New Childcare Subsidy Digital Service Launch and Lessons

Real world continuous improvement

As we’ve noted in an earlier post, the first of our exemplar projects went live (October 16th to be exact). So we’re here to celebrate (a little), but also wanted to let everyone know how it went. So think one part retrospective on our path to launch and one part ‘see how the Digital Innovation Office and its partners actually work.’

To get to launch we’ve been through the Discovery| Alpha|Beta phases we’ve described before. We built a series of prototypes, demonstrated them to our users (and to our Deputy Minister and Minister along the way). We integrated (and continue to integrate) with some legacy IT. So how did it go?

Approximately one second after launch, our application crashed. One mystery javascript library later and we were back up and running. Then more things broke. And our team fixed them. In fact we’ve been working on the application ever since. Big props to our partner on this project OXD, who have been with us every step of the way. And this is actually the point — that we launch and then real life conditions tell us what works and what doesn’t. And then we continue to work on the application even after it has launched (did someone say continuous development…?)

So now, after about six weeks of life, it seemed like a good time to take a quick look back at what’s next…

This is likely the first beta launch for any Government of Alberta application. By launching our application in this way we wanted to let Albertans know that new digital services will get under way in this fashion.

And it means that service will work in almost every case — but as we learned there are still small (and sometimes) big fixes that we manage as we go. And if parents weren’t ready to use the new version, we let them use the classic version of the subsidy application if they wanted to (bonus points for finding a computer with Netscape 7 to 9 installed to make this happen).

Must. Keep. Measuring.

Our analytics show that most users tried the beta version, that about 1.5 per cent still used the paper version, processing times are faster, and we are working to make them even better (more on that later).

But most importantly we launched a service that was designed by and for our users. We conducted a lot of research at the outset. Parents, daycare providers, and internal government staff were all consulted in the earliest phases and helped us design a system that they would actually use. And we delivered in a fraction of the time and budget a conventional project would typically take.