We recently ran a workshop at the LocalGovCamp digital innovation day, designed for public sector professionals who wanted to know more about assessing digital services against the Local Government Digital Service Standard.
This blog post shares the findings of the workshop, but first here’s a bit of background.
How did we get started?
It all started when our digital board asked for a better way of quality assuring digital projects and services. As a result, the board adopted the Local Government Digital Service Standard and we booked in the first service assessment for the following month.
A number of pre-meets were held before the assessment to make sure everyone understood what was involved and what their role was. The assessment took two hours and then we wrote it up, got it checked and approved and then published it. To date we’ve completed three service assessments.
Who was in the team?
The assessment team was led by Martin Chaney, our Digital Transformation lead, supported by a representative from IT covering all things technical. Our business analyst covered user needs and user research and we invited colleagues from Communications to cover branding and design. David Durant, our lead business analyst, took notes and wrote up the assessment. Martin then scored the assessment and shared it with all involved to guide next steps.
What did we learn?
We learnt a few key things:
- it is hugely helpful just to have a conversation with a project team around the standard, even if you don’t assess it
- putting a date in for an assessment helps focus on the standard and is a quick way of getting it understood and adopted
- getting all the right people in the room to review a service can be tricky; we can help each other by sitting in on each other’s assessments
- the hardest parts of the standard to meet are: user needs and ongoing research, establishing a truly multi-discipline team and measuring success
The workshop
For the workshop itself, we wanted to give participants who wanted to run service assessments some help to get started. We ran an exercise based on Wise Crowds to help participants find a structured way to remove the barriers they face.
Sharing the advice
At the end of the workshop each group shared their thoughts on what would help them get started running service assessments and, unsurprisingly, there were lots of shared views.
You can see those views in the graphic below, which we hope will be useful in getting you started with service assessments.
If you’d like to find out more, please contact [email protected]. We hold regular meet-ups discussing things like the service standard and service assessment, so please do get in touch.