Colleagues spotted and commented on the Service Standard poster I put up on our 4th-floor level last week. The empty frame the landlord had placed there bothered me for some time. It was time to fill it with something timely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This poster differs slightly from the original one the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community<\/a> created in the summer of 2020. I added a quote from the Ministry\u2019s introduction website<\/a> and put it right in the centre: \u201cUser-centricity is the leading principle when digitalising administration\u201d. Related to our cross-discipline objectives and key results (OKRs), I am working towards embracing the Service Standard holistically at Digital Service. If other people are interested in this new poster version, they can download it from our public documents GitHub repository<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This week was reasonably fragmented, but that was okay. It instead meant making little progress in various areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I joined the comms team for an afternoon workshop to ideate and prioritise new features for our organisation\u2019s blog<\/a>. New features will arrive soon, significantly improving the experience for people with access needs, yet now is a good time to review the blog\u2019s current usage and see how it can be involved. Using Kirby<\/a> as a CMS, fewer features seem to come built-in than with WordPress. So adding author profiles, categories, a search function, an option to subscribe to new blog posts, and topic overview pages is more catching up with what comes out of the box elsewhere. Those things will make the blog much more usable while the number of blog posts continues to rise beyond 2 to 3 posts per month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A workshop of another kind was led by Fabian and Sonja on organisational values. After multiple rounds of engagement and co-creation, we are now narrowing down the options and deciding on 5 to 6 values. The work is supposed to be completed in the coming few weeks. We aim at making them broadly applicate and actionable while also being distinct. Inside the extended leadership team, we had a productive discussion and sorted and limited the options. As work on design principles happens in parallel, I need to ensure these fit together and are distinct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aiming at sharing work on guiding principles, we had an exchange with the UK Cabinet Office\u2019s Central Digital & Data Office (CDDO)<\/a> on Thursday evening. As part of their Systems Reform programme, they work on frameworks for digital-ready policy and legislation as we do in Germany<\/a>. The conversation was interesting and friendly. However, I was taken aback by the fact that Big Four consultants effectively do all the work instead of in-house teams. In the past, GDS and CDDO have argued the strongest for multidisciplinary teams of civic servants. It makes me uneasy sharing the work our teams have done here, paid for by taxpayers in Germany, with internationally operating consultants. We know they distil and sell these approaches to governments in other countries \u2013 and their taxpayers pay. Having our internal cross-border exchange via international communities of practice feels almost like an antidote to the globally operating consultants with the goal of maximising shareholder value over public value.<\/p>\n\n\n\nDoing bits and bobs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n