[blogpost] Ideas for the new Digital Centre Design Panel digitalbydefault.com/2024/10/02/i... (sorry @jenitennison.com but you asked 😆) - ThreadSky

jukes.ie • 154 days ago

[blogpost] Ideas for the new Digital Centre Design Panel

https://digitalbydefault.com/2024/10/02/ideas-for-the-new-digital-centre-design-panel/

(sorry @jenitennison.com but you asked 😆)

Comments

richardbarton.bsky.social•154 days ago

Thanks for calling out the local gang. Just put point 5 first and you’ve nailed it.

jukes.ie•154 days ago

Haha - working in the open will always be number one in my heart...but the local stuff is the big swing I think to move this to a new era.

sophiedennis.bsky.social•154 days ago

Like it 😎

cthimon.bsky.social•154 days ago

This is as great as I'd expect!

jukes.ie•154 days ago

Cheers mate - I appreciate that.
I returned from an all hands meeting yesterday feeling ancient* so it was nice to write something where I felt like it might be useful 😆

See my new LinkedIn heading I updated on the train!

cthimon.bsky.social•154 days ago

Thing is, there's a fair few of us who have seen these cycles in various forms for the last couple of decades whilst trying to positively affect change at an operational level; that experience has gotta be worth something, right? (RIGHT?) I’m still trying to deliver the thing I started in 2012 🤣

jukes.ie•154 days ago

Your resilience is the stuff of legends mate!

cthimon.bsky.social•154 days ago

I'm just lazy and fear change!

jukes.ie•154 days ago

😂

frankieroberto.com•154 days ago

Haha! Would still like to have “weird relic from an earlier time” (from @jiggott.bsky.social) as a sticker.

jiggott.bsky.social•154 days ago

I drafted a reply to Jeni but didn't hit send. You wrote a blogpost!

cthimon.bsky.social•154 days ago

I've also drafted a reply but haven't sent! Civil Service! \m/

jenitennison.com•154 days ago

Send it!

jiggott.bsky.social•154 days ago

Something something fund teams not programmes, something something make user time saved a cashable benefit something something give product managers every other Wednesday off.

(I'll do it properly later.)

jukes.ie•154 days ago

sounds like a crowd pleaser..!

jukes.ie•154 days ago

Haha - I *always* write a blogpost :)

Honestly it is quicker to write a blogpost than a coherent response on here - Twain was right "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead"..

jenitennison.com•154 days ago

Really useful, thanks! I know little about the Digital Academy: do you know why it died?

jukes.ie•154 days ago

Cost and a feeling it was scope creep for GDS I think - but I wasn't that close to it.

For a while it was incredibly important though for capability building across Gov.

blangry.bsky.social•154 days ago

Also _beyond_ gov. GDS job descriptions and approaches are becoming industry standard, but I can't actually train people in it through a consistent method. Not everything about the public sector is about Whitehall, and this is a great way for building capability and earning a bit of money.

timdavies.org.uk•153 days ago

I wonder how future opportunities here might relate to @deaves.bsky.social and colleagues work on Teaching Public Services in the Digital Age: https://www.teachingpublicservice.digital/ as means to embed core skills within feeder-training for public servants

blangry.bsky.social•153 days ago

Absolutely, I've read over this quite a lot and led seminars on a similar course at the OII. A lot of this would need to be about democratising access to learning and working out practice/theory mixture. Comparing TPSDA with gov run courses (e.g.) https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/introduction-to-product-management/2 is a start.

lisajeffery.bsky.social•153 days ago

Capability is key. Even suppliers think this type of thing should be done centrally. For consistency. And all the other reasons… 👍

debblanch44.bsky.social•154 days ago

It is so badly missed, it was a grounding for everyone in Govt services and principles, which doesn't get covered now. Bringing it back would make such a difference- we're all cobbling together different versions of things right now.

nicolafulton.bsky.social•154 days ago

Particularly like your number 1 and number 5

rgarner.bsky.social•154 days ago

I do remember a particularly pointed post-it at DWP in Leeds about the GDS Academy/general principles. Don't remember the precise wording but the overall feel was "we don't need it, we do things fine ourselves"

pubstr.at•154 days ago

But DWP had had a very distinct history, including having created the digital academy, so that reaction may have been less unreasonable that it first appears.

rgarner.bsky.social•154 days ago

I'd *utterly* forgotten that.

rgarner.bsky.social•154 days ago

(so thank you for the reminder, and if you need me, I'll be in this hole*)

*memory

rgarner.bsky.social•154 days ago

It was next to this post-it, which I've scrolled through a year of Stuff to find:

rgarner.bsky.social•154 days ago

I also remember a particular NHS England relative high-up saying "[they] made me feel stupid"

*GDS, not the academy, but the pervasive feeling remains cross-department. Nobody likes to feel like an actual *organisation* has determined they need help...

