Digital

100 day drive and progress update!

April 13, 2015 by Jono Ellis No Comments | Category Digital Public Services, mygov.scot

This is a post by Scott McLear, our Communications Manager

In February, the mygov.scot programme team embarked on the beginning of an ambitious 100 day drive to reinforce and communicate a clear vision of how we want to transform the Scottish public sector. Central to this activity is putting the user at the heart of everything we do and applying digital technology and thinking in a timely and creative way.

The 100 day drive helps us: 

• deliver with the Justice cluster, using user-centric research methods and beginning to build upon our relationship
• establish a more radical and dynamic approach to content, surfacing priority services from across the public sector
• establish partnerships and assessing opportunities for reuse
• we’re moving towards a Lean Kanban method for managing flow

We’re now half way through the 100 day drive.

At a more operational level, it will also encompass:

• running through our user-need process
• an increased focus on content surfacing priority services
• a proactive and reactive approach to fact-checking and sign-off as separate activities
• deeper, more meaningful stakeholder engagement
• public availability of the beta (e.g. availability in Google)
• transitioning the legacy alpha and DirectScot websites

Progress update

So far we have focussed on improvements to the user experience and changes to the backend. Most recently we have:

• on-site feedback on a content-item by content-item basis, allowing users to provide us with valuable insight
• enhancing the data fields stored about user-needs, helping to move us away from using spreadsheets
• introduction of a new accordion content format to help us meet the needs of users who are having financial hardship
• improvements to the publishing platform to ensure compatibility with Internet Explorer 8
• updating the formulas used by the business rates calculator in line with financial changes on the 1st of April
• refining the design of the site for mobile devices, geeking out about how the site looks on smaller screens all the way up to tablets
• An early solution for surfacing local authority content through a lookup content format (paying council tax online)
• Accessibility testing with users from Scottish Government, shedding light on how screen reading tools interact with our site. This will influence interface and design changes in the coming weeks
• Automated testing using Gatling – allowing for performance testing
• Automated provisioning using VMware using Puppet. It’s not common in Scottish Government and our infrastructure guys have been really raising the bar to improve our build pipeline

We’ll have more in the coming weeks as our cadence for releases begins to fall into a rhythm.

Tags: Product

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