Parliament User Group

[parliusergroup]

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.

[parliusergroup]

Building a digital team

The Parliamentary Digital Service (PDS) has been created to deliver effective, user-centred digital services for Members of Parliament, staff and citizens. It follows in the footsteps of the Government Digital Service (GDS), digital teams in departments such as Ministry of Justice (MoJ) Digital and organisations like 18F.

Creating a new organisation requires both retraining of current staff and recruitment of experienced practitioners. An organisation is likely to experience significant challenges while moving away from a traditional model of IT and digital provision, especially where many of the roles required are new to the organisation.

The need for such recruitment was highlighted in the mySociety report commissioned by Parliament:

“Without an increase in the number of computer programmers and designers working full time on Parliament’s online services, it is inevitable that the current site will slip ever further behind what modern users consider to be normal.”

Strategic Review of Online Services, March 2014

Central to mySociety’s recommendations was the need to recruit and retain skilled digital professionals, beginning with the appointment of a new Head of Digital with, “hiring skills, to enable the new Digital Office to acquire the skills it needs today and will need in the future”, and who should “develop their own plan once appointed”.

Digital roles

PDS must build a team of digital specialists - including user researchers, developers and designers - if they are to deliver. At this early stage, a priority should be to recruit leaders, and empower them to hire and train their team members. This should include writing their own role specifications - we suggest borrowing heavily from those in the GDS service manual.

The market for digital professionals is competitive. Parliament needs to be a place that people want to work. PDS is competing not only with the rest of government, but with the private sector, not only in London but globally.

Parliament has some unique selling points; it really is an exciting and career-enhancing place to work, with some amazing employee benefits - all things which might tempt a digital specialist to choose PDS over other, better paying, employers. But that all relies on giving people roles which fit into digital career paths, and in which they can make a difference.

But since PDS launched, we’ve seen some highly questionable activity, including:

The Director of Digital Development position - This appeared to be a role for a senior leader to "lead the delivery, design, content and technical development for Parliament’s digital presence". However, the job description listed specific technical skills: “.NET, PHP, LAMP based and Microsoft environments  and X/HTML, SQL, JScript, ASP/X, XML and semantic digital development”. It includes management of a huge range of functions within PDS: "technical, delivery, testing, design, user experience and content" as well as duties including "lead the coordination of social media policy enabling the House of Commons and House of Lords to be effective with web 2.0" and "ensure that all new code generated by the team is documented and stored or annotated as appropriate". This is clearly an inappropriate role description and the scope of it leads us to believe the PDS was searching for a unicorn

Online Learning Content Officer - At first glance that appears to be a training role as the advert speaks of ‘inspiring digital content’. However, it speaks of evaluating services, but also asks for experience in Office 365 as well as iOS “software and hardware”

Developing Project Manager - The focus on Project Managers rather than Agile Delivery Managers raises a concern about continued Waterfall ways of working

A continued focus on ‘enterprise’ roles such as ‘Enterprise Solutions Specialist – Messaging’

We’re also concerned that some of these roles are advertised 2 or 3 grades lower than elsewhere in government.

The recruitment process

The government recruitment process is currently a deterrent to digital professionals. While we recognise that PDS has to operate within constraints, there are ways of improving the experience for potential applicants.

For instance, there is no reason that we know of for having separate recruitment websites for the House of Commons and the House of Lords. This is not only unhelpful in terms of getting people to look at job adverts, but it’s also wasteful.

We also encourage PDS to ask applicants for feedback at all stages of the recruitment process.

PDS should also talk to people in other government departments who have experience of recruitment in government. In order to expedite hiring, we also encourage them to connect with external recruiters.

Recommendations

In summary, we suggest that PDS:

reach out to others that have done this before

review results of recruitment so far and iterate the process

publish an organogram that will help potential applicants work out what the jobs are and which teams they’re in

publish all PDS job adverts in one place and tweet / blog about them

publish PDS successes and future plans to encourage potential recruits about coming to work at Parliament

engage with professional technical recruiters

create a plan for recruitment as per the mySociety report and have it reviewed by trusted third parties, such as GDS, before publishing

Further reading:

The Team – guide https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/the-team

Recruitment – guide https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/the-team/recruitment/index.html

Working for GDS – article https://gds.blog.gov.uk/working-for-gds/

Job Descriptions and templates – resource https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/the-team/recruitment/job-descriptions.html

Technology Leadership – guide https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/the-team/recruitment/scs-orgdesign.html

[parliusergroup]

Who are Parliament’s users?

