Our governance is there to support us. It’s appropriate to the risk and the scale of the investment, whether that investment be time or financial. This is particularly the case when experimenting and iterating. We've always worked as openly as appropriate and this remains a key focus for the directorate.
Transforming mindsets
In the last 2 years, our focus has been on changing the mind set of investment - from one of funding projects to one of funding teams (see Fund Teams, Not Projects on GOV.UK). We’ve made good progress towards this as we have grown, and through our work with finance and commercial colleagues we have transformed the way in which the directorate is funded.
We have created a funding model which establishes digital services as evolving and constantly - iterating from first release, live support, through to retirement.
We've revised our team’s governance approach with the introduction of our rolling quarterly investment case model.
Building on the existing
To increase awareness and sharing, we’ve extended our invitation to monthly showcases and fortnightly ‘Show and Tell’ sessions (digital downloads) to the whole organisation. We also invite stakeholders from outside of our organisation to join our showcase. This includes NHSX, GDS and DHSC colleagues and partners.
Our focus will now be to provide more transparency and open working beyond our boundaries, increase our ability to react to change and further mature our reporting metrics.
1. We’ll use technology to deliver our showcase sessions virtually
This will further increase:
- our open working and make our sessions more accessible for a wider audience, including those outside of our organisation
- the number of people who can attend in real time by removing the physical constraints
- our ability to share openly through recording and publishing sessions
2. We’ll further strengthen our reporting metrics, linked to our approach to quarterly investment cases
We will measure our team's delivery against their commitments within those investment cases. This will improve the transparency of the value each team brings to its service and the wider organisation.
3. We’ll code in the open and open source our research insight
This will allow the sharing of knowledge and insights across Government and Health.
4. Although we have moved to ‘Fund Teams, Not Projects’, we continue to face the challenge of new requests with extremely short deadlines
In the past, we’ve relied on the use of external suppliers or pivoted existing teams to deliver. In both instances, this has resulted in an adverse impact upon us achieving our objectives.
To reduce this, we’ll look to introduce a ‘pioneer’ team during 2020. This team will not be allocated to an individual service, but will be focused on supporting the delivery of new services. This will allow us to react quickly to requests, whilst establishing firmer arrangements.
The team will also explore different methods of delivery and technologies, again increasing our appetite and commitment to experiment quickly.