It’s because we’re so aware of the growing demand for these assessments that we’ve put together an all-in-one package to support your organisation through a DDAT assessment with minimum disruption to your organisation.

Benefits of a DDAT assessment

The Digital, Data and Technology Profession Capability Framework assessment explores the different job roles in the DDaT space. By running a DDaT assessment in your organisation, you can give your teams the opportunity to evaluate their skills and capabilities. 

Giving people the option to review their roles and responsibilities allows you to coach, mentor and upskill your people while growing the digital skills to build government fit for the 21st century. And by identifying, recognising and valuing the skills you already have in place, you’re better placed to retain people with with essential DDaT knowledge and skills.  

Using the DDaT framework, teams can learn more about what different digital roles do in government, understand the need for specific skills and plan pathways in their specialist field their career progression. Assessing your organisation against this framework can also help to review individual skills in preparation for performance reviews, create effective job adverts and carry out human resources and workforce planning. 

It’s no secret that teams across all areas of the public sector are stretched, with complex workloads and limited resources. And, not to toot our trumpets too hard, but we know a bit about digital, data and technology in the public sector – it’s what we do all day.  So we’re keen to help public sector organisations through their DDaT assessments, saving your team time and effort so they can focus on helping citizens. 

The complete DDaT package

We can support you through 6 core areas of your DDaT assessment:

1. Independent evaluation of your self-assessment including a detailed report 
2. Delivery management of your DDaT project
3. Upskilling, mentoring and bringing together Communities of Practice through the introduction of Heads of Community
4. Business analysis, including cost analysis and identification of individuals who align to the DDaT roles
5. Business case support
6. Communications and engagement support

We’re particularly pleased to offer communications and engagement guidance, which includes workshops for line managers and those staff invited to take self assessments to help you develop your DDAT strategy and communications plan to set up everyone in your organisation for success.

Supporting a central government department through their first phase DDaT assessment

We supported a large central government department through the first phases of their DDaT assessments. We ran an end-to-end package in the heart of the department, making sure their teams felt valued while also attracting new specialisms into the organisation. 

Focusing on the organisation’s specific needs, we were able to collaborate with them on their communication and engagement strategies, business analysis and workshops to brief line managers and those colleagues identified as sitting in Group 1 roles within the DDaT framework. 

By transferring our sector knowledge, we’ve coached the team and purposefully developed a programme they can confidently run without further input from us.

The option for the DDaT self-evaluation has meant staff can actively assess and improve their skills, working toward their career progression while encouraging cross-government digital capability and transformation. 

After work began, we were delighted to be kept on for another 12 months, supporting the organisation through the next phases of the programme. 

If you want to find out more about our complete package for DDaT assessments or have a chat about how we can help you, please get in touch below.

All-in-one, but tailored to your org

The beauty of this approach is that it’s cost-effective, thanks to the reusable assets we’ve developed, yet has the scope to tailor to your organisation’s needs with Made Tech experts available to support at every stage. If you’d like to talk more about next steps, please get in touch. 

If you’d like to talk

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In our latest Made Tech Talks Webinar, Scott Edwards, one of our Lead Engineers here at Made Tech, talked through a recent project we ran with the DVLA. We worked as part of a blended team to help the organisation modernise its Driver’s First Provisional service — all with the goal of helping new drivers get on the road.

To watch the full webinar, hit play below — or keep on reading to find out our three key takeaways.

Break down team barriers and encourage collaboration

One of the key challenges the DVLA faced was centred around their collaboration between roles. And for Scott, driving collaboration meant breaking down these barriers. To encourage collaboration, Scott and the team implemented a SCRUM framework, which helped team members more easily understand the business needs of the project, split work into sensible iterations, and work as a single team.

The team also focused on working together in the same room — albeit virtually — as well as championing transparent communication, which enabled them to raise any issues or challenges so that they could improve processes moving forward.

Expand the scope of automated testing 

Another key challenge the DVLA faced was that as they continued to expand their service, their testing scope just kept getting larger.

In traditional models of development, developers will typically build a feature, and then hand it over to testers to find any errors. But as the service scales, features are added, and the scope of testing increases, this can become a blocker to getting new services live on production.

Scott explained that making this testing process more efficient starts with automation, and building up cumulative testing capability over time. By encouraging knowledge and skills sharing between roles, developers can feel empowered to learn how to test, while testers can likewise be empowered to develop code that automates the testing process. 

This means that teams can quickly identify errors and integration issues, but it also ensures lower operational costs and organisational risks.

Slowly introduce new ways of working

Ultimately, when you’re implementing new processes, it can be tempting to roll things out as quickly as possible — especially on the technical side of things. But, Scott cautioned, we need to remember that this process is also about cultural change, and will mean teams will need to learn to work together in a new way.

Scott suggested being understanding as to how people’s identities intertwine with who they are at work. He also recommended that teams implement knowledge-sharing sessions, where team members can ask questions, or share domain-specific expertise, as well as hosting retrospectives to dive deeper into projects after completion.

Going through this process slowly will help rally people around a shared goal, encourage deeper knowledge sharing, develop trust between team members, and allow teams to modify and optimise their processes over time.

The post Driving modernisation with the DVLA — 3 key takeaways appeared first on Made Tech.