Digital

Analysing what will be mygov.scot by David Bell, lead business analyst

June 6, 2014 by Jono Ellis No Comments | Category Digital Public Services, mygov.scot

Business analysis is often at the forefront of major business and internet change programmes, but what role does it play in mygov.scot? I’m one of a small team of business analysts (BAs) working within the programme. Within the early stages of the mygov.scot programme we have focussed on various aspects to help define what mygov.scot may look like, where this will benefit the public sector organisations involved and most importantly how this may shape the user experience.

A service review

For my part, with the help of Robert Black, a large amount of my time has been spent trying to establish what public services exist in Scotland’s public sector organisations. With over 115 parent organisations considered within scope at this stage, our initial focus has been on those services delivered by various Non-Departmental Public Bodies such as Disclosure Scotland, SEPA and Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh. The exercise has concentrated on understanding the services landscape at a relatively high level which will enable us to build a directory of services for Scotland as we continue to develop mygov.scot.

Turning a service into an experience

In the meantime my colleagues Raj Ramar and Ade Sanda have been analysing a wealth of user experience analysis captured through various analytics, insight and interview tools to understand the requirements of the end user in more detail as we’ve built the scope of the Alpha release of mygov.scot. Working closely with colleagues from the Department of Justice, and the Alpha release Product Owner (Pete Smith) they have been focussing on the topic area of housing to determine and document “user stories”. These user stories document the requirements of the website from the perspective of various anticipated users from citizens, civil servants, technical resources and more. The stories are prioritised ready for the development teams, which include our BAs, to begin to refine the stories into actual tasks for delivery and release.

Planning for the future

Now that Alpha development sprints are well underway, members of the BA team can start to look a little further in to the future whilst also supporting the development team’s delivery. Robert & I, now with the additional help of Jack Bradford & Donald Izuagba, are reviewing the initial services review approach and adapting it to suit the wider public sector organisations such as NHS, Local and Central Government departments, as well as revisiting relevant Non-Departmental Public Bodies. Learning from the successes and lessons of our initial review, we’re also now looking at how we can adapt our methods to closer fit with the objectives of the forthcoming digital transformation activity. We’re also working very closely with Jennifer I’Anson, the final member of the mygov.scot BA team, who is working on defining user story requirements for a data management system that will help us to catalogue the various organisations and related services as the programme evolves into future mygov.scot releases and various digitally enabled services. It’s fair to say it’s an exciting and challenging road ahead for the BA team as they work closely with the various other aspects of the programme at strategic, operational and development level as mygov.scot emerges.

Tags: Service Review, Transformation

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