stamanfar.bsky.social•154 days ago

The academy was one of the few opportunities for local gov to get training offered in central gov, it was well received and it was a massive loss when we couldn’t provide it any more. I think partly because it was difficult to manage the cross charging between departments (GDS to MHCLG)

pixlz.com•154 days ago

I have some recons about this, will try to put something sensible together

gavinfreeguard.bsky.social•154 days ago

I've not yet listened, but Global Govt Forum did a podcast on it recently https://www.globalgovernmentforum.com/the-story-of-the-uk-digital-academy-why-good-decisions-follow-good-data-and-more/

andyjones.bsky.social•154 days ago

Guess you saw my responses then ❤️

tomski.com•154 days ago

Well, Martha just signed up to working in the open... https://medium.com/@marthalanefox/digital-government-2024-2687912d3ec1

visitmy.website•154 days ago

Maybe I’ll send her the note I sent to Rachel Reeves’s private secretary...

martinjordan.com•154 days ago

Big YES to all of those things!

pjmoran.bsky.social•154 days ago

Spot on

stamanfar.bsky.social•154 days ago

The combination of the loss of the academy (foundational / entry level) with the loss of communities of practice has left a big capability hole which I suspect departments are filling inconsistently themselves. Any centralised team needs to at least do one of these.

priyanca.bsky.social•154 days ago

100%

communities are everything

makes such a difference

himal.bsky.social•154 days ago

Communities are institutional memory. Communities don’t just happen. Real people with real jobs are needed. They need failover too. And more. I wrote something about this on the other place ages ago but the rest escapes me.

stamanfar.bsky.social•154 days ago

100% invest in community managers

himal.bsky.social•154 days ago

“Glue people” was a sort of loose term I used whenever it came up in conversation “but what do they really do? Can’t we just get a lower grade to do it?” No. They glue your org together. You just can’t see it.

stamanfar.bsky.social•154 days ago

Totally. Making informal networks visible (maybe not just visible but celebrated and (hesitantly)…useful)

simoneverest.bsky.social•154 days ago

Good stuff @jukes.ie – departments are starting to do 'Academy-lite' through internal training to meet this https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/digital-data-and-technology-essentials-for-senior-civil-servants/digital-data-and-technology-essentials-for-senior-civil-servants but it doesn't match the scale of the GDS Academy…

simoneverest.bsky.social•154 days ago

On the Performance Platform, the issue was never the Platform itself, it's that influential people in GDS, or Cabinet Office, or departments weren't clamouring for or acting on the data and insight it (should/could have) held. If no one cares if the scores are going up or down, why have a platform?

jukes.ie•154 days ago

I think its importance (or at least the possibility of it) was wider than that though - absolutely those people needed to use it to make decisions but it was about openness and transparency and providing data for other people to ask questions of, to benchmark against, to challenge.

frankieroberto.com•154 days ago

Time to rethink the 4 ‘mandatory’ KPIs? https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/measuring-success/data-you-must-publish

jukes.ie•154 days ago

Definitely - I don't think they are helpful.
Letting services define their own, explain why and then report on them always felt better to me.

simoneverest.bsky.social•154 days ago

I don't think I'd get rid of them, or at least the principle of the 4, as providing some consistency between reporting on services is important for shining a light on relative performance. But everything and be improved. AND there should be service/dept specific measures.

simoneverest.bsky.social•154 days ago

I'd additionally like to see function level measures – percentage of departmental staff in specialist DDaT roles, percentage of civil servant versus supplier versus contractors, that sort of thing (given this 5 minutes thought, others could do better)…

simoneverest.bsky.social•154 days ago

I know that was the aspiration, but in the not insignificant number of years that Platform was running, did that challenge ever manifest itself? There wasn't even much of a whimper when it was shut down. Allowing wider transparency is an important additional benefit, not the whole shooting match IMO

peterkwells.com•153 days ago

A partial reason for the lack of whimper is that the platform mostly published info that was useful for GDS/govt's strategic/policy aims - eg digital takeup rates & cost/(online?)transaction - rather than things meaningful to wider civil society - eg # of complaints, performance by demographics

jukes.ie•153 days ago

Sure - and I agree - but I don't know that everything has to be useful/meaningful to the wider civil society. Some things are useful because they are useful to the people doing that work across Government - like I said in the post that sparked this my thoughts were 'inside baseball'

jukes.ie•154 days ago

I guess it depends on where you were standing - I know a lot of people were unhappy when it was shut down and I agree it isn't the *whole* shooting match - but it is part of the game and the game has moved on (maybe...IMHO etc)

simoneverest.bsky.social•154 days ago

I think in _our_ world it registered, but outside of 'government-adjacent digital-ish people' I don't think it really registered (which is fine).

simoneverest.bsky.social•154 days ago

For service KPIs (or whatever success measures we choose) to matter, someone senior needs to be directly accountable for ensuring each of them improves over time, and it's that that needs to be fixed. The tech bit providing the measures or publishing them is relatively easy.

peterbjordan.bsky.social•154 days ago

Yr post touched a few nerves for me. I've commented with a bit of history and actions :)
https://digitalbydefault.com/2024/10/02/ideas-for-the-new-digital-centre-design-panel/#comment-6606

jukes.ie•154 days ago

I suspected one of them definitely would :)

None of it is easy and the culture and expectations has changed forever (no flying under the radar for digital work) but I still think there are opportunities for all of it with the right leadership.

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