ONS Digital

It’s official: Digital Leaders week is over for 2019!

From the 17 to 21 June we hosted 6 events on 2 of our sites. Subjects ranged from Inclusive design, Agile troubleshooting and designing accessible online forms. For more information about the sessions, see our previous blog.

DL week is an annual national celebration of opportunities, challenges and support for the digital transformation of Britain’s businesses, public services and society. It aims to share, inspire, inform and build the UK’s digital confidence, and is a series of events run by different organisations across the country.

We had a great response to our sessions, and really enjoyed the week. But things can always be better, right? Being the agile organisation that we are, we wanted to do a retro to see how we could improve on for the sessions in 2020.

What went well
Our sessions had a great response with a great pool of attendees. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive:

• Design professionals said the inclusive design sessions has made them think about inclusivity and the importance of service blueprinting, and we’ve had requests for the sessions to be delivered in house to other organisations.
• Attendees for the Agile Troubleshooting sessions said the sessions gave them space and freedom to talk through the blockers they were facing in their projects.
• We had fantastic feedback from the webinar on Building Accessible Forms, which drew an audience of mainly local councils across the UK. They told us that seeing the iterations of the forms really helped them, and being able to ask questions to someone who’d already been through the process gave them more confidence and ideas for their own services.

What didn’t go well
We had some teething issues with the webinar technology during the first session, with attendees saying they couldn’t join. We did manage to solve this ready for the second event, but some attendees from the first session were unable to make this. We’ve sent on a recording of the session to everyone who signed up but this still wasn’t ideal.

For our agile troubleshooting sessions we had fewer participants that the other sessions. We realised that running an Introduction to Agile, or Agile Intermediate course may have attracted more attendees, as lots of organisations are in the early stages of their agile journey.

What are we doing differently
Lots of things!

• We’re looking at webinar software for the organisation to ensure that our technical difficulties don’t happen in future
• We’re planning to poll potential attendees next year to see what they’d like sessions on to ensure we’re meeting their needs
• We’re planning to do lots more promotion around our sessions in the run up to the events to ensure as many people know about them as possible.

It’s safe to say we’re looking forward to Digital Leaders Week 2020!

We’ve included the collateral from the sessions below for anyone who wasn’t able to attend, and if you’d like more information or to give us any feedback, contact sarah.evans@ons.gov.uk.

Designing Accessible Forms slide deck and webinar recording
Inclusive Design slide deck