After just 2 weeks, I returned to Hamburg.
The Digital First programme of Hamburg’s Senate Chancellery ran its now annual ‘OZG Forum Live’ for the 4th time. (OZG refers to the Online Access Act of 2017, which set the goal of bringing the primary 575 services online by the end of 2022, which didn’t succeed.) The colleagues from Digital First invited me to tell more about the Service Standard and related DIN SPEC 66336.
In their remote fortnightly cross-city exchange, they already dedicated a gathering to introducing the standards regulation a few weeks ago. Now, they wanted me to go deeper in person.
Workshopping Service Standard application
About 130 civil servants from the city-state of Hamburg joined the cosy conference. Over 150 had applied, but space was limited. They either work at the state or city level, creating a curious mix of perspectives. Some of them are also in charge of services serving half the country.
In the morning, I had the honour of giving a brisk 10-minute keynote (slides available on GitHub), reaching all participants. I talked about service quality, standards, and the impact of poor service quality on trust in government.
Returning to the Digital First team after more than 7 years allowed me to dust off some pictures I took while working on my MBA thesis with them. In April and November 2018, I facilitated 2 service quality workshops with the Digital First team. The final one discussed a Hamburg Service Standard. I picked things up from where I left them. And the Service Standard we have today is not that different from the draft 7 years ago.
I used the talk to advertise our afternoon workshop. Split into 2 parts, it covered 3 hours. My colleague Isabella, who works as a senior agile coach and lives in Hamburg, assisted me.
About 30 participants joined us to look more closely at the Service Standard, review how the points align with their current work on the services they are responsible for, and ask us plenty of questions. People wanted to understand the scope and timings of the DIN SPEC and the standard regulation. I explained. Stefanie, who leads the online agency at Digital First, chipped in at times. Stefanie was part of the DIN SPEC consultation process, and I learned about Hamburg’s now-mature setup during that process last year.
To explain the relationship between what we formally call the Service Standard (the 13 plain-language points with detailed explanations, available on servicestandard.gov.de and posters), the DIN SPEC, and the standards regulations, my colleague Robin created a graphic. I used it in Hamburg for the first time. It worked well.
We got Hamburg colleagues, some of them service owners, some service designers, to review each point of the Service Standard with its description at first. Then, we let them decide on 5 of the 13 points to dive deeper into.
For the 5 highly voted points, smaller subgroups looked further into the various criteria for each point:
- Point 1: Understand users and identify needs
- Point 2: Describe the problem and define goals
- Point 4: Develop, test and adapt solutions, incorporating specialist knowledge
- Point 5: Reuse existing elements and jointly design new ones
- Point 12: Measure impact and build on results
Isabella and I roamed the room to understand the groups’ questions and considerations. In these moments and the subsequent sharebacks, I learned the most. It was the first time 2 service owners working on very different services talked about how they measure service performance and gather data.
As far as I can see, Hamburg has the most mature service design and management setup in Germany today. A lot has changed since I collected notes on my observations in 2018.
I am convinced there is some good practice we need to record via blog posts and our peer review format. I might return to Hamburg for that in a couple of months or so.
Opening service design roles
Times are tough in the job market – at least in the private sector. However, the public sector is somewhat different.
In November, we had 10 new starters at DigitalService. Last Thursday, we celebrated 200 people. Another 10 people will join us early in the new year, and we anticipate bringing in more talented individuals throughout 2026. We are now looking for service designers to help us create better government services and policies.
This hiring spree is not specific to our organisation. The entire public sector keeps hiring. That is how it seems. The boomer generation is starting to retire in significant numbers, and digital transformation is urgently needed to keep the public sector running and innovating.
For the past 11 months, I’ve been tracking user-centred design roles across the German public sector. I have built and maintained a simple job board as a little side project. It got some traction over the year. I spotted 23 user-centred design roles from 14 public sector organisations in these months. The number was close to zero 5 years ago.
Now, I see 5 recurring profiles: service design, UX/UI design, communication design, accessibility, and systems design. (User research is absent, indeed.) These openings were located throughout Germany, from Kiel to Freiburg and Osnabrück to Leipzig. These were only the roles I found. It’s pretty likely that I missed various more. Yet people started sending me roles they found or wanted listed. Other people told me that they frequently looked at the page.
It’s encouraging to see a significant increase in user-centred design capability across all levels of government and throughout the country. While we can only have a limited impact individually, we can change things together as a network.
We have been bringing together user-centred design specialists from across the country. My colleague Sonja is organising a monthly cross-government user research exchange, with 18 different public organisations participating. Additionally, Maria and I are hosting a quarterly user-centred design gathering via NExT. And with Public Service Lab, we are running an annual conference that took place again last week. This is a growing movement that gains in strength month by month.
As mentioned, DigitalService is looking for service designers. We also have openings for agile coaches, a PMO manager, product managers, and software and platform engineers. At the same time, our colleagues at Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (SPRIN-D), the German Centre for Accessible Reading, and IT.Niedersachsen are also looking for UX, service design and accessibility specialists. Those roles are spread across central Germany. I hope people interested in working for the public good and improving how the state serves its people consider joining our movement. I will keep updating my little page to let people discover more openings. The past 11 months have shown that they keep coming.
A post about the open roles on LinkedIn went a little viral on Thursday and Friday. It received over 1,000 responses and got reposted over 80 times. I am curious how many applications we will receive this time. Back in early summer, we got over 370 submissions.
One person who reached out via email suggested I create an RSS feed for the job openings. Toying around with some freely available tools, I got an RSS feed for the design jobs running.
Planning international events and activities
On Thursday, I checked in with Ottla and Kara about the EU Policy Lab’s ‘PolyFutures’ event. It’s running from 20 to 21 April. It will bring together about 150 policymakers, policy designers, and foresight cognoscenti to “reimagine policymaking for Europe,” as the tagline suggests.
They have received over 60 submissions for formats, which is terrific, given that it’s been a rather closed call rather than an open one. We discussed a third day as community day, on 22 April. We plan to do further panning for it in December.
The event website is not live yet, but I have now listed it on our International Design in Government community page.
In the meantime, our international community update blog post is still pending with the Cabinet Office communications team.
On Friday, I also had a call with the OECD. I will join a 1-day workshop on ‘customer satisfaction and life events’ in early December. The event will include a hands-on session of blueprinting life events.
Over the past few years, I missed earlier international gatherings on life events, including one in September 2023 in London, co-organised by the United States Office of Personnel Management and GDS. The December gathering will be attended by 10 EU countries that have participated in a cross-union customer satisfaction survey (see notes for week #182). The EU will be presenting, and also Norway. In addition, I was asked to share the approach taken in Germany. I will only have 10 minutes, so I will have to boil it down quite a bit. I’m looking forward to that exchange and will try to meet with other OECD colleagues and French counterparts when I’m in Paris, too.
What’s next
On Monday, I will have another opportunity to discuss applying the Service Standard. In the morning, I have some 15 minutes with the team in charge of digital identity and authentication in the Federal Ministry for Digital and Government Modernisation. They govern, at least in parts, the EU Digital Identity Wallet version for Germany. The team is also responsible for the national login, called Bund ID.
On Thursday, I will attend another session of the Digital Council in Sachsen-Anhalt. I will travel to Magdeburg for it.
Friday will be all about community as we are running our 37th international call on service patterns in the morning. After lunch, I will co-host the 9th NExT user-centred design gathering on the cross-government umbrella brand.