesWeek channel on the cross-government Slack to find out more and connect with others. You can also email us directly to find out more or we can add your event to the schedule.
Thanks to everyone who has previously taken part in Services Week. We hope you will pay it forward this year by sharing these details with people who could benefit from attending Services Week 2023.
We look forward to seeing you all soon.
]]>Having worked across the public sector in a number of government departments, local authorities and the NHS, I’ve experienced first hand some of the extraordinary achievements that have taken place over recent years. Whether that was to deliver the changes required for Brexit or to support the fight against COVID-19, a lot of complex services have been stood up at speed. I often ask myself, what makes good public services possible?
Before delving in, it’s worth briefly defining what a (public) service is. A service is something that enables a user to do something, such as learn to drive, register to vote or apply for a passport. Importantly, however, public services in most cases are not a choice, users cannot go elsewhere in the market to get the outcome they need, such as applying for a state benefit, this therefore requires these services to work for everybody.
Many of us working in government and the wider public sector will know what makes a good service. It should be grounded in a firm understanding of your users needs, adhering to the Service Standard, accessible, and utilising technology to enable scalability. However, it is evident across the vast array of services delivered to the public that how good and usable a service is, varies considerably.
In order to understand what makes a good service it is vital to have an appreciation of what enables the design and build of good services. By enable I mean the organisational set up, mindset, ambition, risk appetite, culture, funding models, and the nature of the leadership in the organisation. Does the leadership for example buy in to building user centred services in the right way?
We have come a long way in the UK over the last 12 years or so. We have the Service Standard established by the Government Digital Service and the NHS’, award winning design patterns and a growing and thriving Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) community. However, we still have significant inconsistencies in relation to the way we design and build services across the public sector, resulting in varying experiences for our users, citizens, organisations and businesses.
The public have (rightly) become used to services that work for them, whatever their needs. This is why it’s important to recognise the significant number of complex services delivered in response to COVID-19 were largely effective and met the user needs because the voices of user centred, product centric people were heard loud and clear by those at the top.
Paradoxically, the pandemic provided an opportunity for the government, local authorities, NHS and wider public sector to learn at scale how users engage with services. In many ways, this has enabled a resetting of the dynamic and relationship between the public and providers of public services, based on trust and it is vital we keep this momentum, with effective leadership across our public organisations.
Despite swathes of government (local and central) and the NHS delivering effective user centred services, it begs the question, how do we ensure that all public services across the UK are designed and built to better meet the needs of our users? This is not a new question but the reality still shows, from experience, that there remains significant differences in the understanding and appreciation of what a good service looks like and how you deliver them, or dare I say, whether this is important.
As mentioned, we have thriving communities working with the same goals in mind (cross gov, cross NHS Slack channels, Services Week, NHS UCD maturity models and the NHS UCD working group) but for real change to take place at pace, we need our leaders to be committed and equipped to implement the DDaT framework, from policy and communication professionals, to hospital operations directors, clinicians and local authority housing teams. Within government this is being championed by the great work in the Cabinet Office initiative to drive at refreshing the leadership framework to be more attuned to the vital need for a DDaT, User Centred Design (UCD) mindset in our leadership.
The capability and appreciation of DDaT and UCD from our leaders is fundamentally important to ensure we have effective leadership in critical roles in the public sector. Without this we will not be able to deliver the standard of services we need to, but this is only half of the puzzle, a strong(er) network across the public sector that understands the value of what a good service looks like is needed.
We are making inroads in central government, the next stage is to scale this to ensure that from a holistic service offering, the public sector as a whole takes the same user centred, consistent approach, adhering to the service standards, sharing best practice, reusing components and implementing funding models that reward risk, avoiding preconceived ‘fixed scopes’. All of this will help to drive economies of scale and return on investment, which will be vital in the current economic climate, post-pandemic.
