Service assessments

Questions in a live assessment

Run through these example questions with your team.

Answer some of these questions as you tell the story of your service.

Designer and content designer

Your designer and content designer will be asked questions like:

What constraints are you working within? What are the barriers to removing or reducing the impact of those constraints?
How do you know a service is the right way to solve the problem you’re looking at?
How do you know you’ve got the scope of the service right?
Can you talk us through a few of the prototype ideas you tested and explain why you rejected them?
If there is a journey from GOV.UK, how will it work?
What are you doing to make sure users don’t have to provide the same information multiple times?
How are you planning to make sure that the service doesn't exclude any existing or potential users of your service?
Have you had an accessibility audit on your service?
What is your approach to access needs and assisted digital needs?
What support will you offer to users who have problems with the digital part of the service?

Your lead developer will be asked questions like:

What technical choices have you made and why? Including language, framework, deployment, integration and 3rd parties.
What other distinct options have you tried or tested?
How do you plan to make the service open? Including open source, open standards, open data, common platforms and ownership of Intellectual Property.
How will you ensure the service is safe for users? Including data privacy, security threats and fraud vectors.
What is the minimum amount of personal information your service needs to collect?
Does your service need an authentication solution?
What plans do you have if your service is unavailable for any length of time?
Have you spoken to your department’s data protection officer about the decisions you’ve made?
What are your technology plans for public beta?

Your user researcher will be asked questions like:

Who are your users?
What are your users’ lives like?
Why do they need the thing you’re planning to build or buy?
Why has Defence asked you to solve the problem you’re solving?
How did you decide that the problem was worth solving?
How did you identify which assumptions to test and how did you test those assumptions?
What do you know about the offline parts of your user’s journey?
How will you know your service joins up with those offline elements?
Who are you inviting to your user research sessions?
What are your plans for user research in public beta? Is the budget sufficient?

Your service owner and delivery lead will be asked questions like:

Who’s in your team?
How are you engaging outside of your team? For example, inside or outside your department, or with the ops and policy professions.
Has the team disagreed on anything and if so how was that resolved?
How are you using agile methods?
How does governance work? Are there any issues you’ve had to escalate?
Did you discover anything that will make it difficult to design the service your users need? If so, what are your plans to address the issues?
What will the team look like moving into public beta and live?
What are you doing to make sure other teams know what you’re working on?

Your service owner or performance analysts will be asked questions like:

What key performance indicators (KPIs) have you identified so far, beyond the mandatory four?
What existing data sources did you use to decide on your KPIs?
How will you know your service is meeting your users’ needs?
How will you check the service is doing what it needs to do?
What data are you collecting and how are you using it to improve your service?
What management and governance do you have? For example SIRO approval, not collecting personal data or retaining a raw backup data view.
Have you spoken to data.gov.uk and agreed the KPIs to publish on launch?

Published March 2023