This was yet another busy week, as it was the last before the school summer break started. So, before colleagues with kids leave, everyone tries to squeeze in as much as possible before some teams see each other only in September.
The week included several in-person workshops and gatherings for me.
Running the first follow-up peer review against the updated Service Standard
On Thursday morning, we had a double premiere. We ran the first Service Standard follow-up peer review. We also ran the very first peer review against the updated Service Standard.
Almost exactly a year after the first peer review, the justice service team working on court claims for flight rights returned. And so did the original peer review team. Last time, the discussed scope included the eligibility check for small claims. This time, it was for the extended scope, including the court claim creation and parts of the submission.
We have a double premiere this morning! We run the first peer review against the new #ServiceStandard. We also run the first time a second peer review—a year after the original review. It’s for the court claims service for flight rights of the Federal Ministry of Justice that has grown in scope.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) July 24, 2025 at 9:21 AM
[image or embed]
As part of the setup, we had to consider and connect the previous Service Standard’s 19 principles and the new version’s 13 criteria, as last year’s report was written against the old. My late colleague, Vicki Teinaki, did an excellent job of matching the various versions of the UK Service Standard. I am tempted to do a similar thing for Germany.
Our peer review setup is robust after running these for about 2 years. Last November, we blogged about it. We are now recreating the related guidance we previously produced and will soon integrate it into the handbook section of the Service Standard website. We are also redeveloping the report template.
Things went pretty smoothly. We still collected some feedback. Once we have published the revised guidance, we would like to invite additional service teams to peer reviews. On Friday, I approached colleagues from Hamburg regarding a big service they run and continue to develop for various parts of the country.
Workshopping next steps for the umbrella brand
This week, as our work around the cross-government umbrella brand intensified and became more visible, we launched our project page and hosted a two-day workshop with its coordination circle.
In December 2024, after years of work behind the scenes, Germany launched gov-dot-de and a pilot for a cross-gov umbrella brand for all 3 levels of government. Now, @digitalservice.bund.de is supporting this work. Yesterday and today, we are running a workshop with its coordination circle. 1/X
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) July 25, 2025 at 9:56 AM
[image or embed]
Members of the coordination circle consist of the City State of Hamburg, the state IT supplier Dataport, the Federal Ministry for Digitalisation and State Modernisation, and the Federal Press Office. Our small team had recently interviewed everyone to get a comprehensive picture of everyone’s priorities, including differing views. That allowed us to share back what we heard and present options.
We tried to understand what we should be doing beyond the original scope of our work, wanted to learn what an expanded scope could look like and get a sharper priority from the coordination circle. We also let them map out engagement approaches for various stakeholders, effectively utilising their collective knowledge and experience.
We closed the second workshop day with a phenomenal 4.8 ROTI score. In the coming days, we will synthesise all of the guidance extracted from the workshop days, which will significantly aid in planning the work for the coming weeks and months.
Getting together as a delivery discipline
For the fourth time in the past three and a half years, we got our delivery disciplines together.
Together with Magdalena, the former Head of Product, and Christian, the previous Head of Engineering, I started the annual offsite event series in December 2022. We ran it in a shabby-chic villa before relocating to a more established venue over the past two years. Our 4 disciplines have grown significantly since then. More than 100 people joined this year, with some travelling across the country to attend. We, the now 5 heads, co-ran and co-organised it together.
The last 2 times, we had a theme. This year, we picked ‘Delivery through change’. It is a spin on our ‘Change through delivery‘ strategy and tag line. We are currently witnessing significant changes with a new government, an entirely new ministry, and a new private sector minister. Whatever the degree of temporary uncertainty, delivery goes on.
It’s our annual delivery offsite! Which means a whole day of exchanges, discussions, claps and laughter. We, the heads of the delivery disciplines—design & user research, engineering, product management & transformation management—and our CPO run a day for now 150 people to reflect together. 1/X
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) July 22, 2025 at 4:50 PM
[image or embed]
Taking a day out of work for over 100 people is costly. There has to be a good return on investment and reasons for taking that time.
We described the main reasons as follow:
- Meet people across projects and network
- Enable learning across disciplines and projects
- Make shared challenges in our project work visible
- Have fun in the exchange and recognise diversity
- Strengthen team spirit by presenting projects
As in previous years, we ran two rounds of unconference workshops. I hosted a theme that I will lead as our half-year objectives initiative. It is around our project portfolio model. I had engaging discussions with dozens of colleagues around the topic and collected genuinely helpful insights, questions and suggestions.
One of the absolute highlights has been the special edition of our show and tell. Once a year, teams drop the slides and go for acting things out. Last year, we had a rap performance. This year we had various poems, jokes and roles place.
One of the highlights every year is a special show-and-tell edition. What makes it special is the creative storytelling and the almost absence of slides. Teams explain what they do in unusual ways. This year, it included: – a mini poetry slam – a dad joke competition – various role plays 3/X
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) July 23, 2025 at 7:45 PM
[image or embed]
One way to measure the greatness of such an offsite day is by counting the laughers and the volume of people’s laughs. Then, this was a pretty successful day.
The inspiring addition has been a longer prototyping slot, which ran in parallel to the unconference rounds. A group of mostly engineers made 3 separate attempts to put the KERN design system on top of existing products, which was 1.5 out of 3 effective. I was pretty impressed with what they were able to come up with in those two hours.
What’s next
Next week is likely to be calmer.
I am off for the first 2 1/2 days of the week, and then hope to find time to write. I need to sort out the peer review report, write text for our revised discipline pages and create my first piece of guidance for the Service Standard’s new handbook. That sounds quite ambitious now and should keep me busy for the second half of next week.