Around the world, digital service units along the lines of the UK’s Government Digital Service, Italy’s Team per la Trasformazione Digitale, 18F, and the Canadian Digital Service are springing up. Teams like these have brought modern digital ways of working into the heart of government, adopting agile software development, user centered design, and the use of cloud hosting and open-source technology.

Along with new practices, these organizations have brought new professions into government ¹: product managers, software engineers, user researchers, service designers, data scientists and chief digital officers. These people are the intended audience of this playbook: practitioners looking for approaches to implementing platforms in government.

As such, there is some level of minimum capability that an organization needs before it starts trying to implement many of the examples listed in this playbook. If you are working in an organization that is just starting on its digital transformation journey, then probably the best thing to do is focus on building an effective user centred design capability first.

Even for more digitally mature organizations, attempting to do everything listed here at once is probably a bad idea. Every organization will have strategic decisions to make about where to start. Please view this as a starting point rather than a detailed journey map.

Wherever possible, it includes footnotes and links to further reading and quotes from practitioners.