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Government Digital Service Design Principles

gov.uk

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Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#11

Post by weego »

Having worked close to the department for education in the past it's refreshing to see a strategy that was implemented by employing smart people and giving them enough rope to actually do what was needed, rather than outsourcing to one of big suppliers (the DfE has been far too close to Capita over the last decade or so) and letting them bleed the pot dry with project management and consultancy fees (at one Capita run front-line strategy project that shut down not so many years ago the developers were allowed to quit as full time employees and instantly start back as contractors earning roughly three times as much).

I wonder if it's a coincidence that this project appears to be blossoming while almost every large project I saw that was outsource either massively underachieved or was just buried after huge loses (schoolsweb for example).

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#12

Post by jackfranklin »

cheery wrote: post #7

What.. Are these government sites? Those do not look like such as they are too clean and positive. Are you sure they're just not a victim of very stylish hacker?

They are indeed Government sites! GOV.UK itself is looked after by the Government Digital Service (GDS). A brief history is available on the GDS blog: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/about/. It's also different in that it's coded in the open. Most of the code behind GOV.UK is on public Github repositories: https://github.com/alphagov.

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#13

Post by UK-AL »

rmoriz wrote: post #6

Awesome stuff which makes me sad: Here in Germany OpenData and Open Government is really bad. The government started an initiative, later backed out in nearly every aspect of "openness" and hired some Fraunhofer FOKUS people (federal research institute) do code something. They used a huge JEE app-server as foundation for their work, have not a single test and neither a documentation. When they launched a couple of mo…

Java EE servers run some of biggest throughput web services in the world. But your saying its a bad choice?

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#14

Post by jackfranklin »

jackfranklin wrote: post #12
cheery wrote: post #7

What.. Are these government sites? Those do not look like such as they are too clean and positive. Are you sure they're just not a victim of very stylish hacker?

They are indeed Government sites! GOV.UK itself is looked after by the Government Digital Service (GDS). A brief history is available on the GDS blog: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/about/ . It's also different in that it's coded in the open. Most of the code behind GOV.UK is on public Github repositories: https://github.com/alphagov .

As another example, the app behind what powers the Design Principles, which is what this post links to, is here: https://github.com/alphagov/design-principles.

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#15

Post by buro9 »

weego wrote: post #11

Having worked close to the department for education in the past it's refreshing to see a strategy that was implemented by employing smart people and giving them enough rope to actually do what was needed, rather than outsourcing to one of big suppliers (the DfE has been far too close to Capita over the last decade or so) and letting them bleed the pot dry with project management and consultancy fees (at one Capita ru…

I've been part of a large consulting bid for work, and part of the team that executed it. It was horrible.

We were bought in because we knew how to do something, but we won the bid because we simply could do it cheaper than anyone else.

Where it went wrong though, was that even though we knew what to do, once engaged the client insisted on how it would be done and meddled with every part of it.

And the next big failure was our part... our project management team let the client change the requirements frequently even though we told them in no uncertain terms that we were moving from the stated goal and that what was now being asked would not work.

The project management team expanded to deal with the stream of change requests and meddling, and the devs got bogged down with change requests rather than actually driving the project to the project goals.

Finally the project ran out of cash, and what was delivered fitted no-ones needs. It was horrible.

I think the greatest thing that the gov.uk team have been able to achieve is finding the ability to say no when it needed to be said, and to dictate how it should be done right rather than permitting meddling.

It's no surprise that #1 is "Start with needs", and it's less of a surprise that they've had to clarify this is the end user's needs and not the needs of anyone in government.

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#16

Post by edbloom »

I'm not connected with anyone who works on gov.uk but I've been a huge fan of what is going on over there for some time. In my view it is without a shadow of a doubt the best digital government team in the world. They've assembled a massively talented team who are knocking it out of the park week after week. It's rare to see this anywhere never mind a bloody government agency!

well done folks - you're leading the world!

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#17

Post by bapbap »

Can anyone with some knowledge of the GDS explain how they seem to be doing such a good job? It just seems impossible that someone somewhere in Government got something right for a change and brought this team in and let them get on with it.

- I know Government projects get a lot of flak, rightly or wrongly but they always seemed to be awarded to companies like Capgemini who would spend £100's of millions achieving much less. I could be wrong.

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#18

Post by petepete »

weego wrote: post #11

Having worked close to the department for education in the past it's refreshing to see a strategy that was implemented by employing smart people and giving them enough rope to actually do what was needed, rather than outsourcing to one of big suppliers (the DfE has been far too close to Capita over the last decade or so) and letting them bleed the pot dry with project management and consultancy fees (at one Capita ru…

As a Capita employee (we were acquired), I can empathise.

Re: Government Digital Service Design Principles

#20

Post by scraplab »

bapbap wrote: post #17

Can anyone with some knowledge of the GDS explain how they seem to be doing such a good job? It just seems impossible that someone somewhere in Government got something right for a change and brought this team in and let them get on with it. - I know Government projects get a lot of flak, rightly or wrongly but they always seemed to be awarded to companies like Capgemini who would spend £100's of millions achieving m…

This report started it all: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/digital-by-default-propos...
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