Returning from a 9-day break while others start their vacation, I had some time to think and make this week.
Working against Conway’s Law from the ground up
Government services are broken, not by intent, but by structure. People often deal with more than 1 part of government at a time, but we often fail to join things up. By turning citizens and residents into sudden project managers of our disjointed services, we offer a bad experience.
“Good services are only as strong as their weakest link“, Lou Downe writes in their new book. That is what we see as harsh reality in Germany: 70 to 90% of users are lost once they reach digital identity components BundID and AusweisApp. All the good efforts by designers, user researchers, and other service team members don’t make a dent when 1 or 2 shared components break the journey for the majority of users. The core digital identity components are developed and governed elsewhere. The teams working on individual services integrate them, but they cannot do more than share feedback, which hasn’t improved much.
User researchers and like-minded colleagues from 7 public organisations felt the pain so strongly that they got together to write up their research findings as part of a NExT network working group. The paper they presented earlier this month doesn’t contain much groundbreaking insight, but granular evidence and straightforward recommendations. The up to 90% churn rate number is well known across the German public sector, at least at working levels. The IT Planning Council published them last year, too. If it keeps ministers accountable for digital transformation sleepless at night, we don’t know. But now, senior leaders have some concrete ideas on what to act on.
That 7 public organisations got together to compare their qualitative and quantitative research with overlapping findings is a terrific indicator of the significant capability growth we have seen over the past few years. Just years ago, none of that would have been possible. It shows the bottom-up willingness to overcome organisational silos that hold back service improvements.
This week, 3 media publications picked it up, reported on the paper and summarised its content. It also received some reflections in posts on LinkedIn, some from contributors, some from digital identity experts.
The way we govern the parts of the whole service directly impacts service quality. We embed our siloed structures in the fragmented outputs of our work. That’s why I’ve been rocking up to cross-government meetings with senior stakeholders with sheets saying ‘Conway’s law’ a few times now. Pinning them on the wall is usually a good conversation starter.
My former boss Lou references Conway’s Law extensively in their new bestseller ‘Bad Services’, too. They dedicate a whole chapter to ‘Cause 5: structures’. During last week’s hiking vacation, I found time to pick it up and kept nodding through the pages. The book offers sound advice on dealing with horizontal and vertical silos – plus much more. It’s ordered in bulk for Digital Service’s book club.
It’s powerful to see a shared responsibility in collaborating to fix what is broken and needs to be joined up. Much in the spirit of what Lou writes in their last chapter: “Just because you don’t provide the whole service doesn’t mean you’re not jointly responsible for helping your user to reach their goal.”
Seeing the Service Standard team grow bigger than ever
The Service Standard team got so big! In a sharing session this week, I realised it’s a team of 10 – if I include myself. In addition, a freelance content designer helps out 1 day per week.
If I remember correctly, my previous Service Standard team at the Government Digital Service eventually reached 8 people in 2021. From there, it shrank.
With this team size, we can do quite a few things. So in our sprint planning and sharing sessions this week, we reviewed guidance and sketched out new interactive functions. I also talked with new transformation manager Konrad about community engagement. After some back and forth, we seem to have an August date for an external peer review, for which I am now recruiting peer reviewers.
In an online exchange with my former team member Ben, I tried to explain what a transformation manager does. I wrote a string of posts to outline the role and how it fits our setup next to low-capability government departments in Germany.
I also made some slight progress on what I see as essential guidance on naming services. For various months, I wanted to finish it. Now, I have a deadline set by the team; I am trying to meet it.
Planning my writing
People are on holiday, so there should be fewer meetings, which should allow me to spend more time writing in the coming weeks. That is at least what I hope. So I made a little plan of what I will work on in the coming days and weeks.
Our post on roadmaps needs one long afternoon, I reckon, to be finished. Designer Benedikt, who had a bit of time, helped sort the notes and sketches I made in April.
I have an idea for how to write our discipline growth blog post, but it will require at least 2 afternoons, I think. And I created an outline for a post about putting our organisational values into practice. It’s a contribution post I haven’t done in some time. I have invited 2 members of the team so far and asked them to contribute. One of them, user researcher Joshua, already wrote his 200-word section. As we have 6 values, 3 more need authors, as I plan to write about our value ‘open by default’.
What’s next
On Tuesday, I will participate in the Service Standard’s team day. I will also continue working on my naming guidance and need to put some of its advice into practice. We need to find a suitable title for the first-steps interactive self-assessment and guidance feature. As its purpose, scope and functionality become clearer, we should be able to narrow down some name options.
Together, with accessibiltiy designer Marion, I will meet with counterparts from the Federal Information Technology Centre (ITZBund). The 2 colleagues will be in Berlin for the day. So we are planning an afternoon exchange and subsequent dinner. It’s helpful to compare notes face to face. For Global Accessibility Awareness Day in May, we already teamed up for a NExT network-hosted event, which we jointly put together.
Otherwise, I hope to find time to work on talks and blog posts.