As someone deeply immersed in Government Service Standards and Digital Delivery within the Public Sector for almost 15 years, I’ve witnessed first-hand their transformative power. These standards have been instrumental in guiding us towards user-centred design and digital excellence, shaping how we approach public service.
Yet, the world has shifted dramatically. New technologies, complex societal challenges, and ever-increasing public expectations demand that we evolve these foundational principles. This isn’t about discarding what works, but enriching it – integrating new imperatives like responsible innovation, sustainable practices, and continuous value delivery into the heart of public service.
So, what should this evolution look like?
Updating the Service Standards
Deepening Our Understanding of Users and Their Needs
The first standard, “Understand users and their needs,” remains paramount. However, in today’s complex landscape, this must extend far beyond the immediate citizen user. We need to thoroughly research and understand the diverse needs, behaviours, and contexts of all users – including internal government staff, agents, and even other product teams who interact with our services. This includes those with complex requirements, accessibility needs, and varying digital literacy. For brownfield projects, this means deeply understanding existing user journeys and pain points within legacy systems. This comprehensive approach to user research, drawing on ethnographic studies and co-design techniques, is a lesson learned from both leading public sector digital teams and innovative private sector companies who prioritise deep customer insight. Continuous feedback loops and iterative research are no longer just good practice; they are essential for truly empathetic and effective service design.
Embracing the Whole Service Ecosystem
The principle that “It’s a whole service, not just a website” is more critical than ever. We must design and deliver services that address the entire user problem, end-to-end, not just a fragmented part of it. This means acknowledging that a comprehensive service is often composed of multiple interconnected products or components. Some may be unique, while others are designed as reusable components or platform products serving multiple services. This “platform thinking” and focus on reusable components is a key learning from large-scale private sector enterprises that build scalable, interconnected digital ecosystems. Our updated approach must champion clear interfaces, robust integration strategies, and foster shared understanding and collaboration across all contributing teams; even across Departments. The service, and its constituent products, must provide a coherent experience and collectively contribute to broader strategic outcomes and programme objectives. This holistic view must be embedded from the earliest Discovery phase, mapping out the entire user journey and identifying potential components and dependencies across the government ecosystem.
Universal Design for a Diverse Public
The standards “Make it simple and intuitive to use” and “Make sure everyone can use it” are intrinsically linked and demand heightened attention. We must continue to design services to be as simple and intuitive as possible for all users, regardless of their abilities or circumstances. This means adhering to the highest accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG 2.2 AA) as a baseline, not an afterthought. Furthermore, for bought products, we should prioritise configuration over customisation to maintain simplicity and ease of updates, ensuring the user experience remains consistent and accessible. This also avoids the trap of customising products so much that updating and maintaining them becomes as expensive (if not more) than building them ourselves. This emphasis on configuration over customisation is a direct learning from the private sector, where it’s understood that excessive customisation of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products negates their benefits, leading to higher costs and maintenance burdens. Our commitment to universal design must encompass not just digital interfaces but also assisted digital support and offline channels, ensuring no one is left behind.
Driving Continuous Value Delivery Through Agile Methods
“Iterate and improve frequently” and “Use agile methods” are the engine of modern service delivery, enabling rapid adaptation and continuous value delivery through frequent releases and improvements based on user feedback and data. This approach, mirroring private sector investment in product lines, necessitates clear metrics, continuous funding models, and a demonstrated alignment of iterations with strategic priorities and spend controls, fostering a culture of continuous learning. However, recognising that most public sector products operate in brownfield environments within programme contexts, service standard assessments must also clearly articulate how individual products contribute to programme objectives, manage dependencies, and navigate programme-level governance.
Choosing the Right Technology: Sustainable, Secure, and AI-Ready
“Choosing the right technology” now carries a broader mandate, requiring us to select scalable, secure, and appropriate solutions while strategically managing technical debt in brownfield projects and prioritising open standards. Crucially, this standard must explicitly encompass sustainability, driving energy-efficient solutions, resource optimisation, and responsible lifecycle management, alongside responsible AI, which demands adherence to ethical principles like fairness, transparency, and human oversight, robust data governance, and a proactive assessment and mitigation of AI’s environmental footprint, ensuring the public sector establishes vital ethical guardrails for its deployment.
Transparency and Collaboration Through Open Source
“Make new source code open” remains a vital standard. Unless there are specific security or policy reasons not to, making new source code open and reusable promotes transparency, collaboration, and efficiency across government. While primarily a public sector principle, the broader open-source movement, heavily supported by the private tech world, demonstrates the power of shared codebases for innovation and resilience. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, maintaining transparency in our code is even more important, as hiding the code does not inherently make it more secure. This fosters a culture of sharing and learning, accelerating innovation across the public sector.
