All I need is an opportunity with a deadline.
Between Sunday and Tuesday, I finished the draft for an opinion piece for the Süddeutsche Zeitung Dossier to be published before the general election. On Wednesday and Thursday, I tweaked it. It was published on Friday morning.
Based on my LinkedIn post from 2 weeks ago, I was given 5,000 characters to reflect on the different paths for digital government taken in the US and the UK. I compared what we have seen unfolding in the past 4 weeks under the Trump administration and Musk’s so-called ‘Department for Government Efficiency’. I looked closely at the UK government’s ‘A blueprint for modern digital government’ and the related ‘State of digital government review’ analysis document. It’s thoroughly comprehensive.
The permitted length didn’t allow me to go as deep as I wanted to. The final version should offer a good enough view for the audience of SZ Dossier, which is essentially a newsletter for political decision-makers. I ended up with dozens of references; quite a few remain linked in the text. So readers can dig deeper into the stories.
Incorporating feedback from colleagues Christina, Chiara, and Katharina, it became a solid narrative that was well-received by the SZ Dossier editor.
I wrote a piece in German for today’s edition of @sz-dossier.de. Digital transformation at the crossroads—ahead of Germany’s general election on Sunday, I looked sideways at the recent paths taken in the UK and the US. And what we can learn from that. It’s paywalled, but there’s a free trial.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) February 21, 2025 at 10:24 AM
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I got hooked and would like to write another text about how we chase the wrong end when talking about end-to-end. But that’s for another time.
Formulating H1 delivery objectives
Although many things are in flux due to the elections, we looked at objectives for the first half of 2025. It took us various weeks to get to a sharable version. What we wrote as Team Delivery is part of the leadership objectives. Our focus is on scalability.
Our delivery disciplines have grown a lot in the past year. For example, design and user research grew by 75%. Our structures and processes are still catching up.
So we give that work the attention it requires. We wrote this:
Our aim is to be able to make decisions more quickly as an organization in order to be better positioned for potential growth in the second half of the year. To achieve this, we will sharpen responsibilities and revise core processes.”
There are several initiatives and desired outcomes connected to this. Among other things, we will review, refine and document 3 core processes that are currently insufficiently defined or are even largely missing. Through the work, we want to reduce the perceived workload for people and cross-functional problem-solving be perceived as more efficient and effective.
Doing this internal procedural work is vital for us to ensure we work well. It’s easy to just do the work and not review how we work. Hence, I’m glad we are making this collective effort as heads of disciplines.
Figuring out what an updated Service Standard looks like
We continue to investigate what the updated Service Standard can look like.
How should it be branded?
Which brand should be attached to it?
Federal government? Or rather not?
Should we use the still relatively new umbrella brand linking up federal, state and local government?
Unfortunately, the latter isn’t ready to be taken for a test drive yet. So, we reached out to the colleagues working on its building blocks to understand what we can use now and what might be around the corner.
Visuals and naming are one thing. Content structure and information architecture are another. We have to address
From March onwards, content designer Linn will join us on the Service Standard team. Content design is an urgently needed skill and lens.
We will still be far from the setup we had in my GOV.UK Service Manual and Service Standard team in 2020. We have about half the team size but not less work to do. Currently, we don’t have a content management system in place to manage the content for the Service Standard and related manual content effectively. So, there is still a lot of essential work to do. Like at CDDO/GDS, we plan to take a community-based approach to all content. It will mean we are slower than with a capsuled team approach, but it helps us build awareness, momentum and a group of contributing advocates. That will be vital for making the standard a success after it largely fell flat in its first incarnation, which was released in the summer of 2020.
Our approach won’t be faster but better and more sustainable.
What’s next
In the coming days, we should get the earliest ideas of what a new government setup might look like – and if the emergence of a stand-alone Federal Ministry for Digital is likely to come true.
On Monday, we have a kick-off workshop for a new project. I’m looking forward to getting hands-on with it. I’m supposed to spend 10% on it each week. It will, of course, fluctuate. It is another, as we call it, ‘lever project’ – with links to our Service Standard work.
As we get closer to the end of the month, Torsten and I need to finish the first version of the skill matrix for content design. We have made some progress. We need to verify we don’t miss any significant skill or task on the framework.