The Parliamentary Digital Service’s (PDS) first ask is, “whose needs are we tasked with meeting?”.

That must be their starting point for early digital transformation work. It will help them discover:

who are their users?

what they’re trying to achieve?

what they need to do it?

The answers help describe their user needs and will guide PDS’ work from then on. They’ll continually revisit and research user needs as they deliver transformation. Knowing what people need, and why, focuses PDS’ digital strategy and roadmap. It also drives delivery of specific services.

Simply put: who are Parliament’s users and what do they need?

You’d think this is easy to answer: it’s the MPs and Peers. They rely on services to help them do things like debate and scrutinise legislation. But they’re one of many types of user, trying to do different things, with different user needs. Understanding and mapping these will highlight how different users’ motivations and needs interact or overlap, and therefore ultimately what services you’ll build.

This is a continuous process of user research and rapid iterative delivery. Things change as you deliver services, like behaviours and processes. Opportunities appear that you didn’t imagine before. This is transformation - not only making sure services are developed that meet needs, but an opportunity to make sure the services are the right ones in the first place.

Then iterate and iterate again - you’re never finished. Things can always be improved, business as usual (BAU) is this process, not some maintenance or simply operational caretaking mode after you’re done.

You get the idea.

It all starts with knowing who your users are.

While this is a piece of work that needs to be carried out by the teams inside the PDS, here’s a starting point of how it might break down:

People and organisations outside of government:

The public

Press (including bloggers)

Researchers and academics

Lobbyists, third sector policy and campaigns teams as well as trade organisations (Unions, Guilds, Royal Colleges).

Members and their staff:

Members of the House of Commons (MPs)

MPs’ staff

Members of the House of Lords (Peers)

Peers’ staff

Parliamentary staff (people who work for one or other house, not for MPs). These include:

People administering the legislative work of Parliament, such as Clerks

Security

Those supporting MPs, such as library researchers and information professionals

The back office staff that you need to run any large organisation who need just as much support as they would if they worked for TfL or Marks and Spencer - in facilities, HR, IT, catering, procurement and so on

Other areas of government:

The Executive part of Parliament - e.g. Whips Offices

Auditors (especially Public Accounts Committee and the NAO)

Civil Service (who need to know about Parliamentary Questions, progress of a bill, select committee timings etc)

Other governments (devolved administrations, European governments and the broader Commonwealth)

Get them in the room, consult them repeatedly along the way. Test what you build with them on a very frequent basis. Invite them to talk to the team. Work out how to measure whether they’re being successful, or not, with new services, compared to anything you have now.

Share the outputs of those conversations so the broader public can see why decisions were made to prioritise one user need over another (just as GDS have done).

There is a high chance that for most products or services differing user needs will conflict. This is where vision, strategy and leadership come in. PDS will have to explain to all their users why decisions have been made, and stick to focusing on their highest priority groups for that product.

This process has to start with identifying users, researching their needs and publicly showing the results of that analysis and the strategies to meet the needs identified.

So the challenge for PDS is to answer the questions: who are your users, what do they need and how are these competing needs being prioritised and delivered?

Further reading:

How to focus a service on users – guide https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/user-centred-design/user-needs.html

Ways to understand your users and their needs – guide https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/user-centred-design/user-research/index.html

Start with needs – design principles https://www.gov.uk/design-principles#first

Prioritising needs, and product ownership – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=502ILHjX9EE

Reflecting on the big idea behind GOV.UK – article https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2012/10/09/exploring-user-needs/

“User needs and revolutions” – article https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2014/04/23/user-needs-and-revolutions/

[parliusergroup]

Parliament User Group (PUG) Manifesto

This sets out what we do. Read the about us page to see who we are.

We will:

be a critical friend to the Parliamentary Digital Service (PDS)

provide feedback to PDS on their progress on areas such as:

user needs

digital product and service projects

internal processes (recruitment, procurement and project management)

Blog http://parliusergroup.tumblr.com/

Twitter https://twitter.com/parliusergroup

Workload https://trello.com/b/AFyEffQq/parliament-user-group

push PDS to also be as transparent as possible

treat anything we’re told privately by PDS in confidence

We won’t:

build digital services for PDS

sell services or our time to PDS

We care because:

we work with digital services

some of us have worked in Parliament before

we want PDS to deliver world class, user focused digital services

PDS can help make our democracy better and more accountable

we are concerned by PDS’s limited public outputs since they formed