GovWifi
This report is GDS's GovWifi live assessment on the 16th of September 2021
Digital Service Standard assessment report
GovWifi
| From: | Central Digital Data Office (CDDO) |
| Assessment date: | 16/09/21 |
| Stage: | Live |
| Result: | Met |
| Service provider: | Government Digital Service (CO) |
Previous assessment reports
- Alpha assessment report - October 2016
- Beta assessment report - November 2016
- Beta reassessment report - April 2017
Service description
This service aims to solve the problem of providing an automatic, simple, secure and reliable way for people to connect to the internet in public sector buildings.
Service users
This service is for people that work in government buildings including public sector workers, contractors and visitors as well as government IT administrators including wifi installers, maintainers and architects and IT support.
1. Understand user needs
Decision
The service met point 1 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team continued to demonstrate a good understanding of the needs of their user groups, and this has been enhanced considerably by recent research
- the research into people’s support needs has been thorough and well analysed
- a good mechanism for researching with accessibility users has been established and the results have had an impact on the team’s thinking
What the team needs to explore
- formulate a clear plan for meeting user needs around support, including ways to measure the effectiveness of any design changes
- continue to prioritise accessibility research, ensuring the full range of users are covered
2. Do ongoing user research
Decision
The service met point 2 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- it was clear the whole team were involved in and engaged with user research
- a new user researcher is being onboarded to increase the team’s capability in this area
- recruitment has been broadened and the team have sustainable routes to reaching the widest range of users possible
- research methods have diversified, producing great quality data. The team were clearly impacted and motivated by the face to face research that has taken place
What the team needs to explore
- ensure prioritisation and planning results in realistic workloads for the user researchers. The team have great ambitions around research, and it’s important they continue to prioritise quality work over getting things done quickly
3. Have a multidisciplinary team
Decision
The service met point 3 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- there was clear evidence of valuing the multidisciplinary team and expertise in each other
- the team has a strong and experienced service owner who was able to present a very clear mission for the service
- the vast proportion of team members are permanent civil servants
- we heard from a wide range of team members during the presentation and there was a clear sense of team and mutual respect in the way they answered questions
- they demonstrated they have adapted successfully as a unit for remote working with a strong focus on team health and there was evidence of a good separation of roles
- the team feel they have autonomy in their roles
- previously the service team suffered from under investment with significant gaps in public beta but that has been addressed with the team now satisfied with the levels of capability and capacity
- the team has experienced complex organisational changes but they’ve managed to keep focus and be effective
- following recommendation to improve, they presented a process for effective knowledge transfer for incoming staff that includes a strong culture of documentation including a team manual
- they presented the commitment and engagement of the governance and Senior Responsible Officers in the service and their commitment towards risk
What the team needs to explore
- continue to work to ensure effective working within the ecosystem of the wider teams that support the service
- ensure that the current set of multidisciplinary roles continue to support the service
4. Use agile methods
Decision
The service met point 4 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- on the whole, the team evidenced using Agile tools, cadence and methods effectively to work collectively to solve shared problems including Slack and Trello tooling
- they explained an example of how the team collaborated to solve a user problem
- the 9 month product roadmap was clearly articulated driven by user centred design and technological needs
- we saw how the service has been flexible and has achieved great benefits, for example, providing NHS Nightingale with provision at short notice
What the team needs to explore
- ensure they display and encourage an ‘agile mindset’ to explore possibilities, even when there are limitations including lockdown
5. Iterate and improve frequently
Decision
The service met point 5 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- there has been focus on improving the administrator experience as detailed in the previous Beta recommendations
- the technology has been improved to allow the service team to update the service to user needs
- the team showed functionality iterations to the service as well as backend templating to manage user contact channels more efficiently
- they have considered how the service works and needs to be improved within Covid and during post Covid life
- the example of the improvement of “publishing the text sign up journey” and the wider sign-up flow demonstrates the mind-set and commitment to deliver improvements that make a measurable difference to users and their experience
What the team needs to explore
- continue to focus the team on improvements and ensure there is capability to tackle the identified problems to solve
- focus on improvements around the administrator journey
6. Evaluate tools and systems
Decision
The service met point 6 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the service team updated the original tech stack to bring it into line with the latest GDS standards
- the GDS way is being followed and CI/CD pipelines and automated testing are in place
- the team has already identified areas for improvement, such as moving secrets from an encrypted repo to parameter store
- the standard of the systems documentation and procedures is high
- service team kept up to date with the latest wifi technologies and protocols
- the recent addition of Prometheus and Grafana adds important new functionality to support analysis
What the team needs to explore
- the UI components to use the latest version of the design system
- implement the planned improvements especially those related to security
- updating the roadmap for the introduction of upcoming technological changes, such as the Internet of things and new wifi protocols
7. Understand security and privacy issues
Decision
The service met point 7 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
- a detailed tech roadmap is in place to ensure ongoing improvements in security
What the team needs to explore
- make improvements and engage with their user community to identify and address future security threats.