As is evident the delivery of any service often touches and integrates with various other parts of the public sector. Achieving the aim of designing and building consistently good public services will only be possible by strengthening ties and further joining up central government, the wider NHS ecosystem, local authorities and the third sector. Systems thinking and enterprise leadership are vital to help facilitate this.
By building and growing this network of DDaT grounded and user centred leadership we can be confident that we are all moving in the same direction to ensure we deliver good services for our users and serve as a reference point in delivering good services to the public, across the world. A consistent standard and ‘look and feel’ of services can only help to drive user satisfaction and trust from the public, which is arguably the most difficult sentiment to achieve.
The value of getting this right, establishing a leadership network and capability that understands the value of DDaT and user centred design cannot be underestimated in terms of delivering better citizen/patient outcomes. Complementing this with the enormous efficiencies that would be enabled by a more connected public sector stands to establish an as yet unattainable consistency in the quality of public services.
We need to move away from ‘policy’ being handed over to DDaT professionals and ensure our policy leaders appreciate and understand the fundamentals of what makes a good service. A service and policy is more likely to succeed in its objectives if policy makers are closer to DDaT. Through policy co-creation, drawing upon the right blend of skill sets it is shown to result in better outcomes for citizens and government.
For real change to take place in the wider public sector, to deliver against the objective of delivering good public services, it needs to start from the top. As stated on the posters of Services Week 2022, with tongue in cheek, ‘Services are too important to be left to digital’.
In 2021 I joined a discovery led by data expert Irina Bolychevsky of NHS England. The focus was how we could help information professionals, developers and others find the standards needed to support interoperability in the NHS.
Interoperability allows IT systems to communicate. An example is nurses being able to update GP records directly using their own systems instead of sending emails.
To achieve this, everyone needs to use standards to collect and format information in the same way and have the confidence to share it across organisational boundaries. The term ‘interoperability standards’ refers to the standards needed to achieve this.
Interoperability is an important part of the government’s goal to reshape health and social care using data. The pandemic showed how important it is that systems can communicate quickly and reliably with one another. In a modern healthcare system staff should be able to access information straight away, no matter its source.
One barrier in the health and social care sector however, is that interoperability standards are published by multiple organisations, making them hard to find. Our ambition was to solve that.
Starting this work, the first problem we found was there didn’t appear to be widely used language conventions for talking about interoperability and standards.
Stakeholders had different understandings of what ‘interoperability standards’ were or what the terms ‘interoperability’ or ‘standards’ meant, with the term ‘standard’ used to describe lots of different things. Much of the information that existed was academic, confusing and sometimes inconsistent.
This meant that people were talking to - but not always understanding or agreeing with - one another, an issue confirmed in user research:
“The thing is…there are different definitions of interoperability. That [contract that has interoperability as a requirement] is going to fail, because the people who issued it don’t really understand what interoperability means” Chair, interoperability discussion forum
“Different people mean different things by ‘standard’” Data Architect, NHS Digital
“A key question at the moment is whether we have the technical knowledge to be able to assess against interoperability standards” Head of Technology Standards and Assurance, NHSX
There was also the problem that the word ‘interoperability’ is not well understood by non-experts. What did all this mean for people on the frontline? As one user put it:
“You do have to get used to the language...there is quite a steep learning curve!” IT supplier
This was an important finding. Research by the Behavioural Insights Team suggests that if people don’t understand something, or if terms mean different things to different people, this could be a major barrier to communication and ultimately achieving change.
If we wanted people to adopt standards, and central staff to hold them to account for using them, we had to start by helping everyone speak the same language.
A related question was whether framing this service around the standards needed for interoperability was the right approach.
Yes, standards are essential for joining up care but there are other benefits, such as it’s cheaper to use the same technical specifications than build bespoke integrations between different solutions. Arguably, those benefits might be equally important to healthcare leaders.
We also heard that not all care settings have the resources to do all the work needed to join up their IT systems right now, but there’s still value in standardising how data is structured so they can share it later.
