Service assessments and applying the Service Standard

What happens at a service assessment

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From:
Standards and assurance community

You may need to book a service assessment to check you’re meeting the Service Standard. Check if you need an assessment if you’re not sure.

Your assessment will be run by a panel of experienced specialists from the Government Digital and Data community. Panels are normally made up of a lead assessor, a user researcher, a designer, a technical lead and sometimes a performance analyst. There might also be one or two observers, but they will not ask questions.

Assessments usually last about 4 hours.

Check with your department’s assessment team for more information about what will happen at the assessment.

Preparing for an assessment

It can be tempting to spend a long time preparing for assessments.

But try not to over-prepare. Do just enough to make sure you can give an open and honest account of the work you’ve done and what you’ve built.

And remember that the panel is not there to catch you out. They offer a peer review of the work you’ve done and help you understand anything you’ll need to change or improve.

What to cover on the day

Spend the first 30 minutes of the assessment talking about and demonstrating what you’ve built. During that time, you’ll need to:

  • give an overview of your service
  • walk the panel through the user journey

Give an overview of your service

In any assessment, it’s useful to start by briefly setting the scene. This usually means talking about the things you learnt during your discovery and alpha, including:

It’s also useful to explain any changes you made based on the feedback the service got at its previous assessment, if it had one.

You probably shouldn’t spend more than 10 minutes covering these issues.

Walk the panel through the user journey

Once you’ve explained what your service is and why you’re building it, spend around 20 minutes walking the panel through what you’ve built.

You might not have time to show every screen, but you should make sure to show any particularly important interactions.

And don’t just focus on the happy path. Also show what happens to users who are not eligible, or who cannot provide a piece of evidence at the right time.

Remember to talk about the whole user journey, including offline channels. This means explaining the processes that support staff need to follow to deliver the service, as well as the skills and capabilities they need to have.

At the alpha stage, you don’t necessarily need to prototype the entire user journey - just enough to test your riskiest assumptions. It might be worth bringing along a set of user needs or a rough journey map to your assessment too.

This post on the services in government blog gives advice about how to tell the story of your service.

Answer questions from the panel

Once you’ve demonstrated your service, the panel will spend the remaining time asking questions about the decisions you’ve made and how you’ve built your service.

There’s no specific set of questions that a panel will ask during an assessment. It’ll differ depending on the service you’ve built and which development phase you’re in.

It’s a good idea to make sure you and your team are familiar with:

There’s also guidance on how assessors will apply the Service Standard.

Get your result

Your service will be assessed as ‘green’, ‘amber’ or ‘red’.

‘Green’ means that the service has met the standard and can continue to the next phase of delivery.

‘Amber’ means that the standard has not yet been met, but the issues are not critical. The service can continue to the next phase of delivery while you work on the amber issues.

You need to fix amber issues within a reasonable period of time, usually up to 3 months. You must record your progress in a live ‘tracking amber evidence’ document which will be visible to the assessments team.

‘Red’ means that the standard has not yet been met and the issues are critical. The service will stay in its current phase of delivery. Further work needs to be done on the points that did not meet the standard before they can be reassessed. Not meeting the Service Standard doesn’t mean that you failed.

If your service has been assessed by a cross-government panel you’ll get your result in a report within 3 to 5 working days.

What happens next depends on the result of the assessment, and the delivery phase your service is in.

Departmental assessments

There can be exceptions to red, amber and green assessment ratings.

Your service may be assessed as ‘met’ or ‘not met’ if the assessment was done by a panel from your own department. Contact your department’s assurance team to ask how your service will be assessed and when you’ll get the result.

Assessment reports

CDDO will publish the outcome of the assessment - see the list of published Service Standard Reports. You’ll have the chance to fact check it before it’s published.

Examples and case studies

Read the Department for Work and Pensions’ blog post on what the Secure Communications team learned from their alpha assessment.

Read the Office of the Public Guardian’s (OPG) blog post on how they prepared the Complete the deputy report service for live assessment.

You may also find the following guides useful:

From:
Standards and assurance community
Last updated
8 months ago
Last update:

Corrected timings and updated out of date references.

  1. This guidance has been updated to reflect a change in the way assessments are rated.

  2. Added detail on how and what to prepare for a service assessment.

  3. Clarified guidance on what happens at a service assessment.

  4. Updated the address for GDS assessments to The White Chapel Building.

  5. Added link to 'How your assisted digital support will be assessed'.

  6. Guidance first published