Communicate the benefits of service design and delivery
Understand and communicate the value of using agile processes to build digital services.
The service design and delivery process puts people and businesses at the centre of government service delivery. Communicating the value of service design and delivery is the best way to make sure teams and decision makers in your agency understand the process and get onboard.
Meet the Digital Service Standard
The Digital Service Standard guides teams to create and maintain digital services that are:
- user-friendly
- inclusive
- adaptable
- measurable.
You’ll need to follow the service design and delivery process to meet the Digital Service Standard requirements.
The 4 stages of service design and delivery
Government traditionally creates services in response to policy needs. This means user needs go undiscovered until after a service is released. Service design and delivery changes this by starting the process with the user in mind.
- Discovery stage – the team gain a deep understanding of the user needs and develop a hypothesis to solve the problems
- Alpha stage – the team builds prototypes to test the hypotheses identified in the Discovery stage
- Beta stage – the team builds and tests the solution they validated in the Alpha stage
- Live stage – the team maintains and continuously improves the service.
The stages do not need to be performed in order. For example, a service in Beta might go back to the Discovery if the team learn they’re working on the wrong problem.
Communicate the benefits
To change the way you work, you need support and budget from decision makers. You can get this by communicating the benefits of the service design and delivery process.
Align with best practice
Governments around the world, including the UK and the US, follow similar processes to add value to their services and citizens.
Deliver the right thing
Service design and delivery builds end-to-end services to help users get from point A to point B in the way that suits them best. This means services will be more inclusive to everyone, including those with diverse needs.
Deliver quickly
Releasing in regular intervals rather than all at once allows users to test and give feedback on what needs work. This means you can prioritise resources to the user need. When releases become routine for a team rather than major milestones, they’ll make better use of their time working towards what matters.
Provide visibility
Working in an agile way gives you lots of opportunity to communicate your progress and findings through artefacts. Regular showcases provide visibility of the work and help you quickly discover if something is not meeting user needs.
Be adaptable
Learning about your users early helps you to make better decisions about how to meet their needs with the resources available.
Manage risk
When you follow the service design and delivery process, you’ll test assumptions early on. This helps you identify and prioritise risks based on data. You'll break risks into small, manageable pieces and release updates often.
Make a business case
Make sure you understand your organisation's goals. You may need to make a business case that shows how using the process will help you meet those goals.
For example, the process will help you build quicker, which reduces the cost of running a team.
Get support
Be clear from the start what support you need from other people. This might include the authority to recruit the right roles and capability for the team.