Podcast appearances and mentions of tom loosemore

In the shadow of worries about the NDIS, do we even believe that big system reform in Australia is do-able any more? Is the juice worth the squeeze?In this first of a two part series, we explore the example of Universal Credit, a 15 year long reform agenda in the UK to combine 6 benefits into one, and, more importantly, seeking to transform the relationship of the citizen to work and welfare. In this episode we unpick how it goes from an idea that is incorporated into the UK Coalition Government's priority list in 2010 to a £450m hot mess in 2013.We also look at the unusual (and brave) decision to keep going.Along the way, we cover:Whether radical transparency can be an answer to rescuing something when you're in the middle of a hot mess?Whether we underestimate the importance of a 'holder of the vision' in giant systems reform? Whether articulating a north star for reform is hard because it makes clear what you are prioritising, and, equally importantly, what you're not?The laughable idea of low hanging fruitReferenced in the episode:Ed Milliband's interview referencing PM Gordon Brown as an ideas factory, on Leading (The Rest is Politics)David Freud's masterful memoir on his seminal role in Universal Credit, Clashing AgendasInstitute for Government has held a number of great events on this, including one in 2016 and another in 2025Abul Rizvi's appearance on Joe Walker podcast on the origins of Australia's immigration systemIntro grab is Lord David Freud from Institute for Government 2016 event, From disaster to recovery: Learning the lessons of Universal Credit Clashing Agendas.Outro grab is Tom Loosemore, former Deputy Director, Government Digital Services, from Institute for Government 2025 event, From disaster to completion? What Government can learn from the Universal Credit story? Now for some appropriately bureaucratic disclaimers....While we have tried to be as thorough in our research as busy full time jobs and lives allow, we definitely don't guarantee that we've got all the details right.If you want rigorous reporting on Robodebt, we recommend the work of Rick Morton at the Saturday Paper, Chris Knaus and Luke Henriques-Gomes at the Guardian, Ben Eltham at Crikey, Julian Bajkowski at The Mandarin, and of course, the Robodebt Royal Commission itself.Please feel free to email us corrections, episode suggestions, or anything else, at thewestminstertraditionpod@gmail.com.Thanks to PanPot audio for our intro and outro music. 'Til next time!

Canada has fallen from 3rd in the 2010 UN e-gov rankings to 47 in 2024. We're stuck when it comes to modernizing government for the digital era. But our guests this week, recorded on location at this year's FWD50 conference in Ottawa, have a new playbook that they say can help get governments in Canada out of the rut and back on track.Anna Hirschfeld and Alex MacEachern and are two of the authors of a new report from the UK-based digital government advisory firm Public Digital called A Radical How for Canada (https://public.digital/where-we-work/canada/a-radical-how-for-canada). It takes inspiration from a similarly titled report that Tom Loosemore and others from Public Digital published last year focused on the UK. It lays out concrete recommendations on the steps that governments in Canada need to take in order to change how government works for the better.Anna has been with Public Digital since 2020 where she is now their Regional Director for Canada. She has supported work with the Nova Scotia and British Columbia provincial governments, as well as other projects back home in the UK. Before that, she worked in the UK government including as the Senior Product Manager on the UK Universal Credit programme, scaling it up from a proof of concept to a live service supporting six million people.Before recently joining Public Digital, Alex was Chief of Staff at the Canadian Digital Service as the team grew from just 30 people to 150, and was involved in a number of significant digital transformation projects in the federal government.Related LinksA Radical How for CanadaWatch on YouTubehttps://youtu.be/kA0cc1mdQ7sChapters00:00 Welcome and Introductions02:41 Interview and Anna and Alex07:40 A Radical How for Canada16:34 Reflections on ArriveCan24:48 Political Transitions38:38 Funding and Procurement46:47 Conclusion

Can the NHS really grasp the digital transformation opportunity? In this episode, Matthew Taylor sits down with Tom Loosemore and Deborah El-Sayed to explore how integrated care boards can capitalise on the digital revolution. Get their take on pitfalls to avoid, principles to apply and why digital is more than just technology. Tune in as they debate skills, leadership, strategy and data. This podcast forms part of our Digital ICS programme delivered in partnership with NHS Providers and Public Digital, and supported by Health Education England and NHS England. The Digital ICS programme is a free support offer for integrated care boards and integrated care system leaders and offers a range of free resources, events and leadership sessions focused exclusively on the role of the board in leading the digital agenda across systems. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alec speaks with Tom Loosemore and Ben Terret of Public Digital. They chat about how the story of starting and launching the gov.uk design system and how much they learned as they started, grew, and scaled it. One of the key learnings from this story is lost on a lot of people who have tried to copy their success, and they'll be talking about it in detail in their upcoming DesignConf talk.

We speak to Tom Loosemore, Partner at Public Digital and co-author of Digital Transformation At Scale. Getting the right team in place for your digital transformation, and helping them work on the right things, can be the difference between success and failure. What can leaders do to build winning teams? Tom Loosemore, Partner at Public Digital and co-author of Digital Transformation At Scale has a wealth of insights to share on building teams to do pioneering work in digital, from his experience as deputy director at Government Digital Service, Director of Digital Strategy at the Co-Operative Group, and digital strategy lead at OFCOM. Tom tells us what leaders need to do to help their organisations take their digital transformations to the next level, and how to tackle culture change at a time when many of your colleagues will be exhausted and craving stability. Tom is giving away a signed copy of his new book Digital Transformation at Scale and you could win a copy if you sign up for our newsletter. Zoe and Paul share their round-up of the latest tech news, from what the new Beatles documentary can teach us about collaboration, and what the future of work will look like in 2022. The interview with Tom Loosemore starts at 13:07 Notes and links - Public Digital Tom's new book is Digital Transformation At Scale (updated 2nd edition) We discussed: What the Beatles documentary can teach us about collaboration (Huffington Post) -For more on this topic, listen to our previous episode about what we can learn from musicians about collaboration https://www.startsatthetop.co.uk/episodes/episode21-digital-leadership-music-innovation US boss fires 900 employees over Zoom (BBC) Instagram builds in new features to help teenagers reduce screentime (BBC) What work will look like in 2022 (WIRED) Annual Google search terms report (BBC) Email us with your questions and ideas for future episodes startsatthetop@gmail.com And please leave us a review if you enjoy what you hear! Editing and production from Syren Studios and Paul Thomas Music by Joseph McDade https://josephmcdade.com/music

Over the last decade in the public sector, there’s been a global explosion in citizen and resident-centered design and development, with movements in the UK, Estonia, Australia, Canada, USA, and many more strengthening their approaches. Where it’s been done well, it’s made a huge difference.  At the same time, civil services are always facing budget [...] Read more » The post Public Service Product Management – Tom Loosemore on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

