Mastered by the Prussians in the 19th century, ‘mission command’ is a well-known military doctrine that encourages soldiers to use their own initiative in battle. 

The last blog looked at the importance of balancing the user, organisation and technology in digital product delivery. This blog gives a bit more detail about how that works in government and the public sector.

A discovery phase allows you to identify what problems exist and what steps you need to take in order to address those problems.

Here is an overview of how we can quickly implement a digital service suitable for both citizens and partners with Digital Process Automation (DPA). The following video shows how a local council can use DPA to digitise and streamline its housing process, empowering public sector employees to create solutions quickly and easily, saving time and money compared to both manual and custom code approaches.

The GDS' updated Service Standard – initially introduced in 2014 to help government create and run user-led digital services – has now come into force. From 1 July, any new discovery work undertaken by government bodies needs to adhere to the new standards. At some point, services already in progress will transition to the updated standards but GDS says this is unlikely to happen before early 2020.

Public sector organisations are wrestling to address a whole host of issues when they embark on their digital transformation journey.

The government set an ambitious target that 33% of Central Government procurement spend will go to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by 2022.

A few weeks ago, I overheard a conversation on a train between two, let’s call them ‘seasoned’ consultants, who were raving to each other about this wonderful new methodology they’d discovered called ‘Agile' and how they were super excited to learn more and put it into practice. Using all the Agile buzzwords, they obviously thought Agile was the answer to all their problems. 

The GDS Government Service Standard — formerly Digital Service Standard — helps government create and run, user-led digital services.  As part of the government’s wider ‘Digital by Default’ drive, the service standard was introduced in 2014 and updated a year later to reduce the number of assessments from 26 to 18. You can find the list here.

You can now expect most of the services delivered by your local or central government to be found online either through a desktop or a mobile platform. Not only will this offer a better service for everyone, it should see massive savings in cost and an all round better experience.