PDS Progress So Far
The review of Parliament’s digital services was published on 17 March 2014. It noted that, “Parliament cannot continue for long without a clear digital plan in place”.
Central to that plan was the creation of a Digital Office, tasked with increasing Member’s, staff’s and the public’s satisfaction with Parliament’s digital services.
And yet a year and a half later, Parliament still lacks a clear digital plan. Within 100 days of launch the Government Digital Service (GDS) had:
blogged about the programme of work to support digital skills development across
begun 23 transformational projects sourced from departmental strategies
moved a proportion of departmental information and services across to GOV.UK
established clear guidance to assist departments in making services digital by default, delivering the beta version of the Government Service Design Manual
(for more see the GDS quarterly report, April 2013)
What have PDS been doing?
In October 2014 Parliament published a document called Preparations for the new Parliament Digital Service which sets out some views and recommendations. So let’s start there.
What commitments did Parliament make for PDS, and what progress have they made towards these?
1. Launch the digital service
Check. PDS officially came into being on 1 April.
Progress: Objective met
2. Agree aspirations for the digital service
They’ve done this. And very aspirational they are too, including aims such as considering user needs and delivering value for money.
Although so far these seem to be just aspirations - none have translated into actual digital services and products designed around the needs of people.
Progress: Objective met
3. Develop a digital strategy
This has been less forthcoming. The paper talks about holding a joint awayday in “late 2014/early 2015” to discuss the strategy, but it’s not clear if this happened. This leaves us wondering if things are stuck. Are we seeing the same situation that we had before the mySociety report? Are both houses unable to agree?
PDS has just appointed a Head of Strategy (but not announced it on their blog). We look forward to finding out more about their vision for a digital strategy.
Progress: Objective not met
4. Recruit a Head of Digital and give them sufficient clout and influence so they can get things done.
A gold star on part one. Rob Greig was appointed in December 2014, and started in March this year. The Preparations paper sets out a number of different options for ensuring they have the authority to get on with the job - but since no follow up has been published it’s not clear which of these has been selected.
Progress: Objective partially met
Suggestions for improvement: PDS could remedy this quickly by publishing org charts on their website. It would be interesting to have incorporated into that the scope of each role, and where decision making lies within that structure.
They could also share their conclusions on how to ensure the new Director has the autonomy and authority to deliver on PDS’s mission.
Especially key to this is the ability to identify capability gaps and to be able to hire both full time and contract staff to enable the Digital team to be able to get started with new way of working ASAP.
5. Review governance after two years
As it’s been less than two years since the inception of PDS we can let them off on this one. But given it’s almost a year since the paper was published, at the current rate of progress such a review could be taking place before a single product gets shipped.
Two examples that could be adopted pretty rapidly are:
Spend Controls – ensures that the right things are considered during proposal for digital spend
Delivery Governance – ensures the same for the delivery of a digital project
Progress: Unclear
Suggestions for improvement:
We don’t have a clear view of what boards exist, who sits on them, what responsibilities they have, if SMART objectives have been defined or if there are people and dates assigned to projects.
This could also be remedied in part by the publication of an org chart, but it would still be good to have some idea of how they intend how to review the governance, including a better idea of any metrics and objectives that have been sent.
6. Have a think about performance measures
The paper is decidedly vague about how PDS will be accountable to users for progress made, promising only to “undertake further work on this issue”.
It’s not clear if KPIs or a scorecard have since been agreed. If they have, we would urge PDS to share this to improve transparency and accountability.
common metrics to measure
how to identify specific metrics for a service
It wouldn’t be too difficult for PDS to publicly publish real time metrics and dashboards like GDS do on the Performance Platform.
Progress: Objective not met
Suggestions for improvement:
It’s possible work on this has been done but without any communication about progress made in this area it’s impossible to know if that’s the case. A clear commitment to specific goals and greater transparency about progress would be welcomed.
7. Openness and transparency
“The success of the preparations for the new Digital Service, are as much about having an open and transparent discussion [...] as getting the recruitment and governance structure right.” - Preparations for the new Parliamentary Digital Service (PDF)
Unfortunately this openness extends only to discussions with affected staff - the paper makes no commitment to keeping users and the public informed about progress. A missed opportunity, but one that would be simple for PDS to put right.
Progress: Objective partially met
Suggestions for improvement:
They have developed a new blog - we’d urge them to start using it to share progress on what’s planned. It would also be great to see progress on a per-project basis.
Building on the start that’s been made with the data.parliament.uk Trello board, PDS could:
publish regularly in a single place, much like the GOV.UK Transformation program
or openly in a publicly available version of a trello board, much like the GOV.UK roadmap
While outreach by individual members and staff at events is wonderful, and there is always Parliament Week to look forward to, we’d love to see the Director of Digital engage with the digital community, both online (eg via Twitter and the new blog) and at events such as CitizenBeta, UKGovCamp, Teacamp, Open Tech, and People Before Pixels.
Conclusions
This many months after the launch we'd have expected to see a product roadmap and a clear definition of purpose and vision. But these don't seem to be forthcoming either.
There are some smaller milestones that have been delivered - a new (if rarely updated) blog, a new data portal, and a semi-official portal from Parliament’s rapid apps team. These all have potential to develop into a useful ecosystem of products, but at the moment seem quite disjointed and it’s not clear how they fit into a more strategic vision of digital in Parliament.
In their statement to staff with the launch of the mySociety report, the two Clerks said that their vision for the Digital Service was:
To give priority to the needs of users of parliamentary data – Members, staff, and both specialist and generalist groups in the public – rather than the interests of producers;
To share and reuse the data our users need, in the form in which they need it; and
To make things happen more quickly, more simply and more electronically.
Seventeen months on, these ambitions are a long way from being achieved. This isn’t just a question of irritating bureaucracy; the paper acknowledges the urgency of this mission:
“This change is essential in order to ensure that Parliament remains relevant in a digital world (and, indeed, to regain some lost relevance). If we do not make this change, the disconnection between Parliament and the people we are here to serve will grow, undermining our democracy.”
The continued lack of progress towards even the minimal actions noted in the preparation report is troubling for Parliament, and for anyone with an interest in strengthening our democracy.