In the latest episode of the Government Digital Service podcast, we speak to people from across the public sector about how digital has affected their lives, their careers and the organisations they work for. Those who contributed to this episode are: Kevin Cunnington, Director General of the Government Digital Service Sally Meecham, Head of Digital Data and Transformation for UK Research and Innovation Caron Alexander, Director of Digital Shared Services for Northern Ireland’s Department of Finance Matthew Cain, Head of Digital and Data from the London Borough of Hackney Caren Fullerton, Chief Digital Officer for the Welsh Government A full transcript of the episode follows: Angus Montgomery: Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of the Government Digital Service Podcast. My name is Angus Montgomery, and I’m a senior writer at GDS. We’re recording this podcast in March 2019, and a few days ago, on the 12th March, it was the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for linking information across different computers , which was the proposal that he wrote that would eventually become the thing that we now know as the World Wide Web. And this anniversary got us thinking, like lots of other people I suspect, about how much the World Wide Web has changed the way that we do things, the way that we work, and our lives. And in particular for those of us working in the public sector, how much it has changed public services and the way that governments and other public sector organisations, can deliver services and can improve the lives of the people using those services. So for this episode what we wanted to do was, we wanted to hear the views of people across public sector digital roles, not just in central government but in local authorities, in devolved administrations. And we wanted to hear from them about how digital has changed the way that they work and what it means for them, and the advantages and the changes that it’s brought to their roles. So we put out a call for contributions from people in senior digital roles and lots of people were kind enough to respond and what we did was, we emailed a bunch of questions out and people responded by sending audio clips of their thoughts. So we’ve got a whole load of audio clips, a load of great answers and we’re now going to use those audio clips to create this episode of the GDS podcast, so rather than hearing from just one person, you’re going to hear from lots and lots of different people and lots of different viewpoints. So first of all, thank you very much to all of those people who contributed to this episode. In this episode, you’re going to hear from Kevin Cunnington, who is the Director General of the Government Digital Service. You’re going to hear from Sally Meecham, who is Head of Digital, Data and Transformation for UK Research and Innovation. You’re going to hear from Matthew Cain, who is Head of Digital and Data for London Borough of Hackney. And you’re also going to hear from two people working at devolved administrations, and you’re going to hear a lot more from them in the future, because we’re working with...GDS is working with devolved administrations to run a series of Sprint events this year. So we’re going to be talking about those in the episode as well, so we’re running Sprint events all across the UK in partnership with the Scottish government, the Welsh government, the government of Northern Ireland and Leeds city council. And in this episode, you’re going to hear from two of our partners, who are working on those Sprint events. You’re going to hear from Caron Alexander, who is Director of Digital Shared Services for Northern Ireland’s Department of Finance, and you’re going to hear from Caren Fullerton, who is Chief Digital Officer for the Welsh Government . So that’s my very long intro over. The TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) version of that is, you’re going to hear from lots of different people, lots of different sound clips, and it’s going to be a lot of fun and it’s going to work seamlessly, I hope. So let’s get down to it. So the first question that we wanted to find out was, why people wanted to work in digital, what excited them about it and what it’s meant for their careers. For lots of people, digital has always been a part of their working lives, so this was the case for Kevin Cunnington and this is what he said to us. [Audio starts] ‘My bachelors degree is Computer Science, my masters degree, as people know, is in A.I. In 1992, this is a trip down memory lane, I wrote PWC’s global methodology of how to develop A.I systems using Agile. So I’ve always been a digital person. I spent most of my life in blue chip corporates really, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), Goldman Sachs, Vodafone, but I had a spell in the middle as an entrepreneur with mixed success if I’m honest. We built one company and sold it for lots of millions of pounds, and then I build another one which failed to make any money on them, and lost rather a lot of money. And I do say this to people, if you ever get to meet my wife, please don’t mention it, because she has forgiven me now but she wasn’t very happy about it at the time’. Angus Montgomery: And for some people, digital represented a new opportunity in their careers, it represented an opportunity to do something that they might not have imagined they were going to end up doing. This is Sally Meecham who’s got a really interesting story about how she ended up in a digital world. [Audio starts] ‘I was a set designer, and I attended an internet conference about twenty years ago. And was just immediately enthralled and excited by the opportunities, the reach, the ability to connect, to have your own voice, be who you want to be with digital. That day I had an idea for a website, and I hadn’t really been using the internet hardly at all, so was quite surprised when this idea popped into my head for a peer-to-peer travel review website. And literally within the next few days, I’d given up my job, I met some people to set up a business and we set up a website. And within four months, I was an internet guru, which is obviously silly, but there weren’t that many people doing it at the time, so I’ll take that. And I still love digital, I think it’s phenomenal and we just need to keep working to make sure that it is fair’. Angus Montgomery: Sally Meecham there, from set designer to internet guru in just four months. So a common thread that came through in a lot of responses, and something we’ve obviously explored lots in this podcast previously, is the opportunity that digital provides to improve public services, and to improve the way that government and other organisations can serve people. So here’s Matthew Cain on that theme. [audio starts] ‘In Hackney council, digital has changed our expectations of what we can do with technology and data to meet residents’ raised expectations. We’re using user centered design Agile approaches in order to redesign services so good that people prefer to use them.’ Angus Montgomery: Shout out for GDS there as well which is great to hear. Caron Alexander had a similar, or a response on a similar theme, and also talks about the opportunity for digital to impact the way that government and [other local] other public sector organisations can deliver front line services to people. Here’s what she had to say. [audio starts] ‘Working in digital transformation provides great opportunities to work closely with service owners and users, and really understand the needs. It’s very rewarding to work collaboratively, designing services that are easy to use, services that are accessible when and where you want to use them, and using a device of your choice.’ Angus Montgomery: And Caren Fullerton explains how digital has changed her career as a civil servant and how that’s developed over the time she’s worked in the Welsh government and the Civil Service. [audio starts]‘Working in a digital role gives me a really great opportunity to focus on something which I’ve always really enjoyed in my career in the Civil Service, which is to look in a fresh, or even a critical way sometimes, at the way in which we work. My first job in the Civil Service was as an analyst, and every year we used to look at our data collection exercise, look at how we could redo the form, improve our IT system, change the way we presented the results. And so a focus very much on learning and continuing to improve and, for me, the opportunities offered by my current role are to look at everything we do, whether it’s a corporate system or whether it’s a system that provides a service to the population, look at it in a way that means we never have to stand still, and we’re always looking for ways to change and improve’, Angus Montgomery: So it’s great obviously, to hear very personal responses about how digital has affected people’s working lives, and what it’s meant for them on a personal level [0.08.00]. As I mentioned at the start of the podcast, all the people that we spoke to, have very senior digital roles in public sector organisations. So we wanted to kind of go beyond the personal viewpoints, and find out also how, what digital has meant, not just for these people but for the organisations that they work for and lead, and what it’s helped those organisations do. And here’s Matthew Cain again. He’s talking about how digital really helps Hackney council meet the needs of its users, of the people who live in the borough of Hackney. [audio starts] ‘I wanted to work in digital because I was always passionate about public services and about good public policy. But I always wanted to be able to see how that happened on the ground. So the opportunity to come in and work for the public sector gave me a chance to harness the inspirational qualities that Francis Maude (former Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General) and Mike Bracken (co-founder of GDS), and Tom Loosemore (co-founder of GDS) had led in the Government Digital Service, and give me an amazing opportunity to put that into practice myself.’ Angus Montgomery: And Caren Fullerton sort of continues on that theme and talks specifically, not just about services but how digital can change the way that public sector organisations can deliver the policy that drives those services as well. Here’s Caren. [audio starts]‘I think the biggest change for us in terms of impact of digital on the way we work, has been to transform the way in which we develop and deliver policy. So through the whole policy cycle, whether it’s the discovery phase, looking at how the world looks at how we engage with our stakeholders to look at what the case for change is, all the way through to actually delivering the policy out there in Wales. Digital tools, digital thinking, user centered thinking has actually offered a whole new way of working, which people, who work in the Welsh government, are really enthusiastic to embrace’. Angus Montgomery: And Kevin Cunnington who as well as being Director General of GDS, has worked in senior digital roles at the Department for Work and Pensions has, you know, quite an interesting sort of oversight of how digital has developed in central government. He talks about how, over recent years the environment has really changed in government and the public sector, now digital ways of working and responding to user needs are business as usual in many organisations. [audio starts] ‘When I started in DWP (Department for Work and Pensions) in 2013, there were no other digital people apart from me. There was no profession for people like me in the Civil Service. There was no academies, there was no training. When we first set up the first academies and trained people in digital, I then went back into the existing DWP workplaces, and people used to say to me, genuinely said, ‘we don’t do it like that round here thanks’. So in the end, I ended up setting up an academy in a building in Leeds, and taking over the whole building. So we used to train people on the ground floor, and then allow them to work in an Agile way on the first and second floors, because the native environment in DWP was just so alien for them, they had to be sequestered, or quarantined, in this single building in Leeds. So I say the biggest changes, when you look back, nobody ever debates now whether we should do things digitally. Digital is business as usual.’ Angus Montgomery: ‘Nobody ever debates now that we do things digitally’, which is a great point and a great position for us to be in. And Caron Alexander sort of echoes this point about how digital can change organisational culture. [audio starts] ‘Digital transformation has really started to change the culture within the Northern Ireland Civil Service. Now we’re designing our citizen facing services around people, the people that use those services and the uptake of our online digital service has exceeded all of our expectations’. Angus Montgomery: And as I mentioned at the top of the podcast, this change in culture and the whole idea of how digital can drive transformation, collaboration and innovation is something we, as GDS, are going to be exploring more in the Sprint series of events that we’re going to be running this year. And we’re running these in collaboration with devolved administrations, including Northern Ireland and Wales. And so we wanted to hear from Caron Alexander, what she’s looking forward to in Sprint Belfast, which is the event that we will be doing there shortly. And here’s what she had to say. [audio starts] ‘I’m really looking forward to meeting new people, and hearing about digital developments across UK government. It will be great to showcase some of our local digital transformation successes, to share experiences and to discuss lessons learnt with colleagues from across the public sector.’ Angus Montgomery: And as well as doing a Sprint in Belfast, we’re also doing a Sprint in Cardiff in collaboration with the Welsh government. And so we wanted to hear from Caren Fullerton, what she’s planning and what she’s looking forward to from this sprint event. [audio starts] ‘What I’m most looking forward to in Sprint Cardiff is actually meeting up with people who work in the same kind of role as me elsewhere in the Civil Service, find out about what they’re doing and learn about their experiences, good and bad, and hopefully taking some of that learning and applying it to the things that we’re doing here. There’s also a great opportunity to tell people about the things that we’re doing within Welsh government, and to sing some of our own praises for once’. Angus Montgomery: So lots to look forward to at these Sprint events, and if you want to find out more about them, then keep your eyes peeled on the GDS blogs because we’ll be talking a lot more about them in the coming weeks. So finally, we’ve heard a lot about kind of how digital helps organisations deliver things better and how digital can change organisational culture, and Sally Meecham sort of closes off this section by pointing out that while obviously, digital has brought huge benefits and it is becoming business as usual, or has become business as usual for large public sector organisations, we do need to be careful not to sit on our laurels, and we need to make sure that we are continuing to drive forward and talk about, and showcase the great things that digital can bring. Here’s Sally. [audio starts] ‘For me, it’s more consistency, design standards, spend control, empowerment and transparency. We’ve only really just begun this journey, it’s a few years old, and not everyone has adopted it. But it’s critical we stay on this path, it’s critical we still have standards and openness in government’, Angus Montgomery: So for our final sort of subject that we wanted to hear from people about. We heard about changes that digital can bring on a personal level and changes that digital can bring to organisations, and we wanted really to drill down into the specifics, to hear, not just about kind of, you know, cultural change or transformation of services, but what are the specific things that digital and digital government, and digital public services allow people to do that they couldn’t have done before. So Sally Meecham has an example that will be familiar to lots of people I think, about how digital has changed an aspect of her life and probably changed the same aspect of lots of listeners’ lives as well. [audio starts] ‘I’m going to start with banking, which used to be for me, a really horrible experience. We needed to make that we were there for their opening times, and that we were lucky if we got somebody who was helpful and the queuing, just the whole thing about it, I used to really detest. And I do my banking, my personal banking and my business banking, when I want it, on what device I want to do it on. And I think that the advancements and changes of online banking are just getting better and I just think you know, it might sound a bit boring but it really does free up time to do things a little less boring instead’. Angus Montgomery: So I think the banking example is a really useful and interesting one for those of us working in the digital public sector because it’s the same thing for delivering government services. So what digital is allowing people to do as Sally has said, is do things in their own, on their own devices and freeing up people’s time. So rather than you know, government and other public sector organisations absorbing people’s time through difficult services, we’re making these things easy to do so people can spend the rest of their time doing the things that they actually want to do. So I think that’s a really valuable example. Matthew Cain focuses specifically on how digital has helped him and his colleagues working lives. And again, lots of this will feel familiar to those of you who work in digital public sector organisations. [audio starts] ‘The work we’ve done in Hackney together has included some of my absolute career highlights, whether that’s the improvement to the Hackney work service, which means that more than 40 people now have a job that they didn’t have this time last year. Our work in fostering to improve the experience of applying to be a foster carer, or our work in the housing services. Personally though, the way we use Google Drive has changed the way I collaborate with teams, with people across the organisation and outside the council. Twitter has enabled us to develop much broader networks across the sector so that we can tap into the expertise in central government and local digital agencies. And Todoist is a brilliant tool for making sure that I can communicate and work well with my own teams’. Angus Montgomery: So lots of good examples there about how digital has helped Matthew’s day to day life, and helped him and his team deliver those great services. And when we asked Caren Fullerton this question, she had a really interesting and quite specific example about how digital can improve service delivery for a very particular group of users. The user group is those people who use assistive technology, so things like screen readers. And here’s Caren talking about how digital has helped to deliver services for that user group. [audio starts] ‘So we’ve always given high priority to serving their needs well. Being as flexible as possible in making a range of tools available to users of assistive technology. But the way in which we’ve integrated the service to them with our basic service provision, has not worked particularly well. So typically we would roll out some new software or new hardware, and come to the needs of that group of users, the assistive technology users, right at the end of the project when it became a problem to solve, sometimes very difficult problems, so in some cases, software that had been rolled out to 95% of the organisation couldn’t be rolled out to the final 5%. This wasn’t satisfactory, and meant we were spending an awful lot of resources on actually providing support to those users. So by transforming the way we thought about that service, we were able to reduce support resources and to actually improve service and most importantly, enable those staff to be much more productive and the simple way of doing this was to start any new project with the roll out to that particular group of users, so from about 3 years ago, we have started to do that. So new phone systems, new hardware which we’ve recently rolled out in the last year or so, moves to Windows 10, upgrades to software, we have taken the needs of assistive tech users to be the ones that we need to sort out right at the start of the project and that has meant that, the needs of our, the majority of our users are relatively straightforward to deal with in the second and third stages of the project. So what it’s given us is a slightly longer start to some of our projects because we have to deal with some of the more challenging integration issues right at the beginning, but a much softer landing towards the end of a rollout, much better service for our assistive technology users enabling them to be productive, and to receive the same service as everybody else, and has required lower levels of support from our software teams as the services have gone into regular business as usual service delivery’. Angus Montgomery: So Caren Fullerton there with quite a specific example of digital improving something. Caron Alexander focuses on, in her response, on the broader benefits that digital tools that can bring, that is if you build these digital tools using the right approach and embed them across organisations. [audio starts] ‘In driving forward the Northern Ireland digital transformation programme, we used a principle of re-use when developing new digital services. This has resulted in a growing number of reusable technical components which are now in our digital toolkit. And these components are available at little or no cost for subsequent projects and also, this can substantially increase the pace of delivery. Angus Montgomery: And Kevin Cunnington also focuses on tools and platforms, and one platform in particular, GOV.UK Verify, which is government’s identity assurance platform. And he has an anecdote from his family, and how GOV.UK Verify has helped them. [audio starts] ‘A good example happened recently with my wife, where my wife’s been a long time user of the Verify system, she used it to check her state pension. The other part of her pension is with the NHS, because she was an NHS worker. And that’s always been problematic because historically, it’s one of these systems that’s got a you know, a cryptic username and an even more cryptic password methodology, so she’d never remember it. And everytime she goes to check it, she has to ring them up and get them to tell her da da da. But good news. The NHS pension scheme has adopted Verify. So she texted me at work, saying ‘this is brilliant, I’ve just used Verify to check my state pension and I’ve just used Verify to check my health service pension’. She said, ‘I love your Verify’, she said, the highest compliment in my line of work you ever get. Angus Montgomery: So there you go. We’ve heard from a range of people, kind of at a range of different levels about what digital has brought to them from the personal, to the professional, to the way that their organisations are structured, to the culture, to the way that they deliver services. So I wanted to give a big thanks again to everyone who contributed their answers to this, and gave us some really really great responses. And I hoped that you enjoyed this episode and I hope that you found those responses interesting and valuable as we did. And if you would like to contribute your own thoughts about how digital has changed the way that you work, and what excites you most about working in digital public services, we’d love to hear them so please do share on social media. You can use the hashtag #GDSpodcasts, all one word. And also if you could tag us at @GDSTeam in your comment, that would be brilliant. And then we can sort of see what you’re saying and share them more widely and it would just be lovely to hear kind of, more widely from people about what they think about this. So that brings us to the end of this episode of the GDS podcast, so thank you very much for tuning in and listening. If you’d like to catch up with any of our previous episodes, or if you’d like to subscribe to future episodes, then please head to wherever it is that you download your podcasts from, we’re on all the major platforms, Spotify, Apple Music, Pocket Casts, everything like that. Find the GDS podcast and hit subscribe, and we hope you enjoyed this episode, and we hope that you will tune in again in the future. Thank you very much and goodbye.

