Julia Harrison
Senior Director
The unit of delivery is the team
At Public Digital, we often use the phrase “the unit of delivery is the team”. But what do we mean by that?
Put simply, we mean that teams of people solving problems together are the key to delivering great services quickly and cost-effectively.
A digital team isn't simply a collective of people working on the same project or reporting to the same manager. Instead, it is a cohesive, empowered group where collaboration and shared purpose create something greater than the sum of its parts. A team like this is:
Dedicated to and oriented around a whole service
Multidisciplinary and empowered
Focused on achieving a purposeful outcome for which they can truly be accountable
Long-lived and sustaining
Supported by governance which seeks to enable
In this post we break down what that looks like.
Dedicated to and oriented around a whole service
While organisations often focus more on their own functions (finance, strategy, marketing), digital teams are oriented around services. As such, a digital team must include all the people needed to design and build a service, end-to-end.
Ideally, the team has a core dedicated group of people who work exclusively on that service. If some roles do need to be shared, team members should - at a minimum - have sufficient capacity to fully engage in the work, and be present enough that the team isn’t frequently blocked by their absence. Being a member of this team can’t be a side-of-desk activity alongside a full time job.
The Team Onion is a useful model for building that dedicated team.
Multidisciplinary and empowered
As well as digital and user-centred design roles, the team must include representatives for the end-to-end service experienced by its users. In government this might mean policy and frontline delivery experts, or in a retail organisation this could be the product manager of a retail line and a retail operations specialist.
A multidisciplinary team must be empowered to make decisions, and to test and learn: forming assumptions about what will work and testing them with real users. They should have the expertise and authority to answer the following questions amongst themselves:
What does the user need here, and how can we help them get it?
How can we make this service accessible, inclusive and easy for anyone to use?
What are the needs of the people and organisations delivering the service?
What are the needs of our organisation?
If this approach isn’t working, how can we achieve the same outcome in a different way?
How confident are we that this will work, and what might go wrong?
Can we release this now?
If any of those questions frequently require someone from outside of the team to answer, or “sign off” on the answer, it’s worth figuring out whether that person can be a member of the team, or whether the team can - in most cases - safely make that decision for themselves. It’s useful to think about this as reducing the mileage claims for decisions.
Focused on achieving a purposeful outcome for which they can truly be accountable
Like a sports team, a service team is a group of people who depend upon each other to achieve, together, an outcome they all care about.
This is not the same as all having work assigned from the same queue, or all reporting to the same manager. In fact, multidisciplinary team members often each report to a manager aligned with their profession who can better support them with career progression and pastoral care, while the owner of a service or business value stream provides direction on what outcomes the team works on together.
Crucially, the team is accountable for that outcome, and for the service as a whole. This is why it’s so important that they are empowered and dedicated: it is impossible for a team to feel accountable if they are regularly blocked by external dependencies, they lack the power to implement change, or they are distracted by competing obligations.
Long-lived and sustaining
In a traditional project model where a service is delivered with a fanfare and the team is disbanded, you get one shot at delivering a service that works. Whatever happens next - be it changing user needs, a shift in the service’s relevance or competitiveness, or the new availability of cheaper or more effective methods of delivery - the service can’t change without investment.
By contrast, a team funded to own, improve and look after a service over the long term can respond to the changing needs, changing conditions and changing capabilities of their organisation. They can deliver partial value early, prioritising progress over perfection, because everyone can be confident that the journey doesn’t stop there. Seeing the service in action is the best source of information about how it works in real life, and the team can iterate or pivot based on what they learn.
What’s more, long-lived teams develop expertise in the problems they solve, and the user needs and broader needs they serve. They build key relationships and valuable knowledge, meaning they spot opportunities others would miss to make the end-to-end service more efficient and effective. Compare this to project teams, wound down at the end of a piece of work, where all that valuable knowledge would be lost.
Supported by governance which seeks to enable
Digital teams need the space to work differently, particularly when they're starting out. It is the role of senior leadership to create these conditions and remove roadblocks so that teams can deliver.
That means encouraging and enabling a focus on outcomes (the real goal of the work) over deliverables (the stuff that is easy to measure). It means providing an environment where the team has direct access to users in order to test and learn, and can respond to what they learn, even if it’s uncomfortable to hear. At an executive level, all of this requires trust - in both directions.
Consider what teams need from you in order to work effectively. How can you bring assurance into the team itself rather than in a distant governance forum, and empower the team to escalate to senior leaders when risks are of strategic importance?
How can we support digital teams? Questions for executives
Organisational structure is often the greatest blocker in enabling teams to work in this way.
As an executive team considering digital transformation in your organisation, these key questions can help you set the right conditions for your teams to succeed:
Who is designing your services and how? Are your teams bridging the traditional silos between the technology division and the staff in the rest of your organisation?
Does your governance entrust and empower, giving decision-making authority to teams so they can focus on delivering? Does information flow to authority (hoarding power), or does authority flow to information (distributing power)?
What happens when you discover you've taken a wrong turn in designing your services? Is it safe for teams to signal their concerns, pause, and look for a better path?
When did you last see or use a digital service yourselves? Can teams show you what they're working on, instead of telling you in a report?
The idea of building teams like this - sustainable, multidisciplinary, focused on delivering improved services - might seem far-fetched. But we’ve proven in our work with clients that it’s highly achievable, whatever your organisation’s challenges.
Likewise, it might seem easier and lower-risk to continue to fund new technology products. But creating teams in this way is the least risky way to manage your technology and your services, and - as stories like the 2013 Universal Credit reset show - the best way to avoid using up time and money building things that don’t work.
Read our new book on Adopting the Practice of Test and Learn, and request your free copy.
Written by