Fifteen years ago I was sitting in a government meeting with the Heads of Digital [1] from across UK government. We were talking about plans for the forthcoming Gordon Brown vs David Cameron vs Nick Clegg General Election. None of us had any idea what was going to happen. As we sit here in 2024, there’s a chance that we’re about to see a change …
In 2011, I presented a digital strategy to a board of directors in government for the first time. A few years previously, the board had decided to ditch printing things physically and put everything online for download instead. As a result, they expected all following conversations about publishing to be an all or nothing approach. Talking about publishing on social platforms like Facebook, or making …
This is the second in a series of three posts on hype circles around tech innovations. In 2010, if I wanted to commiserate with a public sector colleague about something that had gone wrong, I had a quick riposte. “Cheer up”, I’d say, “it could be worse. Your Director could have got an iPhone for Christmas.” Anyone fighting in the same web (we hadn’t yet …
This is the first of a series of three posts on hype circles around tech innovations. In the early noughties the web was a sterile, text-based world where a custom link style constituted pushing the envelope. Anything beyond this was exotic, desirable and more than a bit profitable. When a former piece of drawing tablet software called Flash stepped up to the plate and looked …
When I was working in the GDS transformation team, one of the questions I got asked often was “why should we spend money and time on user research?”. This case study is the answer I usually gave. I still talk about it today, despite the fact that it dates back to 2014. [With the agreement of all involved, I used the screenshots and details in this …
Of the assessment panel roles, the role of lead assessor for a government service standard assessment is both the most daunting (any difficult questions, everyone looks straight at you) and the least obvious (to be the design assessor, it helps to be a designer; to be a lead assessor, it helps to, um, know a lot about government services). Somewhere back in the mists of …
[Scene: An angry civil servant from a government department confronts me, a civil servant working for GDS.] “It’s ridiculous. The service standard is just an excuse for external organisations to make money out of government. You [pointing at me] should be ashamed of this.” “What’s the problem?” “This is the problem. Every team has to have all of these people in it [brandishes print-out]. You …
I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about the service standard since it was introduced. There’s one aspect of the standard that is hidden from sight and that most people miss. This is that the service standard is itself a service. Understanding this is the key to how the standard works. If that sounds a little meta, let me give you a little bit …
We sometimes talk about “bad smells” from digital teams: indications that not all is well. This is a list of the ten most pungent odours I’ve encountered. I wrote this because I hoped that it might help people identify issues and improve things. Please feel free to take this and iterate it; I’d love to know how you used it and improved it. 1. Do …
What a season that was: an amazing late season comeback by the reigning champion against all the odds that narrowly, so narrowly, failed; an aggressive, new champion who showed little respect for history or to others (“he came right up on the inside at the last moment and I had to step immediately out of the way or we would have crashed” said the reigning …
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