I’m still recovering, so I worked from home this week.
I did make it out for a half-day offsite with my head of delivery colleagues, though.
Reviewing how we support delivery teams best in 2025
On Thursday morning, the few of us – representing product management, software engineering, user-centred design and transformation management – got together for 6 hours to pull together and look ahead.
We reviewed our team’s mission statement after our setup has changed significantly since last year. We looked at the effectiveness of the regular meetings we run and participate in and reviewed the metrics linked to the objectives for which we are responsible.
The draft of our redrafted mission statement as heads of delivery is this:
“As Team Delivery, we help Digital Service to develop measurably effective products and services by creating clarity on the organisational context and goals, establishing structures, collaboration models and best practices so that teams and individuals have a stable foundation to do good work on their own responsibility. Specifically, we will:
- ensure that the right people with the necessary skills are in the organisation and have sufficient development opportunities
- provide impetus and focus on outcomes
- take responsibility for issues that individual teams cannot resolve
- remove obstacles, provide resources, give guidelines for good decisions and resolve conflicts
- shape the interface between the executive and leadership team as well as the core functions and the implementing teams.”
In the coming days, we will tweak this statement further. It feels like a solid draft already.
Offering an inspirational outlook for user research
On Wednesday, I missed the user researchers’ half-day onsite workshop.
After the sub-discipline grew by 600% in 2024, it’s vital for the now 6 user researchers to come and grow together. Starting with a democratised user research approach, we are moving towards an embedded model. About half of our service teams have a user researcher in their team. The others have a different scope of their work or currently lack the funding.
In the past months, we introduced new tools and processes, talked to hundreds of users of our services and ran another survey across service teams to understand what they need from research. So, this week’s onsite gathering was an opportunity to look back and then forward. It offered time to discuss a shared identity of the members of the sub-discipline and identify thematic areas.
In a short, remotely delivered input, I asked: “Quo vadis?” Adding more researchers? How long until we sextuple again? Running more research activities? Doubling again after we doubled the number of users we engaged in research activities from 2023 to 2024. Supporting more projects? Maybe we do all of that.
Not knowing what to expect from the year and what might happen after the general elections, there are still a few things we must aim for. There is a significant role user research can play in the profound transformation of government that we need.
User research helps address the needs of truely everyone government servces. We already made good steps in the past year to develop routes for involving people with broad range of capabilities and barriers in our development work. We will continue doing that and take further big steps.
User research at Digital Service helps make good practice the norm. I shared a picture of federal minister Nancy Faeser in front of a user journey map. We must aim to make it the standard for senior leaders to ask for the evidence, the data points and the user research when receiving any project update from their policy and delivery teams. To get there, we must increase the visibility of our work and the value of our work understood.
User research helps get the whole picture with rich data points. When I joined, there were various projects in the discovery stage. Now, we operate an increasing number of live services. It allows us to intertwine qualitative and quantitative data. While we still lack dedicated performance analysts, I want us to combine all kinds of data points to inform services’ future strategy.
User research helps develop an end-to-end view and understand life circumstances to design holistically. It took others abroad a while to do that – like the UK’s work in service communities. But we must bundle our user research effort across organisational silos to join fragmented experiences up.
User research helps make insights accessible to others. It’s something discussed with Steph Marsh and her team last year: We want to standardise insights to make them universally sharable across teams, domain areas and organisations.
User research helps model good practice and scale it across the public sector. As our monthly user research exchanges show, our teams are already seen and respected for their exemplary work. But there is limited value, and it misses the actual point. The real value is in collective discourse to raise the bar across the entire sector and equip colleagues in other organisations with the references and talking points to establish good practice everywhere. We all benefit from that collectively.
User research helps increase research literacy and capability across government. Through our partnering work with various ministries, we see their understanding, appreciation, and experience with user research and evidence-based work grow. The updated, mandatory Service Standard could offer a fertile ground for that. In cooperation with the federal government’s digital academy, we could test new learning formats like we saw in the UK some years ago.
User research helps upstream: improve legislation and policy when drafted. As we demonstrated with strategic research into various tax types, user research capability and activity can be instrumental in making policy better and thus resulting in products and services downstream. Our work in task force mode with legislators currently proves that once more.
Writing, publishing, and writing more
After weeks of waiting for review, we got our latest international community update published on the ‘Design in Government’ blog earlier this week.
Here is how we are progressing international #GovDesign discourse in Helsinki, Amsterdam and beyond— @karakane-kk.bsky.social, Viktoria Westphalen, and I just published an update on our community activities. Join us in Amsterdam in April! 🌱
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) January 14, 2025 at 10:51 AM
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I worked on my next German blog post on bringing together the digital-ready check for legislation and the Service Standard. The draft is due next week and should be published before the end of the month.
As we have some things done and to show, I started writing a proposal for a guest blog post for the ‘Accessibility in Government’ blog. I still have to submit. The working title is “Building on strong foundations: Accessibility at the German Digital Service”.
Right before the deadline, I responded to the call for participation from re:publica. It’s been 14 years since I last spoke at Europe’s largest digital society festival. This year’s topic is ‘Generation XYZ’. It takes place in late May. I titled my proposal “State for all: a practical approach to inclusive digital administration”. I should find out in the coming weeks if my submission were successful. The competition is rather fierce.
Spotting another opening, I updated my German public sector job board. I added a role at the German state pension provider. Currently, there are 3 jobs advertised. I started promoting the page on social media and an internal public sector email list for the first time.
Job alert 🚨 I just added an open senior #ServiceDesign position at the German pension provider Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund to my little page, which lists #GovDesign jobs in Germany. This role is in Berlin. It closes on 19 January. verwaltungsgestaltung.de#positionen
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) January 13, 2025 at 9:04 PM
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What’s next
Next week, I will spend more time preparing for Demo Day. It’s less than 2 weeks away.
I will participate in a 2025 goal-setting workshop for the Service Standard and adjacent activities.
We will talk to our colleagues in the innovation office of the City of Cologne about their approach to radical form re-design.