Building Trust and Resilience: Privacy and Security
The bedrock of public trust lies in robust privacy and security. We must handle user data ethically, transparently, and in full compliance with data protection regulations like GDPR, ensuring strong data governance, quality, and ethical use for AI-driven services, where citizen trust is paramount. This necessitates designing, building, and operating services with comprehensive security measures and resilience strategies for continuous availability, alongside rigorous end-to-end testing across all user journeys and dependencies. For brownfield projects and bought products, this includes mitigating legacy vulnerabilities and rigorously assessing vendor security, while live services demand clear operational support, monitoring, incident management, and disaster recovery plans that span organisational boundaries.
Considering new standards
While the above outlines critical areas for updating the existing Service Standards, a truly comprehensive framework would also need to explicitly address several foundational elements that are currently not overtly assessed. These include dedicated standards for ensuring strategic alignment across programmes, robust end-to-end testing, the operational reliability of services, the crucial role of skilled multidisciplinary teams, strategic procurement practices, and explicit planning for the full service lifecycle, including future change and decommissioning. Furthermore, a distinct focus on holistic sustainability and responsible impact across all aspects of service delivery should be paramount.
Evolving the Assessment Process: From Stage Gate to Continuous Value Review
Beyond the standards themselves, our assessment processes must evolve.
Discovery: The traditional 12-week Discovery is often impractical. We can learn from the private sector, like McLaren, who allocate just two weeks for rapid strategic validation of the problem and possible solution identification that could generate an RoI. AI can accelerate this by helping review user research findings to pinpointing pain points, develop requirements; gauging demand and generating solution concepts and options appraisals. This rapid, data-driven approach allows us to quickly validate problems, identify potential solutions, and integrate early sustainability and ethical AI impact assessments.
If a positive RoI is indicated, teams then progress to the Alpha-type phase to explore how the idea could work in practice. AI can support the rapid prototyping of multiple solutions in over half the time it currently takes teams. Throughout this process, there’s a strong drive to move to production as soon as a clear solution is designed that successfully proves the initial hypothesis. Where a solution isn’t viable, it’s quickly binned, and the next potential solution is explored. This Alpha phase benefits from high support and significant challenge from the Senior Leadership Team, who actively ‘kick the tyres’ and test the key principles and ideas to ensure robustness and strategic alignment. This focus provides constructive feedback, strategic recommendations, and formal endorsement for continued funding; truly embracing the Fail Fast culture the Public Sector is still often missing.
Edit to Add: Yesterday I had the opportunity to join an Agentic AI Hackathon, which reaffirmed my belief that it’s 100% possible to design, develop and prototype a working, user centered, Gov Standard Compliant service in under 6 weeks; compared to the current 6 months+ it currently takes to complete Discovery and Alpha. This allows for sufficient time for user research; stakeholder engagement and design iteration based on user feedback; with AI enabling us to speed up our analysis and design work etc.
At the other end of the lifecycle, we also need to think about how we assess Live Services. If we’re honest, many Departments don’t bother with Live Assessments in their current format, with many teams choosing to remain in Public Beta as they see no value in the Live Assessment.
We need to shift from pass/fail Live Assessments to a “Continuous Service Review” (CSR) or “Strategic Service Value Review.” Inspired by private sector product management, this would be a collaborative, periodic review focused on continuous value, outcomes, and strategic alignment. Teams would submit concise “Service Health & Value Reports,” leading to constructive feedback, strategic recommendations, and formal endorsement for continued funding, mirroring how successful product lines are funded in the private sector. This would also help teams identify and agree the right time to decomission their service when value is no longer being delivered.
Navigating Modern Complexities in Public Sector Delivery
Any updates to the standards and assessment processes must also explicitly address the complexities of modern public sector delivery, drawing on lessons from both sectors:
- Brownfield Projects: Strategic integration, modernisation, and technical debt management.
- Buying Products: Strategic procurement, rigorous vendor assessment (including ESG), and robust exit strategies.
- Funding Continuous Improvement: Agile funding models, value streams, and lean budgeting.
- Using AI: Explicit criteria for ethical principles, data governance, and human-in-the-loop strategies.
- Alignment with Major Programmes: Clear frameworks for contribution, dependency mapping, and governance.
- Complex Users & Cross-Departmental Services: Holistic user research, end-to-end journey mapping, and robust interoperability.
The Time to Act is Now
By updating the Government Service Standards, we can empower our teams to build truly modern, resilient, and impactful public services. This is not merely an administrative update; it is a strategic re-commitment to excellence in public service delivery, informed by the collective wisdom of both public and private sector innovation. It’s about fostering a culture of continuous improvement, strategic alignment, and responsible innovation, ensuring that every pound spent and every line of code written contributes meaningfully to a better, more equitable future for all citizens.
The time to evolve is now, to ensure our digital public services are not just fit for purpose, but truly lead the way in a rapidly changing world.
This is very much my views; but with massive thanks to Andy Loughran and Chris Ethridge who helped me pull together my thoughts on this.