Canadian Government Executive - Volume 21 - Issue 7

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September 2015 // Canadian Government Executive / 7
Service delivery
ers financial risk by highlighting what it
will really take to build and operate the
service before you’ve over invested.
But how do you “do” agile in govern-
ment? Is it really possible to “start now,
start small and work it out as you go?”
Booking a UK prison visit used to in-
volve lots of phone calls, lots of waiting,
and lots of paper. It consumed lots of pris-
on officer time, and was managed in lots
of different ways across lots of different
prisons. And, it led to lots of cancellations.
More than 160,000 of the 1.5 million visits
booked each year, cost some £600,000.
Prison service technology was some-
thing of a joke. Hundreds of millions of
pounds were sunk on a failed prison IT
system. Politicians scrutinising the failure
commented that, “in scales of comprehen-
siveness of incompetence” the implemen-
tation project was “largely unmatched.”
If ever a government agency had been
wounded by big bang launches, big IT
and big budget tech spending, this was it.
And so booking a prison visit became one
of the UK government’s first transactions
to be redesigned using a user-centred ag-
ile approach. As a start, a small team was
formed to build a picture of the context
for the service.
We call this first step “discovery.” It in-
corporated lots of user research with
social visitors, lawyers, prison staff, and
prisoners; lots of analysis of policy, le-
gal. and operational constraints; lots of
time behind bars, learning how you run
a prison, getting under the skin of the
visit-booking process; lots of conversations
to define how we measure success with
everyone from the Prison Service CEO to
frontline prison staff.
Armedwith the simple hypothesis that an
email booking sent to prison staff would be
more effective than the existing paper and
phone-based service, the team set about
building a working prototype. This would
be the MVP. Testing with real users would
allow the team to learn from it and iterate
toward a fully automated service.
The prototype used what we affection-
ately called a “human API” as workaround.
An API is an interface that allows you to
get data in, and out, of a system. In this
case, it simply meant that prison staff were
the link between booking the visit and the
business process in each prison.
Crucially, this allowed the team to put
the prototype to use in four prisons to
quickly understand what they got right,
and what they hadn’t. It sidestepped pain-
ful integration with legacy IT that would
likely have derailed the work.
From this early stage it was possible
to book a visit from a desktop or mobile
phone in just a few minutes, and prison
staff could approve visits quickly. But it
wasn’t perfect. As Reid Hoffman of Linke-
din says, “If you’re not embarrassed by
the first version of your product, you’ve
launched too late.” The point is to fail fast,
learn quickly, and improve continually.
The data from user testing shouted
loudly about the need for a standardized
visit booking process to work for all users,
across all prisons. Thanks to the learnings
from prototyping, the team were able to
iterate and scale the service making it op-
erational 24/7 in 96 prisons.
By the time the service was declared
“live” it had been fully tested. It met identi-
fied user needs, security, and performance
standards. The “analogue” visit booking
process was retired. And the right people
were in place to run and continue to im-
prove it.
Today it’s still changing in response to
feedback from users. That’s the whole
point. Taking small steps towards achiev-
ing a big goal. Always improving. Thanks
to the team’s agile approach, the goal of
a fully automated, real-time service that’s
every bit as good as buying a cinema tick-
et online is in sight. And it’s opened the
door to broader digital change in prisons.
By making it easier to book visits, pris-
oners will see more of their loved ones.
There’ll be more money available for
things like the playroom where kids can
visit their dads in a safe and friendly en-
vironment. Prison officers will have more
time for other duties to help prisons to run
more efficiently. Evidence suggests stron-
ger community links help rehabilitation.
Transformation isn’t just about websites.
This is changing by doing. Amazon —
bigger than many governments — has
done it by empowering small teams.
did it by swift, iterative
change with proper user and operational
input and space to work it out as you go.
And the tech? Well, this is 2015, so that’s
rarely the hard part.
What is hard is that, to achieve all this,
government departments probably have
to reorganize, reskill, and reprioritize.
That’s been the UK experience where
some now say that government is the best
digital start-up in London. Closer to home,
it’s what is happening in the Government
of Saskatchewan, where the conditions
are being consciously created for a culture
of digital transformation through Sas-
Among the quotes added to the walls at
Jen Pahlka’s Code for America is a rallying
call for digital government from the UK
Government’s Digital Chief Mike Bracken.
“The strategy is delivery.”
That should be the motto of every gov-
ernment executive in Canada.
R oger Oldham is senior director,
Strategy & Transformation, at FCV and
the former Chief Digital Officer in the
UK’s Ministry of Justice. Next month,
Roger Oldham looks at the third
ingredient for digital success —
getting the right digital leadership in
place.
If ever a government
agency had been
wounded by big
bang launches,
big IT and big bud-
get tech spending,
this was it.