The more we learnt, the more it felt like framing the service around interoperability risked turning people away, either because they didn’t understand the language, weren’t aware of all the benefits realised by adopting standards or they didn’t feel in a position to achieve interoperability right now.
Our hope was that reframing the service away from the policy goal (interoperability) and towards the action users could take (using standards) would increase standards usage, helping get everyone closer to interoperability in the long run.
With the problem identified, the team set about finding a way to reframe the service in a way that would help all our users find, understand and use these standards.
Our user researcher explored the search terms people were using to find these standards. I researched language used by similar services in the UK and internationally to see where we could align and help tap into any existing mental models users might have.
We also held a naming workshop with stakeholders to get their views and understand any sensitivities around specific terms.
As a result, over several iterations and following extensive user testing, we changed the short and long service names from:
To:
The new name is still being tested but so far the changes seem to be helping users better understand the scope of the service. As one person remarked, “it does what it says on the tin”.
It’s also had an unexpected benefit of helping us avoid scope creep, which has been a real challenge in a space with so many unmet user needs. By giving the service a clear name, it’s become harder to see how it could be changed to encompass a lot of other content or features and still be clear enough for users.
The NHS Data Standards Directory is now live and we welcome feedback. We know we have a long way to go to make it as valuable as users need it to be.
However, this service is only one small part of a bigger ambition. During the original discovery 9 barriers to interoperability were identified (links to supplier website), 7 of which extend beyond the remit of this service.
Now, new teams are exploring problems such as how you speed up the standards development cycle or improve the quality of data standards - all through that vital user-centred, agile, lens.
It will take many more years to achieve interoperability but by continuing to listen to people on the frontline and designing services around them, we have a much better chance of getting there.
It takes a village to raise a child… and to create a clear user-centred blog post. With thanks to: Kuba Bartwicki, Emma Harvey, Lisa Jeffery, Amy McNichol, Gemma Richardson and Sara Wilcox.
In a previous blog post, I described how to prioritise the riskiest assumptions in big problem spaces. This blog post shows why we should prioritise assumptions by their risk and gives some examples of when it’s been valuable.
Prioritising our assumptions by risk can demand a lot from a team. We’re not prioritising a backlog we already have. We’re asking our team to write assumption statements from scratch. Why should we spend this extra time on prioritisation?
I’ve used other prioritisation methods like MoSCoW, impact vs. effort, or RICE. These are good for prioritising when we're quite confident about the solution and want to make improvements. This might be a prioritisation of components, features, user stories or products.
When uncertainty was higher, I’ve suggested we prioritise hypotheses by impact and effort. That was quite useful to frame things as experiments to prioritise. Yet our hypotheses were always too centred on features.
Risk of failure doesn’t just come from focusing on low value, high effort features. It also comes from limited trust between people, slow feedback loops, or slow delivery; to mention a few causes. None of these featured in our prioritisation methods. We weren’t focusing enough on the things that were most likely to cause us to fail. When this happens, explorations lose focus on value. They drag on and become failed investments.
Using riskiest assumptions gives us a way of comparing risks, like for like, across all areas of our work. In an uncertain problem space, riskiest assumptions are most likely to lose us our bets. When we spend more time testing our riskiest assumptions, we reduce uncertainty. We also reduce the cost of failure, as we learn the big things that don’t work early on. That's much better than finding out later in development, or after launch.
I’ve tried prioritising assumptions by risk myself. I found it much more valuable when we open up the evidence behind them to build on and critique. Make things open, it makes things better.
When you score assumptions as a team it:
It’s also the most fun I’ve had prioritising.
This has less value when we’re working in a much smaller problem space. Here, we should have greater certainty about what the solutions might be. This could include refining parts of an existing service in the public beta or live phase. By this stage, the value of our service should be clear. The team should already have a common understanding of the problems and opportunities. Other prioritisation methods are more useful here, and less time-consuming.
