{"id":2285,"date":"2023-10-22T18:21:25","date_gmt":"2023-10-22T16:21:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/verwaltungsgestaltung.de\/notizen\/?p=2285"},"modified":"2023-10-28T19:06:26","modified_gmt":"2023-10-28T17:06:26","slug":"week-77-at-the-digital-service-notes-for-16-20-october-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/verwaltungsgestaltung.de\/notizen\/2023\/10\/22\/week-77-at-the-digital-service-notes-for-16-20-october-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Week #77 at the Digital Service: Notes for 16\u201320 October 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Big digital projects need accountability and good scrutiny. Running them as secretive waterfall projects makes them prone to fail. We know that for decades \u2013 from the Chaos Reports<\/a> and other studies \u2013 and from plenty of publicly reported and documented cases of failed IT projects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The German government has an external advisory council for the task of applying scrutiny to its digital strategy<\/a> \u2013 launched in the summer of 2022. Every month, the 19-people advisory council \u2013 with experts from academia, industry, and civic society \u2013 gets together to review 2 of the digital strategy\u2019s lighthouse projects. It\u2019s part of a healthy democratic review process set up by Minister Volker Wissing. For some time, the advisory council has been publicly critical of the implementation of the strategy and some projects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So when we were given a slot with the council to share progress on the lighthouse project DigitalService is working on, naturally, we were a bit nervous and full of respect. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Together with our ministerial colleagues, my colleague Nico, a product manager, and I went to the Federal Ministry of Digital and Transport to tell and show how we work on the \u2018file a civil court action\u2019 service with the Federal Ministry of Justice. We were ready to answer some critical questions <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We talked about the pain points of users, the complexities of the stretched justice system, and how we work in an iterative way to address the challenges one by one. Nico demonstrated the latest alpha version of the service live from the staging environment, and I highlighted why it\u2019s crucial we follow the Service Standard to get things right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the session, council members responded positively to seeing a live service demo with a clear structure and plain language. They asked many questions, made comments, and proposed ideas. And we left with plenty of notes to follow up on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I left in gratitude \u2013 being able to represent our team\u2019s work and receiving some high-quality feedback. The feedback will also be helpful to play back to stakeholders in the ministry for them to see the value of the back-and-forth content design work and the various rounds of iteration they have to endure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bringing all delivery disciplines together<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On Thursday, we ran our 2023 Delivery Offsite. During the days leading up to it, I worked with the other heads of disciplines to prepare for the event. It\u2019s been 10 months since the last one, and it was about time to do one again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since December 2022, the delivery disciplines have grown by just over 50%. 31 people joined us this year, making it 92 people in total. Software engineering and transformation management saw the biggest growth, with 12 and 10 people, respectively. The change in design & user research and product management was more modest, adding 5 and 4 people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Head of Engineering Christian managed to get some further numbers from the recruitment team. In the past 10 months, we collectively interviewed 187 candidates and did 550 interviews that led to 31 hires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Stephanie, our Chief Product Officer, went through some more numbers that capture where we are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n