Digital

Second 100 day drive – what did we achieve?

September 23, 2015 by craigmilligan No Comments | Category Digital Public Services, mygov.scot

We’ve been quietly chipping things off our to-do list and today marks the end of our second 100 Day Drive. It’s a time where we reflect on what we have achieved over the period. When the 100 Day Drive kicked off we set ourselves some ambitious goals. We are proud to say that we have met quite a few of these (and more, including a migration to Amazon Web Services).

A core part of this was moving www.mygov.scot from beta to live. This follows the increasing availability of information from across the Justice and Business sectors and the closure of the Scottish Business Portal – in which business support content and tools moved onto the www.mygov.scot site. It also included the development of content aimed at victims and witnesses going through the Scottish justice system – both helping us make the decision to drop the ‘beta’ label.

“There is real momentum building with mygov.scot and hitting these milestones helps us show confidence in our ability to deliver”

Colin Cook – Deputy Director – Digital Public Services and Business Transform, Scottish Government

Here’s a breakdown of what we’ve delivered since the 12th of June:

Justice content 

This is a continuation of the work undertaken with our partners in the Justice space during the first 100-days.

• 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     ✓
• Acknowledge the wider Justice landscape     ✓

The Victims and Witnesses Team has been working with the mygov.scot team to improve the informational content online for citizens who are a victim of crime or who are a witness to crime. Existing information on legacy websites at Victims of Crime in Scotland and Witnesses in Scotland has been repurposed for mygov.scot under the Crime, Justice and the Law topic.

The move to mygov.scot will deliver enhanced information to people affected by crime. Informational content has been written in plain English to improve usability and enable people to make informed decisions about interacting with the justice system. User journeys were developed to improve access to relevant information including key support services provided by third parties. Joining-up related information will ensure citizens can quickly find and use reliable sources of help. Content has been developed and checked for accuracy with subject matter experts across Scottish Government and with justice partner organisations.

We have also added a new feature to the site so that vulnerable users can escape from a page via a “Hide this page now” button.

Victims of Crime in Scotland and the Witnesses in Scotland sites will both close by Q4 2015. To support users, redirects are being used to direct people to equivalent information on mygov.scot. The redirects to mygov will ensure there are no broken links when the websites are closed. Information covers a broad range of topics from reporting a crime, through what happens when the police respond, the court process, being a witness in court and after a trial has taken place.

We attended the Digital Criminal Justice Conference as part of our effort to acknowledge the wider landscape. It was interesting to hear about on-going work within Criminal Justice but outwith mygov.scot.

GOV.SCOT

Working closely with a team in Scottish Government, we have begun discovery on a new GOV.SCOT website.

• Setup initial platform environment     ✓ – We have a prototype available and have begun to adapt the publishing platform to support multiple sites.
• Begin developing content for the first target directorate     ✓ – We’re working through discovery and have started producing content that fits with our proposition.
• Agree corporate (gov.scot) vs. mainstream (mygov.scot) content fitness     ✓ – The grouping of informational and policy information and where it lives has been mapped out and we have begun repurposing content.

High-demand content 

Continuing to add content which is of high value for users.

• Identify and visualise data-driven prioritised content areas     ✓ – Our performance team have combined analytics and demand analysis to highlight priority areas that aim to grow uptake. The wider team are now beginning to research these areas to look at the user journey. What’s the real starting point and context that we need to design this around?
• Respond to internal demand and new opportunities to establish a successful narrative and increased reputation     ✓ – Over the next 100 days we will begin to set acceptance criteria for high-impact internal demand content but in the meantime we have been developing a process of establishing the MVP and getting this live. As an example, we are working to develop education content and signpost to appropriate government agencies.
• Establish citizen-focused quantitative KPIs to communicate progress     ✓ – We’ve made available a series of performance measures to do exactly this. We now need to think about how we quantify a success visit.
• Complete a new iteration of the organisation hub pages   ✗ – We’re winding down our focus on this and will provide more information later.

Business Portal content

Migrated the Business Portal and made the information available through mygov.scot.

• Complete migration of duplicate, devolved GOV.UK content     ✓ – All relevant content was migrated to our site.
• Request the decommissioning of the Business Portal     ✓ – The website is now retired.
• Align the migrated content to our content strategy     ✓ – We are continuing to refine the content on our site in order to make it easy to find and to enhance user journeys.
• Review fitness for purpose for business users     ✓ – Our lift and shift process was not our first choice, so we quickly reviewed where we were. We have now identified key areas, such as an exporting journey for businesses, where current content was insufficient. We are now working meet these user needs through a collaborative process with a group of business consortiums. We have also enhanced both the funding tool and rates calculator.