8. Make all new source code open
Decision
The service met point 8 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the code is readily available on GitHub
9. Use open standards and common platforms
Decision
The service met point 9 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the choices of the core technologies such as Ruby, FreeRadius and MySQL are open source projects that are widely used and supported
- GovWifi has the size and stability to set the standard for shared wifi across the world. The team has started to promote its success at conferences and forums
- the team has started to form a closer relationship with the FreeRadius team and taken a more active interest in the development of this open source project
What the team needs to explore
- implement the team’s plan to engage with the FreeRadius project
- the benefits of increased open source contribution for this team are expected to be: better visibility of emerging security threats, extending the life of technology the public sector is now reliant on, and improved team members’ skills and motivation
- the team should evaluate these benefits and promote them to their stakeholders
10. Test the end-to-end service
Decision
The service met point 10 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the service has been running live for several years
11. Make a plan for being offline
The service faces a number of technical challenges, such as IP address caching that are not an issue for most other services. When this is combined with coordinating the large number of partner organisations, then the current recovery time objective of two weeks is reasonable. This potentially lengthy down time and the large number of users that rely on the service means that careful consideration has to and has been made to prepare for being offline.
Decision
The service met point 11 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team have given careful thought and consideration to the technical aspects of disaster recovery and has a plan in place
- the team has used chaos engineering exercises, threat modelling, a secure backup facility, a service status page and makes use of multiple AWS availability zones
- the team are aware of the challenges caused by the use of static IP addresses and the lack of flexibility this imposes on restoring the service
- the partner organisations that join GovWifi are made aware of the need to develop their own plan for GovWiFi being offline and for their own disaster recovery
- the service has prepared communication content in advance for being offline. This will ensure partners can be informed quickly with accurate messaging, if the need arises.
- there are plans to improve the technical aspects of recovering the service that will enable the service to substantially reduce their recovery time objective
What the team needs to explore
- consider running mock ‘offline’ at sample settings involving a focussed user research approach
- continue to make user administrators aware of the need for them to have their own plans in place to cope with a loss of the GovWifi service
- conduct user research of the user administrators to determine their awareness, capabilities and their needs for disaster recovery
12. Make sure users succeed first time
Decision
The service met point 12 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- there is good interaction within the team looking for opportunities and ways to improve the service through analytics and user research
- the majority (81%) of users have no issues accessing GovWifi
- there is a high level of satisfaction rating with the majority of users being at least satisfied or higher
- the team are in the process of setting up a dashboard to monitor support tickets being created to identify new ways to improve the service
What the team needs to explore
- set up a community or some sort of mechanism to share insights, feedback and ideas with the administrative users to ensure the usage of Gov WiFi is consistent around the whole of the UK
- continue working closely with the administrative users to gather feedback and identify opportunities to improve the user experience
- look at how the support model works and where the support comes from for the end user
13. Make the user experience consistent with GOV.UK
Decision
The service met point 13 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- there were good examples presented of where the team has improved the interaction and content design of the service based on user feedback
- there is good documentation provided both for the end user and administrative user on using Gov Wifi that has been iterated in the Beta phase
- the way in which the backlog of work is being prioritised is encouraging and has all different professions feeding into
What the team needs to explore
- keep the styling of the service up to date using the latest GOV.UK frontend styling to ensure it meets accessibility standards and is consistent with other services
- ensure the service continues to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards as stated in the accessibility statement page
14. Encourage everyone to use the digital service
Decision
The service met point 14 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the service and content design encourages all current users to use the service. The team have thought about the potential blockers to use of the service and have addressed those, especially with their content design