In this episode, we talk to former DWP Deputy Director and OneTeamGov co-founder Kit Collingwood about her time in government.  A full transcript of the episode follows: Angus Montgomery:Hello and welcome to the Government Digital Service podcast, my name’s Angus Montgomery, I’m a senior writer at GDS and I’m very pleased to be joined today by Kit Collingwood, currently at DWP but recently announced soon to be leaving and getting an exciting new job in agency-world, so we’ll be talking to Kit about her time in government and looking back over some of the things that she’s done, so thankyou for joining us Kit Kit Collingwood:Thanks for having me. Angus Montgomery:So Kit, just to kick things off could you tell me a little bit about your role at DWP, your current role, and some of the things that you do there? Kit Collingwood:Sure. So my role is head of data transformation for the Department for Work and Pensions, so what my teams do is we work in the intersection between data, digital and technology to improve services and improve decision-making. Angus Montgomery:And how did you end up there? What’s your career path been so far? Because you’ve been around- well, I think it’s fair to say you’re a well-known figure in digital government. You’ve been around digital government for a while. What’s that journey entailed? Kit Collingwood:Well, it’s a huge cosmic accident actually. I worked actually in the engineering sector for five years after I graduated. I was a proof-reader and a translator for five years and then I decided that I wanted to be in the public service in some capacity. So I in 2009 joined the civil service fast-stream. I was a policy maker for three years working on different areas of justice policy, and I worked in parliament for a while putting a bill through parliament. When I came from the end of that experience, I almost left the civil service because the ways that I thought that policy making and parliamentary work were happening were so antiquated and so out of touch with the average person’s experience that I’d really sort of lost faith with a lot of government ways of working and I was really saddened by a lot of what I’d seen. There was really no empathy or contact with people on the outside of Whitehall and I felt myself really distanced from average human experience. At the same time, I fell into a delivery manager job at a place called the Office of the Public Guardian, which is one of the executive agencies of the Ministry of Justice. I applied for it as a fast-stream role, so it was just one of the regular rotation roles. I didn’t know what a delivery manager was. I didn’t really know how the internet worked, and I knew nothing about agile or about technology. I applied for this role called delivery manager which looked quite fun, and it turned out to be the delivery manager for the lasting power of attorney service, which was one of the first exemplars in the GDS transformation programme. So this was coming towards the end of 2012, which is why I’ve been around for a long time because the beginning of digital government I suppose was around that time in the way that we know it now. GDS was about a year old really. I had an induction that was hilarious in hindsight where my boss sat me down on my first day and she said, “Here’s your induction. I’ve just quit.” So my boss quit on my first day, and she was head of the transformation programme for the Office of Public Guardian. I, being the cheeky youngster that I was, went to her boss and said, “Can I have her job please on a temporary promotion?” And he was foolish enough to give it to me, and that’s how I came into digital government. Angus Montgomery:Oh wow. Kit Collingwood:So I was the accidental head of a transformation programme that I had no idea how to lead, but I did have some ideas about how I thought the place could be better run. So at that point, I was working with a guy called Chris Mitchell from GDS who was one of the very first sort of transformation partners which GDS would place with departments to help them understand how to do digital. He and I got on very well and I also got on very well with Mark O’Neill who was the other person sort of in place at the Ministry of Justice, where OPG was. So they began to teach me the ropes about what this thing called digital was because I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know what a software developer did. I had no idea about how all of this works, and really the first six months of that were just me learning and learning and learning. Very quickly I met a few people who would completely transform how I thought about government. Tom Loosemore, Mike Bracken, Richard Pope, Tim Paul and a few others, so I would go to the old buildings in Holborn and that’s how I learned what digital government was, was from those people. They really taught me the basics of why this thing was necessary, what transformation meant, and they inspired me to stay in public service. Angus Montgomery:I’m interested in- because you sort of described in your early career you were becoming frustrated at the lack of human-centeredness or lack of humanness of governments, but you didn’t know what digital meant. So you kind of obviously had a lot of empathy and you understood that government needed to be more user-centred, but at what stage or how did you realise that digital was a way or the way to do this? Or is digital the way to do this? Kit Collingwood:No, I don’t think digital in itself is the way to do it, but it’s one of the tools that we need to be able to do it. So the ability for technology to bring services into people’s homes and everyday lives is part of the way that government should re-approach human connection. I’m fairly convinced about that, but it’s only a subset I think. We, I think, need fundamental retraining in empathy skills, or training not retraining. Fundamental training in empathy skills in order that we can approach the people we serve with compassion. That’s not sort of pure cuddly thinking. There’s a huge economic benefit to understanding end users better, because if you understand the impact of your ideas and your policies on the average person then you can more effectively implement those policies. That to me just stands to reason, so to me high empathy has financial gains for government as well and it frustrates me that people don’t often see that. But to put that aside, to answer your original question, the way that I sort of connected this idea of human connection and digital government was through user research, the kind of doggedness of user research. And quite quickly coming into- I think I inherited a team of sort of two or three people at the OPG and they were bolstered by some GDS folk. I mean, it’s a dream to have somebody like Richard Pope being able to effectively just consult on your ideas with, and that’s kind of an incredible privilege to have had. But there was also this cohort of user researchers, and I didn’t know what one of those was. So just observing them at close quarters, this idea of iterating on your ideas, not doing a massive big bang thing and then just sort of hoping it works, which was- that is the way that government has and had done things. Suddenly there was this cohort of people who would do something small and then test it, see if it worked, and then do something else and then test it to see if it worked.I saw the potential for that outside of technology, so I could see the application of that in policy-making very easily. I could see the application of that even in law-making, which is more controversial, but I can see that. And in fact law-making is iterative actually. It goes through both houses several times, but to me the connection to end users is still lacking, and it’s got huge application for customer service as well, iterating in your ideas. None of the things I’ve just said are remotely original. They all happen now, but at the time it was quite revolutionary. So this idea of getting in a room with people who would be on the receiving end of your stuff, that was huge to me and that really reinvigorated my faith in public service. Angus Montgomery:And can you describe for people who weren’t around, say, back then, it wasn’t that long ago, but in 2012 when the exemplars programme was running, what was the exemplars programme? How did it function and what was the purpose of it? Kit Collingwood:Well, it was 25 high volume services that had a huge potential to be transformational, so it was things- so lasting power of attorney was one and that’s the ability to give somebody the power to act on your behalf if you lose mental health. There were things like carers’ allowance, which is part of my current department, Department for Work and Pensions, and also some less emotive but high volume stuff, so a lot of the DVLA’s digital services, a couple of them fell into that transformation programme as well. So these were high volume services that would show the potential for digital government, and they were acknowledged as being the starting line really. It was to get 25 of them into beta within a certain timescale to show the pace that was potentially there. And for me to begin to develop the skills that government would need to be able to be digital for the future, one of the things which has really dragged, it’s a lot better now, but one of the things that really dragged was this acknowledgement from government that we need this massive cohort of skills to be able to be sustainable in digital beyond something that was a programme, you know, beyond something finite.So I used that exemplar programme to build up a lot of trust and support in what I was doing so I could hire the right kind of people because I could see that this wasn’t going to go away. Angus Montgomery:Yes, yes. How did that actually function day to day, and what was the kind of relationship between- because exemplars is very much run by GDS with these departments. How did that work in practical terms? Was there a sort of mixed GDS/MOJ team? How did that work? Kit Collingwood:Yes, there was initially, yes, and then GDS slowly peeled off. I’m wary that I’m speaking entirely from my own experience. I know that I have an overwhelmingly positive experience of it. Other departments I know felt almost affronted that GDS were coming in and sort of telling them how to do their own services effectively, and I know that there was tension there. Angus Montgomery:Why do you think your experience was positive in that sense? Because GDS was still coming in and kind of telling you or showing you a way of doing something. Why do you think that worked when it might not have worked elsewhere? Kit Collingwood:I never felt that I was being told anything. Maybe it’s because I was so keen to listen, so I felt very humbled by being in this new role, so part of it undoubtedly will be how willing I was to listen to them. I was in a new executive agency, so the OPG was new to me. The Office of the Public Guardian was new, so I was learning the professional domain I was in. I was learning the technical domain and I was learning about digital government so I felt extraordinarily empty-headed. But I’m a really good leader, so I knew I could lead the things. I knew I’d have the right ideas, but I had so much to learn and probably me being so open to learning helped us move that path. If I’d have had slightly more emotional and professional capital invested in what had already gone before, maybe it would have gone less smoothly. That was definitely part of it. The other thing is I recruit curious people, so the team that I brought in to work with me in the OPG were secondees from operational centres, people from policy-making, some external hires. I always promoted a culture of partnership with GDS, so for me they were friends from the beginning. I had no reason not to have that attitude and other people did. Angus Montgomery:Yes. And I suppose the other kind of truism that’s spoken about the exemplars is that they were really, really difficult to work on and that there was burnout and that there were people working incredibly hard but getting incredibly frustrated, and was that something you experienced as well? Kit Collingwood:I didn’t burn out. I found it hugely energising, and again I think my teams were protected by the fact that we did have such a positive relationship. I’m quite keen on sustainable mental health so we never were a team that would work until midnight. We never thought that was cool. We never thought there was anything cool about that, so it never felt very tense in our office. It never- and also you have to embrace a bit of humility in what you’re doing. You’re doing something great and we had a great sense of pride about that, but it’s not brain surgery. Nobody was going to die if we all knocked off at 6:00pm instead of 10:00pm. We took it incredibly seriously but not too seriously, so we never did burnout. We were extraordinarily focused. We basically did one thing for nine months and then we did a second thing for another nine months, so sustainability was always on my mind. And I found very quickly, because I got promoted quite quickly  at that time, I was in danger at the end of my time of OPG of losing visibility of individual products being delivered, so I always had this awareness that you can reach a tipping point where people will start to feel out of focus, and I’d known that from my own experience. So I always tried to have empathy with my teams and make sure that they could work at a pace that suited them. Angus Montgomery:Yes. And they understood- because the other thing about working in that sort of environment is you’re delivering so quickly, you kind of need to- I don’t know. This is just me positing, I suppose. You kind of need to step back and look at what you’ve achieved as well and if you’re delivering really quickly that can be quite hard to do. Kit Collingwood:Yes, it was a whirlwind. It always felt like a happy whirlwind, and a lot of the- we had like the lowest turnover of the whole place, you know, really high engagement, and there were people still working in that digital team that have been there now for five or six years, so it was a good place to be, but the pace was high. I remember a year in we looked back at what we’d done and we’d done one service from scratch to public beta, an additional service from scratch into alpha. We’d done the first digital strategy. We’d quadrupled the team size. We’d redrawn how we did recruitment. We’d changed the pay scales. We’d redone our commercial contract so that we were outside of big IT contracts, and what else had we done? There was something else as well. Oh, we’d redesigned the governance as well so we could do our governance. And we’d sort of looked back after a year and we were like, “Holy.” We did a lot, and a lot of it was- there was a real lack of self-importance to that team. We knew we were doing good stuff, but when we wrote our strategy it was like eight pages so we did it in about three weeks, so there was a real lack of fanfare in a good way. You know, it was just heads down and crack on and try not to show off too much. Angus Montgomery: It’s interesting you say that because that’s one of the things, because I joined GDS in 2016 because I’d been a journalist before so I’d been a sort of observer of digital government and one of the things that really struck me about what GDS and what people working in digital were doing was that they were delivering stuff. GDS in particular was really vocal about the work that it was doing, but it was showing the work. It wasn’t talking about abstract things or concepts or strategies. It was like, “Here’s a thing that we’ve done. Here’s how it works,” and that was really inspiring as someone outside this. Kit Collingwood:The phrase of strategy as delivery is banded around by everybody now, and it’s almost had its hay-day. People have almost stopped saying it in some circles, but I can’t describe how powerful that was to somebody like me who’d come out of the most bureaucratic part of Whitehall, you know, the middle of a policy team, a kind of strategic policy team, and I’d come out of- I’d worked for all three main political parties by that point, so I’d joined the government in 2009 and I’d worked for the coalition government which I was working for at that time. So working with a lot of different ministers doing things like ministerial handover, loads of briefings, lots of policy documents, lots of consultation, very slow, sluggish pace. Great work being done but sluggish, and suddenly this idea that we could be released from writing constant documents to prove the worth of what we were doing was just ridiculously revolutionary, and I can’t  exactly describe why. It’s so obvious that you could get on with the work rather than spend a million years doing a 100-page business case, but to me that was like, “Oh, Christ, I can do this so differently.” And that’s why our strategy took three weeks and it was eight pages, and our business case was like ten pages. The hidden bit about that was a lot of me putting my neck on the line saying, “No, no, no, I’m going to write this short. It’s going to be really short, really simple,” trying to simplify everything, and that’s where the effort went. It’s a funny analogy actually because it’s the same way that the design plans went as well. Government websites are massively overdesigned. Then GDS comes out with something that’s basically a white page with a green button in the middle with a bit of highlighting on it and everyone is like, “Oh. That’s how we’re going to design things now,” and they were like, “Yes, yes. We just basically don’t put much on the page.” Everyone is like, “Oh, right,” and it’s a really analogous approach to what I took to everything after, business cases, documentation, recruitment processes, governance. Everything went the same way. You don’t need to clutter it with all of that noise. Angus Montgomery: Yes. It’s just so incredibly powerful because you were in government while this was happening, but I was reporting on the private sector and the private sector organisations weren’t doing this. It took an organisation within government or a group of people within government to drive this kind of simplicity home. And working in government now and understanding the complexities of it, it’s just unbelievable almost that that happened. Kit Collingwood:Yes, and of course it peed people off. Of course it did. Everybody who had ever built one of those websites would be peed off because that’s your work being rubbished by these people, all of whom were pretty young. They were highly paid because they’d come from the private sector. They were off, siphoned off from Whitehall. They were other, and they were consistent. GDS were consistently othered by a lot of big government departments, and still are frankly. I don’t think you can be a rebel of that magnitude without peeing off a hell a lot of people. What I took as my task was to try and- I’d been in a policy-making community that thought that digital government were a load of jeans-wearing hipsters. Now I was in a digital community that thought that policy-makers were a load of 50-year-old white fuddy-duddies, and elements of both of those things are true. You know, there are jeans wearing hipsters in digital government and there are white middle-aged fuddy-duddies in policy making but that doesn’t mean that we’re not trying to do the right thing. So from that point, my mission was just trying  to connect people so that- you can’t do anything without trust so it’s just trying to increase the level of trust between the different communities that I was operating in. Angus Montgomery: Yes. And how did you- because I guess we’ve talked a lot about the exemplars and the rapid pace of what was happening, the rapid pace of change, and touched on things like the controversies around that. But you’ve been in government for a long time and carried on that work, and how did you make it sustainable? How did you take that kind of environment and that thinking and sustain it into another department, into another role, into new teams? Kit