Make use of the Government Service Toolkit

Many of us work joined the Civil Service to work on public services because of the mission set by the Government Digital Service, to build public services so good that people want to use them. The Government Digital Service (GDS) has turned this mission in to a toolkit that has been adopted across government, and gives us the space to improve the lives of the public by focussing on their needs.

GDS took The Lean Startup and adapted it for the context of working on public services within the Civil Service. The Lean Startup provides a scientific approach to creating and managing new products and services in order to get those products/services into users’ hands faster. In turn, the Lean Startup is based on lean manufacturing, design thinking, customer development, and agile software development. GDS took all of this and created the Government Service Toolkit. The Government Service Toolkit is a great shorthand for what Lean Startup, lean manufacturing, design thinking, customer development, and agile development means when working on public services. It’s a great tool for us all but particuarly useful for Associate Product Managers looking for a practical way to begin their development.

Key sections of the Government Service Toolkit include:

• Government design principles - including the famous ‘start with user needs’
• Digital service standard - the 18-point standard that government services must meet
• Service manual, guidance on how to research - design and build services that meet the Digital Service Standard
  • this includes the common phases of agile government service development: discovery - test your assumptions about the problem; alpha - testing assumptions about the solution and looking for problem/solution fit; beta - build the thing and test it works; live - test that the thing you built is being used, is useful, and it can can have its value continually optimised; retirement - stop a thing because it’s no longer being used or no longer useful (or both).
  • the type of team we’re often a part of
• Service assemssment, what happens at a service assessment, and checking if you need a service assessment
• Technology code of practice - the set of criteria to help government design, build and buy better technology.