This was another week that went by fast.
Thursday ended up being the most dense day.
Stefan and I attended the Piazza conference on digital administration and society. It was run online and included 2 dense workshop blocks of 3 hours each. In our slot, we workshopped on the topic “Collaborative implementation and further development—Service Standard for digital administration.”
Working on and around the Service Standard
People from local, state, and federal government joined us for the workshop. It remained a small group. We shared what we do, where we are with updating the Service Standard, and why we do it in the first place. As there was time, I also gave an overview of how the Service Standard in the UK got implemented, evolved, and is supported by various adjacent activities.
Participants got to read the latest edit of the reworked now 12 Service Standard points. Like last week in Leipzig, we asked them:
- What do you need to follow these Service Standard points?
- What hinders you in your organisation from implementing it?
- What suggestions and change requests do you have?
We received another pile of digital sticky notes as feedback. We will work through it in the coming days and plan to publish the first version of the reworked standard points on OpenCoDE in January.
In the meantime, my colleague Kannika has already created the needed Service Standard repository on OpenCoDE. There, she created the peer review facilitation guide, which she and Caro have been working towards. We will reference it in an upcoming blog post about our peer review efforts. I started writing the blog post draft this week. We plan to get everything finished and published in the coming week.
With the blog post comes also another peer review report for the civil courts claim service one of our teams is developing. We also did the peer review in summer but got too distracted to finish it. It’s done now and it can be published next week, too.
On Friday, the Service Standard also played a minor role at the last learning cluster gathering at the Federal Ministry of Digital and Transport. The ministry and the digital strategy’s advisory council invited the 18 lighthouse projects from all other ministries to review a concluding report of this year’s work.
Getting together for the last time in the learning clusters of Germany’s #DigitalStrategie of Federal Government. It’s been a remarkable cross-departmental sharing and learning journey with 18 of its lighthouse projects. I had the honour to support the user-centricity learning cluster.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) November 15, 2024 at 9:22 AM
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As a subject matter expert on user-centricity, I supported one of the 5 learning clusters and co-facilitated the feedback session. Attendees moved between the learning cluster stations to read and comment on the report, which is supposed to be published in early December.
We had once more a useful conversation about what needs to change to progress good digital service development, including the governance structures behind it. I understand that the report will be presented to parliament.
Discussing digital sovereignty
Topic-wise, we had an exchange not too far away on Thursday evening. We hosted a rather exclusive talk series that moves around the country: Digital Sovereignity Talks.
Set up by a think tank of the Technical University of Munich, it discusses ambidexterity in the context of digital government. It is the organisers’s notion that we need to learn from our international peers but cannot get too dependent on them. They call it a balance of national resilience and international integration. They argue that that approach allows countries to deal with current challenges effectively without isolating themselves and cutting international cooperation. They published a paper in the spring I studied before preparing my talk.
They asked us what role user-centricity plays in all of this. So, I put together a short talk that title translates to ‘Only an easy-to-understand and accessible state is a sovereign state’. I gave an overview of our design, research and accessibility work and how it enables government to better serve the public. I shared various project examples that make the impact tangible.
The small group of less than 20 attendees included people from academia, the public, and the private sector. I had some good exchanges, and we will follow up on some of those conversations.
Looking inwards
This is a good portion of what I do anyways each week. This week, I did some curious number crunching.
I was curious to find out my team’s full-time employment rate.
Of our design and user research team of 34 people at Digital Service, 32% work full-time.
In Germany, full-time work is 40 hours per week.
68% of team members work fewer hours.
The mean and median are 34.5 and 34 hours, respectively.
30% of the team members identify as men.
70% of the team members identify as women.
Regarding full-time employment, men in the team are more likely to work full-time.
60% of the men work full-time, but only 20% of the women.
That’s even though there is no gender pay gap in our team.
After sharing those numbers with the other delivery heads, they did some math on their end, too. The numbers from product don’t look too different. What we haven’t done is looking at how the spread links to caring responsibilities people have.
Team makeup is just one of various topics we touched on during a half-day offsite on Wednesday. We, as delivery heads—engineering, product, transformation, design, and user research—plus our Chief Product Officer, who we report to, consider ourselves a team. But we still don’t get enough face time to work through all the tasks on our board. This week, we sorted tasks at least, and will continue with another collaborative afternoon the week after next.
Planning next community events
I cannot do without some community work. It’s extra work, but vital for staying motivated.
Without community work, I could not do my job. It helps me keep going. It’s additional work – next to all the (sometimes very tedious) managerial and administrative tasks I do as a head of design and research. It also comes with extra admin work, but the reward is enormous: I stay motivated.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) November 15, 2024 at 6:43 PM
So, this week, Maria and I planned the next cross-government community of practice gathering for 26 November. We’ll look at holistic service design. As the city and state of Hamburg now have about 10 service designers, I recruited them for input. I am also hoping to hear from a job centre or our parental benefits service team.
We are also preparing the next public-facing meetup for early December. The topic will be ‘checks and balances’—how both civic society and independent internal audit units keep the government and the administration accountable. It’s a vital topic this point in time. We have approached some interesting speakers. I hope they can all make it.
What’s next
The NExT networks invite us to their annual autumn conference on Thursday and Friday. I attended the last two times, travelling to Boppard at the river Rhine in 2022 and Wiesbaden the previous year. This year, it takes place in West Berlin. That’s a bit boring but more practical.
We will be present at the conference with an input on the Service Standard. In addition, Maria and I will represent our community. For that, we reviewed the data from our second community survey among user-centred design folks.