One team I worked with were trying to confirm the need for a particular solution for businesses that could be reused across government. It was a bit like a hammer looking for nails. We should avoid coming up with solutions before we understand users and their needs.
To create a safe space for discussion, I asked a senior stakeholder for a one-to-one to talk about how we might get the most value out of the discovery. To prepare, I prioritised some of their riskiest assumptions. I wanted to give them credit for the good work they had done so far. To do this, I wrote down “What we know so far…” next to each assumption.
When we met, the sponsor helped fill in some gaps in my knowledge about why they had those assumptions. I went in open-minded about their feedback. In turn, this helped them to receive my feedback well. After a positive meeting, they agreed to broaden the scope of the discovery. They were happy to approach it with less focus on a specific solution.
The expanded discovery found that there wasn’t a clear user need for the proposed solution. As a result of talking about their riskiest assumptions, they paused to reconsider the value of continuing. The discovery also uncovered some real problems businesses face, which they shared with their colleagues.
The Department for Education was looking at helping adults get more secure jobs if they were at risk of losing their jobs to automation. They were testing different approaches to retraining people.
Nasreen Nazir and Georgina Watts facilitated theory of change sessions with their product managers every quarter to understand which potential services and products to prioritise building next. They started by placing user needs and known problems on the left, and outcomes they would like to get to on the right, before suggesting potential solutions in the middle that could help the users get from their current needs to achieving those outcomes. But potential solutions often have assumptions, which the riskiest assumptions approach can draw out.
For example, where they were previously discussing solutions like, “we could build users a portal to find local jobs,” they can now tease out more detailed questions like, “is it realistic to expect Local Enterprise Partnerships to upload job vacancies into a portal?” Drawing out the riskiest assumptions helped to sense check which services and products to prioritise and which to leave for later.
We were trying to make it easier to buy products and services for the public sector. To do so, at the end of our discovery, I facilitated the prioritisation of our riskiest assumptions.
We sat together to reach a consensus score for each assumption, looking at impact and confidence. It was fun watching when people thought a particular assumption should be a 9 on confidence, when others thought it should be a 3. People said things like, “Remember that user research session? The users never read all that text.” It was also great to see new members of the team challenging our assumptions from a fresh perspective. Going forwards, we were all referring to the same knowledge.
We wanted to check these scores with our stakeholders, to improve the accuracy of our prioritisation. We plotted the assumptions on a 2x2 grid, using impact and confidence. It showed stakeholders where we were most likely to start our alpha phase.
We used the prioritised riskiest assumptions to inform our alpha phase backlog. We knew what we most needed to learn about. Testing these assumptions helped us rule out certain approaches to improving our services. This stopped us investing lots of time into something, rather than finding out much later that it's not valuable.
I’m still learning about this method and tweak it each time I use it. I’d be curious to know how other people are finding it? Please leave a comment if you want to share your reflections.
In the Department for Education (DfE), we know that standards are important when building digital services and products. They provide assurance, consistency and help us to deliver great services.
We also know that the Service Standard is broad and open to interpretation, which is a good thing because teams can then apply it to the context they are working in, but this also means that sometimes, the Service Standard is not consistently understood or applied. In relation to this, teams are also looking for specific DfE-related examples of how to apply standards and how they are assured.
I’m Kerry, a Senior Content Designer in the Standards and Assurance team in DfE. Our goal is to look at how standards are understood, applied and assured across professions.
We are working with service assessors and teams across the department to ensure that the government Service Standard and collective community standards can be found, understood and applied. In applying standards consistently we will build more consistent, user-centred services and improve the assessment experience for service teams and assessors.
In DfE, we run internal service assessments to help teams to create and run public services. If a DfE service does not fit the criteria for a Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) assessment, it can be assessed by an internal panel of assessors to ensure the service meets the Service Standard. We used data from internal assessment reports to identify where understanding and application of the Service Standard could be improved. We looked at 136 internal assessments between March 2018 and mid-February 2022, analysing where standards were:
Assessment report summaries showed us where teams needed support with meeting standards. And, user research helped us to understand the assessment process and how, and when, teams apply the Service Standard.