Collingwood:I think it was a series of steps really. There were some mechanistic steps such as I began quite early to realise that government funding isn’t set up for digital. It is a bit better now, but at that point you did project works. You’re funded for a blob of thing and when the thing ended you weren’t funded for the thing anymore. Well, that was never going to work with things like CICD, so the continuous delivery of technology doesn’t work with that funding model. I blessedly realised that quite early and I started to work very closely with finance and commercial business partners to smooth out that path so that things like- this is so boring, but this was what got it done. CapEx versus OpEx was well-known and well chartered, so I didn’t want to have a drop in the team that was sharp between this thing called build and this thing called run. For me that’s still a false divide. Well, anybody who works in a DevOps way, that’s a false divide. So I plotted with them to go from a full team size- say your team size is 10. Over time I would look to retain 4 of that team and I would build that into a bigger business case and I’d have like a slide down from one to the other. And putting in the groundwork with those people who are naturally mistrusting of something where it looks like you’re trying to game an existing process and just getting them to see what I was doing and these services- if you run these services while in perpetuity, you don’t have to then have this change request of £1m a year down the line. Angus Montgomery:Yes, that comes in, yes, yes. Kit Collingwood:Because you’re continuously enhancing what you’re doing, but you can enhance it with a smaller team and it wasn’t always cheaper actually or it didn’t always look cheaper, but I knew that you’d then five years down the line wouldn’t have to buy the thing again because you’d have built it in-house. So it was a lot of donkey work of redrawing everything about how we do finance and commercial work and commercial partnering and governance and all that kind of stuff, so that was part of it. Part of it was government catching up, so digital became not weird while I was a couple of years in, call it 2014, digital government was then effectively becoming sustainable in its own right. I had to fight a lot less hard to get the basics that I wanted to get done done. In the early days I had to have Mike Bracken come and advocate for the things I wanted to get done. It was that ridiculous. I didn’t need that by 2014, and at that point I moved to Ministry of Justice digital, the central digital team, and that had people like Dave Rogers in it who’s still there. He was great, and you kind of move from sensible support people to sensible support people. Angus Montgomery:Yes. How do you kind of- well, it might sound a stupid question, but how do you identify and how do you end up working with people like that? How do you find allies? Kit Collingwood:How do I find allies? Angus Montgomery:Because I do get the sense there’s kind of a network of people in different departments now, and the names are probably well known of people who are doing good things who- Kit Collingwood:Yes. How did we all find each other? Sort of thing. Angus Montgomery:How did you all find each other? Yes. Kit Collingwood:I think we were all curious. So this community of- they’re well known on digital government Twitter. That community of people. You know, there’s probably a couple of hundred of us who’ve been around for- call it five years or more. Dave Rogers is one of them. All of the original GDSs are in there as well, although many of us have gone our separate ways. For the ones who weren’t the real inception, so the Mikes and Toms, I think curiosity was a big bit of it. A lot of us found each other from being mutually introduced by well-networked people, so people like Tom would introduce us sometimes. Emer Coleman was another one for doing that. Kathy Settle. There were these people who knew people and they’d say, “Oh, so and so,” and then people would make some kind of connection between us and we’d almost invariably get on, so that was part of it. Those of us who came out of Whitehall as opposed to being external hires found a natural empathy with each other because we’d been so frustrated by where we’d been and we were generally known as being pains in the bum basically where we are and we were quite grateful- I always think if you, in any meeting room, say you’ve got 12 people in a meeting room, you’re the one that feels really outré and the radical one. You’re just in the wrong room, and suddenly you’re in the right room and it’s just this huge comfort. Angus Montgomery:Yes, that was going to be my next question is kind of, what are you looking for in these people? Because it sounds like a mix of sort of bravery in a sense of they’re willing to take a risk with something. They’ve got convictions, but also they have empathy. Kit Collingwood:Yes. Well, I probably can’t swear in this podcast, can I? Angus Montgomery:I think you maybe could. Kit Collingwood:I’ll put it the opposite way. I only work with lovely people, that’s my rule, so three is something about being kind and warm that is at the core of the kind of person I would look to work with. But there’s something about- the way I put it is we want to reform the machine without breaking it, so all of those people are massively inpatient with the way the government works, massively frustrated, want to beat their heads against the wall but basically love the place, and if they leave they’ll always come back. They are either civil servants through and through in their DNA or you know that you’ll see them again in some point in the future, and it’s those people who care deeply about public service, it gives them that lovely balance of wanting to do the right thing by end users but without completely breaking the machine that they’re working in, and it’s a really hard balance to strike. But when you find it, it’s like gold dust. They’re the best people. Angus Montgomery:Right, okay. And the other thing I wanted to talk to you about was One Team Gov as well because you were one of the- were you one of the founders of One Team Gov? Is that right? Kit Collingwood:I was. Angus Montgomery:Yes. Well, first of tell me why it was set up and what the purpose if it is. Kit Collingwood:One Team Gov was born out of my frustration at the lack of empathy between government professions, so it’s the ultimate realisation of my experience leaving policy-making and going into digital government really. And having observed and then worked in such a tribal system where if you weren’t us, you were them and you weren’t to be trusted. Well, id’ belonged to two tribes and I was like,  “Well, where’s the ‘us’ in the middle of all this ‘them’ then if everybody is ‘them’?” So I spoke at a conference in March 2017 about- I gave a talk about data as it happens. That’s what I’m working on at the moment, and I was advised to go and see a guy speak after me called James Reeve who works at the Department for Education. I’d been told he was a great speaker and I listened to him and I spoke to him afterwards and we got on really well, and he was also coming out of policy making and going into a digital role, so the same thing that I’d done, what, five years previously he was now doing. We talked about the experience of how policy-makers don’t get on with digital people in mutual mistrust, and we’d said we’d both been to professional events. We’d been to policy-making events and digital events, but there was no rebel event just for- where are all your generic rebels regardless of background? Where is anybody welcome? Angus Montgomery:This is how you find each other, was it? Kit Collingwood:Yes, exactly. And the tagline we often use for One Team Gov is if you’re tired of waiting for the revolution, start one yourself, not that we aim to start a revolution. That’s really self-important, but we did want to have an event where you would be welcomed as a reformer regardless of your background. You didn’t have to be some whizzy fast-streamer. You didn’t have to be anything really, and we just had a single event. As we were coming up to the event we realised that we wanted to make it a community, so we, classic bit of partnership, Joe Lanman who works here as a designer designed us some branding and we built a little website and we got some regular meet-ups in which are still going now 18 months down the line. All we aimed to do was just to give a safe space to rebels, that’s all. So those people who don’t want to trash the machine but want to make it better, we just wanted to be the people that they could go to, and that was it. It was and is super simple really. [00:35:30] It’s based mainly on networks, on connections and on honest conversations with people. But the heartbeat of it is our meet-ups that we have in London, Cardiff, in the north, Scotland, Stockholm, Ottawa. Angus Montgomery:Internationally now. Kit Collingwood:Yes. So it spreads internationally through those same networks of those positive rebels, and, yes, I’m really proud of it. It gives such a safe space to those people who are just sitting in the wrong meeting room being that single person. They just need to find the right meeting room and we’ve given them that. Angus Montgomery:Yes. One of the things that strikes me having talked about your time working in digital government is you’ve gone from, and this is kind of, I suppose, illustrative of digital government as a whole. You’ve gone from working on an exemplar, so a single service or a single digital touchpoint, to working in an area where you’re bringing together people from across different professions to look at kind of the much wider picture, and that to me kind of illustrates the broadening of digital government, how we think about it from kind of these single touch points to suddenly these whole services or these whole kind of policies. Is that kind of how you see your career having developed? Do you think it has kind of gone like that? Kit Collingwood:Yes. Yes, I think it has. It started off as a blob. We were almost a carbuncle in the beginning and seen by some as a carbuncle as well, and the world to make digital governments sustainable- well, you know, they say that it’ll be sustainable when we stop saying digital, but we’re not there yet. And to my mind, you’ll still need specialist technologists in government so you’ll always have a thing called a technology team or a digital team or something, so it’s not quite the ambition to never say digital ever again but it should evolve in meaning, I think, to encompass not just technologists but people who are interested in internet-enabled reform, which is kind of how I would characterise it. So, yes, it’s definitely evolved from being something where you’re a heavily specialist team relatively separated from the rest of the organisation to something where every profession is welcome. One of the things that- I get a bit [00:40:26] twitchy talking about things that I’ve done that I’m proud of because I get self-conscious, but there are a few and of them there’s somebody called Kaz Hufton who was- she worked for the Office of Public Guardian and she worked in our call centre. She’s one of our operational people and we found her and she was an exceptionally good and is an exceptionally good product manager. We found her in operations, and she proved very quickly that she was going to be better at this job than anybody else we could find and we made her a product manager, and I had to propose and then stand behind that decision. She needed to be promoted about three times because the grade difference between operations and digital was quite tricky at that point, but we did that and it proved something. It proved that if you’re this thing called operations, you don’t have to stay there forever just as I hadn’t in policy. You can transition your career actually, and people come into digital and learn how to do product development. You don’t need a million years to learn how to do it. You need a lot of smarts, a lot of empathy, very open ears, and then professional skills that you learn down the line. I was so glad that we gave her that break, and that’s something that I’ve done consistently ever since is not assume that if somebody is a policy-maker that they can never be a digital person or vice versa. It’s the same reason I started One Team Gov is it’s kind of this you don’t have to stay in that tribe actually. You can go and work across, and I suppose where I am now working in data is a natural extension of that because to my mind, there needs to be a data leap for government in the same way that there was a digital leap for government from 2011 onwards. Data people are still a little bit off in a silo in a corner being nerds. They’re even siphoned off from product teams, so one of the missions that I’ve had in DWP is to work intersectionally between digital data and technology so that we blur those professional boundaries. Somebody like a data scientist is a classic- you know, if you call them sort of a coder analyst, they’re already a technologist and a data professional, so why do they have to sit over in that corner? Why can’t they come and be in this product team? And embedding data scientists into product teams has been one of the things that we’ve done in DWP to absolutely great effect. So again it’s trying to fight the good fight every day for people, dropping their assumptions about what somebody can and can’t do. Angus Montgomery:Yes, yes, yes. And just before we finish off, I’d like to ask you, I suppose potentially at the risk of making you feel uncomfortable, a couple of questions about you and how you operate, I suppose. You said earlier in this conversation that when you’re taking about going on the exemplar you didn’t know much about digital but you knew how to lead, and you are one of the people in this world who’s seen, I suppose, as a role model, as a leader. What sort of behaviours do you hope that you’re showing, that you hope that people kind of pick up? What do you hope that you’re role modelling that people will pick up from you? Kit Collingwood:I’m kind to people. Angus Montgomery:That’s the best behaviour. Kit Collingwood:You can never have too much kindness in the world, I think, and I think I’m pretty consistently kind. I will say that about myself. I’m very willing to re-examine what is a yes and what’s a no because I’m very dogged in the pursuit of what I believe to be right, and I think that’s a good role model for the bit of government I’m in because you have to be fairly persistent to get things done and I’ve never taken a no to be a final no. I’ve always been able to chase down what I believe to be the right answer. I don’t know if that’s- maybe I’m ideological, but I’ve always tried to fight for the right thing. I hope that I am seen as being passionate about diversion and inclusion because I am. Although I’m a woman in technology and a gay woman in technology and a gay woman parent in technology, my interests do go beyond that and I would hope that I have given other people space to progress where they thought they might not have that space. So inclusiveness with age, grade boundary, professional boundary, colour, disability, I hope that I’m not deluding myself, that that is something I’m known for. And as I said, I do try and give my time to try and make the place a bit better, so things like One Team Gov and mentoring people, that kind of thing. If I were to leave an impression of myself, I hope that that would be in it. Angus Montgomery:And who do you look to as a role model or who inspires you at the moment? Either within this world or outside it, I suppose. Kit Collingwood:Am I allowed a few? Angus Montgomery:Of course. Just like a dinner party thing. Kit Collingwood:My girlfriend would have to go on that list. One of the most amazing product people I’ve ever observed and the kindest person. Angus Montgomery:Just for the sake- who’s your girlfriend? Kit Collingwood:Kylie Havelock. Angus Montgomery:Kylie Havelock. Kit Collingwood:Yes. Yes, she’s taught me a lot about kindness and about diversion and inclusion as well and a million other things. My kids inspire me all the time. They’re not constrained by what anybody expects of them, and I love that about them. I try and learn from them and try and- they’ve made me challenge a lot of my assumptions about myself and about the world. And then professionally, I’d always say Lara Sampson who works at the DWP who is the most consummately brilliant civil servant I have ever worked with and has remained that to this day. She wins the prize. She is incredible and inspirational. I would always say Tom Loosemore as well who’s effectively very quietly, without anybody knowing it, mentored me for about six years without ever asking for anything in return and has quietly been responsible for several of my career moves without ever taking credit for it or asking for anything back. So given that this will be public, I’ll say publically thank you to him. He’s done a lot for me without anybody ever knowing that, so I’ll always be grateful. Angus Montgomery:And just finally, if there’s one piece of advice you could give to someone, so say there’s someone in your situation now going back, what was it, six years ago, kind of in a role. You were in a policy role were you were kind of thinking, “This isn’t really what I’m interested in. This isn’t giving me the empathy, the satisfaction that I want.” What advice would you give to that person that you've learned over the last seven or eight years? Kit Collingwood:Wow. I’d say find a hero. It’s always good to have somebody to look up to think, you know, what would so-and-so do in this situation? I think it’s always good to see a perspective that isn’t your own. I’d say a good dose of sort of mindfulness for want of a better word, so realising where you are on the frustration versus action scale. There can be a feeling amongst some civil servants in particular that they’re so frustrated the only thing they can do is leave, and I’ve seen many people go their way and it’s not a bad thing to do at all. It’s the only thing to do for a lot of people, but there’s this tipping point and if you’re on this tipping point of, “Oh my God, I want the world to be better but I want to stay and make it better,” I’d always say contact One Team Gov because you’ll find some likeminded people as well. But I’d also say to them, if any of those people are listening, you’re not alone. So many civil servants are frustrated. The civil service is frustrating. It will always be, but it’s the best place in the world, my belief is, and if you’re on that tipping point where you’re incredibly frustrated but believe you can do something better, it’s not just you. And again if you’re that one person in a room of 12 who’s just in the wrong room, go and find a different room and you can start to feel more normal, and there are so many lateral moves you can make to get that done and you might just start to be reinvigorated like I was. Angus Montgomery:And those rebels are easier to find now. Kit Collingwood:Very easy to find now. Yes, so Clare Moriarty is one of them and she’s got one of the toughest jobs going in government at the moment. Jeremy Heywood was one as well. He was one of the people who gave me advice, again when he didn’t have to. A very tough time for him that showed me that truly he was on the side of the revolutionaries. He wanted to see reform as well, so you can move up the pay scale and up the ladder and be a rebel as well. You can do that. Angus Montgomery:Yes. Kit Collingwood, thank you very much for joining us. Kit Collingwood:Thank you for your time. Angus Montgomery:Thank you. Thank you very much for joining us for that episode of the GDS podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to listen to any more of what we’re doing, then please go to wherever it is that you listen to or download your podcasts and subscribe to the GDS podcast because we’ve got lots more exciting stuff coming up this year, so we hope you’ll join us again soon. Thank you very much.

