A pretty solid approach to building digital services and to digital transformation emerged out of the work of GDS and others across government.

It is a synthesis of established processes of user-centered design, civil service processes and the collective wisdom (and biases) of lots of people. It’s broadly set out in the Government Service Design Manual and can be characterised as setup a multi-disciplinary team of 5–15 people, then do one or more of: Discovery, Alpha, Beta, Live.

This is a good thing.

Government now has an approach to building digital stuff that is better suited to a world of the shortened development cycles that the maturity of open-source software, commoditised services and integration testing have gifted us.

Reflecting on my time at GDS, I think there is something missing. Not everything that followed the process succeeded, and not everything that succeeded followed the process.

From the original alphagov project the reset of the Universal Credit project, there are examples of where just making something at speed worked as a strategy to give space and poermission to do more work, and to change the way people view a problem.

When it comes to digital transformation, we are missing a mature approach to knowing when to run and when to follow a more structured process. We don’t have the words.

I don’t know exactly what form that narrative should take, but I think it could include some of the following:

  • Generating ideas and prototypes early on is OK, so long as the ideas are loosely held. Projects can fail through a lack of good ideas, just as much as they can by a lack of top-cover.
  • That moving fast is a strategic tool, with a different set of outcomes.
  • Designers should design in a way that embraces high-level concepts but allows for details to be filled in later (more on this coming in a future blog post).
  • An acceptance that, sometimes, we are not starting from scratch and the only thing to do is get something done. (By the time Alphagov started, the flaws and opportunities of Directgov had been debated and prototyped again and again at Govcamp, at RewiredState hack days and in the community around mySociety.)

As the development cycle gets even shorter (see Google App Maker and the as a hint of what the future might bring). Knowing when to run is only going to get more pressing.

Originally published on blog.memespring.co.uk