This post is written by Gregory Lainé, Consultant at Digitalmente.

  • **The problem: Traditional **governance, funding and approval practices in public institutions are costly and inflexible.
  • **Why it matters: **Rigid oversight practices clash with digital ways of working and make it harder to build services that better meet citizen needs.
  • **The solution: **Digital leaders need to work with executives and treasuries to adapt processes that grant flexibility and empower digital teams to deliver.

Over the last two years, I’ve been working with teams in Guernsey in the Channel Islands to deliver new digital services for the island’s Revenue Service as part of SMART Guernsey. Like many other digital teams in public institutions around the globe, we followed the exemplary model set by the first-wave UK Government Digital Service on how to design and build digital services in government. But effectively engaging in digital transformation has also required a huge focus on rethinking traditional governance, funding and approval mechanisms that often impede rather than enable digital delivery. In this post, I’ll summarise three key lessons for adapting traditional governance mechanisms to help teams make and sustain digital services.

Ensure funding matches the rhythm of delivery

It’s inevitable that rigid capital spending policies clash with agile, flexible delivery models. While we managed to secure smaller, more frequent releases of funding to ensure we didn’t have to wait for the next budget cycle to advance between service phases, executives were keen to link the release of funds to defined outputs to reduce ambiguity. To accommodate this in funding requests, we grouped priority backlog features into Statements of Work (SoWs) comprising clear sets of deliverables. In line with agile principles, SoWs formed functional iterations of working software that could be tested with citizens - enabling us to deliver value early. But specifying concrete deliverables meant SoWs dictated what teams could deliver, removing flexibility. This inhibited experimentation and limited our ability to respond to changing priorities and evolving needs.

To remedy this, we moved to provide monthly ongoing funding to product teams. Funding is released as long as teams achieved defined missions or goals for the period. This ensures robust governance for executives, is agile friendly and also has allowed for changes in the mix of skills and size of the team throughout delivery.

Balance measuring outcomes and outputs

Agreeing on what matters most when measuring progress is another common source of friction between executives and digital practitioners. In the Revenue Service, we often reported on outputs such as “50% of citizens are choosing to register with the Revenue Service digitally” or “20% of businesses use digital channels to contact the service”. Focusing on tangible statistics enabled us to generate momentum and demonstrate progress to executives. But this came at the cost of measuring more abstract, longer-term outcomes that ensure a service meets a citizen’s needs. For example, “as a new arrival to the island, I can successfully register in a way that best meets my needs”. Staying on track through agile delivery requires keeping executives' focus balanced on where you are trying to get to and how you are doing getting there.

Take advantage of evidence and data for decision making

Throughout deliveries, we put a lot of effort into deciding what got worked on. Rigorous prioritisation was crucial to help executives feel confident we were delivering the right thing. This often translated into producing additional documentation for high-level conversations and distracted us from concentrating on validating whether what we had delivered was the right thing - leaving little time to take advantage of working on adjustments and changes based on data. With iterative delivery, hypotheses can be validated quickly and investments prove their value early. To reduce overhead and accelerate delivery, shift the focus of oversight and scrutiny from senior sponsors on the evidence and data generated from services delivered.

Traditional approaches to governance, funding and approval pose significant challenges to effective digital transformation. Slow-moving, rigid approaches hinder digital teams and reduce the benefits of agile delivery. Alongside adopting best practice design and software delivery techniques in digital programmes, digital leaders need to work with executives to adapt decision-making and financial processes that grant flexibility and empower teams to deliver.

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