Data showed us which Service Standard points were repeatedly difficult for teams to meet, including:
Plus, we had suggestions and tips in assessment reports from DfE assessors on how to meet the standards. But, wider teams weren’t benefitting from these learnings.
This was the start of our work to design Apply the Service Standard in DfE, to help teams understand and apply the 14 point Service Standard in DfE.
Duplicating content in the Service Standard was out, but pair writing, content crits and workshops with DfE subject matter experts, including Heads of Profession, helped us to design the right content in the right way. We worked with the assessments team to understand what assessors look for at each phase. We also reached out across government to understand what brilliant things other departments are doing to help teams apply standards. We learned that other teams have similar issues and are looking to solve similar problems.
At present we’ve finished our third round of testing and are iterating the manual as we go. For example, we’d included practical things for teams to think about which have been written based on data and DfE assessment report feedback. We’re iterating this as users told us it was hard to process a list of things to think about, as well as things to consider for each phase and how these two things relate to one another.
We have then taken the ‘think about’ content and are adding it into the ‘things to consider lists’ across each standard - this content was thought to be the most valuable for users in telling them what they need to do at each individual phase to meet the Service Standard as a whole .
To underpin the Apply the Service Standard manual we’re building out community spaces to house professional standards. These are our guiding principles and ways of working in DfE. We’ve started by codifying the design standards as our minimum viable product (MVP). Using open code, templates and platforms that already exist for our tech and architecture communities is helping us to work in the open and use an already familiar process in DfE. DfE Technical Guidance and DfE Architecture document tech and architecture standards, principles and guidance for teams working in DfE.
We are building this manual in protected community time on Thursdays. We’ve started with design, with the intention to support user research, delivery managers and other professions. By involving communities in the build, we are documenting ways of working and using content created by the professions in DfE, for the professions.
Feedback from research for Apply the Service Standard in DfE has been largely positive. Teams have told us that they’d use the manual to apply the Service Standard across each phase of a project, as well as to prepare for assessments.
It is still early days for Design in DfE. We are looking at the information architecture and are planning to run a design crit so the wider community can have input.
This is the start of our work to support standards and assurance. We’ll continue to work with our communities of practice to build on ways of working, processes and knowledge. This will enable us to continue to help teams understand how to apply the Service Standard and help us to build better services for our users.
We’d love to speak with you if you’re working on something similar, or, if you’d like to hear more about our work, email kerry.lyons@education.gov.uk.
]]>We often fail to test the things we’re uncertain about and instead spend a disproportionate amount of time on the things that are givens. This leads to long explorations, without conclusive evidence to make good, timely investments. We can avoid this by prioritising our assumptions by their risk, then testing them. If you are working in a big problem space, doing this will focus your service team on learning the things with the most value.
In this blog post, I’m sharing how you can use this method with your teams. Plus, you’ll get to make your prioritisation more like being a judge on a reality TV show, Strictly Come Dancing-style. This is way more fun than any effort-and-impact priority matrix.
This is the first of two blog posts. The second blog post will be about the value of testing riskiest assumptions and will be published soon. It will discuss the benefits of using the method, with some examples of when it’s been valuable.
Exploration can drag on when we don’t spend enough time learning about the uncertain, especially in a big problem space. We might make progress on solving some problems, yet we’re still no closer to a usable service we can operate, or having an impact.
When starting the discovery phase for a service, we often don’t know where to begin our research. It’s great when people have different hunches. We see this particularly in teams with many disciplines. Yet it can be hard to know what to focus on when trying to solve a whole problem for users.
When a discovery phase throws up lots of problems, we don’t know where to start our alpha phase. We know we need to design a few user journeys from start to finish. We could say start at the beginning or start anywhere, as it all needs designing.