"You now, in this era, can, should, and must iterate your way to the least bad solution...and build a culture and a community of constant improvement."This episode of Tech States features Tom Loosemore, co-founder of Public Digital and prior co-founder of the UK Government Digital Service. Interviewed by Dr. Tanya Filer, Tom discusses his recent essay on 'Government as a Platform' (GaaP), as well as the politics and practice of digitising government more broadly. They also discuss the globalisation of digital government models and methods, and the intersection between GaaP and the GovTech industry. Throughout, Tom argues passionately for the need for accountability, humility, and iteration.Prior to GDS, Tom ran the digital innovation arm of Channel 4. He was responsible for the BBC’s internet strategy between 2001 and 2007. In 2003, he helped found mySociety, and in the mid-90s Tom was a journalist on the UK edition of Wired Magazine.Dr. Tanya Filer leads the Digital State project at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Interview produced by Eloise Stevens.Tom's essay can be found here.A full transcript of this episode is online here.

    In this episode, we interview outgoing head of GOV.UK Neil Williams about his time at GDS, learning about agile and scaling the nation's website. The full transcript of the interview follows: Angus Montgomery: Hello and welcome to the very first episode of the Government Digital Service podcast. My name’s Angus Montgomery, I’m a senior writer at GDS and for this episode I’m going to be talking to Neil Williams, who is the head of GOV.UK. And Neil is leaving GDS shortly for an exciting new job, so we’re going to be talking to him about that and also talking to him about his time at GDS, because he’s been here since the very beginning. So I hope you enjoy this episode and let’s go straight into the conversation. Neil Williams: I'm going to Croydon Council. So leaving not only GDS- Angus Montgomery: South London? Neil Williams: South London. South London is the place to be, I have to say. Yes, not only leaving GDS, but leaving the Civil Service actually, because local government is not the Civil Service of course, to go and work in Croydon as Chief Digital Officer for the council there. They've got a lot of ambition, and it’s a really exciting time for Croydon. People laugh when I say that. Angus Montgomery: I just laughed as well. I didn’t mean to. Neil Williams:  Croydon has this reputation that is completely unwarranted, and we’re going to prove the world wrong. It’s changing massively. It’s already gone through a lot of change. You're probably aware of some stuff. It’s got a Boxpark. There’s a lot of reporting around the Westfield/Hammerson development that might be happening, which we very much hope is happening. Also Croydon Tech City. So Croydon’s got a lot of growth in the tech industry, tech sector. Fantastic companies starting up and scaling up in Croydon, and that’s all part of the story. Plus the stuff that’s more in my wheelhouse, that I've been doing here in GDS around transforming services. Making the public services that Croydon provides to residents and business to be as good as they should be. As good as everything else that people expect in their day to lives using digital services these days. Angus Montgomery: So not much on your plate then? Neil Williams: It’s quite a big job. I'm excited about it. There’s a lot about it that’s new, which is kind of giving me a new lease of energy, the fact that I've got this big challenge to face and lots of learning to do. Which reminds me a lot about how I felt when I first working with GDS in fact. Just how exciting I found the prospect of coming and working for this organisation, and being part of this amazing revolution. I'm feeling that again actually about the job in Croydon, [00:02:33] about the work to be done there. It seems like the right time. It’s a perfect time and place, where I am in my career, those things coming together. It’s a really good match. So it came up, and I put in for it, and lo and behold I am now Chief Digital Officer in Croydon Council from mid-October. Angus Montgomery: You’ve been at GDS since before the beginning, haven’t you? Seven, eight years? Neil Williams:  Yes, I was working it out this morning. It’s seven years and two months. I was 34 when I started working in GDS. I'm 42 now. I just had my birthday last week. Angus Montgomery: Full disclosure. Neil Williams: Yes. That’s maybe too much information to be sharing. I didn’t have grey hair when I started. My youngest child was just born, and he’s nearly eight now. So yes, it’s been a really big part of my life. Angus Montgomery: So you can track your late 30s and early 40s through images of you standing in front of number 10? Neil Williams: Yes, and unfortunately quite a few embarrassing pictures of me on the GDS flicker. (Laughter) There have been a few regrettable outfits for celebrations and milestones launching GOV.UK, and celebrating GOV.UK birthdays, where looking back on it I may not have worn those things if I had known it was going to be on the internet forever. (Laughter) Angus Montgomery: Now you say that, there’s an image of you… I'm trying to remember. I think it’s at the Design Museum, when GOV.UK won the Designs of the Year, and you're wearing a Robocop t-shirt. (Laughter) Neil Williams: Yes, I am. I can tell that story if you like. That’s one of my proudest GDS moments, I think. Maybe we will get to that later. Do you want me to do it now? Angus Montgomery: Well, no. Let us know where that came from, because this is… Well, just as a bit of context, because I've gone straight into that, but you’ve been head of GOV.UK since the beginning, and in 2012, shortly after GOV.UK launched, it won the Design Museum’s Design of the Year Award, which is an incredible accolade. I can’t remember what it beat, but I think it beat several…  That’s one of those awards where they judge things like buildings, and cars, and new products, and mad graphic design. So for a government website to win that award was really incredible, I think. Neil Williams: Yes. Actually, we were talking about it the other day, and Mark Hurrell, the head designer on GOV.UK, he said it’s actually the first time a website ever won that award, which I had completely forgotten. Yes, it was amazing. That was 2013. We had launched GOV.UK in 2012, as in replacing Directgov and Business Link, which were the previous big super sites for public services. Then we were well into the next phase, which was shutting down and replacing all of the websites of departments of state. I was very much working on that bit of it at the time. My head was down and working very attentively, in this fairly crazy timescale, to shut down those websites, and starting to look at how we were going to start closing down the websites of 350 arms-length bodies. A huge project. In the midst of that, in the midst of that frantic busy period, someone approached me. It was Tom Loosemore, Etienne Pollard. One of those early GDS leaders. Saying, “Oh, there’s an award ceremony. We’ve been nominated for an award, and we need some people to go. Can you go to it?” Angus Montgomery: “We need some people to go.” That’s an attractive… (Laughter) Neil Williams: Yes. It was just like, “We need a few people to make sure we’re going to be represented there.” Angus Montgomery: “To fill the seats.” (Laughter) Neil Williams: I now know that they knew that we were going to win, but I didn’t know that, at all, at the time, and I didn’t really think much of it. “Oh, yes, fine. Yes, I will go along to that. That’s no problem at all.” I think it was the same day. I'm not sure whether it was that same day or a different day when I was given notice, but anyway, I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t dress up for the occasion. So I rock up to the Design Museum in my jeans and in my Robocop t-shirt, an OCP logo on it. The evening included quite a lot of free alcohol. It was quite a glitzy affair, and I was definitely under-dressed for the occasion, but I thought, “That’s fine. We’re just here to be part of an audience.” Hanging around at the back, having the free canapes, partaking of the plentiful free wine that was being distributed. Then Griff Rhys Jones, who was presenting the award, gets up on stage and announces the winners in each category, and we won our category. Much triumphant jubilation and celebration. Then went on to reveal that we won the whole thing. We won the Design of the Year Award as a whole. Which then led to this photo call. By which point I was quite drunk as well. I had no idea this was going to happen. Yes, so there’s that famous photo of a bunch of GDS people accepting the award, all quite smartly dressed, apart from me letting the side down with my Robocop t-shirt. Angus Montgomery: Tell me how you got involved in this thing in the first place. You’ve been in the Civil Service before, but you're not a career civil servant, are you? Or you hadn’t been. Neil Williams: Well, yes. I would like to think of myself as not being a career civil servant. I started in the private sector, in a communications publishing agency. It was a magazine agency. I thought I wanted to be a journalist actually. I did English at university. I thought I wanted to be a journalist. Went into publishing. Was passionate about publishing and the power of the printed word. Distributing information to people. Equipping them with information. Informing people and so forth. I went into corporate publishing, as a way to learn about publishing, but whilst I was working for that company the internet was becoming a bigger deal, a bigger thing. I was also mucking around in my spare time with comedy websites. That was known by my employers, who then said, as they were starting to think about, “How do we get in on this?” they asked me if I wanted to run the London office of their new digital offering to their clients. I leapt at the chance. That was a really good leg up for me. That’s where I learnt about digital, about building websites. So that was a great place, where I learnt… I said I wanted to be in publishing and journalism. The information is power thing excited me, and of course doing that digitally, doing that online, massively more so. More empowering people. I fell in love instantly with the immediacy of what you get with publishing to the web, and providing services over the web, and getting the feedback, and being able to improve based on the fact that you can see in real time what users are doing. That’s been my passion ever since. After a few years of doing that… That is now a dwindling small part of my career, when you look back on it, so it’s probably true to say that I am a career civil servant. A few years in a digital agency. Then I wanted to see the other side of things, and be client side, and see something through to its outcomes, rather than just build a thing and hand it over. I joined the Civil Service. I joined the government communications profession. Angus Montgomery: I know it well. Neil Williams: And my first gig was in the Department for Trade and Industry, as it was then, as an assistant information officer. A young, eager civil servant. There were some digital elements to that job, but actually quite a lot of my earliest Civil Service gig was going to Number 10 every week to do the grid meeting, which is the Alastair Campbell era. It’s still the process now. And I was moving around within the department. So there’s an eight-year period, which I'm not going to go into in any detail,where I moved around between different departments, doing digital things. I worked my way up the greasy pole of the Civil Service. From a web manager, managing a bit of a website and looking after the content and the information architecture, through to running whole teams, running the website, intranet, social media side of things. During those years I did a lot of work on product development, around online consultation tools and digital engagement platforms. And lots of frustration actually. So this brings us to the beginning of the GDS story. Angus Montgomery: This is the 2010 Martha Lane Fox bombshell? Neil Williams: Yes. The old way, the traditional way, and this is pretty common not just in government but everywhere, websites sprung out of being a thing led by communications teams. “It’s just another channel for us to do our communications.” And it is, but it is also, as we all now know, the way that people do their business and transact. People come to your website to do a thing, to use a service, to fulfil a need. It took a long time for the Civil Service to recognise that. For many years myself and others in the digital communications teams within departments were getting increasingly frustrated. A lone voice really. Trying within our departments to show them the data that we had and go, “Look, people are coming for things that we’re not providing them with. We need to do a better job of this.” A lot of that falling on deaf ears, not getting prioritised in the way that it needed to, and also clearly fragmented across thousands of websites, across all of these organisations. A lot of great work was done before GDS, and this story has been told on the History of GDS series of blog posts, which if people haven’t seen are really well worth looking at. Tom Loosemore has talked about this before, about standing on the shoulders of giants. There was enormous effort, over many, many years, to digitise government, to centralise things, to put users first. Directgov and Business Link were the current incarnations of that, of a service-led approach, but it was just a small proportion of the overall service offering from government, and it was still really quite comms focused. The conversations were about reach, and there was advertising to try and promote the existence of these channels, etc. Lots of it was written from the perspective of the department trying to tell people what they should do, rather than understanding what it is that people are trying to do and then designing things that meet those needs. So GDS. In 2010, this is a really well-told story, and people are pretty familiar with it now, but 2010 Martha Lane Fox was commissioned to review the government’s website, particularly Directgov. She took a broader remit, and looked at the whole thing, and, in summary, said, “Start again.” Angus Montgomery: ‘Revolution, not evolution’. Neil Williams: ‘Revolution, not evolution’. Yes, that was the title. Angus Montgomery: And everyone at GDS, or who has been at GDS, has said, like Tom, that we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, and huge amounts of work was done beforehand, but why do you think Martha’s report was such a turning point? Because it was, because it led to a huge amount of change. Neil Williams: Yes. It’s a really pithy, succinct little letter. It’s not reams and reams of paper. It was just quite a simple call to action really. Which was to say, “You need to take ownership of the user experience, in a new organisation, and empower a new leader, and organisation under that leader, to do that, to take a user-led approach.” That was the different thing. Take a user-led approach, and to use the methods that are being used everywhere used. Government had not yet really caught up to what was going on in the wider technology industry around ways of working, agile and so forth, around working iteratively, experimentally, and proving things early. Rather than upfront requirement specs, and then out comes something at the end which you then later discover doesn’t work. Those were the two things really. It was that focus on user needs, and work in that different way, which was bringing skills into government that hadn’t been here before. Design, and user research, and software development skills that hadn’t previously been done in-house. It had always been outsourced. Angus Montgomery: So it was a clear and simple strategy, or strategic direction, from Martha Lane Fox’s report. There was a clear mandate. This has been talked about a lot, that we had, or GDS had, Francis Maude backing it at a very high level, and giving it the mandate to- Neil Williams: Yes, absolutely. That was the other thing. It wasn’t just Martha’s letter. It was absolutely a kind of perfect storm of political will and the timing being right. Yes, the Martha letter came out when I was Head of Digital Comms, or some title like that, at the Department for Business. I had moved around between departments. Ended up back in the Department for Business again. It was advocating something pretty radical, that would be a threat really to the digital comms view, to a comms-led view of controlling our channels. That was an interesting situation to find myself in, right? I was reading this stuff from Martha and thinking, “This is brilliant. This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is absolutely the right thing.” But then internally my job required me to do some more maybe circumspect briefing to the minister and to the director of comms about, “Actually, well, this is a risk to us.” So I was doing both of those things. I was talking internally about the positives of what this could mean for government, but the risks to our organisation, but publicly I blogged… I thought, “This is brilliant.” I blogged enthusiastically, because I had a personal blog at the time, about my thoughts on how this could be the beginning of something really exciting. That’s the thing that led me to meeting Tom Loosemore. Tom Loosemore, who as we all know is one of the early architects of GDS, saw my blog post, and got in touch and said, “Let’s have a chat.” And that’s how my journey into GDS started. It started by answering that email from Tom Loosemore and going for pizza with him. Angus Montgomery: The power of blogging. Neil Williams: Yes. We had a chat over pizza, where he was talking about his ideas for getting an alpha. Getting a team together that could produce something quickly, as a sort of throwaway prototype, that would show a different way of working. Tom was saying stuff that was exciting but contained many new words. (Laughter) He was talking about alphas and agile ways of working. I don’t know what these things are. Angus Montgomery: Now we’re at a stage, at GDS and throughout government, where agile is a touchstone of how we work, and it’s accepted that doing things in agile is doing things better, and there’s lots of opportunity for people to learn how that works, and what that means, and apply that to the things that they do, but at the time, as you said, this didn’t really exist in government. You, as someone who had worked in government, probably didn’t know what agile was. Neil Williams: No. Angus Montgomery: How did you learn about it, and how did you know that this was the right approach? Neil Williams: A mix of reading up on it. Initially just going home and Googling those new words and finding out about these ways of working. But also it immediately spoke