The library

This is our library of excellent things. Enjoy!

The internet is full of amazing help and guidance, if you know where to look. But there’s so much of it!

The Localise library is where we curate the very best online articles for people working in change in local public services. Where we can, we save our own copy to preserve them too.

Local Government Service Design Maturity Model
"The Local Government Service Design Maturity Model has been developed for service designers in local authorities to use with council staff. It helps councils to explore how well they support and grow service design practice. Councils can use the model to ascertain where service design approaches are already adding value or could add more value, and to identify opportunities to develop the capabilities and conditions for service design to thrive."

I Will F**king Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again
The recent innovations in the AI space, most notably those such as GPT-4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from the utopian eliminating of drudgery, to the dystopian damage to the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself.

Tech has no answers for you
These are people who believe in spending massive amounts of public money to enrich themselves while they make shitty tunnels under Las Vegas or drop off scooters on city sidewalks or chase self-driving cars, so firmly believing that these are total solutions ready to solve all problems right now, in complete ignorance of any existing systems or mechanism or solutions that exist.

Building a data driven public sector
This presentation unpacks the OECD’s Data-Driven Public Sector framework that I developed with Barbara Ubaldi, Jacob Arturo Rivera Perez and Lucia Chauvet. That framework drew heavily on the working paper – “A data-driven public sector” – authored by Charlotte van Ooijen which I completed for publication.

Agile or not, it’s all about your worldview
What do you believe about how the world works? Do you believe it works like a machine, that a cause always leads to an effect and that makes the world predictable? Or do believe it works in random ways, where sometimes a cause doesn’t have the expected effect and sometimes effects appear from unknown causes, that the way the world works is unpredictable and emergent.

Bringing innovation methods to local government
Over the past year, our journey towards bolstering our innovation practice has been both rewarding and insightful. As you might expect, our focus on innovation is not merely about adopting new technologies or data platforms, but about creating a culture that embraces continuous improvement.

A Roadmap Readme
In the dying days of 2022 I started to crowdsource a collection of roadmap examples to help land on a format and approach we could consistently embrace at the day job. I was looking for something that needed to walk a very fine line – an approach that aligned with our agile/product thinking and ways of working but that provided enough detail and clarity that it could help wean stakeholders off of the false certainty their delivery plans offer them.

Big programme design and the willing suspension of disbelief involved
Whenever I have been involved either as part of the delivery or an observer of Big Programmes – usually in local government – I have been struck by the willing suspension of disbelief that participants have to sign up for. The first suspicion of disbelief is the idea that you can plan a two or three year programme and deliver certainty of process and outputs from the start.

Comparing service design and business analysis
As I’ve spoken about service design over last few years a number of people have told me that they are business analysts and that they do the things that a service designer does. I’ve especially heard this a lot working with government organisations in the UK. I’ve also seen service designers working more like business analysts which doesn’t always help the teams or organisations they’re working with.

A guide to agile communication
The traditional approach to comms is to do a lot of planning up front. Many teams will embark on a “comms strategy”, or perhaps write a set of “comms principles”, and then set about filling a calendar or grid with expected messages at expected times. Most of these are unnecessary when doing comms for agile work and agile teams.

‘We’re not leaving this bar until we’ve come up with such a great idea that I can’t sack you’
The third list I’m going to tell you about very quickly is the BBC iPlayer, which of course is nothing more than a list, presented well. A list of telly programmes and radio programmes. I thought I’d tell you the story of how we came up with it in the very, very first place, before it was a list.

UX Theatre: Are You Just Acting Like You’re Doing User-Centered Design?
Organizations have latched on to "user-centered design" as a buzzword. In many cases, executives seem to misinterpret it as a euphemism for "thinking from a user's perspective." They don't fund user research or provide project owners the latitude to create teams that include UX and service designers. For all the talk about users, there is no consideration given to including them in the design and delivery process.

Where do service designers fit within an organisation?
Many services (as end users would know them) transcend teams, directorates, organisations or departments. It’s not obvious where service designers should sit, since we want them to be working on services which by nature don’t always fit current organisation structures.

What, exactly, is a Product Manager?
In his book Inspired, Marty Cagan describes the job of the product manager as “to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible”. Similarly, I’ve always defined product management as the intersection between business, technology, and user experience.

Funding product teams, not projects
Over the last year Defra has started making the transition from focussing on projects to focussing on teams. The results of this have been great. More stability has meant work gets done more quickly, meaning we can deliver more great services for our users. “Focus on teams, not projects” even made it to the top of our list of digital principles.

Digital leadership: changing your whole approach, not just doing better digital projects
We want to make the internet work for everyone. For that to happen, our public, civic and business leaders need to become digital leaders — not just so that they can manage specifically digital programmes and projects, but so that they can make sure their entire organisations are relevant and effective in a digital age.

Digital is something you are
If you’re a leader or a manager of people, part of your job is telling them that they’re allowed to think and behave that way. Most people, in most organisations, will be nervous of doing so unless they have permission from whoever’s in charge. So if you’re in charge, grant that permission. If you want your organisation to change, or if you want to bring about true transformation, grant your people the freedom to think and behave in new ways.

INVEST in Good Stories, and SMART Tasks
A pidgin language is a simplified language, usually used for trade, that allows people who can’t communicate in their native language to nonetheless work together. User stories act like this. We don’t expect customers or users to view the system the same way that programmers do; stories act as a pidgin language where both sides can agree enough to work together effectively.

What a digital organisation looks like
There’s been a lot of work to define what a good digital service looks like (see for example the government’s Digital Service Standard). It’s less obvious what to do if you want to make your whole organisation digital, and there are even fewer success stories to model yourself on.

Creating better acceptance criteria for user stories
Acceptance criteria (ACs) are a key part of user stories. They set the boundaries of what should be achieved - telling the developer when to stop, the QA how to test, and the product owner what to expect. Because they’re used by technical and non-technical people, ACs must use simple language and be non-implementation specific. This post looks at why we changed our approach to ACs on GOV.UK Verify and the effect it has had on the team.

Six alternatives to traditional top down public service delivery
Many councils have made it this far by cutting back on their existing model of public service delivery - in some cases right to the bone. But what do they do when all the incremental cuts that can be made have been made? One potential avenue may be to ask if there is a completely different operating model for addressing a particular need.