The success of our Digital Strategy depends on the skills and hard work of everyone in the team, including our:
- content designers
- delivery managers
- dev ops
- developers
- digital support teams
- product owners
- strategists
- testers
- user experience (UX) designers
- user researchers
Our video shows some of our colleagues talking about what it’s like to work in our Digital Directorate.
Over the past 3 years, we‘ve grown from a small start-up of less than 10 people in an established organisation, to a large directorate with over 150 permanent employees.
We began by creating new roles which have evolved over time into established career pathways. These include the professional fields of user research, content design, delivery management, service design and solution design.
Supporting our people
To support the growth of our team, we’ve moved away from a traditional hierarchy structure. We have adopted a matrix management approach. This helps us to focus on empowering our people and providing the right support for their needs.
We have grouped our roles into these 3 areas:
Professional leadership (professional leads)
Task leadership (delivery managers)
Personal development / people leadership (team leaders)
Our communities
We’ve introduced ‘Communities of Practice’ for our disciplines across the directorate and cross-directorate.
Each ‘Community of Practice’ is led by a professional lead, allowing:
- peer review
- problem solving
- collaboration
- best practice
Our people are linked into external communities, collaborating across government and beyond, exploiting both national and global platforms to showcase our work and share our learnings.
Our communities include:
Content design
Delivery
Design and research
Developers
Solution design
Testers
Our future
As we have grown, we‘ve identified the need to invest in the future by developing our people in line with their aspirations and that of our organisation.
To support this, we introduced structured development time, allowing each member of the team half a day personal development time per sprint to explore and expand their knowledge and capabilities.
We’ve continued to host students during their placement year with a number of these staying with us whilst completing their final year and ultimately moving into permanent positions. We are proud that this has enabled us to develop a capability framework offering a clear career pathway for people who join us.
There’s more to do to support the development of our people and ensure our teams can be their best. We’ll do this through our apprenticeship scheme, structured career pathways and more structured learning opportunities.
The introduction of our apprenticeship scheme
In the 2020 to 2021 academic year, we’ll welcome our first full cohort of undergraduate students to the team. These people will work with us as part of a 3-year scheme to attain a degree level qualification.
They’ll develop their skills through a combination of academic studies and hands-on learning within the delivery teams.
This scheme will form the basis of our training academy.
Structured career pathways
We’ll make sure all our people have a clear development path and capability framework for their role, to allow them to develop and strengthen skills, and ultimately progress. This may be within our organisation or another.
We’ll always support our people to achieve their goals.
More structured learning opportunities
We recognise that self-development alone is not enough. We’ll be working with external academic partners, to introduce more structured support for those wanting to gain certifications, to include access to online learning and specific classroom learning.