This standard has been created to make the Government Service Standard more easily applicable to the local government context.
For some background on the service standard and local government, this LGA report is a good read.
It reduces the main points down from 14 to 5, and the constraints of local government are reflected throughout the guidance around the standard. The word ‘service’ is generally avoided, and ‘work’ used instead. The aim is for the standard to be applied to anything digital teams create – web pages, forms, whole products etc. We don’t want to let things get bogged down in “is this a service?” conversations.
The 5 points are:
- Have you designed around fulfilling the needs of your users?
- Have you ensured what you have made is easy for everyone to use across all channels?
- Have you ensured your team has all the skills and perspectives required to do good work?
- Have you used the best technology available to meet the needs of all your users all of the time?
- Are there mechanisms and plans in place to review performance of your team’s work and improve it based on that data?
It also suggests a process through which the standard is used before, during and after a project, including a final assessment stage. Additionally, there’s a template checklist that can be used to structure discussions around the standard within a project team.
The standard was commissioned by Luton Borough Council, and developed, and will be maintained, by Dave Briggs. It will always be free for councils to access and use. We are building a community of users and contributors – find out how to get involved.
Why is this useful?
This standard is a method by which digital teams in councils can embed new digital ways of working within their own teams and across the whole organisation.
The focus is on improvement and learning, and in most cases does not need to result in formal go / no go decisions.
It is also aimed to be easily adopted by councils by avoiding being overly prescriptive or onerous. People should not dread the mention of this standard!
Using the standard
The standard should not surprise teams at the end of a project: it needs to be introduced from the outset.
A knowledgeable person from outside the core project team should take responsibility for the standard for that project – introducing it to the team and explaining where it can and should be applied.
They should regularly attend project meetings to see how things are going, make notes in response to the points in the standard, and remind the team of what they need to be doing.
At the end of the project, either just before or after go-live, the person with responsibility for the standard should sit down with the team and with a senior digital leader to go through the checklist.
The discussion is more important that the final checklist!
- Encourage conversations about the points in the standard: what evidence is there that a point was met?
- More importantly, if more had been done to meet that point, how might that have produced better results?
The completed checklist should be presented to the digital management team to ensure learnings are captured and actioned.
It should also be presented to the whole team during a suitable show and tell style event.
The checklists should also be published – at the very least internally on the digital team pages of the intranet, but also externally to encourage broader learning and collaboration across the sector.