to me. I had been through several years of several projects where I had felt just how awful and frustrating it is to build websites in a waterfall way. I've got some very difficult experiences that I had at [BEIS], when we rebuilt the website there, and it was project managed by a very thorough project manager in a waterfall way. I was the Senior Responsible Officer, I think, or Senior User I think it is in PRINCE2 language, for the website. As the website was progressing we had a requirements document upfront, all that way of working. We were specifying, with as much predicting the future and guesswork as we possibly can, a load of stuff, and writing it down, around, ‘This is what the website needs to do. This is what the publishing system needs to do’. Then handing that over to a supplier, who then starts to try and interpret that and build that. During that process, seeing as the thing is emerging, and we’re doing the user acceptance testing and all of that stuff on it, that this is just far away from the thing that I had in my head. So there’s already a gap between the written word and then the meaning that goes into the heads of the people who are then building that thing. Then also all of the change that’s occurring at the same time. Whilst we are building that thing the world is not staying still, and there is an enormous amount of change in our understanding around what we want that thing to do. Trying to get those changes in, but facing the waterfall approach, rigid change control process, and just feeling like I'm banging my head against a brick wall. It was really frustrating. Then when I… Back to the question about how do I learn about agile, and some of these new concepts, it was really only when I got in there. I knew what the bad thing felt like, and I knew that that wasn’t right. I knew that you absolutely need to embrace the change as part of the process, embrace learning as part of the process of delivering something as live and ever changing as a website. Then I came in as a product manager, initially part-time, and then full-time when GDS was properly established and able to advertise a role, and started working with Pete Herlihy, who is still here now in GDS. Angus Montgomery: Yes, on Notify. Neil Williams: Yes, he’s lead product manager on Notify now, but back then he was delivery manager. Again, Tom Loosemore was making stuff happen behind the scenes. He was the person who introduced me and Pete. He said something along the lines of, “Neil’s the guy who knows what needs to happen, and Pete’s the guy who knows how to make it happen. You two should talk.” So we did. I learnt a lot of what I now know from working with Pete and working as we then built out a team. Working with some terrific talented software developers, designers, content designers, and so forth, and user researchers, in a multidisciplinary way. Learning on the job what it meant to be a product manager. Obviously, reading up about it. I went on a few courses, I think, too. But mostly learning on the job. Zooming back out a little bit to the GDS career experience, I've learnt so much here. I've never learnt as much probably in the whole of the rest of my career as I've learnt in my time here. Angus Montgomery: Because that first year was learning about agile, putting a team together. Learning how to build this thing. Learning how to land it. At what stage did you realise, “Oh, we’ve done this now. This thing is landing, and it’s getting big, and it’s successful. Oh, wow. We’re in charge of a piece of national infrastructure now”? Neil Williams: That’s an interesting question. I always knew it would. We knew what we were building at the start. We knew we were building something- Angus Montgomery: So you never had any doubts that this was going to work? Neil Williams: Oh, God, yes. We had absolute doubt. The prevailing view when we started was that, “This will not work.” Not internally. Internally, it was certainly a stretch goal. (Laughter) It was ambitious, and it felt a little bit impossible, but in a really exciting way. That is one of the key ingredients of success, is you want your team to feel like something is only just about doable. (Laughter) There’s nothing more motivating than a deadline and a nearly impossible task. Also a bunch of naysayers saying, “This will never work.” And that really united us as a team. Angus Montgomery: So what then happened? Because I think we talk quite a lot about the early years, and a lot has been written, obviously, and GDS was blogging like crazy in those days about the early stages, and how quickly you built the thing, and how quickly you transitioned onto it. One thing that we have talked about as GDS, but probably not in as great detail, is what happened when it then got big, and you had to deal with issues of scale, and you had to deal with issues of… Something a lot of people on GOV.UK have talked to me about is tech debt. That you built this thing very quickly and you had quite a bit of tech debt involved. How did you deal with that? Presumably you always knew this was a problem you were going to have to face. Neil Williams: Yes, to a degree. That 14 people that did a bit on alpha scaled very rapidly to being 140 people. There were lots of teams working in parallel, and building bits of software just in time, like I was just talking about. Just in time for… “We’re not going to build anything we don’t have to build. We’re just going to build what’s necessary to achieve the transition, to shut these other websites down and bring them all in.” But that approach means you're laying stuff on top of other stuff, and things were getting built by different teams in parallel, adding to this growing code base, and in some cases therefore duplicative stuff happening. Where maybe we’ve built one publishing system for publishing a certain kind of format of content, another publishing system for publishing another kind of format of content. Then in the process we’ve ended up with two different ways of doing something like attachments, asset management. Then we’ve got complexity, and we’ve got bits of code that different teams don’t know how to change without quite a steep learning curve, and so on. And that was the case everywhere. Given the pace of how fast we were going, and how ambitious the timescales were for shutting down what turned out to be 1,882 websites… (Laughter) Exactly. It was incredible. We knew, yes. We knew. It was talked about. It was done knowingly, that, “We are making things here that we’re going to have to come back to. That are going to be good enough for now, and they’re going to achieve what we need to achieve, but they will need fixing, and they will need replacing and consolidating.” So we absolutely knew, and there was much talk of it. Quite a lot of it got written down at the time as ‘This is some tech debt that we’re going to definitely need to come back to’. Yes, we weren’t blind to that fact, but I think the degree of it, and the amount of time it took to resolve it, was slightly unexpected. That’s partly because of massive personnel change as well. Straight off the back of finishing… Well, I say finishing. GOV.UK is never finished. Let’s just get that out there. Always be iterating. GOV.UK’s initial build, and the transition, and the shutting down, the transition story of shutting down those 1,882 websites, had an end date, and that end date felt like a step change to many people. As in lots of people came into GDS in those early days to do the disruptive thing. To do the start-up thing. To do Martha’s revolution. Then at that moment of, “Actually, we’ve now shut down the last website,” to lots of those people that felt like, “Now we’re going into some other mode. Now we’re going into actually we’re just part of government now, aren’t we? I don’t know. Do I necessarily want to be part of that?” So there was some natural drifting away of some people. Plus, also, the budget shrank at that point. The project to do the transition was funded and came to an end. So actually we were going to go down to an operational smaller team anyway. So a combination of attrition, of people leaving anyway, plus the fact that we did need to get a bit smaller. Also, at that time, that’s when the early founders of GDS left. Mike Bracken, Tom Loosemore, Ben Terrett left around that time. Which also led to some other people going, “Well, actually, I came here for them. I came here with them. And I'm leaving too.” So that meant that we had the tech debt to deal with at a time when we also had quite a lot of new stuff. We had all of this unknown and not terribly well-documented code, that was built really quickly, by lots of different people, in different ways. Plus people who weren’t part of that joining the team, and looking at it and going, “Oh, what have we got here? Where do I start with this?” (Laughter) So it took a long time. I think it’s common in agile software development to underestimate how long things might take. It’s an industry problem that you need to account for. Angus Montgomery: Well, this is the interesting thing, because it feels to me as an observer that there have been three main stages of GOV.UK so far. There’s the build and transition, which we’ve talked about quite a lot. There’s the growth and sustainability years, I suppose, where you were sorting out the tech debt, and you were making this thing sustainable, and you were dealing with departmental requests, and you were putting in structures, and process, and maturing it. Now it feels like we’re in a new stage, where a lot of that structural stuff has been sorted out, and that means you can do really exciting things. Like the work that Kate Ivey-Williams, and Sam Dub, and their team have been doing on end-to-end services. The work that’s been going on to look at voice activation on GOV.UK. And the work that’s been done that Nicky Zachariou and her team have been looking at, machine learning, structuring the content. And it feels like now, having sorted out those fundamentals, there’s a whole load of stuff we can do. Neil Williams: Yes, absolutely. We’re iterating wildly again, I would say. (Laughter) We’re back to that feeling of early GOV.UK, where we’re able to turn ideas into working software and working product relatively quickly again. Some of the stuff we’re doing now is greenfield stuff. Again, a lot of the ideas we had way back when, in the early days of GDS, about making the publishing system really intuitive, and giving data intelligence to publishers, so that they can understand how services are performing, and see where to prioritise, and get really rich insights about how their stuff as a department is working for users, we’re getting to that now. We’re starting to rebuild our publishing tools with a proper user-centric design. Which we didn’t do enough of, because we had to focus on the end users more in the early days. It’s great to be doing that now. We’re also deleting some stuff, which were the mistakes that I made. (Laughter) Which feels good on my way out. Some of the things that we did, that have stuck around way longer than we intended them to, are now being deleted. We’re now able to go, “Actually, we know now, we’ve known for a while, that this isn’t the right solution,” and we’re able to change things more radically. Yes, we’re doing really exciting stuff. Thanks for mentioning it. Angus Montgomery: What are you most excited about? Because Jen Allum, who was lead product manager on GOV.UK for a couple of years, I think, she’s taking over now as head of GOV.UK after you leave. What are you most excited about seeing her and the team do? What do you think is the biggest challenge that they face? Neil Williams: I'm thrilled that Jen is taking over the job. She obviously knows the product, knows the team really, really well, and she’s absolutely brilliant. There is some incredibly exciting stuff happening right now, which I will be sad not to be here for. You mentioned one of them. That’s the step-by-step navigation product, which is our solution for, “How do you create an end-to-end holistic service that meets a whole user need?” If you’ve been following GDS at all, which if you're listening to this podcast you probably have, then you will have seen stuff from Lou Downe, Kate Ivey-Williams, many other people, around end-to-end services and what we mean by services and service design. Around good services being verbs and bad services being nouns. Government has the habit of creating schemes, and initiatives, and forms, and giving them names, and then they stick around for a very long time. Users end up even having to learn those names in some cases. The classic example is, “I want to SORN my car.” What the hell does that even mean? Whereas actually what they want to do is take their car off the road. It’s an actual thing that an actual human wants to do. Nearly every interaction or task that you have with government requires more than one thing. You need to look at some content. You might need to transact. You might need to fill in a form. You might need to go and do some stuff that’s not with government. You might need to read something, understand what the rules are, and then go and do something offline. If you're a childminder you’ve got a step there, which is you’ve got to go and actually set up your space and get it inspected. Then you come back, and there’s more to do with government. Those things need setting out clearly for people. It’s still the case now. Despite all of the great work that we’ve done on GOV.UK to improve all of this stuff, it’s still far too much the case that people have to do all of that work themselves. They have to piece together the fragments of content, and transactions, and forms that they need to do. So what we are doing with our step-by-step navigation product is that’s a product output of a lot of thinking that’s been happening in GDS for many years, around, “How do you join services together, end-to-end, around the user?” We’ve got that product. It’s been tested. It works really, really well. To look at you might just look at it and go, “Well, there’s not much to that, is there? That’s just some numbered steps and some links.” Yes, it is, but getting something that looks that simple, and that really works, is actually a ton of work, and we’ve put in a huge amount of work into proving that, and testing that, and making sure that really works. Making it as simple as it is. The lion’s share of that work is actually in the service design, and in the content design, going, “Let’s map out what is… Well, first of all let’s understand what the users need. Then let’s map out what are the many things that come together, in what order, in order to meet that need.” Angus Montgomery: Before we wrap up I just wanted to ask you to give a couple of reflections on your time at GDS. What’s the thing you're most proud of, or what was your proudest moment? Neil Williams: That’s tricky. I've been here a long time. I've done a lot of… I say I've done a lot of good stuff. I've been around whilst some really good stuff has happened. (Laughter) Angus Montgomery: You’ve been in the room. (Laughter) Neil Williams: Right. I've had a little bit to do with it. It’s got to be the initial build, I think. Other than wearing a Robocop t-shirt to a very formal event, which I'm still proud of, it’s got to be the initial build of GOV.UK and that was the thing that I was directly involved with and it was just the most ridiculous fun I've ever had. I can’t imagine ever doing something as important, or fast paced, or ridiculous as that again. There were moments during that when… Actually, I don’t think I can even tell that story probably. (Laughter) There were some things that happened just as a consequence of the speed that we were going. There are funny memories. That’s all I'm going to say about that. If you want to- Angus Montgomery: Corner Neil in a pub or café in South London if you want to hear that story in the future. What was the scariest moment? Or what was the moment when you thought, “Oh, my God, this might not actually work. This thing might fall apart”? Or were there moments like that? Neil Williams: I don't know. No, I think we’ve always had the confidence, because of the talent that we’ve brought in, the capability and the motivation that everyone has. When bad things have happened, when we’ve had security threats or any kind of technical failures, just the way that this team scrambles, and the expertise that we’ve got, just means that I'm always confident that it’s going to be okay. People are here in GDS because they really care,and they’re also incredibly capable. The best of the best. I'm not saying that’s an organisation design or a process that I would advocate, that people have to scramble when things fail, but in those early days, when GOV.UK was relatively newly launched, and we were going through that transition of from being built to run, those were the days where maybe the operations weren’t in place yet for dealing with everything that might come at us. There was a lot of all hands to the pump scrambling in those days, but it always came right and was poetry to watch. (Laughter) Those moments would actually be the moments where you would be most proud of the team and to be part of it. When it comes down to it these people are really amazing. Angus Montgomery: Finally, what’s the thing you are going to miss the most? Neil Williams: Well, it’s the people, isn’t it? That’s a cheesy thing to say, but it’s genuinely true. I've made some amazing friends here. Some people who I hope I can call lifelong friends. Many people who have already left GDS, who I'm still in touch with and see all the time. It’s incredible coming into work and working with people who are so likeminded, and so capable, and so trusting of each other, and so funny. I laugh all the time. I come into work and it’s fun. It’s so much fun. And we’re doing something so important, and we’re supporting each other. The culture is just so good, and the people are what makes that. Cheesy as it may be, it’s you Angus. I'm going to miss you. Angus Montgomery: It’s all about the people. Oh, thank you. That was a leading question. (Laughter) Neil Williams, thank you so much for doing that and best of luck in the future. We will miss you lots. Neil Williams:  Thanks very much. Thank you. Angus Montgomery: So that wraps up the very first Government Digital Service podcast. I hope you enjoyed it - we’re aiming to do lots more episodes of this, we’re aiming to do around 1 episode a month and we’re going to be talking to lots of exciting and interesting people both inside GDS and outside GDS and we’re going to be talking about things like innovation and digital transformation and user-centred design and all sorts of interesting things like that, so if you’d like to listen to future episodes please go to wherever it is you get your podcasts and subscribe to listen to us in the future. And I hope you enjoyed that episode and I hope you listen to more. Thankyou very much.