More information on our work with Business Portal can be found in this blog post.

Platform refinement

Evolution of our platform to so that it can support multi-site needs (gov.scot & mygov.scot).

• Release the platform as open source software     ✓ – Components of the technical stack have been open sourced. We have also established the Scottish Government presence on GitHub – the market leader in code collaboration and sharing for the open source community.
• Support a multi-site environment (e.g. mygov.scot and gov.scot)     ✓ – We have now created separate instances for gov.scot.
• Improve the overall user experience for content designers    ✗ – Taking learnings from a co-design workshop, we have implemented a re-think of how we create articles. We are going through discovery for an improved markdown editor as well. We’ve also worked on other small improvements.
• Improve our search functionality     ✓ –  Our development team have put in place Elastic search which has significantly improved our site-search.
• Produce work-in-progress dashboards    ✗ – We ran out of time and felt this was a much larger piece of work than we had anticipated.

Programme review

The mygov.scot programme of work has been going on for almost two years, as part of the 100 day drive we worked to review the programme.

• Review our vision and business case, reaffirming its validity and our benefits realisation     ✓
• Complete an independent review of our platform and reaffirm its fitness for purpose    ✗
• Review the fitness of purpose of STARS     ✓ – We made the decision to retire this, taking forward data about transactional services through a performance platform.
• Establish a content strategy     ✓ – We have a first iteration and are maturing this on a regular basis.
• Complete a review of our existing content     ✓ – This is being done on an on-going basis, with a focus on our format usage.
• Complete a review of our approach to information architecture     ✓ – Refreshed our categorisation, tagging is evolving on an on-going basis.

Live operation

Moving the mygov.scot website to be a live service by increasing the level of support and availability delivered.

• Identify the levels for live operation support and possible existing service providers within Scottish Government     ✓ – Our site will be supported during the working week (Monday – Friday, 8:30am – 5pm), with round the clock server support.
• Evaluate appropriate options to service our support levels     ✓ – We have a solution internally to cover round the clock server support and are working to expand the number of people who can fill this role.
• Establish a plan for live launch (technical, policy, communications, etc.)     ✓ – We’ve done the work behind the scenes to ensure we are in a position to think of the product as being live. The next step is to establish a communications plan around this to increase awareness of the brand.

Feedback mechanisms

Using feedback from our users, stakeholders and industry-specialists to feed the next iteration of our product.

• Complete and communicate the delivery of retrospective actions     ✓ – Teams meet to reflect frequently and retrospective actions are made available.
• Establish a robust process linking the findings from user research sessions to our horizon boards     ✓ – We have worked to make the content delivery process open and transparent. We have placed feedback mechanisms at our core. We’re working together to ensure user research is baked in for every piece of new content we aim to produce. On-page feedback is now actioned more regularly as well.
• Introduce new direct citizen feedback mechanism    ✗ – We are looking to improve the on-site feedback. Improvements are coming soon that will allow us to report back satisfaction on a page by page and section by section basis.
• Expand our performance analysis     ✓ – We are going through discovery for a service focused performance platform for Scottish Government, whilst also improving our ability to report more widely through the implementation of Google Tag Manager.
• Evolve our search engine optimisation approach     ✓ – We have made changes within the platform have made it easier to optimise pages, though there is still much to do to bake in search with our daily activities.
• Create website dashboards     ✓ – Our team have access to a series of web dashboards and we are looking at our options to open this up more widely.
• Establish citizen-focused, qualitative KPIs supporting our benefits realisation     ✓ – We have made available programme level performance measures across product, transition, transactions and the performance platform.

Ways of working

Striving to improve how we work.

• Complete a lean management education programme     ✓ – Individuals within the team are sharing their skills and working practices with others.
• Evolve our team structure     ✓ – We have had a long-awaited boost in numbers in our content team (welcome everyone!)
• 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     ✓ – We have made changes to our delivery method, reducing the need to report on lean-based system performance metrics.

We’ll update the blog over the next week or so to share our plans for the next 100 days.

You can also keep up with what we’re up to on twitter. Thanks for reading and feel free to share your comments below.

Tags: Product

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