Many alpha phases take much longer than the suggested 6 to 8 weeks. We still don’t feel confident about what our service should look like in the beta phase. We’re left in perpetual exploration, like me digging for records in a shop basement, but less fun. This can happen when we mistakenly spend all of our time according to what is most valuable for the user. Value for users is incredibly important, but there’s a nuance to it.
We should prioritise spending time on things we most need to learn about. The things we most need to learn about might be different from what has the most value for users. We don’t always make this distinction, and in the end, value for users suffers.
It’s ok to have hunches. Everyone has them. Hunches are only dangerous when we don’t test them.
We form hunches about how to solve problems from a range of assumptions. Sometimes, our assumptions are informed by spotting patterns in our experiences. Other times, we overreach and that’s when, to quote the old saying, “To assume is to make an ASS out of U and ME”.
Prioritising assumptions by risk helps us focus on where they might be overreaching and prevents never-ending exploration. The first step is called assumption surfacing, then later when testing them, riskiest assumption testing (RAT).
How to do it:
I’ve given a simple example below, with a throwback to a 2004 design icon – the Motorola Razr mobile phone. The overwhelming sense of nostalgia should help the method feel less intimidating. Imagine our team are trying to figure out how to make the next smash hit smartphone…
Assumption | Consequence if wrong | Existing knowledge to mitigate risk | Impact if wrong | Confidence we know the answer | Risk score |
People would buy a folding smartphone | We lose money on our investment | The 2004 Motorola Razr was popular | 8 | 4 | 48 |
We can produce folding glass screens | We don’t have a unique selling point | We have low-resolution prototypes | 7 | 2 | 56 |
If you’re reading the example, thinking, “no way is that a 4!”, perfect. You know something that I don’t. You can imagine our team discussing how popular the Motorola Razr was. We’d debate how similar our folding smartphone is.
Our team now has a list of assumptions, prioritised by risk. Now we can agree as a team what we need to quickly learn, experiment and test to help mitigate those risks. This will help form a good backlog for a discovery or alpha. This method can also help in other situations when you're working in big problem spaces with lots of uncertainty, and don’t know where to start.
When we discussed the method, Georgina Watts was curious about weighting the impact and confidence scores. For example, we could weight impact higher than confidence. This might be useful with a group of people that tend to be overly-confident, or don’t talk about failure.
I’ve only used a 50/50 weighting. I'd be curious to hear from others that have experimented with other weightings. Please leave a comment if you want to share your remix.
]]>Service design keeps growing as a discipline, approach and profession across all parts of the UK government. However, while more service designers than ever are employed in the public sector, not everyone knows how to work with them well and let them effectively utilise their skillset.
Taking inspiration from a blog post with 10 tips for working with your user researcher, this one does the same for working with a service designer. The service designer might be in your team, your programme or elsewhere. You might work with them daily or only interact with them occasionally.
This blog post is for people who have worked with a service designer before and those who have not yet.
Service designers ask ‘why’ a lot. They need to get to the bottom of a problem, find out why things are the way they are, and zoom out to understand the broader context to help make the service work well for its users and meet organisational goals. They cannot do this alone or find the answers all by themselves.
This might be irritating, distracting, or even annoying at first, but it is essential for the effective transformation of services.
When working with service designers you might also hear them asking questions to find out things like:
Support and join them on their investigation as it helps you unpack the current situation and gain clarity about what you are actually doing.
Creating maps is an essential activity many people expect a service designer to carry out. But it’s not done for the map’s sake. Among other things, maps help develop a shared understanding, coordinate work and identify priorities. It’s less about the map and more about the process of mapping.
Mapping is a collaborative information-gathering and sense-making process that often involves various people from inside and outside the direct team, sometimes including users, subject matter experts and stakeholders. Whether done in a physical space or on a virtual whiteboard, mapping takes some time and space, often requiring multiple sessions and the involvement of people with specific knowledge or experience.