In the final interview hosted at the OneTeamGov Global event in London, we're incredibly excited to speak to Tom Loosemore, co-founder of the Government Digital Service (GDS) and partner at Public Digital. We get the inside story on how GDS radically disrupted the workings of U.K government and started a worldwide movement to bring public services into the internet age. We chat to Tom about his early career at Wired and the BBC, and how he co-authored the report with Martha Lane Fox that kick-started the government digital movement. We hear fascinating tales from the early days of GDS, chat about his favourite exemplars, and look to a future of services underpinned by data registers and platforms. Tom also shares inspiring examples of ambitious service transformation from around the world, and explains why the biggest learnings often come from mistakes. All aboard the Loosemore dinghy, let's sail off into his story!

Sarah Richards Sarah Richards created the field of content design as she revamped GOV.UK's web presence. From a messy amalgam of hundreds of government websites, she created a user-focused "storefront" where UK citizens could get their most common questions answered. Always focused on her users' needs, Sarah developed an approach and methodologies that can help anyone design, create, and manage better content. Sarah and I talked about: the origin story behind the field of content design the importance of people (80%) over tech (20%) in digital transformation Sarah's diabolical scheme to wrest control of government content from department heads her commitment to a user-focused approach to content design how to get high-level buy-in for a big project balancing business goals with user needs the folly of "push" publishing using pair writing and crits to improve content Sarah is the author of the edifying and amazingly designed book, Content Design. Sarah's Bio Sarah spent 10 years working in digital government, ending as Head of Content Design for the UK Government Digital Service. There she created and developed content design as a discipline for the GOV.UK. Sarah now runs the Content Design Centre, training and consulting in content strategy and content design for organisations and governments around the world. Video Here's the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UpsazMWxx8 Show Notes/"Transcript" [Not an actual transcript - just my quick notes on first listen-through] 0:00 - intro 1:15 - Sarah intro - actually started in design - had the dungarees and half-shaved head, and "terribly arty-farty" - heard that copywriters made more money - "massively mercenary" at age 19 - better now :) - then on to editorial and checking grammar and then on to "what is content?", where should it go? - then user-centered at GDS 2:15 - when did you articulate the field of "content design"? 2:35 - conversation with boss at GDS, late 2010/early 2011 - outside in freezing cold - Tom Loosemore, GDS director and founder - he said, "Tell me about editorial in government. What do you want? If you had anything, what would it be? Blank sheet. Go." - and she went off - years of frustration with infrastructure, leadership, etc. - "Content people should not be stuck with just words because we have developers on this project. We have designers sitting right next to us." - if audience needs a calculator, or calendar or other tools, give it to them - need to change the way government thinks about content team; spent a lot of time thinking about how to speak to audience but not to each other - and that's where content design came from - they were designing with designers, developers, user researchers - across the government, folks were laughing, "Oh, that's what you call yourselves now." - editors, copywriters were doing their best but had had trouble pulling it all together - now, idea that they were just proofreaders and grammar checkers stops now - now we design content for user need - 5:35 - great origin story 6:00 - percentage of her work is people stuff vs. word stuff? 6:05 - 80% people - "digital transformation is very little about the tech. It's mostly about the people." - you can just analyze tech and decide - content is all about who does what, what we'll say, consistency across channels - "It's all people based." 7:10 - how did you come to have control over the gov.uk content? 7:15 - "we created a content management system, and didn't give anybody access." - it was very difficult - big meeting with Tom Loosemore and franchise [department] heads - Tom rolled out new workflow and process - had her charter in place, top 100 user needs - said that her team would write them and come to their folks for fact checking - and they said "Sign-off?" and she said, "No, fact checking. You don't need to sign things off. I'm not asking for your approval.