- the service has saved the taxpayer money through economies of scale
- word of mouth is believed to provide the most growth in use across government
- they’ve adopted a new high-level product vision along with a product roadmap with measurable objectives
What the team needs to explore
- review their marketing provision to users as part of the end to end service design
- consider whether there is a benefit in other government departments knowing about the service to deliver wider benefits. For example, providing content for decision makers
- consider a post-Covid way of working roadmap
- as part of the product vision, look to quantity or quality growth if seen as a benefit
- consider a stretching target or benefits to reach across government beyond those that currently use the service
15. Collect performance data
Decision
The service met point 15 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team has developed their performance framework and monitored the service performance. This monitoring is showing the service performance is stable. This is a great position to be in for iterations as mapping improvements become more reliable with stable metrics
- the team has Grafana and server log boards in place to compliment and triangulate Google Analytics findings. This is essential with the Google Analytics nuances and the expected cookie banner impact of KPI’s sourced from Google Analytics
- the team are monitoring the impact of the implementation of the cookie consent banner - the service has retained approx 40% of tracked user data
- the team has a regular weekly meeting to discuss findings from analytics and potential opportunities
- there were no obvious concerns with the route to sharing data with wider stakeholders
What the team needs to explore
- the team still needs to consider and agree alternatives/more automated reporting to wider stakeholders. The current process relies on Show & Tells, so live teams may struggle to uphold non-automated reporting routes for this service
16. Identify performance indicators
Decision
The service met point 16 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team has developed a set of usable KPI’s derived from the performance framework
- the KPI’s were sourced from Google Analytics and Grafana, depending on the type of measure being reported. It was great to see the use of both while being conscious of the nuances of Google Analytics
- the service has shown stable performance which is a testament to the combined team/project efforts. This is manifested in high stable completion rates across all channels and strong feedback scores. It is worth noting that the thematics breakdown of the negative feedback scores and points of failure showed 3rd party failures rather than team or service build/design weaknesses being the main points of failure, however this does bring up an important question on what can be done to improve user experience in this circumstance
- the team now have access to the Zendesk (service desk) tickets and are able to monitor tickets and their resolution timescales and reasons for help requests
What the team needs to explore
- given that the team are able to measure certain points of failure for the service (as shown in the assessment) where the reason for failure is known (even when outside of the team’s direct control) and as this has direct impact on whether users go to GovWifi or not, it’s recommended the team build a suite of KPIs around points of failure which feeds into the support processes also recommended in this report
- consider options to introduce additional reporting and visibility of KPIs and measures to monitor the impact of failures and the reasons for these failures. A process to feedback to local admin teams could be established to avoid users defaulting to alternative providers with no real path or driver to return to GovWifi
- the team has developed basic metrics which aid in determining the service’s effectiveness. It is recommended to add additional metrics that focus on the broader user experience to understand whether there are additional feedback loops or work needed. An example is where local admins may be seeing drops in their user volumes but onsite staff numbers volumes are increasing. Are users going through 3rd party providers rather than gov/local? This could be achieved through running more surveys/experiments, which would also help to promote the service
17. Report performance data on the Performance Platform
Decision
The service met point 17 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team are aware of the data.gov.uk platform as a replacement for the original performance platform and plans to publish key service KPIs in the future
What the team needs to explore
- the team need to identify KPIs for publication to the data.gov.ukplatform and need to ensure they are able to create and update (automatically if possible) this reporting as soon as practical
18. Test with the minister
Decision
The service met point 18 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- whilst Lord Agnew, their minister, has declined the invitation to test the service they approached and tested with Neil Williams of the Government Property Agency (GPA) instead. Neil Williams was very positive in his feedback: “your demo showed me how easy it was”