The more you can get involved in the mapping process, the more you will learn and see opportunities for change.
Typically, product managers are responsible for determining the scope of the work. But when service designers take what they learn in their investigations and while mapping the user journey and larger service area, they might see new opportunities for effective interventions. They will bring qualitative and quantitative data to provide evidence to back up their suggestions of where to shift the focus to and change the scope.
When investigating, mapping, and designing, service designers tend to oscillate between artefacts and their higher-level context, bounce between the strategic and the operational level.
While working on a transactional service, they might zoom out to the broader service area and show you how things on a higher level are impacting your current work. They might also go into the very details, for example, reviewing how one question in the online form or telephony script leads to unexpected failure demand.
Service designers operate on these different levels so they can find various ways to intervene and improve the service.
As looking sideways and understanding the service at different levels offers novel insights, service designers might find connections to other services and reach out to their teams. They might spot another government service that many users interact with earlier in their journey, which collects valuable data you could use in your service without asking the users for the data a second time. Or the service designer might discover a transaction offered by another organisation with similar user needs, interactions or outcomes.
For example, the service designer working on the ‘Prove your right to work to an employer’ service realised the similarities to the ‘Share your driving licence information’ service. The team was then able to reuse parts of that service’s well-tested flow and save significant time.
Equally, inside service teams and programmes, service designers help people across disciplines understand how their work connects and contributes to outcomes users are trying to achieve.
The service you’re building might primarily be an online transaction. Still, responding to point 3 of the Service Standard, the service designer will look into how the service is provided across channels, including paper, phone and in-person.
A service designer at the Department for Work and Pensions worked on a radically simplified online version of the ‘Check your state pension forecast’ service. Once done, they helped translate the information designs for the online to the paper version and improved the service’s telephony interactions. That helps ensure a user has to do as few things as possible – across all channels.
When mapping the user experience and existing service landscape across different channels, service designers regularly find unnecessary process steps, redundancies in the system and unknown waste points in existing procedures. Addressing these can reduce failure demand and simplify the user journey, cut costs and increase user satisfaction. That works best when paired with an economist, business analyst or product manager.
In one instance, a team working on designing a paperless version of a service decided to shift their focus to fixing a letter that was confusing users, resulting in a high number of calls. The team estimated the flaw in the letter led to a preventable cost of £47,000 every month. They changed the structure and wording of the letter and recovered the cost of the project’s detour in a few weeks.
You might have to deliver a transactional service linked to a ministerial promise with an unchangeable deadline. While doing that, your team might also learn many other things outside of this work's scope, which can become highly relevant later.
The service designer might find issues and opportunities in various adjacent areas. It could be a legal requirement that is impossible to change short-term but would have a transformational effect on the service experience – for example, requiring a wet signature on a Lasting Power of Attorney. Or it could be the reuse of data held by another department, which requires working out data-sharing agreements over multiple months.
Fundamental service transformation takes time. Have the service designer look at the opportunities across various timeframes.
This is a good thing! The work of a service designer tends to overlap with quite a few other disciplines. They get involved in the research, work on the value proposition and scope of the service, facilitate team workshops, and map and redesign behind-the-scenes business processes. That makes service designers occasionally run into the space of user researchers, product and delivery managers, and business analysts.
While that is the case, service design is its own discipline. Service designers are the glue, looking at how to make the various parts of a service and the whole work better for users. Pair with them for the best outcomes – just remember to wear solid shoes!
Service designers are making significant contributions to individual services and transactions. But they are working most effectively in larger service areas and at a programme or higher organisational level. There, they can connect the dots, work on the bigger picture, and address the more considerable barriers to users having a good experience when interacting with government and achieving their desired outcome.
Service designers are often among the very few who bring in the much-needed user perspective and advocate for their needs at that strategic level. By taking a broader view of things, and applying their efforts across many different areas, service designers make the user journey more straightforward.