Check the discovery road and focus on the path ahead

We are a new service team looking at common and repeating delivery challenges across the Department for Education (DfE). We want to help service teams to deliver better outcomes for users. We’re in a unique position to do this. We have the time and space to use data and evidence to solve these complex problems.

The first challenge we are looking at is around creating non-transactional services. We know there is an opportunity to help teams solve some of the delivery challenges when designing and delivering non-transactional services. Which is why it was so important to come together as a team mid-way through our first discovery to get a stronger sense of which problems are worth solving. If we can figure out if and why we should solve a problem, we can think about creative ways to try out different solutions in alpha.

So we met in person, in Manchester, to look at what we know, identify gaps in our knowledge, and to understand what we need to quantify and measure. We wanted to get a shared understanding of what the most valuable opportunities might be to help teams delivering non-transactional services.

We walked the blueprint wall

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been creating a blueprint of high level steps as a non-transactional service goes through from the start of an idea, to a service being built, then live and maintained. We talked through each step, and merged some together to help narrow our focus.

For example, ‘generate user needs’ and ‘digital teams generate business requirements’ became ‘frame needs’. We also invited service design teams to come in throughout the day and add comments based on their experience. This is a work in progress as we find out more.

Defining the stages of non-transactional services

We created a priority map

Using the blueprint stages, we mapped each one against a priority map. These included things like, ‘decide on a content management system’, ‘service assessment of non-transactional services’, and ‘designing content’. We mapped each stage against high to low confidence and against the impact we think this could have.

It was important to remember that we are not defining the full yellow brick road we can skip down to alpha — but that we are defining the start of several roads. We don’t yet know the full way but we can see a suggested direction based on what we know so far.

We are laying the path ahead a few bricks at a time, so we know the options we can take in alpha

This tactic allowed us to pinpoint the stages that mattered most to the team. Doing this helped us to create priorities where we think we can add the most value. Where we can create the biggest impact to help teams.

We wrote problem statements

We then used the yellow bricks — or priority areas — identified during the mapping workshop to get a shared understanding of some of the problems.

Each problem was split into 3:

1. identifying a specific problem or user need,
2. the result of the problem,
3. the situation, explaining why it is a priority.

We quickly gathered a whole bunch of problems with results and why they should be a priority. We thought about things we’d seen in user research, or documented on the blueprint

We turned problems into solvable questions

For example, we know non-transactional services have design needs that GOV.UK cannot fulfil, so how can we help teams make informed decisions on whether their service should be on GOV.UK.

We looked at existing data, costs analysis and research insights to understand where we might be able to direct value-add, or cost-savings, or improve processes. All of which could have a positive impact on the overall service delivery lifecycle.

Where to next?

We need to decide — based on evidence — what is the most valuable thing to solve. What do we have a level of confidence in that we could make a first attempt to prototype and test in alpha.

Getting together as a team resulted in us focussing on three problems for the final weeks of discovery:

• Service assessment of non-transactional services
• Spinning up a non-transactional service
• Decide on a content management system

We want to work with other teams and champion processes and platforms that already exist but are not currently central to designing non-transactional services.

We might not be at the Emerald City yet, but the path is becoming a little clearer for our discovery.