For Tom Wynne-Morgan, deputy director for Service Design and Transformation at the Government Digital Service (GDS), one of the most significant challenges in public service transformation is adapting ways of working.
As the world changes at a staggering pace, he argues that government must fundamentally rethink how it delivers services.
"There needs to be a seismic shift”, he said.
“There needs to be a fundamental paradigm shift, almost, in some services.”
It was in response to this need that CustomerFirst was established. This new unit within GDS intends to contribute to improving the overall citizen experience within public services by trialling an approach in which small, multidisciplinary teams work towards modernising services from end to end, having the freedom to operate outside of legacy constraints and consider transformation holistically. This approach is termed “NewCo”.
The first public body CustomerFirst is working with is the DVLA, chosen as its complex nature and high volume of customer interactions present a significant opportunity to reduce friction and improve outcomes. The team plans to work with up to three more departments over the next two years, after which point the success of the pilot will be assessed.
To ensure problems are examined from as many perspectives as possible, CustomerFirst brings together civil servants and external industry experts. The unit’s commitment to cross-sector collaboration is reflected both in the private-sector experience of its director and in the appointment of Octopus Energy’s chief executive as its first co-chair.
The team also employs a "test-and-learn" methodology, continually testing assumptions to determine what works in practice, and developing a rapid feedback loop. “NewCo” and “test-and-learn” are not specific to GDS but rather are being increasingly adopted across government departments, with the Cabinet Office’s £100 million public service reform programme, “Test, Learn, and Grow”, being a prominent example of both approaches in action.
Crucially, CustomerFirst hopes to create an environment where only the “minimum viable set of constraints” are enforced, allowing the team to act with more agility. Changes are evidenced post-action, and further checks are carried out subsequently.
This offers an escape from a system of checks and balances which, while helpful for a “certain way of working”, often possesses an inflexibility which means that desired changes can get “stuck in the processes”, Wynne-Morgan says.
Another fundamental obstacle to fast and effective transformation is the federated nature of the civil service, which can prevent any one team from looking at the big picture, and responding effectively to structural problems. CustomerFirst hopes that by bringing together a range of people with an array of specialist knowledge, points requiring improvement will be identified more quickly.
While emphasising that he nonetheless believed the digital transformation work of the last 15 years has been “fantastic”, Wynne-Morgan said: “Most public service transformation doesn't fail because of a lack of effort, or a lack of skill, or a lack of desire, or a lack of knowledge.
"It fails mostly because, systemically, no one team is empowered to solve the end-to-end problem."
He added: “We have to experiment and find other ways of creating change. We can't just rest on our laurels.”
Yet this is easier said than done in a system “designed for stability” rather than rapid exploration.
“You're kind of having to build the plane as you fly it, which can feel very uncomfortable for people”, he said.
Within CustomerFirst itself, finding the right department or government body to partner with for the pilot is also a challenge. The team must consider whether there is primary legislation which would block rapid change, and whether the problems the organisation faces could truly be solved by a new way of working, as opposed to by examining what products are available on the market, for example.
Wynne-Morgan also expects difficulties in aligning different organisational cultures, workflows and data-sharing arrangements once partnerships are established.
He stressed that it is important not to underestimate the scale of the technical challenge. Moving from short test-and-learn exercises to a live service brings challenges, and even when that is successful, “proving something works once, or four times in this case, is only half the challenge,” he emphasised
He said: “Making it scale across multiple different services across government, that's a whole different ball game”.
“It will be incumbent upon us as we move through our programme to be able to begin to do that, and figure out how we enable other teams to do this”, he added.
However, Wynne-Morgan was also clear that CustomerFirst alone cannot solve all the challenges public services are facing.
“There isn't a silver bullet,” he said.
“There are multiple different types of challenges in government and multiple different types of services, that all will require slightly different things.”
Over the next two years, CustomerFirst hopes to deliver faster resolutions and reduced friction for citizens. They are currently determining the core metrics for DVLA’s modernisation drive, which they will subsequently publish as part of a commitment to transparency.
Even if the project doesn't prove as successful as hoped, Wynne-Morgan believes the lessons learned will still be valuable.
He said: “Whatever the case, whether this is or isn't the most effective way of tackling this challenge, we're going to learn stuff along the way.
“There'll be some tools, we will create some patterns of ways of working, some playbooks that will be useful regardless of what the final outcome is”.