A catalogue of things that are stopping change. Part II, ministerial engagement.
By Rose Mortada and James Reeve
According to the policy profession’s official GOV.UK page:
“The Policy Profession designs, develops and proposes appropriate courses of action to help meet key government priorities and ministerial objectives”
Finding the Digital equivalent of that statement was a bit harder, but I did find this on Civil Service careers:
“… the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Profession build and manage services that positively affect the lives of millions of people.”
To summarise, the policy profession proposes a course of action and then recommends it to ministers. So if it’s a service, the DDaT profession then “builds and manages” services that deliver that course of action. What could go wrong? Well quite a few things…
Big bang fixation
This is launching a new service to the world all at once, on a fixed date. Big bangs might be excellent for announcements, but they can fill delivery teams with fear and anguish. Here’s an example:
We had to launch the public beta of our Find Postgraduate Teacher Training service on 2 October 2018 — not a day earlier nor a day later — and it had to work better on day one than the service it was replacing. It was tough on the team but we managed to hit the launch date despite a huge influx of user support queries and multiple production incidents. Needless to say we all got more grey hair.
It could have gone so very wrong but thanks to the way everyone pulled together and worked very hard we pulled it off. Just. Thanks in large part to how the policy people had understood the dangers of big bangs, we’ve been able gain ministerial approval to start gradually but steadily rolling out Find’s sister service, Apply for Teacher Training. It’s a challenge of a whole new order of magnitude, but at least we can get feedback, make changes and build new features as we go. Phew!
My website is special
It’s not uncommon for senior people to want a website. We’ve seen ministers express a desire for a new website, brand or ‘feel’ for their department, agency or project. We think this might have been because they are looking to create a new ‘visual identity’. A compelling visual identity can set the department’s services apart from those of other departments and might better engage users.
For example, I could take a service with the familiar GOV.UK visual identity, say Teaching Vacancies, create a copy of it but then give it a more empathic tone of voice, some pictures of smiling people and a vibrant colour palette — but keep the same underlying content as the original. If we A/B tested the two versions of the service, the same person might (and very probably would) feel and respond differently to each.
Given this it’s understandable that ministers may want to deviate from standard design patterns. The GOV.UK Design System will always be incomplete — it can’t change at the pace that our user’s needs change because our services must work for everyone. Unlike for all our private sector counterparts, accessibility and inclusivity are sacrosanct. New needs will always emerge faster than we in government can create universal patterns to meet them.
Expectation mismatches
Ministers work to address big problems, so tend to think in terms of big solutions. The way policy people working on these solutions communicate with one another (submissions and formal briefings) — are inherently geared for building confidence, relating the greater ambition and constructing a path toward it. Small beginnings, iterative improvements and the fail often/fail fast ethos doesn’t lend itself to formal and often infrequent communications between policy teams and ministers.
It’s been a while since I was involved in writing a submission, so I asked a colleague involved in writing submissions how he felt they communicated the realities of creating a digital service. He described it like this:
“Writing a submission feels artificial. We need to recognise the value of failure, have no qualms about the messiness of the process of solving a problem, saying what you’ve found and how you’re going to react. Submissions need more persuasion as you want the minister to agree, so a lot is lost. We deliberately remove unnecessary detail and complexity from submissions to land the message clearly.”
Buzzword addiction
Be it blockchain, AI, predictive analytics, RPA or [insert name of industry here]tech, they might sound great but often they have no bearing on a problem a service is trying to solve or a user need it’s aiming to meet. Yet we give these buzzwords serious airtime. This definitely isn’t a new problem. Tom Loosemore talked about it in 2013 and more recently Dave Rogers wrote about how hype tech is killing innovation.
It can be tempting to use the latest buzzword to signal you’re up to speed with the latest, most cutting edge developments in tech. But big decisions about digital services should rely not on buzzwords but on expert advice and the evidenced needs of the services’ users. Otherwise government pays a premium for hyped, branded products and services fail to give people using services a good experience and meet their needs.
We believe:
- We have a way to go with helping our ministers understand the reasons that we can’t always meet their expectations in the way they’d like us to.
- We have to take a step further in helping ministers get under the skin of the problems they see — to pre-empt well-meaning but flawed solutions.
- We need to expose them to the guts of the design and testing process in more direct ways.
As we said before, this isn’t about being negative: I’m a firm believer that calling out a problem is the best way to start addressing it. I’m going to be publishing another one of these focusing on governance early next week… stand by!
Blog posts in this series:
