Running a retro using the Digital Service Standard

Written: 16 August 2022 by Darren McCormac, Senior Delivery Manager

In central government, digital teams work according to the Digital Service Standard. As their work moves between phases, they have a Service Standard Assessment, where colleagues from other departments review their work to ensure the team, and their service, has met the Standard.

The idea is that if you do these 14 things, your service should be pretty good. And when you use the services on GOV.UK, people are often struck at how easy things are; think of the last time you renewed your passport or driving licence, or used one of the many HMRC or DWP services.

Local government digital teams should at least follow the spirit of the Standard. After all, it’s tried and tested, and who doesn’t want a digital service that’s so good, people prefer to use it?

What is different is that local authorities aren’t required to have Service Standard Assessments. Colleagues in some other councils do light-touch internal assessments, but here at Greenwich we don’t (yet).

How we’re using the service standard at the Royal Borough of Greenwich

When the team working on the Greenwich Community Directory reached the end of our Alpha phase I ran a retro. I wanted to celebrate the work done and help the team appreciate how good their work has been. So I decided to base the retro around the Service Standard.

I looked at the 14 standards for which ones were more relevant, dismissed some and merged others. On the day, we had six “provocations”:

• We know who our users are, we understand them and their needs (standard 1)
• We’re solving a whole problem for our users (standard 2)
• Our service is simple to use, and everyone can use it (standards 4 and 5)
• We have a multidisciplinary team that uses agile working practises (standards 6 and 7)
• We’ve responded to feedback — and can explain how (standard 8)
• We’ve chosen the right tools and technology and are happy it’s secure (standards 9 and 11)

The team was challenged to post up stickies with evidence of what we’ve done under each heading, and also to think of things we may need to do, or do more of, in the future.

How it went

This format worked well, and the team enjoyed it. Some of the team had encountered the Service Standard before, but had never really applied it to our work.

Some team members found it helped them focus their thoughts in the retro. It helped them make specific rather than general points, especially when thinking about what we should do more of. It helped others think about our work differently. To quote a colleague:

“I had this realisation that some of our nervousness around the unknowns in our work didn’t matter that much, as we’ve shown how much we involve users in the process, how we actively seek feedback, and how we’re good at making a pivot when we need to.”

That really is the heart of agile working — being user-led, responding to feedback, and adapting to change.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the details of work, and I’m glad that this exercise helped people take a broader view. It certainly helped people appreciate just how good we are as a team, how far we’ve come. Taking an objective, high-level view of what you’ve accomplished is so important, and can be so difficult when you’ve been caught in the weeds for months.

There was also appreciation for the value provided by our service colleagues in the Adults and Children’s & Families services. They were able to reflect on the new ways of working that they’ve learned over the months.

Overall, I think this retro was a success and I’d recommend it to other teams here at Greenwich. We combined this with a “Springboard” review with senior leaders in Digital. This is a session where teams discuss decision points and future plans for refinement and endorsement. These two sessions together could be a good, structured way to move between phases of work without creating too much overhead.