Looking back: CDPS year in review 2022 to 2023

CDPS are responsible for the Digital Service Standards for Wales and creates standards and guidance to ensure consistency in the design and delivery of public services, making services easier to use and easier for organisations to work together. 

Objective 5: Continuing to promote shared use of the technologies and create and embed common and shared standards in digital, data and technology 

Five Ways of Working: Long-term, involvement, collaboration, prevention 

7 well-being goals: A more equal Wales, a Wales of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language, a globally responsible Wales 

CDPS are responsible for the Digital Service Standards for Wales. This year, we added more guidance to help the public sector get started on implementing the standards in their organisation. 

From our research, it was clear many people running services didn’t understand what we meant by taking a ‘digital approach,’ or know how to use the digital service standards. 

We decided to run a roadshow across Wales and go back to basics. We wanted to support the public sector in understanding what we mean by digital and the importance of good service design. 

We focused on 3 standards, as we felt these are the foundations people need to get started: 

1. Understand users and their needs  
2. Have an empowered service owner 
3. Have a multidisciplinary team 

We visited Cardiff, Carmarthen, and Ynys Môn.  

We had 44 attendees from across 10 local authorities, Welsh Government, arm’s length bodies, the education sector, and the health sector. 

We had 17 attendees in Cardiff, 15 in Carmarthen and 12 in Anglesey. 

We asked attendees what they hoped to gain from our roadshows and had really useful feedback: 

We want to keep momentum and the conversation about standards going. We’ve recruited a product manager and a Head of Technology who will work to support organisations to understand, embed and adopt the digital service standards. 

Objective 5: Continuing to promote shared use of the technologies and create and embed common and shared standards in digital, data and technology 

Five Ways of Working: Involvement, collaboration 

7 well-being goals: A more equal Wales, a globally responsible Wales 

The skills and capability team at CDPS have developed a service standard retrospective (retro) to assess the quality of the Campws Digidol training service. We’ve made this available to the Welsh public sector.  

We wrote about our approach, learnings, and outcomes in a blog post. 

The Retrospective Prime Directive states:

This is the mindset we recommend teams have when using the service standard retro and one that Fliss Bennée, Head of Data at Public Health Wales adopted with her teams when they recently used our retro template. 

They fed back to the Public Health Wales Business Design Authority:  

• The team used the retro and identified key things to improve. They loved having a criteria to measure against. 
• The team are going to use the service standards for all their services going forward with the aim of all their services meeting the standards. 
• The team are going to stop using the GOV.UK service standards and swap to the Digital Service Standards for Wales. 
• The team really enjoyed the approach – it gave time for individual reflection, group discussion and achieving consensus on how to move forward. 

Try our service standards retro 

Hear from Fliss Bennée, Head of Public Health Data, Public Health Wales, on using the service standards retro board: 

Transcript

“Hello, I'm Felicity Bennée, or Fliss, and I'm the Head of Data at Public Health Wales. 

So, when I worked for the UK Civil Service in GDS, and we had the service standards that we worked towards, it was a really useful opportunity to sit down and say at the end of each phase of development, actually are we meeting the needs of the users that we've identified, is this on the right track, is what we're going to deliver actually going to be able to be evaluated, and in Wales, CDPS has done an update for the Welsh Digital Service Standards. 

So, I reached out to Peter and asked if there was a service standard assessment we could use, and I was sent the retro board, which is called the Digital Service Standard Review, and I took several of my projects through at the end of discovery and two through at the end of alpha, so that we could assess where we were, and have a look to see where our weaknesses were to learn lessons for the next phases. 

Well, having identified the areas that we were weakest, we thought during our discoveries, as I go through to alpha and beta, I'm making sure as I did previously that my tenders understand that part of the requirement for further activity is to meet the service standards in assessment at the end of each phase, and we're going to take the areas that we were weakest at and make sure we spend more time concentrating on why it was that we didn't feel we met those. 

The ones that we were really good at again we're going to highlight the things that we thought worked really well and try and do more of it. We think there's an opportunity really, to make these sorts of assessments our own, but we appreciate that standardising them enough that they can be a good assurance, is the best way for us to show that we're meeting good governance during Agile, and I think working with CDPS is a really good way for us to make sure that we're staying on top of whatever the latest insights into good governance for our Agile projects are, and also to learn what other people are doing and share what we've done.”