Sarah Richards Sarah Richards created the field of content design as she revamped GOV.UK's web presence. From a messy amalgam of hundreds of government websites, she created a user-focused "storefront" where UK citizens could get their most common questions answered. Always focused on her users' needs, Sarah developed an approach and methodologies that can help anyone design, create, and manage better content. Sarah and I talked about: the origin story behind the field of content design the importance of people (80%) over tech (20%) in digital transformation Sarah's diabolical scheme to wrest control of government content from department heads her commitment to a user-focused approach to content design how to get high-level buy-in for a big project balancing business goals with user needs the folly of "push" publishing using pair writing and crits to improve content Sarah is the author of the edifying and amazingly designed book, Content Design. Sarah's Bio Sarah spent 10 years working in digital government, ending as Head of Content Design for the UK Government Digital Service. There she created and developed content design as a discipline for the GOV.UK. Sarah now runs the Content Design Centre, training and consulting in content strategy and content design for organisations and governments around the world. Video Here's the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UpsazMWxx8 Show Notes/"Transcript" [Not an actual transcript - just my quick notes on first listen-through] 0:00 - intro 1:15 - Sarah intro - actually started in design - had the dungarees and half-shaved head, and "terribly arty-farty" - heard that copywriters made more money - "massively mercenary" at age 19 - better now :) - then on to editorial and checking grammar and then on to "what is content?", where should it go? - then user-centered at GDS 2:15 - when did you articulate the field of "content design"? 2:35 - conversation with boss at GDS, late 2010/early 2011 - outside in freezing cold - Tom Loosemore, GDS director and founder - he said, "Tell me about editorial in government. What do you want? If you had anything, what would it be? Blank sheet. Go." - and she went off - years of frustration with infrastructure, leadership, etc. - "Content people should not be stuck with just words because we have developers on this project. We have designers sitting right next to us." - if audience needs a calculator, or calendar or other tools, give it to them - need to change the way government thinks about content team; spent a lot of time thinking about how to speak to audience but not to each other - and that's where content design came from - they were designing with designers, developers, user researchers - across the government, folks were laughing, "Oh, that's what you call yourselves now." - editors, copywriters were doing their best but had had trouble pulling it all together - now, idea that they were just proofreaders and grammar checkers stops now - now we design content for user need - 5:35 - great origin story 6:00 - percentage of her work is people stuff vs. word stuff? 6:05 - 80% people - "digital transformation is very little about the tech. It's mostly about the people." - you can just analyze tech and decide - content is all about who does what, what we'll say, consistency across channels - "It's all people based." 7:10 - how did you come to have control over the gov.uk content? 7:15 - "we created a content management system, and didn't give anybody access." - it was very difficult - big meeting with Tom Loosemore and franchise [department] heads - Tom rolled out new workflow and process - had her charter in place, top 100 user needs - said that her team would write them and come to their folks for fact checking - and they said "Sign-off?" and she said, "No, fact checking. You don't need to sign things off. I'm not asking for your approval.

A conversation with Sarah RichardsGov.uk is perhaps the most prolific website of the last 10 years. It stands out because of its simplicity and timelessness. Its no-frills design and content didn't come easy. Just try and strip down thousands of pages of content to the very core, leaving only what's necessary to help its visitors to get the information they need, and to complete their goal. All the while dealing with many different stakeholders (and their politics). But that's exactly what Sarah Richards did.  Sarah Richards What should it look like, that bit of information that people in a particular situation, really need? Sarah Richards and her content and design team at GDS (Government Digital Services in the UK) asked that question, hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, for just as many situations and pieces of content. They found most of their answers by going after and using the data that was available to them, and by creating user stories and job stories (a practice also used in software development), where you create a little story to tune into the particular need you would need the content for. It creates space for different forms and formats of content, by not assuming that the solution would for instance be a web-text, per se. It could be an image, a flowchart, a video, a map, a calculator, or something completely other than that. Sarah named their practice 'Content Design'. My own, battered and dog eared copy of the book In her book, also titled 'Content Design', she shares its core approach and tactics. I really enjoyed reading Sarah's book and attending her workshop on content design. I learned a lot of new skills that I have already put in practice in a few of my projects. I'm sure those skills can be helpful for you, as well. So, have a listen to this episode and our conversation. You'll hear what it was like to work on gov.uk during the first few years (spoiler alert: it was not completely void of stressful situations), how Sarah and her team implemented their methods and what content design entails. Please note:Unfortunately, I have been very clumsy with the recordings, so this episode's sound quality is way below the standard I set for myself, and I'm so so sorry about that. Podcasting is very humbling in that way: I'm constantly reminded of how much I still have to learn... Links:Gov.ukContent Design LondonSarah's book: Content DesignSarah's colleague Tom Loosemore

We’ve experienced a manifestation of new behaviors, driven by the underlying shifts around the democratic process: the transition from broadcast media to niche media moderated by dominant social media platforms. Have these behaviors hacked our democracy? For better or for worse? Azeem discusses these questions with Carole Cadwalladr, Luciano Floridi, Hari Kunzru, Tom Loosemore.

On this week's Byte:Chris Burgess from Clickify chats about open source communities and Tom Loosemore is interviewed in the latest instalment of 'Wed Directions'.Presented by Vanessa Toholka, James Noble and Laura SummersKeep up with all things Byte on Twitter, Facebook, and G+

It’s October 3 and we’re being towed slowly down the Kiel Canal, preparing for our boating adventure in the Frisian sands, whilst staring out at the ‘vast plains of Holstein'. We explain the benefits of *pledging your support* to the Club at unbound.co.uk (01:22); Lloyd offers a reading recommendation - 'The Year of Reading Dangerously' (4:21); Tim has a proper small boat adventure on the Dengie peninsula with Club member Tom Loosemore (04:50) - sailing to West Mersea, trudging across the marsh, towing the boat in knee-deep water, rowing home against the tide, ruining a pair of flannels. PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT at http://unbound.co.uk/books/riddle-of-the-sands Lloyd gives us the lowdown about the East Frisians (17:20), with much talk of the Inselbahn island train service (20:02); Tim offers what he knows about Holstein (24:26) and asks the question: why did Childers fail to write about all the animals of the region? Gulls & seals (25:15), Holstein cows including a famous presidential pet (26:05), Holsteiner horses (28:22); a few salient facts about Rendsberg (30:15); Holstein’s greatest literary figure with a (sort of) Childers connection - Theodor Mommsen (30:40). Musical interlude: the Schleswig Holstein Festival Choir, and the sad tale of Eric Whitacre's ‘Seal Lullaby’, based on a Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book story (34:03); we sample cigars and schnapps of the region, and of the period (33:45) - and then on to Club Business (40:10)/ John Ironside’s family connections (40:18); Erskine Childers shares with us a link to his great grandfather’s WW1 notebooks (41:08); Patrick on mooring Baltic-style and drinking at the British Kiel Yacht Club (41:34); Ian on the resting place of Esterhazy the spy (44:37); Sam on reading ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ in exotic locations - where and when did you last read this great book? (43:50); ahoy to Porter of the Bookseller for commissioning an article about our project - http://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/digitally-book-mapping-line-sands-can-unbound-crowdfund-riddle(47:27). Next week: What do we know about Dollman’s boat ‘The Medusa’? What do we know about Dollman’s daughter Clara? We propose a discussion about attitudes towards women who like to sail alone - both now and in 1903; how are we going to get from Brunsbüttel to Wangeroog? MUSIC CREDITS Great Open Sea by Wellington Sea Shanty Society (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Wellington_Sea_Shanty_Society/none_given_1098/12_-_Wellington_Sea_Shanty_Society_-_Great_Open_Sea) is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License. The Seal Lullaby at Schleswig Holstein Musik Festival 2013 - https://youtu.be/3w7q1Db0IfI