Digital

Our next 100 days: Out of Beta

June 12, 2015 by Jono Ellis No Comments | Category Digital Public Services, mygov.scot

This is a blog post by Jose Casal-Gimenez, Programme Director for mygov.scot

We have just completed our first 100-day drive – 100 days during which we focused on firming-up our beta release and getting good traction in our publishing flow. The 100-day format was so well-received internally that we have decided to continue with a second. This time our big goal is to move mygov.scot into a “live service” over the next 100 days – which means a lot of work ahead for our team!

100 day drive workstreams

One key area of activity is to continue building the right product for our citizens. The 5 areas of activity are:

1. Justice content (cluster approach)
2. gov.scot migration
3. High-demand content (start-up approach)
4. Business Portal content
5. Platform refinement

In parallel to building the right product, we need to continue improving how we work and how we build and deliver products. The key areas of activity are:

1. Programme review
2. Live operation
3. Feedback mechanisms
4. Ways of working

High-level objectives in detail

Justice content (cluster approach)

This is a continuation of the work we did with our partners in the Justice space during the first 100-days. We need to continue learning from our experiences so far delivering user journeys, but also start focusing on enabling our colleagues to continue in a more autonomous fashion.

• Establish a better understanding of the journey ahead
• Identify and deliver the next user journeys
• Initiate the knowledge transfer to justice through trailing our academy approach
• Evolve along the product roadmap maturity phases: from build to enhance to enable

Gov.scot migration 

We are partnering with Digital Communications to start the work on a new gov.scot website, using the mygov.scot publishing platform. It is going to give us a huge opportunity to evolve and mature our platform as well as working closely with a core group in the Scottish Government family.

• Setup initial platform environment
• Begin developing content for the first target directorate
• Agree corporate (gov.scot) vs. mainstream (mygov.scot) content fitness

High-demand content (start-up approach)

Continue to add high-demand content (e.g. Blue Badge) that is fundamental to our success and is seen as valuable to a large proportion of users. Our new performance team is doing lots of great work to help us succeed in this area.

• Identify and visualise data-driven prioritised content areas
• Respond to ad-hoc, high-impact internal demand. New opportunities to establish a successful narrative and increased reputation
• Establish citizen-focused quantitative KPIs to communicate progress
• Complete a new iteration of the organisation hub pages

Business Portal content

Complete the migration of the existing Business Portal, as it is increasingly out of date and supports the need for the correct information to be made available through mygov.scot.

• Complete migration of duplicate, devolved GOV.UK content
• Request the decommissioning of the Business Portal
• Align the migrated content to our content strategy
• Review fitness for purpose for business users

Platform refinement

The addition of the gov.scot project is moving our platform to a multi-website product. This will require us to evolve and refine our current platform so that it can support the needs of the new website. Lots of behind-the-scenes work will be needed in this space.

• Release the platform as open source software
• Support a multi-site environment (e.g. mygov.scot and gov.scot)
• Improve the overall user experience for content designers
• Improve our search functionality
• Produce work-in-progress dashboards

Programme review

The mygov.scot programme of work has been going on for almost two years. As part of our belief in transparency and openness we are going to complete a comprehensive review of the programme; this is not just good practice in Programme Management, but something we believe we must complete to ensure the programme incorporates all the learnings we have made since its inception.

• Review our vision
• Review our business case, reaffirm its validity and reassess our benefit realisation
• Complete an independent review of our platform and reaffirm its fitness for purpose
• Review the fitness of purpose of STARS
• Establish a content strategy
• Complete a review of our existing content
• Complete a review of our approach to information architecture

Live operation

Moving the mygov.scot website to be a live service means that we need to increase the level of, amongst other things, the support and availability delivered. In the next 100-days we need to put in place all the missing bits to run a successful live service.

• Identify the levels for live operation support and possible existing service providers within Scottish Government
• Evaluate appropriate options to service our support levels
• Establish a roll-out plan for live launch (technical, policy, communications, etc.)

Feedback mechanisms

Our product is available in beta and we are learning lots from what our user researchers and our performance team are doing. We need to continue improving and expanding on this area to ensure we deliver a quality service.

• Complete and communicate the delivery of retrospective actions
• Establish a robust process linking the findings from user research sessions to our horizon boards
• Introduce new direct citizen feedback mechanism
• Expand our performance analysis
• Evolve our search engine optimisation approach
• Create website dashboards
• Establish citizen-focused, qualitative KPIs supporting our benefits realisation

Ways of working

Our team is learning every day and we need to continue improving what we do. We have been using agile methods since the beginning and during the previous 100-days we adopted Lean Kanban to our management and delivery activities.

• Complete a lean management education programme
• Evolve our team structure
  • Secure team stability
  • Recruit additional roles (content designers)
• Identify and agree Service Level Expectations (SLE) between workstreams
• Obtain lean-based system performance metrics (lead time, flow efficiency, etc.), moving us one step closer towards probabilistic planning and forecasting

In conclusion, we are going to be pretty busy until mid-September. As an agile programme of work, we know that things may change along the way and we will have to respond to whatever is thrown our way, but we are gearing up to move mygov.scot “out of beta”. Did someone say t-shirt?! 😀

We’ll be sharing updates on these features, and much more on social, so follow the team via @mygovscot on Twitter for more updates. Want to comment? Let us know below!

Tags: Product

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